by Ted Gup
As they approached Hilo, the captain discovered that the landing gear had been damaged. Mal Maloney offered to climb down and crank it by hand, but the captain had a crew member do it instead. Finally the plane landed without incident. Mary Maloney would honor her oath never again to smoke a cigarette—though twenty years later she would eat potatoes after a doctor told her she needed the potassium. In 1958, a year after that traumatic flight, when Mike went off to Fairfield College in Connecticut, Mary Maloney insisted that her son take the cruise ship Matsonia to the States. No Maloney was taking another plane, not if Mary Maloney had anything to say about it. She would forever have a bad feeling about planes.
Nor was it the last trauma for the Maloneys in Hawaii. Mal Maloney enjoyed robust health, but he had acquired something of a shake or palsy. When he held a cup of coffee, it rattled against the saucer. His friends called it nerves. Whether it was a result of the war or something else, he was not always the best of drivers.
A year after arriving in Hawaii, shortly after noon on October 7, 1958, Mal Maloney struck a sixty-one-year-old woman who was crossing at the corner of Hotel and Punchbowl Streets. The woman died in hospital hours later. Maloney was charged with negligent homicide. The trial hung over the Maloney family for six months. The shock of the accident weighed heavily on Maloney. So, too, did the newspaper articles that drew attention to him, identifying him by his cover, as a Defense Department researcher. From the witness stand, Maloney described the accident to the jurors and concluded, “I will see it for the rest of my life.”
On March 18, 1960, after six hours of deliberation, a jury found him not guilty. But the accident left a deeper scar on him than even the casualties suffered in combat.
Mal Maloney transferred back to CIA headquarters in August 1961. He was a familiar presence in the halls, the sight of his husky figure dragging his leg, braced and inflexible. Without the brace his left foot flopped in front of him like a flipper, and even with the brace he would on occasion stumble and collapse in a heap like a huge rag doll. Such falls would be followed by a moment of concerned silence, inevitably broken by Mal Maloney’s own boisterous laugh as he gathered himself and got up. Except on the golf course where he occasionally cited his injuries in an unsuccessful bid for a few strokes’ advantage, he never played up his wounds. Indeed, he disdained such attention. “Sympathy is a word between ‘shit’ and ‘syphilis’ in the dictionary,” he would often declare until it became a mantra in the Maloney family.
Besides, at the Agency, such injuries were too common to merit special notice. In the years after World War II there were many men like Mal Maloney who loved the military but who, because of disabling combat injuries, were not able to return to active service. Like Maloney, they joined the CIA by default. Among these was one of Mal’s dear friends, Ben Vandervoort, a fellow veteran of D-Day, who lost an eye and would later be played by John Wayne in the film The Longest Day. Another was the CIA’s executive director, Colonel Lawrence K. “Red” White, who lost the use of one leg in combat. In the halls of Langley such injuries merely enhanced one’s credibility. For Maloney and the others the curse of such injuries was that it had prematurely reduced men of action to bureaucrats and desk jockeys.
In Maloney’s Washington home the medals were prominently displayed in shadow boxes. Framed on the wall was a handwritten note that read: “To Col. Arthur Maloney, a veteran of one of the truly great fighting units of World War II. With best wishes from a comrade of the ETO [European theater of operations].” It was signed by Dwight D. Eisenhower. Maloney also kept a yellowing newspaper article about the elite training given paratroopers. The headline read: “Silent, Clever, Deadly.” Not one to romanticize war, Maloney penned under the headlines, “Noisy, dumb, scared.”
But Maloney continually used his wiles to get as close to the action as Langley would permit. From November 1961 until May 1962 he was on temporary duty in Saigon, consulting on the growing U.S. efforts to contain the Communists. There he worked under Desmond FitzGerald, a legendary CIA covert warrior. In Saigon he also caught the attention of other future CIA standouts. Years later one of them would scribble a note to Maloney in the frontispiece of a book: “With fond memories of our time in Saigon—and the Irish wit and courage you supplied.” It was signed “Bill Colby,” Director Central Intelligence.
