“Des was usually very imperturbable, but he was very disturbed about his involvement” in the assassination business, recalled Walter Elder, aide to John McCone.
FitzGerald had fought in wars, led men toward the sound of gunfire, and he was scared about the forces behind the murder of the president. He stayed home that weekend, monitoring the constant TV news coverage from Dallas. On Sunday morning, he sat on the family couch with his wife and son. On the screen of the black-and-white television, Dallas policemen in their wide-brimmed hats escorted Oswald, the suspected assassin, to a waiting police wagon. A man stepped out of the crowd and stuck a pistol in Oswald’s stomach. The screen spun into chaos. The accused assassin was dead.
FitzGerald’s fears erupted into tears. It was the first and last time his wife and children saw him cry.
“Now we’ll never know,” he wept. “We’ll never know.”91
* * *
ANGLETON WAS NOT SO discomposed. He thought JFK’s death a pity, not a tragedy. A couple of days later, he was at home when the phone rang. It was Allen Dulles calling. He said that President Johnson had asked him to serve on a blue-ribbon commission that would investigate the assassination. Dulles wanted to talk about the history of such commissions, and whether he should accept.
Angleton wasn’t fooled.
“I could tell very easily that he wanted to be on it,” Angleton recalled. “He was looking for approbation from me and not criticism.… He said he wanted tips on anything relevant to the Agency.”92
Dulles wanted to steer the commission’s investigation away from the CIA, and Angleton was obliging. A conspiracy theorist would say Angleton masterminded the JFK cover-up. A prosecutor would say he obstructed justice. A bureaucrat would say he covered his ass. In every practical sense, his actions were invisible. In the tragedy of Dallas, Angleton played a ghost.
* * *
“AMERICA IS IN DANGER of upheavals,” said French president Charles de Gaulle after the death of JFK. De Gaulle had survived a rightist assassination attempt on the back roads of France the year before. He knew his way around an ambush—and American officialdom.
“But you’ll see,” he told an aide. “All of them together will observe the law of silence. They will close ranks. They’ll do everything to stifle any scandal. They will throw Noah’s cloak over these shameful deeds. In order to not lose face in front of the whole world. In order to not risk unleashing riots in the United States. In order to preserve the union and to avoid a new civil war. In order to not ask themselves questions. They don’t want to know. They don’t want to find out. They won’t allow themselves to find out.”93
One CIA man tried to find out, and he paid a price.
* * *
JOHN WHITTEN WAS A career civil servant, a GS-16 with supergrade status. His mistake was understandable. He assumed Angleton was interested in a serious counterintelligence investigation of President Kennedy’s accused killer. He assumed wrong.
After November 22, Whitten worked eighteen-hour days, assisted by thirty officers from the Western Hemisphere Division, and another thirty clerical workers.94 They compiled every report about Oswald from anywhere in the world. Much of it was rubbish, but it all had to be processed. Whitten then wrote up his findings and solicited comments from all the CIA offices involved. He incorporated their input. The secretaries retyped his drafts, and the process was repeated.
Angleton didn’t share anything of what his office had learned about Oswald over the past four years. He didn’t offer any evidence of KGB involvement. He didn’t argue that Castro was behind Oswald. Instead, he tried to thwart Whitten.
“In the early stage Mr. Angleton was not able to influence the course of the investigation,” Whitten testified in secret session years later. “He was extremely embittered that I was entrusted with the investigation and he wasn’t.”
Whitten persevered. Based on all the information received, he concluded that Oswald was an erratic man of leftist sympathies who was disturbed enough to shoot the president. Whitten knew that Oswald had been a person of interest to the Counterintelligence Staff before November 22. That did not trouble him. The Agency monitored thousands of people. That was the nature of its work.
Then Whitten found out there was a whole lot he had not been told about Oswald.
* * *
PUBLICLY, PRESIDENT JOHNSON CALLED on the nation to rally around the memory of its fallen leader. Privately, LBJ and J. Edgar Hoover made clear to their underlings that they wanted an investigation that showed that Oswald had acted alone and that no other parties were involved, foreign or domestic. The investigation had not yet begun, but the now-dead Oswald had already been judged the sole author of JFK’s murder.
