Historians and journalists usually describe COINTELPRO as a Hoover creation, which is not quite the case. It was created by Hoover with the critical help of Angleton, and it functioned as a joint FBI-CIA venture, with a bureaucratic division of labor. The Bureau took the lead in targeting dissident Americans inside the United States. The Agency took the lead outside the country. In the COINTELPRO attack on the Fair Play for Cuba Committee and its most famous member, Lee Harvey Oswald, the FBI and the CIA would work together.
Angleton used CIA mail surveillance to feed the COINTELPRO beast.59
MOLE
EZRA POUND WAS RELEASED from St. Elizabeths Hospital in April 1958. He was now seventy-two years old—still a favorite of conservatives but no longer enchanted with fascism. He had finished another book of cantos while incarcerated. Pound’s psychiatrist found him a fascinating thinker and no danger to society.
Although Angleton gave former CIA officer Peter Sichel the impression that he had been in touch with Pound while the poet was at St. Elizabeths, there’s no evidence Angleton ever visited or wrote.60 After his release, Pound returned to Italy and connected with many old friends, but not with Angleton.61
Angleton was consumed by his work and its agonies. He felt intimations of bad news on October 18, 1959. A front-page story in The New York Times reported that Russell Langelle, chief security officer at the U.S. embassy in Moscow, had been arrested. The Soviet Foreign Ministry released a statement saying that Langelle had been seen giving a package to an unidentified passenger on a city bus, arousing suspicion. Langelle, who denied that he engaged in espionage, was expelled from the country.62
The counterintelligence implications were disturbing. Langelle was the Agency’s contact with Pyotr Popov, a military officer and the best agent that the CIA had inside the Soviet Union. For seven years, Popov had been passing reports on the inner workings of the Red Army at incredible risk to himself and at virtually no cost to the Agency. At a time when Western intelligence services had little reliable information from inside the Soviet armed forces, Popov’s reporting was priceless.
“He brought us so much,” said George Kisevalter, one of the Agency’s top Russian-speaking officers. “For instance when he was on duty at night, he could gain access to the monthly payroll. He copied the whole thing, and it contained all kinds of exotic information.”63
Kisevalter was a bear of a man who wore rumpled clothes and spoke perfect Russian and German.64 The only son of an émigré Russian engineer, he had served in the U.S. Army before joining the CIA in 1951. As a branch chief in the Soviet Russia Division,65 his specialty was the handling of Russian agents. Over the course of six years, Kisevalter met more than a hundred times with Popov.66
The CIA soon learned that Popov was the unidentified bus passenger with whom Langelle had made contact. On December 20, 1959, the Red Star newspaper in Moscow reported what the CIA men already suspected: that the KGB had unmasked Popov as an American intelligence agent.67
* * *
THE CIA MEN DEBATED what had gone wrong.
Bill Harvey, chief of the Berlin base, thought Popov had been exposed by the sloppy tradecraft of one of his contacts in Moscow. Bill Hood, Angleton’s friend, who also handled Popov, cited “several obvious clues” that supported this analysis.68
Angleton countered that the obvious clues did not necessarily provide the best answers to counterintelligence problems. Angleton suspected Popov had been betrayed by what he called “a mole,” a spy within the ranks of the CIA.
In time, Angleton’s suspicion would harden into a fixed idea, which fueled an ideological crusade that more than a few of his colleagues denounced as a witch hunt. It all began in October 1959, according to the CIA’s in-house historian David Robarge. The seminal event was Pyotr Popov’s arrest. “Angleton’s fixation on the mole started around 1960, after Popov’s then-unexplained compromise,” he wrote.69
OSWALD
TWO WEEKS AFTER LANGELLE’S arrest, on Monday, November 2, 1959, Jane Roman received her daily call from Sam Papich. He asked her about a story that appeared on page A7 of Saturday’s Washington Post: EX-MARINE ASKS SOVIET CITIZENSHIP.
