* * *
ONE OPPORTUNITY WAS ISRAEL. The Zionists had gained their state in May 1948. Using moral appeals, bombs, assassination, and weapons provided by Eastern European Communists, they drove out the British, commandeered the strategic heights of historic Palestine, and declared a Jewish homeland. They expelled most of the Arab residents and defeated the combined armies of Arab nations, which could not imagine that Jews from distant Europe could establish their own country in their midst. They could and did.
Angleton was initially wary of Israel. Many Jews espoused communism, and the Soviet Union was the first nation to extend diplomatic recognition to the Jewish state. He thought the Soviet intelligence service would use Israel as a way station for inserting spies into the West. But Stalin’s anti-Semitic purges in 1948 guaranteed that the Israelis would not fall under Soviet sway.
In 1950, Reuven Shiloah, the founder of Israel’s first intelligence organization, visited Washington and came away impressed by the CIA. In April 1951, he reorganized the fractious Israeli security forces to create a new foreign intelligence agency, called the Institute for Intelligence and Special Tasks, inevitably known as the Mossad, the Hebrew word for “institute.”213
In 1951, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion came to the United States and brought Shiloah with him. Ben-Gurion met privately with President Truman and Walter Bedell Smith. Angleton arranged for Ben-Gurion to lunch with Allen Dulles.214
“The purpose of the meeting,” said Efraim Halevy, retired director of the Mossad and a longtime friend of Angleton, “was to clarify in no uncertain terms that, notwithstanding what had happened between Israel and the United States in 1948, and notwithstanding that Russia had been a key factor in Israel’s survival, Israel considered itself part of the Western world, and it would maintain the relationship with the United States in this spirit.”215
Shiloah stayed on in Washington to work out the arrangements with Angleton. The resulting agreement laid the foundation for the exchange of secret information between the two services and committed them to report to each other on subjects of mutual interest.216 Shiloah, according to his biographer, soon developed “a special relationship” with Angleton,217 who became the CIA’s exclusive liaison with the Mossad.218
Angleton returned the favor by visiting Israel.219 Shiloah introduced him to Amos Manor, chief of counterespionage for Israel’s domestic intelligence agency, known as Shabak or Shin Bet.220 Manor was an attractive man—tall, athletic, and outgoing. Born in present-day Romania as Arthur Mendelovich, he had grown up in a wealthy Jewish family, most of whose members had died in the Holocaust. Put on a train bound for Auschwitz, he had jumped off and escaped to join the Jewish underground. He emigrated to Israel, using a forged passport. Manor joined the general security service and changed his name. He spoke Hebrew, English, French, Romanian, and Hungarian, and he had uncanny understanding of how other people thought, perhaps the most important skill a counterintelligence officer can possess.221
Manor headed up what the Israelis called Operation Balsam, their conduit to the Americans.
“They told me I had to collect information about the Soviet bloc and transmit it to them,” Manor later recalled. “I didn’t know exactly what to do but then I had the idea of giving them the material we had gathered a year earlier about the efforts of the Eastern bloc to use Israel to bypass an American trade embargo. We edited the material and informed them that they should never ask us to identify sources.”222
* * *
ANOTHER ARENA FOR ANGLETON’S ambition was organized labor. Early on, he grasped the truth that unions were a key to political power in the democratic West, and central to Communist strategy. He needed sources in the labor movement.
That’s why he turned to Jay Lovestone, the chief of the American Federation of Labor’s Free Trade Union Committee. Growing up as a Jewish immigrant in New York City, Lovestone became a Communist. As the leader of the American Communist Party in the 1920s, his independent ways were rebuked by Joseph Stalin himself. In a decade of intra-Communist struggle, Lovestone learned—and loved—to operate through front organizations to achieve his political goals. During World War II, he rejected communism and joined the staff of the AFL, one of the two largest confederations of American labor unions, rivaled only by the more left-wing Congress of Industrial Organizations, or CIO.223
In a mutually agreeable arrangement Angleton hired him. Lovestone handled the AFL’s relations with labor unions around the world. The CIA funded him. He not only reported to Angleton but also helped him build his own intelligence network. Lovestone introduced Angleton to his friend Louise Page Morris, an attractive forty-five-year-old divorcée from New York City. She had worked at OSS and taken its former chief Bill Donovan as a lover for a while, so she knew the world of intelligence.224 As an heiress to the Morris tobacco fortune, she didn’t lack for money. She craved adventure and found it in one of the few roles available to independent-minded women of the era: assistant to a man of power.