But the real focus of Maloney’s attention by 1962 was not Vietnam but Cuba. In the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs in 1961, President Kennedy did not simply lick his wounds and walk away from the debacle. Instead, he and his brother Bobby, the attorney general, resolved to bring down Castro by any means necessary: to destabilize the country’s economy, bankrupt it if necessary, and create such social unrest that the government would topple.
With the Kennedy brothers, it was no longer purely a matter of national security. It was personal. Castro had not only survived the Bay of Pigs but been emboldened by it, openly mocking the United States’ effete and quixotic attempts to bring him down. A smoldering President Kennedy demanded action. Sam Halpern, a veteran Agency officer, recalls Richard Bissell summoning him into his office. “He told us he had been chewed out in the cabinet room of the White House by the president and attorney general for sitting on his ass and not doing anything about Castro and the Castro regime.” Bissell related the president’s order: “Get rid of Castro.”
Halpern wanted clarification. “What do the words ‘get rid of’ mean?” he asked Bissell.
“Use your imagination,” Bissell responded. “No holds barred.”
In the year ahead the Agency did indeed use its imagination. There was even a short-lived plan to convince the Cuban people of Christ’s Second Coming, complete with aerial starbursts. “Elimination by illumination,” the scheme was dubbed by one senior officer. But such silliness gave way to more deadly plans, including a contract on Castro’s life offered to the Mafia. The Agency was determined to create chaos in Cuba, with a mix of sabotage, propaganda, and, if need be, outright assassination. The project was part of a broad-based action against Castro code-named Operation Mongoose.
The name was chosen by Halpern. He had telephoned a woman at CIA whose job it was to track those operational code names or cryptonyms already in use and provide a list of those still available, usually taken in alphabetical order from the dictionary. Only the first two letters, or digraph, were of any internal significance. In this instance, “MO” signified operations in Thailand and was chosen to mislead even those within the Agency. Halpern selected the word “mongoose,” not knowing its meaning. (Years later he read Rudyard Kipling’s story “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi” and learned a mongoose was a ferretlike creature famed for its speed and ability to kill cobras.)
The operation, under a unit designated simply Task Force W, commenced in October 1961. Mal Maloney was chosen to oversee a key component of that project—the selection of targets for sabotaging Castro’s economy. This included copper mines, the sugar crop, and manufacturing concerns. Nothing was off-limits. “We were at war with Cuba,” recalled one former member of the unit.
Maloney’s sabotage efforts were interrupted a year later by the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962. He was then assigned a number of exotic roles. At the height of the crisis the United States had a broad contingency plan calling for the invasion of Cuba. At the CIA Maloney prepared an elaborate diversionary scheme designed to mask the true invasion points on the island. He oversaw an Agency program that was to parachute countless dummies on various landing sites. Each of the dummies was equipped with a timer that would set off firecrackers, in the hope that it would draw attention and fire away from U.S. troops landing elsewhere. As there was no invasion, the plan was put back on the shelf.
The Maloney family, of course, knew that Mal was with the CIA, but they had no inkling of what it was he did for the Agency. Early on, they learned not to ask. “If I told you,” quipped Maloney, “I’d have to kill you.” It was an oft-repeated line in CIA families, a way to laugh off the deadly serious consequences of a
breach of security. As an inside joke, the Maloney’s family dog, a white-and-brown-spotted beagle, was named Spook. But whatever it was that Maloney did, his son Mike decided he wanted to do the same. There would sometimes be friction between father and son, both of them husky, headstrong, and competitive, but there was also an abiding adoration.
If Mike Maloney’s father was a man of action, Mike Deuel’s was a man of words. His name was Wallace, but he was known to family and friends as Wally. He was a bookish figure with an owlish face, horn-rimmed glasses, and a slim frame, the sort of fellow pictured on the beach getting sand kicked in his face. He stood five feet ten, weighed 165 pounds, and had pale blue eyes and a ruddy complexion. As a child he had been pensive and sickly, suffering scarlet fever, diphtheria, mumps, whooping cough, and boils. His eyesight was poor and his later travels overseas would bring him dengue fever, ringworm, and, at age twenty-nine, a bout of pyorrhea. By age forty-one he had lost the last of his teeth.
More scholar than soldier, he loved his quiet Sundays when he would curl up with a literary classic or sit beside the radio engrossed in Puccini performed by his beloved Metropolitan Opera. He would never be mistaken for a warrior, but he had a kind of gumption that even warriors came to respect.