The wire-service story reported that a twenty-year-old former marine from Texas named Lee Harvey Oswald had shown up at the U.S. embassy in Moscow and announced his intention to renounce his U.S. passport and become a citizen of the Soviet Union.
Papich wanted to know more. When Roman received a cable from the State Department about Oswald, she scrawled on the top, “Mr. Papich would like to know about this ex-marine who recently defected into the U.S.S.R.” She routed the cable to a colleague who might have answers.
Two days later, Roman received another cable on Oswald, this one from the Office of Naval Intelligence. ONI had responsibility for Oswald because he had recently been discharged from the Marine Corps.
“Something of special interest,” the sender wrote to Roman.
Another State Department cable came in, and soon Oswald’s name was circled with an underlined note emphasizing “SAYS HAS OFFERED SOVIETS ANY INFORMATION HE HAD ACQUIRED AS ENLISTED RADAR OPERATOR.”
Oswald was an obvious target for the Counterintelligence Staff. It wasn’t unheard of for Americans to move to Moscow in 1959, but it was unusual. Few, if any, of the American defectors had ever announced their intention to give the Russians classified military information. Roman routed the cable about Oswald to Birch O’Neal and the Special Investigations Group, which was responsible for keeping files on defectors. Young Oswald was a person of interest.
* * *
THE CIA’S HANDLING OF information about Lee Harvey Oswald, the accused assassin of President John F. Kennedy, is a story shrouded in deception and perjury, theories and disinformation, lies and legends. But at least one aspect of the story cannot be disputed: Angleton controlled the CIA’s file on Oswald for four years—from his defection in October 1959 until his death in November 1963.
Angleton would conceal this fact for the rest of his life. He hid it from the Warren Commission and he obfuscated about it with congressional investigators in the 1970s. The story only began to emerge when Congress ordered the declassification of long-secret JFK assassination records in the 1990s. While the full story has yet to be disclosed, much of it can now be told.
* * *
LEE OSWALD WAS THE object of intense CIA interest from the moment he arrived in Moscow. Angleton relied on the Special Investigations Group to monitor his movements. Birch O’Neal, the chief of the SIG, supervised a staff of eight people, including Elizabeth Ann Egerter, master of the office filing system. She controlled Oswald’s file on behalf of Angleton.
Betty, as she was known, was a single woman from Croton, New York, who had worked as an interior designer and traveled around Europe with her husband, a professional musician.70 They divorced, and she went to work for the CIA. She had no children. Her life focused on her work, which she took seriously and never spoke about except when compelled by subpoena. Egerter liked to describe the SIG as “the office that spied on spies.”71
The SIG was dedicated to exploiting the actions of defectors like Oswald. As Angleton explained in a staff directive, the SIG “maintains and uses sensitive counterintelligence holdings including certain Comint [communications intelligence] and defector materials to match these against operational and personality data and thus to derive operational leads.”72
This was the arcane language of secret intelligence work: sensitive counterintelligence holdings … match defector materials … derive operational leads. Dense, complex, and allusive, the words have to be unpacked to be understood. In plain speech, you could say the men and women of the SIG used information about defectors obtained via wiretaps or other illicit means to support covert operations against the Soviet Union.
In short, Angleton’s mole hunters were running operations and they were interested in Oswald. So was Angleton himself. Someone, most likely Angleton, gave Oswald’s name to a subordinate in the CI/PROJECT. That
person created a note card in the LINGUAL file bearing Oswald’s name, and the handwritten words “SECRET EYES ONLY.” This notation put Oswald in a rather select group.73 The former Marine Corps radio operator was now one of three hundred Americans whose international mail was opened, copied, and filed for future use.
Why did Angleton do this? He was interested in Oswald. As he told the FBI, the purpose of the LINGUAL program was “to identify persons behind the Iron Curtain who might have some ties in the U.S. and who could be approached in their countries as contacts and sources for CIA.”74 A note scrawled on the card provided the details: “Recent defector to the USSR—Former Marine.”