The Bureau’s agents did their best to oblige their bosses. They compiled a report on the assassination, running to five volumes, and scheduled it for release on December 9, 1963. Whitten went to FBI headquarters to read an advance copy, accompanied by Birch O’Neal, chief of the Special Investigations Group, which had controlled Oswald’s file since 1959.
The FBI report confirmed the story of a lone gunman who acted for no apparent reason. Oswald, the Bureau said, had grown up as “a peculiar boy” and become “a disaffected man.” He had come to the attention of the Bureau due to his obnoxious left-wing political views, but he seemed to pose no threat.
All of which seemed plausible to Whitten, but some details begged for investigation. Oswald, for example, had written his political views in a “historical diary,” according to the FBI. He had carried a card identifying himself as member of the pro-Castro Fair Play for Cuba Committee. He had been known as “Alik” in the Soviet Union, and he had ordered the murder weapons under the alias “Alek Hidell.”
Whitten realized he had been deceived.
“Angleton might have received all this information,” he testified. “But I did not.”
Whitten complained to Helms. The deputy director called both men into his office on Christmas Eve, 1963. Whitten explained to Helms what he had learned from the FBI.
“My report is irrelevant in view of all the added information,” he said. “This now takes [us] in an entirely different dimension.”95
Whitten was both surprised and not surprised by the response of the counterintelligence chief.
“Angleton started to criticize my report terribly without pointing out any inaccuracies,” he recalled. “It was so full of wrong things, we could not possibly send it to the Bureau, and I just sat there and I did not say a word. This was a typical Angleton performance. I had invited him to comment on the report, and he had withheld all of his comments until he got to the meeting.”
Helms deferred to Angleton. The ambitious deputy director didn’t want to make waves at the White House or the Bureau. His predecessors had lost their jobs over the Bay of Pigs. Helms did not intend to lose his job over Dallas.
“Helms wanted someone to conduct the investigation who was in bed with the FBI,” Whitten maintained. “I was not, and Angleton was.”96
Angleton’s power had reached a peculiar apex. The ambush in Dallas on November 22 marked the worst failure of U.S. intelligence since December 7, 1941, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. It had happened on Angleton’s watch. Yet such was his bureaucratic genius that he managed to wind up in charge of the Agency’s investigation of the accused assassin. During Kennedy’s presidency, his staff knew more about the obscure and unimportant Lee Oswald than just about anyone in the U.S. government. After the president was dead, he orchestrated the cover-up of what the CIA knew. Angleton intuited the devastated mood of the men and women who ran the U.S. government in late 1963. They don’t want to know. They don’t want to find out. They won’t allow themselves to find out.
LOATHING
“I AM AFRAID TO sleep for fear of what I might learn when I wake up,” wrote journalist Hunter S. Thompson to a friend on the night of November 22, 1963. Thompson was living in a remote mountain town in Colorado. The shock and rage induced by the mur
der of President Kennedy inspired Thompson to coin the term that would become his signature: “fear and loathing.”
“I was not prepared at this time for the death of hope, but here it is,” he wrote. “Ignore it at your peril. This is the end of reason, the dirtiest hour in our time.”97
Whatever Angleton’s reaction to the murder of the thirty-fifth president, allegedly by a pro-Castro defector, he did not commit his thoughts to paper. Remarkably, the chief of CIA counterintelligence generated no known reports, memoranda, or analyses on Oswald, on his defection, his life in the Soviet Union, his Russian friends, his hunting trips, his marriage to a Russian woman, or his contacts with Cuban and Soviet personnel in Mexico City.
Angleton did not author any studies of the possible role of the KGB, Castro, the Miami Cubans, or anyone else in Kennedy’s assassination. He never even made a formal finding about the six Oswald letters intercepted by the LINGUAL program. On the key counterintelligence questions raised by JFK’s murder, he did very little.