By trade he was a newspaperman, a world-class foreign correspondent for the Chicago Daily News. He had the good fortune in 1934 to be posted to Berlin even as Hitler consolidated power. Deuel would remain there for seven years. During that time he made a study of the Reich and published a book, People Under Hitler, a scathing account of German despotism. Columbia University Press placed Deuel among the fifteen American authors—along with the likes of Pearl Buck, Archibald MacLeish, and Sinclair Lewis—that Hitler would liquidate first if he conquered America. The Reich dubbed him “the worst anti-Nazi in the whole country.” Author and friend William L. Shirer called him “brilliant.”
In the Berlin of 1935 Deuel befriended a young United Press correspondent, a bachelor, with whom Deuel would often share meals and break the lonely tedium of a foreign posting. Later, in March 1942, Deuel wrote an effusive letter of recommendation for that correspondent who had applied for a position with the navy’s public relations department. He hailed the young man’s “personal charm,” his intelligence, initiative, energy, honesty, and patriotism. That correspondent would become an integral part of the nascent OSS. His name was Richard McGarrah Helms, a future director of Central Intelligence. It was a friendship that would last for decades and profit Deuel in his second career with the Agency.
It was during his tenure as Berlin correspondent that Wally and his wife, Mary, had two sons. Peter was born in 1935 and Mike on May 13, 1937, in Berlin.
With the outbreak of World War II, Wally Deuel joined the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner to the CIA. He was named special assistant to Wild Bill Donovan, the charismatic leader of the OSS. Not cut out for the derring-do of covert military operations, Deuel took on a variety of tasks, even working with Walt Disney on a cartoon propaganda project. He was later assigned to the PWD, the Psychological Warfare Division, where he helped to disseminate false stories designed to undermine Germany’s will to fight. Among those Deuel would work with during the war was future CIA chief Allen Dulles.
At the end of the war Donovan asked Deuel to write the first history of the OSS, an internal document chronicling some of the service’s missions and personalities. In August 1945 Deuel returned to the Chicago Daily News and was asked to write a series on the OSS. He prepared a generally glowing account of the OSS but suggested in one brief phrase that at times the espionage business called for the use of “subversion.” In an otherwise flattering portrayal of the service, he wrote, “Some of the methods employed are not nice.”
Constrained by both his lifetime secrecy oath and his bond of friendship with Donovan, Deuel submitted the article to the former OSS head for his approval, assuming it would be instantly forthcoming. But Donovan raised his eyebrows at the suggestion that his OSS had ever stooped to ungentlemanly behavior. Donovan pointed out that at that very moment, the FBI, the State Department, and the Navy and War Departments all had their knives out trying to gut his efforts to salvage elements of the OSS and create a postwar central intelligence apparatus.
The exchange that followed was recorded in an August 25, 1961, letter Deuel wrote to his son Mike, then a marine. Deuel recalled Donovan telling him that “if he and/or I admitted in print that we had used methods which weren’t nice, this would be used as evidence that we were all wicked, dirty people whose agency should be abolished. ‘Besides,’ said Bill, looking his most virtuous, his most butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-my-mouth, ‘I defy you to name me one single case in which we used methods that weren’t nice.’
“This, of course, was my cue to stammer and stutter and blush and pick my nose in well-simulated confusion, and pretend to cudgel my brains and then confess that, shucks, in actual fact I couldn’t cite a single instance of OSS skullduggery.
“But the war was over, and Bill, for all that I adored him, already had a slight overdraft of his moral credit with me,” wrote Deuel, “and I was a newspaperman again as of that day and occasion, and no longer a public servant, and Bill’s righteousness was just altogether too Goddam silly, and so instead of making the obeisance expected of me, I said:
“ ‘All right, dammit, I will give you an example. I’ll give you the example of Baron von ———, of the German diplomatic service, whom we suborned to the betrayal of his country’s military secrets in time of war to an enemy—namely, us—by the threat that if he didn’t give us what we wanted we’d expose him as a homosexual.’”
“Bill beamed with gratification, highly pleased to be reminded of a coup of which he had always been particularly proud.”