* * *
THE PROOF OF ANGLETON’S special interest in Oswald emerged in the Counterintelligence Staff’s unusual handling of his defection. Standard CIA procedure for collecting information on a defector required the opening of a “personality” file, known in the lingo of many federal agencies as a “201 file.” The CIA’s Central File Registry had tens of thousands of 201 files, some fat, some thin. Some were crammed with classified information. Others consisted only of newspaper clippings. Oswald, an ex-marine with a security clearance who had threatened to share military secrets with the Soviets, certainly qualified for a 201 file.
Angleton’s people knew that. Jane Roman and Betty Egerter didn’t have to read the latest edition of the Clandestine Services Handbook to know that a 201 file should be opened on persons “of active operational interest at any given point in time.” They also knew the informal three-document rule: As soon as the Agency received three incoming reports on a person, it was time to open a 201 file.75
Oswald qualified on every count. Nonetheless, the Special Investigations Group chose not to open a file on him. Instead, the Office of Security opened a file on the itinerant ex-marine on December 9, 1959. This file, labeled OS-351-164, then became the repository of all the information that the Agency received about Oswald.76
Needless to say, the Office of Security did not create Oswald’s file without consulting Angleton’s staff. CI/SIG served as “a liaison office between CI Staff and the Office of Security,” Egerter later explained. “We worked very closely with the Office of Security.”77 In the case of Oswald, the unusual procedure had to be approved at higher levels. Robert Bannerman, deputy director of the Office of Security in 1959, told historian John Newman that “Jim Angleton was in on this.”78
* * *
ANGLETON’S INTEREST IN OSWALD was finely tuned. The effect of creating an Office of Security file, instead of a 201 file, was to ensure information about the ex-marine was held more tightly. For Angleton’s counterintelligence purposes, an OS file had clear advantages over a 201 file. A 201 file was accessible to anyone in the Directorate of Plans who had a clearance to draw from the Central File Registry. By contrast, an OS file could not be seen by anybody outside of Office of Security and the SIG.
So, if someone inside the Agency—say a KGB mole—wanted to know more about the ex-marine whose defection The Washington Post had reported, the person would have to ask for his file in writing—and provide his or her name, office, and phone number. By creating a restricted OS file and not a 201 file for Oswald, Angleton could determine who in the ranks of the CIA was interested in him. The unusual handling of the Oswald file was one technique among many for finding the mole who had betrayed Popov.
In the next year, a series of FBI and State Department memos flowed into Angleton’s Oswald file.
* * *
IN OCTOBER 1960, THE STATE Department sent a notice to the CIA stating that it wanted up-to-date records on all recent defectors to the Soviet Union. The notice came attached with a list of a dozen known defectors, one of whom was Lee Oswald. That missive, according to the CIA’s account, prodded the Counterintelligence Staff to act. In December 1960, thirteen months after Oswald’s defection, Betty Egerter completed the paperwork to create a 201 file. In the process, she inexplicably gave Oswald the wrong middle name, labeling the file “Lee Henry Oswald.”79
More important than the name on the file was its contents. Egerter took all the material that was collected in the OS file and transferred it to the new 201 file. The Oswald file now contained a dozen items: four documents from the State Department, two from the CIA, two from the FBI, one from ONI, and three newspaper clippings.80
The mole hunt was the most sensitive of Angleton’s operations, which is why he put Egerter in charge of the Oswald file. All new information on Oswald was routed to her. In June 1962, for example, the LINGUAL team opened and read a letter written by Oswald’s mother, Marguerite. “This item will be of interest to Mrs. Egerter, CI/SIG, and also to the FBI,” said the cover memo on the intercepted letter.81
Neither the CIA nor Angleton shared this early interest in Oswald and his family with the Warren Commission, which investigated the assassination of JFK. Not until the mid-1970s did people start to ask questions. In 1978, an attorney for the House Select Committee on Assassinations put the question to Angleton. Given the Agency’s standard procedures, he asked, what could explain the yearlong delay in opening Oswald’s 201 file?