Angleton acted more concerned about exposure of his long-standing interest in Oswald and his more recent attention to the activities of the Cuban consulate in Mexico City. He and Helms constructed an artful cover story depicting the Agency as inattentive to Oswald.
“After the assassination of President Kennedy and the arrest of Lee Oswald an intensive review of all available sources was undertaken in Mexico City to determine purpose of OSWALD’s visit,” Helms told Warren Commission counsel Lee Rankin in a January 31, 1964, memo. “[I]t was learned that Oswald had also visited the Cuban Consulate [emphasis added].”98
In other words, the CIA claimed it did not know the purpose of Oswald’s visit to Mexico and did not know that Oswald had contacted the Cubans in late September until after JFK was dead. That was a lie. Win Scott knew about Oswald’s visit to the Cuban consulate at the time it happened. He wrote as much in his memoirs and reported it in cables read by Angleton’s successor George Kalaris.99 But the cover story seemed plausible to the Warren Commission, which published it in its final report. It just wasn’t true.
Within weeks, Angleton had gained effective control of the JFK investigation. In February 1964 the commission’s staff attorneys learned that Angleton had shared three CIA cables with the Secret Service on the night of the assassination. Lee Rankin asked the Agency to produce the cables.
Angleton resorted to deflection. He was loath to share anything about Oswald’s Cuban contacts, probably because they related to sensitive operations such as LCIMPROVE (counterespionage), LIENVOY (sensitive signals intelligence), and AMSPELL (anti-Castro psychological warfare). But he wanted to make sure he had Helms’s support.
“Jim does not desire to respond directly,” Ray Rocca, his deputy, told Helms in a memo. “Unless you feel otherwise Jim would prefer to wait out the Commission,” rather than turn over the CIA’s records in their original form.
Jim would prefer to wait out the Commission.
Why would a senior CIA official want to “wait out” the investigators of a presidential assassination? Rocca later claimed that none of the cables were “of substantive new interest.” Oswald was not among the people photographed at the Cuban consulate, nor was he among the passengers on the manifest, he said.
But in intelligence work, the source of information matters as much as its content. The very existence of the Cuban embassy photographs and the Cubana Airlines passenger manifest were substantive. They illuminated the fact that the CIA had the ability and the desire to photograph and identify every visitor to the Cuban consulate in Mexico City, and to identify every potential American traveler to Cuba. Lee Harvey Oswald was no exception. Angleton preferred to wait out the Warren Commission rather than explain the CIA’s knowledge of and interest in Oswald’s visit to the Cuban consulate.
“If they come back on the point,” Rocca told Helms, “he [Angleton] feels that you or someone from here should be prepared to go over to show the Commission the materials rather than pass them to them in copy.”100
Howard Willens, attorney for the commission, did come back on the point. He asked to see the three cables. A graduate of the University of Michigan and Yale Law School, Willens had been serving in the Criminal Division of the Justice Department when JFK was killed. He joined the Warren Commission as an assistant counsel. He had admired the president, just as he admired the CIA.
He assumed, wrongly, the CIA men shared his interest in finding out the truth.
“I consider the CIA representatives to be among the more competent people in government who I have ever dealt with,” Willens wrote in his diary after meeting with Ray Rocca on March 12, 1964. “They articulate, they are specialists and they seem to have a broad view of government. This may be, of course, because they do not have special axes to grind in the Commission’s investigation.”101
Willens never imagined the CIA was deceiving him on fundamental facts about the events leading to the death of the president. In the fullness of time, he realized he had been duped.
“My journal comments about the CIA were naïve, to say the least,” Willens wrote in 2015. “The CIA did have axes to grind.”102
In particular, Willens said, the Agency’s failure to disclose the plots to kill Castro compromised the integrity of the Warren Commission’s investigation.
* * *
ANGLETON PARTICIPATED IN THAT cover-up, too.