When Morris met Angleton in the summer of 1949, she took care to look good. She wore a purple skirt, a tight white linen blouse with a high neck, tucked in at the waist, and white Italian sandals. She thought Angleton was handsome, with his high forehead, large brown eyes, and jutting jaw. She noticed he wore a double-breasted charcoal gray suit and a homburg-type hat in the Washington heat, as though trying to make himself look older. He was all of thirty-one years old at the time.
“Would you like to work with me?” Angleton asked. “Not for the CIA. Just for me. I want you to be my eyes and ears, go on special assignments, stay clear of the embassies … let things come your way naturally.”225
Morris was hired on the spot. She was paid five hundred dollars a month with a generous expense account. Her cover was that she worked for Lovestone and ran the AFL’s library in New York City. Her code name was MARTHA. She passed her reports to Mario Brod, Angleton’s hustler pal from OSS days, who was now a lawyer in New York. In her reports to Lovestone, they referred to Angleton as SCARECROW.
Lovestone’s biographer would describe Morris as Angleton’s “Mata Hari,” the Dutch-born singer and exotic dancer who spied on behalf of the German military command during World War I. Caught by the French police, Mata Hari was executed by a firing squad.
Morris would serve as Angleton’s spy for a decade, traveling to Cairo, Baghdad, Berlin, Jakarta, and Japan. She never met a firing squad, but she did risk her life for Angleton on more than one occasion, a measure of his persuasive powers.
LSD
IN THE DARKNESS OF room 1018 of the Statler Hotel in New York City, someone or something lifted Frank Olson off his bare feet, off the carpet, and propelled him headfirst toward the window overlooking Seventh Avenue. Whether it was a man or mental demons, the source of the force was so powerful that Olson’s body exploded through the glass window and sailed out into the cool night air of midtown Manhattan. In the first second, Frank Olson fell sixteen feet; in the second, sixty-four.
“It was like the guy was diving, his hands out in front of him, but then his body twisted and he was coming down feet first, his arms grabbing at the air above him,” said the hotel doorman, who looked up at the sound of breaking glass.
The falling man struck a temporary wooden partition that shielded the construction under way on the hotel’s facade, then tumbled to the sidewalk, landing on his back.226
It was 2:25 A.M. on Saturday, November 28, 1953.
Up on the tenth floor, inside the room from which Olson had been ejected, there was a wide-awake man named Robert Lashbrook. He was a chemist for the CIA’s Technical Services Division. He looked out the shattered window. Olson’s body lay on the sidewalk below. He had better things to do than go down to see if poor Olson was dead. Lashbrook could (and would) console himself with the thought that he himself hadn’t killed Olson, and that he was forbidden by the Agency and the law from saying anything more about what had happened in room 1018.
The story Lashbrook couldn’t
tell was that he was under CIA orders to control Olson, a U.S. Army scientist. Olson had been given a dosage of LSD to see if it would compel him to tell the truth about what he knew of certain operational matters involving bioweapons research. The CIA had ordered Olson be taken to New York over the Thanksgiving holiday to talk to an Agency-cleared doctor. After a few days, Olson became upset. He wanted to go home, which was not allowed. Olson’s will conflicted with the CIA’s ways in room 1018 and Olson went out the window.
Now Lashbrook had a problem his bosses needed to know about. He uncradled the phone and called the hotel operator. She connected him to Dr. Harold Abramson, the Agency-cleared doctor whom Olson had been seeing. Abramson called himself a psychiatrist but was trained only as an allergist.
