The FBI felt obliged to report Harvey’s contact with a known crime figure to their bosses; Angleton did not.26 He was under no illusions about what the two men were discussing. As recently as March 1963, Harvey was still in charge of the Agency’s ZR-RIFLE assassination program.27 “I knew he was not a frivolous man,” Angleton said.28 He did not have to guess that assassination was on the menu at Duke Zeibert’s that night.
* * *
ANGLETON WAS THINKING ABOUT assassination himself. In July 1963, he asked the wizards of the Agency’s Technical Services Division if they could hypnotize an assassin to kill a certain Cuban leader.
“Castro was naturally our discussion point,” said a CIA officer who worked on the MKULTRA program under Angleton’s direction. The challenge was, “Could you get somebody gung-ho enough that they would go in and get him?”29
Angleton’s people set up an experiment in Mexico City. They tried to hypnotize a Mexican agent, and failed utterly.
Angleton saw no harm in experimenting. Hypnotizing an assassin to kill Castro wasn’t irrational or immoral or even crazy to his way of thinking. It was the applied science of counterintelligence in service of defeating communism. It was necessary.
* * *
AT FORTY-FIVE YEARS OF age, Angleton was impressive and ominous. Most nights, he worked late at his office. He sat behind the raised desk stacked with files. As always, he kept the room dim, with just one desk lamp spotlighting his work. “The only lights came from the tip of Angleton’s inevitable cigarette,” wrote biographer Tom Mangold, “glowing like a tiny star in the dark firmament of his private planet, and the dirty brown sun of his desk lamp, permanently wreathed by nicotine clouds.”30
One awestruck FBI man saw him as a wraith: “His hair was slicked back from a pale forehead, a bony blade of nose, sunken cheeks, and an elegantly pointed chin—a chiseled, cadaverous face. His deep set eyes were emphasized by arched brows, framed by horn-rimmed bifocals and lit with controlled fire. He was stooped and slightly twisted.”31
He was “very British in cut and manner,” said Joseph Persico, a historian of espionage, who saw his face close-up in an interview.
“A collection of angles.… Clearly impatient with stupidity. Tall and cadaverous … the most sinister man I have ever seen.”32
MOLE HUNTS
ANGLETON WAS NOW ACTING out his intellectual passion on a grand scale. Even if his hand remained hidden, his decisions made headlines. One appeared atop the front page of London’s Daily Telegraph in July 1963:
SOVIET DEFECTOR
GETS BRITISH ASYLUM
Major Defection,
Say Americans33
Anatoly Golitsyn, living in a cozy MI5 safe house in the British countryside, read the headline with dread. He was comfortable, to say the least, receiving a stipend of ten thousand pounds a month from the British officials intrigued by his theory that Hugh Gaitskill had been assassinated by the KGB.34 Now someone had leaked his presence.
The Telegraph, citing “unimpeachable U.S. sources,” reported that the British intelligence service had given asylum to “a major Soviet defector.” The New York Times reported the leak might have come from “Benjamin Bradlee, chief of Newsweek magazine’s Washington bureau and a friend of the president.”35 Ultimately, the leak would be traced back to Langley.
“Angleton wanted Golitsyn back,” says Robarge, the CIA historian, “and may have contrived (through a leak to a British tabloid) to force him out of England.”36
Golitsyn felt he had little choice but to return to the United States.
Questions about Golitsyn’s reliability returned with him. A CIA evaluation in September 1963 reported Golitsyn was “dangling before the Agency very enticing and intriguing statements in exchange for acceptance, entrée, support and control. On the face of these statements [about Hugh] Gaitskill and [Harold] Wilson they are far removed from reality but are accusations which, if true, would be a great significance.”