“I don’t know the circumstances,” Angleton replied. “I don’t know why it would take that long.”82
In fact, Angleton did know the circumstances. He had created the SIG to track defectors. He was alarmed by Popov’s arrest in late 1959 and he worried about moles. He had put Oswald’s name on the LINGUAL list. He wanted to monitor the ex-marine closely and guard all information about him. And he needed to hide a damning fact: Oswald figured in his mole hunt a thousand days before he became world-famous.
* * *
IN MAY 1960, ANGLETON crashed.83 Stressed by the demands of his impossible job, drinking to excess, and gasping for breath from a recurrence of tuberculosis, he was a shambling wreck. His doctor insisted he take a medical leave at a sanatorium in Virginia, and suddenly he was outside the world of secret intelligence. Angleton recuperated for months. He did not return to the house in Arlington until November 4, 1960. The next Tuesday was Election Day. When the votes were all counted, Senator John F. Kennedy had defeated Vice President Richard Nixon in the closest presidential election since 1876.
Angleton knew Nixon from policy discussions about Cuba. He knew Jack Kennedy personally from dinner parties at the Meyers’ and the Bradlees’. Like most people in their social crowd, Jim and Cicely Angleton found Kennedy and his wife, Jacqueline, enormously attractive, but they were not always impressed by Kennedy’s politics. Angleton usually voted Republican. He had supported Wendell Willkie in 1940 and Dwight Eisenhower in 1952. Kennedy’s ironic charm reminded Cicely of a certain Shakespearean aristocrat. After Kennedy was elected, she quipped, “Prince Hamlet is in the White House.”84
JFK
JAMES JESUS ANGLETON WAS almost exactly the same age as John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Both men were born in 1917, seven months apart. Both grew up in cosmopolitan families, where they mastered the privileges of elite education and new wealth. Both returned from World War II exuding the hopes and ambitions of a new generation. As they made their way toward positions of power in Washington in the 1950s, they saw each other with their mutual friends Cord and Mary Meyer. But if they were friendly, they were not close. Now Kennedy was the president-elect of the United States of America, and Angleton worked for him.
With the arrival of a new administration came new issues and new assignments for Angleton. One of them concerned Israel.
* * *
THANKS TO A LONG-STANDING agreement with Dulles, Angleton served as the Israel desk officer at CIA headquarters. He also controlled the CIA station in Tel Aviv. In 1960, he brought in Peter Jessup, a career officer whom he trusted, to serve as station chief. Angleton continued to visit Israel often, meeting with Jessup as well as with Isser Harel, Amos Manor, Memi de Shalit, and other senior figures in the Israeli government. What he didn’t do was report on Israel’s efforts to build a nuclear reactor and nuclear weapons.
Others were more attentive.
Henry Gromberg, a physicist from the University of Michigan, visited Israel’s civilian nuclear facilities in November 1960 and came away with the distinct impression that a research reactor in the Negev desert town of Dimona was part of an effort to develop nuclear weapons.
“I feel sure its design is far beyond any kind of training reactor and that it will be capable of producing weapons grade plutonium,” he told the CIA.85
The Agency sent up a U-2 spy plane, which returned with high-altitude images of unusual construction at Dimona. A formal CIA intelligence estimate, produced January 31, 1961, concluded, “The secrecy and deception surrounding the undertaking [at Dimona] suggest that it is intended, at least in part, for the production of weapons grade uranium.”86
The Israelis had managed to keep the secret of Dimona from the CIA for more than two years.87 At the time, Angleton was briefed by Agency photo analysts about the U-2 imagery. He never evinced much interest, said Dino Brugioni, deputy director of the CIA’s National Photographic Interpretation Center.
“He was a real funny guy,” Brugioni recalled. “I’d meet with him, brief him; he’d ask a few questions, you’d leave—and never know what he’s holding. Sometimes he’d have his office real dark and have a light only on you. He was a real spook.”88
The U.S. Intelligence Board, which reviewed CIA operations on behalf of the White House, recommended the Agency “expeditiously disseminate all information that it collects on this subject” to the rest of the government.89
As the Israel desk officer, Angleton was responsible for following the board’s guidance. He ignored it.
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