“Well, he’s gone,” Lashbrook said, according to the hotel operator, who listened in on the call.227
When two New York City police officers arrived forty minutes later, they took Lashbrook to the precinct house, where he gave a statement. He explained Olson’s distressed mental state and the concerns of his army colleagues, without mentioning his work for the CIA or the use of LSD. Lashbrook returned to the Statler and checked into a new room.
Not long after the sun had risen, Lashbrook received a visitor, James McCord, from the CIA’s Office of Security. McCord was a diligent and taciturn man, a former FBI agent tasked with reporting on what had happened. Lashbrook finally felt free to speak. He explained that his assignment involved Olson and security concerns about some sensitive chemical-weapons operations. McCord took it all down.228
And so began the cover-up of Frank Olson’s wrongful death and the notorious CIA operation known as MKULTRA, which encompassed a wide range of experiments to control the workings of the human mind in the service of U.S. national security. It wasn’t until many years later that Angleton’s supporting role in the MKULTRA story emerged.
Angleton worked with narcotics agent George White, his friend from OSS days, to establish two CIA safe houses in New York and San Francisco, where LSD experiments were conducted on unsuspecting subjects for two decades. In the fall of 1952, Angleton had had several work meetings in Washington with Harold Abramson and Robert Lashbrook, the men who would accompany Olson during his fatal trip to New York a year later. Angleton wasn’t involved in the events leading to Olson’s death, but he did help give birth to the CIA’s mind-control program.
* * *
THE TERM MIND CONTROL and the cryptonym MKULTRA have become notorious in the American imagination, and for good reason. The CIA’s efforts in the 1950s and 1960s to manipulate human behavior through chemistry, hypnosis, and coercion constituted a far-flung conspiracy to experiment on unwitting people in the name of “national security.” MKULTRA is shorthand for a government-sanctioned crime wave born in the peculiar circumstances of the world in the mid-twentieth century.
America in the 1950s was peaceful, prosperous, and fearful of subversion. In Washington, the Red Scare and the Lavender Scare (and the flight of Burgess and Maclean) lent credence to the charges of ambitious politicians like Senator McCarthy and Congressman Richard Nixon of California that the government was riddled with security threats. In the newsreels, Americans saw the Communists’ 1949 show trial of Hungarian cardinal József Mindszenty, in which the zombielike defendant confessed to crimes he probably had not committed.229 The word brainwashing, coined in 1950 to describe North Korea’s treatment of U.S. prisoners of war, instantly entered the American lexicon, adding fear of mental manipulation to concerns about Communist infiltration.
The CIA’s Office of Scientific Intelligence responded by creating Operation Bluebird.230 The program had several objectives. The first was to discover ways to condition U.S. personnel to prevent “unauthorized extraction of information … by known means.” Another goal was to outdo the Communists at brainwashing: to control people through use of “special interrogation techniques,” including hypnosis and drugs. A third goal was “memory enhancement” to improve human intelligence collection; and the fourth was figuring how to prevent “hostile control” of Agency personnel.231
When the Korean War erupted, the Bluebird program grew rapidly. A year later, in July 1951, Beetle Smith received a list containing the names of eighty-two employees cleared for working on Bluebird. One of them was Angleton.232
In August 1952, the operation was renamed Artichoke, and responsibility for research was given to the Technical Services Division, or TSD, which provided operational support for CIA clandestine activities.233 The TSD scientists were especially intrigued by the potential of a chemical known as LSD-25. It was an organic compound of lysergic acid discovered by a Swiss scientist in 1943. Even the tiniest of dosages seemed to induce anxiety, hysteria, imbalance, even insanity, but also clarity, calmness, insight, and wisdom.
For help in utilizing LSD, the Agency turned to Angleton’s old friend George Hunter White.