Golitsyn’s statements, the doctor concluded, were evidence of “his feeling of omnipotence and omniscience, which is viewed as abnormal psychologically.”37
Angleton dismissed the diagnosis. He thought Golitsyn the sanest man in the world. The notion that he might be considered mentally ill “would set off the greatest peals of glee in the KGB,” he said.38
* * *
ANGLETON WANTED—NO, NEEDED—to believe. He was undaunted by the paucity of evidence to support Golitsyn’s theories. In the spring of 1963, the FBI investigation of Peter Karlow had found nothing to confirm that he was Golitsyn’s Sasha, the putative mole. Karlow, after waiting on administrative leave for more than a year, was still hoping to become chief of the Technical Services Division.39 In September 1963, he was forced to resign, the first victim of Angleton’s mole hunts, but not the last.40
Golitsyn had settled in upstate New York, where Angleton brought him raw source reports and classified CIA files, which was illegal and operationally reckless. Angleton didn’t care.41
“Golitsyn was so enormous to the Western world,” Angleton gushed after his return in the summer of 1963. “We immediately moved on those cases which were perishable,” he said: “the French, the British, and ourselves.”42
* * *
SO BEGAN THE DISASTROUS “mole hunt” that would paralyze and divide the CIA for the next seven years. Angleton’s mole hunt is often described in singular terms, as a unified search for the spy (or spies) lurking in the ranks of the Agency. Operationally, however, Angleton’s mole hunt was multifaceted, consisting of dozens of different mole hunts—some targeting individuals, others focused on components within the CIA—and always employing a variety of investigative techniques.
Angleton’s first mole hunt focused on the British intelligence services. Golitsyn said his study of British files indicated Graham Mitchell, deputy to MI5 chief Roger Hollis, was a KGB spy. Angleton’s British acolytes endorsed the charge. In September 1963, Hollis himself flew to Washington with the embarrassing mission of reporting to the Americans that his own aide was under investigation. Mitchell, it was later determined, was never a Soviet spy.43
The second mole hunt targeted the French intelligence service, SDECE, which Angleton believed, with more reason, had been penetrated by the KGB.44 Indignant French officials demanded a meeting to respond to Angleton’s charges, which were supported by Philippe Thyraud de Vosjoli, a disaffected French counterintelligence officer.45 Angleton agreed to see Col. Georges de Lannurien, chief of French counterintelligence, in late November.
Angleton’s third mole hunt in 1963 targeted the CIA’s station in Mexico City, and it involved the defector Lee Oswald. It, too, ended badly.
OSWALD AGAIN
ANGLETON’S PEOPLE HAD NOT forgotten about or lost track of Lee Oswald since his defection in October 1959. In the offices of the Special Investigations Group, located around the corner from Angleton’s suite, Betty Egerter still controlled access to Oswald’s 201 file.
All U.S. government reporting on Oswald went into the SIG file—a 1961 State Department cable on Oswald’s marriage to a Russian woman, a 1962 navy memo about his return to the United States, an FBI interview with a surly and uncooperative Oswald outside his home in Fort Worth, Texas, in August 1962.46 If Oswald was a “lone nut,” as cliché would later have it, he was the rare isolated sociopath of interest to the CIA’s Counterintelligence Staff.
The attention was justified. If there was anything more important to the CIA than a defector to the Soviet Union, it was a returning defector like Oswald, who had presumptively been contacted by the KGB and Soviet domestic security agency, the MVD, during his two years of residence. Oswald’s redefection should have been “the highest priority for the intelligence community,” Angleton later told investigators.47
It was. Angleton paid attention when J. Edgar Hoover sent him three more reports on Oswald in the fall of 1963.
The first, an FBI memo from Dallas, arrived on September 24; Jane Roman signed the routing slip to accep
t delivery. FBI agent James Hosty had been assigned to keep tabs on Oswald’s wife, Marina. Hosty reported that Oswald “drank to excess and beat his wife” and had once passed out leaflets for the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. He helpfully attached material on the un-American ways of the FPCC.48
Two weeks later, Roman signed for another FBI report. Oswald had been arrested in August while passing out FPCC leaflets on a New Orleans street corner. The ex-marine had gotten into a heated argument with three members of an anti-Castro organization called the Cuban Student Directorate; he was arrested for disturbing the peace.49
Angleton was certainly interested in the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, which Oswald now purported to represent. It was one of those friendship societies that sustained the Havana regime. It was also a target for Agency action, as Angleton probably knew. As liaison to the FBI, Angleton was privy to all CIA communications with the Bureau. On September 16, John Tilton, an officer in the CIA’s Cuba operation, told Sam Papich that the Agency was “giving some consideration to countering the activities” of the FPCC in a foreign country.50 Given Angleton’s reputation and stature, it would have been unusual, if not unthinkable, for Tilton’s branch to mount an operation against the FPCC without Angleton’s knowledge.