“ ‘But he was a homosexual, wasn’t he?’ said he.”
“ ‘Certainly he was,’ said I.”
“ ‘And the threat worked, didn’t it?’ said he.”
“ ‘Certainly it worked,’ said I.”
“ ‘Well, then?’ said Bill, triumphantly.”
Deuel ultimately won permission to publish the offending sentence, but without reference to any specific misdeeds.
Wally Deuel later took a job as diplomatic correspondent for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, but in 1953 he was laid off. Thereafter he called upon his constellation of well-placed friends to help him find a job. Among these was a prominent fellow Illinois resident and future senator, Adlai Stevenson, and the then president of the Rockefeller Foundation, Dean Rusk. But while there were many offers of assistance, no specific jobs materialized. Deuel’s pride was hurt and his finances were frayed. He recalled that a decade earlier Allen Dulles had attempted to enlist his help in an OSS effort. Dulles was now Director Central Intelligence and eager to have Deuel on board.
In January 1954 Deuel took the oath of office, passed his final security interview, and signed a loyalty affidavit at CIA headquarters. He was a GS-15 with a starting salary of $10,800 a year, but he was jubilant, and once again intoxicated with the mystique of espionage, even though his career would rely more on his skills with a typewriter than a garrote or codebook.
On May 31, 1954, he wrote his friend Adlai Stevenson, “Dear Adlai: I have gone back to spying,” a claim slightly exaggerated, but one in which he took enormous pride. “I thought I could take the stuff or leave it alone, but clearly it had a more powerful hold on me than I realized. Anyway, I’m with the CIA and having the time of my life. It’s the most exciting and rewarding work I’ve done since I was Berlin Correspondent for the Old Daily News. It’s like taking holy orders; you are vowed to silence, to obedience, to poverty and to long, long, long hours of extremely hard work. No vows of chastity, though.”
To Dean Rusk, Deuel wrote: “I am back in the spy business . . . I am working for my favorite Dulles (Allen, of course) in CIA . . .” (The other Dulles, John Foster, brother of Allen, was then secretary of state.)
“The kids in CIA are simply terrific,” he w
rote another friend. “I never saw anywhere such a gang of brilliant, inspired, dedicated, hard-working, selfless men.” Such effusiveness was the hallmark of those early years at the Agency, predating the revelations and allegations that would thereafter stain the Agency’s name and create a more subdued and somber atmosphere.
But there was a strange irony to the idea that a man like Deuel who had made his living sharing his vision of events with the world was now bound to keeping his mouth shut. “The silence is the hardest part, of course,” he wrote. “Imagine to yourself a Deuel unable to say anything about his work or anything about politics, either foreign or domestic. Imagine to yourself a Deuel whose garrulity is inhibited in any manner or degree whatever. What practical jokes life plays on us, sooner or later, doesn’t it?”
At the Agency Wally Deuel held a variety of midlevel and senior positions. He was made chief of staff overseeing all current intelligence publications, including those that each morning went directly to President Eisenhower and, later, Kennedy. From 1957 until 1968 he served as deputy chief and then chief of Foreign Intelligence/Requirements, overseeing those branches that collected, edited, and disseminated the CIA’s secret intelligence. He was later assigned to the inspector general’s staff, traveling to more than twenty countries, examining the conduct of the Agency’s far-flung stations and bases. He even undertook a covert assignment to Beirut, where he made a study of why the Lebanese press was negative toward the United States and what could be done to influence that press and plant stories more favorable to American interests.
In February 1961 Deuel’s immediate superior broke his arm, and Deuel was asked to fill in as the CIA’s representative to the Kennedy White House. There he attended meetings with Pierre Salinger, Ed Murrow, Walt Rostow, McGeorge Bundy, and other senior officials advising Kennedy on how to deal with the press on sensitive political and intelligence matters. At one such meeting, held on February 21, 1961, Deuel noted that the State Department representative advised Kennedy that the United States should have used the recent assassination of Patrice Lumumba in the Congo to its political advantage. The official argued that the United States “should have mounted a ‘black’ effort designed to convince world opinion that the Russians were responsible for Lumumba’s assassination.” Apparently the State Department official was unaware that the CIA had earlier ordered Agency operatives to poison the former Congolese leader.