* * *
GEORGE WHITE WAS A natural choice for CIA consultant on drug-related issues. At forty-four years of age, White was perhaps the best-known narcotics agent in the country. He had made headlines nationwide in January 1949 for arresting jazz singer Billie Holiday in a San Francisco hotel room for possession of heroin. (Holiday was acquitted).234 In October 1949, White received the U.S. Treasury Department’s Exceptional Civilian Service Award for his work on “breaking up numerous illicit narcotics rings” while operating “at grave personal risk.”235
The CIA men were intrigued by his expertise. When White went to Rome for an undercover narcotics operation in 1948, he called on Angleton for support, and deputy Ray Rocca loaned him a gun.236 In 1950, White was introduced to Allen Dulles, and they stayed up until one in the morning, talking about his “truth drug” experiments in the OSS.237 Their mutual attraction wasn’t hard to figure. White was a streetwise cop who could carry out Angleton’s secret missions; Angleton was a savvy insider who could give White entrée into the suites of the glamorous CIA.
* * *
WHITE RECORDED CERTAIN EPISODES of their collaboration in his pocket calendars, which wound up in the library at Stanford University. These diaries trace how Angleton pursued the use of psychoactive drugs for intelligence work.
White’s role with the CIA was formalized in the spring of 1952, when he met Sidney Gottlieb, the chief of the Chemical Branch of the Technical Services Division.”238 To Gottlieb’s surprise, White said that he had already had several discussions about LSD with Angleton.239 Later that summer, Angleton and White met in a Washington restaurant to discuss a “special teaching assignment” for White.240
In September 1952, Angleton met with White and Gottlieb in New York before going out to dinner with TSD colleagues, including Bob Lashbrook and Harold Abramson, the men who later concocted the story that Frank Olson had thrown himself through a window as a way to kill himself. On October 30, 1952, Angleton met again with White, who went on to a meeting with Lashbrook about “TD,” White’s code for “truth drugs.”241
Angleton’s interest in LSD was not purely professional. He tried the drug a few weeks later, according to White. In a letter to his lawyer, White said that Angleton came to have Thanksgiving dinner with him and his wife, Albertine, at their New York City apartment. The next evening, after Albertine went to work, White and Angleton drank gin and tonics laced with LSD. White recounted that he had a “delayed reaction” to the drug, while Angleton had a “pleasurable experience.” He said that Angleton, “after really coming under the effects of the drug,” talked him into taking a taxi to Chinatown to have dinner. With plates of food before them, they began “laughing about something I can’t remember now” and they “never got around to eating a bite.”242
It may be coincidence, but after Angleton and White took LSD in November 1952, Angleton’s name never again appeared in George White’s diary. Over the course of the previous eight years, White had recorded a dozen meetings with Angleton, but not one after November 1952. Perhaps Angleton’s psychedelic trip to Chinatown with White—it
s hallucinatory wonders, its negation of hunger, its comic immensity—ended their friendship or his interest in LSD or both.
* * *
ANGLETON HAD MORE IMPORTANT issues on his mind. Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, elected president of the United States of America on November 4, 1952, was the first Republican to occupy the White House in twenty years. He brought a new foreign policy agenda to Washington and new management to the CIA, which was all to the good as far as Angleton was concerned.
Eisenhower appointed John Foster Dulles, a career diplomat and older brother of Allen, as secretary of state. To ensure his control of the diplomatic corps on a day-to-day basis, Eisenhower also wanted Beetle Smith, his former executive officer, to serve as undersecretary of state. When Smith moved to that job, Allen Dulles became the director of Central Intelligence, the position he had been scheming to create and claim since 1945.
Angleton was feeling inspired by one of the most popular movies of 1952, High Noon. It was a tale of the Old West starring Gary Cooper, which made a lasting impression on Angleton as an allegory of America in the Cold War.
“The prosperous citizens in the frontier town of Hadleyville are suddenly confronted with the return of a menace which they thought had been banished forever,” Angleton later explained in an essay on the movie. “The situation is classic because of its brilliant delineation of the opposed forces of good and evil.”
In the movie, word flashes through Hadleyville that the gunslinger Frank Miller, who had terrorized residents until Marshal Kane (played by Cooper) brought him to justice, has been released from the penitentiary. To take revenge, Miller and his old gang are coming back to the town.
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