Naturally, Jane Roman paid attention when another report on Oswald came clattering in by Teletype on Tuesday afternoon, October 8. From Mexico City, station chief Win Scott reported that a man calling himself Oswald had contacted a consular officer at the Soviet embassy.51 In another cable, Scott reported that Oswald had also visited the Cuban embassy in Mexico City, where the consulate was located.52
Oswald’s visit was Angleton’s responsibility. Scott’s cable was slugged LCIMPROVE, the Agency’s code name for “counter-espionage involving Soviet intelligence services worldwide,” Angleton’s undisputed domain.53
Angleton responded with discretion. Jane Roman drafted and sent a cable to the FBI, the navy, and the State Department, reporting that Oswald, wrongly described as a six-foot-tall, heavyset man, had been seen in Mexico City. Then she and Betty Egerter drafted a separate and different cable to Win Scott, which they then gave to Bill Hood, chief of operations in the western hemisphere, for approval.
The second cable, sent on October 10, provided the Mexico City station with biographical information about Oswald, as well as a more accurate physical description. The cable, also approved by Tom Karamessines, said nothing about Oswald’s recent arrest in New Orleans and his pro-Castro activities on behalf of the FPCC.
With the three FBI reports in hand, Angleton’s people could have described Oswald to Scott as a law-breaking Communist and sometimes violent supporter of Castro. Instead, the October 10 cable was oddly reassuring. Citing a May 1962 State Department cable, headquarters said “twenty months of life in Soviet Union have had a maturing effect on Oswald.”
The Agency had not received any new information on Oswald since, according to the second cable drafted by Angleton’s aides.
LATEST HDQS INFO WAS ODACID [State Department] REPORT DATED MAY 1962 SAYING OSWALD IS STILL US CITIZEN AND BOTH HE AND HIS SOVIET WIFE HAVE EXIT PERMITS AND DEPT STATE HAD GIVEN APPROVAL FOR THEIR TRAVEL WITH THEIR INFANT CHILD TO USA.54
If the October 10 cable was to be believed—and Win Scott believed it—the CIA had gathered no information about the “maturing” Oswald since his return from the Soviet Union seventeen months before. In fact, the CIA knew all about his latest doings.
The cable was intentionally deceptive, as Jane Roman would later admit. When shown a copy of the cable many years later, she said, “Yeah, I mean, I’m signing off on something I know isn’t true.”55
In retirement, Bill Hood had no explanation for why the CIA didn’t share the most recent FBI reporting on Oswald with Mexico City, save that he didn’t think it was “smelly.”
“I don’t see any master hand in it,” he said.56
If there was a master hand, it was Angleton’s. The CIA’s “latest headquarters information” on Oswald was not seventeen months old. It was less than two weeks old. Angleton’s staff had received virtually all of the FBI’s reporting on Oswald and shared none of it. In the parlance of CIA operations, Angleton’s omission was justifiable: If Oswald’s activities were part of an authorized covert operation, Win Scott had no “need to know” that Angleton was using Oswald for an intelligence purpose.
The time stamp on the cable dates Angleton’s deception with precision: 10 Oct. 1963, 5:29 P.M. Washington time.57
At that moment, President John F. Kennedy was finishing up a busy day in the Oval Office. He had spent the morning meeting with his national security advisers about the deteriorating situation in Vietnam. He ended the day conferring with two leaders of newly independent African nations.58
He had forty-two days to live.
* * *
WITHIN A WEEK OF Oswald’s visit to Mexico City, Angleton launched the mole hunt in Mexico. This mole hunt underscores a reality overlooked by Angleton’s admirers and critics alike: Angleton’s mole hunting extended beyond the Agency’s Soviet Russia Division.
In the fall of 1963, the CIA’s Mexico City station was mounting multiple operations to recruit spies in the Cuban consulate and to disrupt the embassy’s political activities.59 These efforts were led by David Phillips, a protégé of Dick Helms. They were reported to Bill Harvey, who was still involved in Cuban operations from the Rome station. Win Scott boasted of the thoroughness of his coverage of the Cuban compound, which housed the embassy and the consulate.