On May 8, 1964, Angleton received a memo from Harold Swenson, chief of counterintelligence for the Agency’s anti-Castro operations. Swenson had started working for the FBI before Pearl Harbor. He had a quarter century of experience. Swenson had learned from a reliable source that Oswalt had been in contact with a suspected intelligence officer during his visit to the Cuban Consulate. A year later, Swenson reported to senior CIA officials that Fidel Castro had probably known of the CIA’s recruitment of Rolando Cubela as an assassin in late 1963.103
“The AMLASH operation,” Swenson wrote in a 1963 memo read by Angleton, “might have been an insecure operation prior to the assassination of President Kennedy.”
The counterintelligence implications were obvious. If Castro knew about the AMLASH plot, then he had a motive for killing Kennedy—self-defense—possibly corroborated by Oswalt’s Cuban contact.104
Angleton chose not to investigate, tantamount to obstruction of justice.105 He knew about the AMLASH plot and its possible compromise. He said nothing.
Angleton’s willingness to risk violating the law is not hard to understand. A serious counterespionage investigation of Lee Oswald would have uncovered Angleton’s abiding interest in him. It would have uncovered the various operations to kill Castro and Angleton’s knowledge of them.
No matter who fired the fatal shots in Dallas, Angleton had failed disastrously as counterintelligence chief. He could have—and should have—lost his job after November 22. Had the public, the Congress, and the Warren Commission known of his preassassination interest in Oswald or his postassassination cover-up, he surely would have.
Instead, his malfeasance, abetted by Dick Helms, went undetected. Angleton would remain in a position of supreme power for another decade.
DEFECTOR
ANGLETON WAS, IN THE words of George Kisevalter, “a combination of Machiavelli, Svengali, and Iago.”106
By the mid-1960s, Angleton reigned as the Machiavelli of the new American national security state, a thinker and strategist of ruthless clarity. Like the Florentine philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli, who wrote in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Angleton did not think ethical claims of virtue could or should restrain a man of power. His way of thinking had enabled him to build the Counterintelligence Staff into an invisible bastion of power, with influence in all the major Western intelligence services; with allies in London, Rome, and Tel Aviv; with interlocutors in organized crime, organized labor, the Vatican, the Ivy League, the Pentagon, and the Washington press corps. He was an unseen broker of American power.
Like Machiavelli, Angleton believed conspira
cies were a key to understanding power. “Many more princes are seen to have lost their lives and states through these [plots] than by open war,” Machiavelli wrote. “For being able to make open war on a prince is granted to few; to be able to conspire against them is granted to everyone.”107
Angleton acted as a Svengali to a generation of Anglo-American intelligence officers and intellectuals. Svengali, the fictional hero of a nineteenth-century French novel, was a show business impresario who hypnotized a young girl into becoming an international singing sensation and then led her to doom. Angleton was a seductive maestro of ideas and action. His theories persuaded experts, editors, spies, journalists, novelists, and diplomats to follow him faithfully, sometimes to their own regret.
Angleton played Iago to four U.S. presidents. He was perhaps not so evil as the villainous adviser in Shakespeare’s Othello. But, like Iago, Angleton was a sympathetic counselor with his own agenda, which sometimes verged on the sinister. Angleton served the men in the Oval Office with seeming loyalty and sometimes devious intent.
Angleton suspected conspiracies everywhere. That was a requirement of his job. Sometimes he was right. Often he was wrong. And never was he more wrong than in the case of Yuri Nosenko.
* * *
NOSENKO, THE DISSOLUTE KGB officer who had sold a few secrets to the CIA in 1962, showed up again in Geneva in January 1964, saying he wanted to defect. Angleton was more skeptical than ever. George Kisevalter and Pete Bagley were sent to debrief Nosenko, who told them a sensational story. He said he had supervised the case of Lee Harvey Oswald when the ex-marine arrived in Moscow in October 1959.108 He said Oswald had been watched by a KGB unit in Minsk between 1959 and 1962 but was not recruited or utilized in any way. Oswald was regarded as unstable and his Russian wife, Marina, was described as “stupid, uneducated and anti-Soviet.”
“The KGB was glad to see them go when they left for the United States,” he said.109
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