“We intercept their mail, photograph all people who go in and out of the Embassy, cover their telephones completely, and within a few hours of the conversations have resumes of all the telephone calls,” he said in early 1963.60
Angleton worried that these operations might be compromised by an FBI informant who was actually a Soviet double agent. He wanted to determine if the KGB had any spies in the Mexico City station. The mole hunt in Mexico began on October 8, 1963, when a team of technicians from the Office of Security flew to the Mexican capital, their luggage bulging with tape recorders and polygraph equipment. They were acting on orders from Bill Hood, chief of western hemisphere operations and Angleton’s longtime friend.61
Between October 8 and 18, the Office of Security team grilled twenty-one CIA employees in Mexico about their loyalties. The mission was to discover if anyone “has been or is now reporting to or employed by another intelligence organization (including local police).”62 The employees were hooked up to the polygraph machine used to detect physical stress. In CIA lingo, they were “fluttered.”
The first employees questioned were the three men who watched the Soviet and Cuban diplomatic offices in Mexico City—the very offices that the defector Oswald had visited ten days before. Whether they were asked about Oswald is unknown.63 By early November, the interrogation team had written up reports on them and eighteen other CIA employees in Mexico City and Monterrey.
The mole hunt in Mexico found some financial irregularities and some loose talk among family members, but no security breaches.64 As far as the Office of Security and the Counterintelligence Staff were concerned, there was no mole in the Mexico City station.
* * *
ALL THE WHILE, LEE Oswald remained a figure of continuing interest. Angleton received no further reports on Oswald’s contacts with Soviet or Cuban intelligence officers, at least none that we know of. He received no indication that Oswald had obtained the visa that he sought to travel to Cuba and the Soviet Union. But he remained concerned about Oswald’s visit to the Cuban consulate.
In his May 1963 memo to the Joint Chiefs, Angleton identified the consulate as a locus of Cuban intelligence activity in the western hemisphere. From the latest FBI reports, he knew of Oswald’s involvement with the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. If Sam Papich knew the CIA operatives had targeted the FPCC for COINTELPRO-style dirty tricks, Angleton surely knew it. For all of these reasons and more, Angleton had to be concerned about Oswald’s Cuban con
tacts in Mexico City. But he did not care to share his concern. He would conceal what he knew about that sensitive subject for the rest of his life.
On November 15, Jane Roman signed for the latest FBI report on Oswald. From New Orleans, senior agent Warren de Breuys had filed a more detailed memo on Oswald’s pro-Castro activities. If Angleton scanned the first page, he learned that Oswald had gone back to Texas after contacting the Cubans and the Soviets in Mexico City. Angleton knew Oswald was in Dallas.
Angleton always sought to give the impression that he knew very little about Oswald before November 22, 1963. For the chief of the Agency’s counterintelligence staff, that was a frail defense. His staff had monitored Oswald’s movements for four years. As the former marine moved from Moscow to Minsk to Fort Worth to New Orleans to Mexico City to Dallas, the Special Investigations Group received reports on him everywhere he went.
An epic counterintelligence failure culminated on Angleton’s watch. It was bigger than the Philby affair and bloodier.
DALLAS
“YOU COULD HEAR THE parade coming down Main Street,” recalled Bill Newman. “You could hear the cheering of the people and I could remember seeing the president’s car turn right onto Houston Street and go that short block and turn left on Elm. His car was out the width of one lane from the curb. He was not right against the curb.… We were, of course, looking at the car coming towards us and it was a hundred feet, or more maybe, from us, and the first two shots rang out. Kind of like a boom … boom, like that. At the time I thought somebody throwed a couple of firecrackers beside the car, and I thought, you know, That’s a pretty poor trick to be pulling on the president.”65
Bill Newman was twenty-two years old, a plumber’s apprentice. He had come to Dealey Plaza with his wife, Gayle, and their two children. They were excited to see the president and the First Lady coming down Elm Street: JFK and Jackie sitting side by side, waving.
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