CHAOS expanded Angleton’s empire of surveillance.
* * *
AND STILL ANGLETON WORRIED. There were so many dangers to deter, so many secrets to keep, so few who could be trusted. His family was drifting away. His colleagues were daring to question his theories. The multiple martinis at lunch blurred his judgment and compounded his paranoia. And his annual fishing trips with work pals on the Brule River in Wisconsin or the Matapedia River in Canada provided only temporary respite from the perils he battled.
Angleton still sought to convince British and American colleagues that Labour Party leader Harold Wilson was a Soviet agent of influence. He still argued the supposed diplomatic spat and shooting war between the Soviet Union and China was an elaborate exercise in disinformation to deceive the West.
In March 1966, Angleton and Golitsyn flew to London unannounced to make their case to Sir Maurice Oldfield, a longtime friend who was a senior SIS officer. They spun a theory of a monstrous KGB plot to disarm the West without firing a shot. The whole performance, one British official noted drily, “was somewhat extraordinary, but then Jim and Anatoly are quite extraordinary chaps.”218
The continuing detention of Nosenko provoked growing criticism inside the Agency. Nosenko had been removed from his spartan attic in Clinton, Maryland, in August 1965 and shipped to an even harsher black site at Camp Peary, the CIA base in southern Virginia. Angleton would deny that he ever visited the Camp Peary site, but a memo later surfaced that showed he had been informed about the details of its construction and was provided with photographs of its completion.219
Under the persistent questioning from Pete Bagley, Nosenko was caught in many misstatements but never changed his story. He was a defector who wanted to help the U.S. government. For his temerity on insisting he was telling the truth, Nosenko says he was dosed with LSD.220
“I was simply floating,” he later recalled. “I was almost half-conscious and suddenly I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t take air in. I couldn’t take [sic] air out. I almost died. They [the prison guards] noticed on the TV camera. They immediately came, and took me out of the cell. Next door was my shower stall. They put me under shower: Cold water, hot. Cold, hot. Cold, hot.… I couldn’t even describe it. I never had such an experience in my life. I’m sure it was LSD.”221
MKULTRA still haunted the CIA, the dream that drugs could serve the ends of espionage. Angleton was responsible.
“They had tried everything, lie detector tests, so on and so forth,” said CIA psychologist John Gittinger. “They decided to try some kind of drugs on him.”222
Word of Nosenko’s plight reached George Kisevalter and other officers who thought he was a bona fide defector. One of them, Leonard McCoy, a reports officer, implored division chief David Murphy to share the results of Nosenko’s interrogation with others.223 Murphy finally did, and the CIA war over Nosenko escalated.
In December 1965, McCoy wrote up a forty-one-page memo, making the case that Nosenko was a bona fide defector, not a KGB asset. Helms then asked the Soviet Russia Division and Angleton’s staff to come to a consensus on the man’s authenticity. Angleton and Murphy rejected McCoy’s analysis. They insisted that Nosenko was a false defector. McCoy countered that Angleton’s belief that all Soviet defectors since Golitsyn were fakes had “generated a widespread feeling of frustration, futility and impotence.”224
In February 1967, Pete Bagley replied to McCoy with a report running to eight hundred pages, arguing that Nosenko was under KGB control.225 He listed hundreds of unexplained gaps and discrepancies in Nosenko’s story. But the sheer volume of Bagley’s argument was greater than its persuasive power. In the words of one Agency historian, Angleton and his acolytes had “developed substantial circumstantial evidence but no hard proof in the form of a confession from Nosenko.”226
Angleton was still flailing after the elusive mole known as Sasha. He suspected a man named Orlov, who had worked for the Agency in the 1950s. Orlov ran a picture-frame shop in Alexandria, Virginia. The FBI put his store under constant surveillance. No suspicious activities or contacts were observed.227
Golitsyn offered a new theory to Angleton: Maybe Dave Murphy, chief of the Soviet Russia Division, was the mole. Golitsyn found it suspicious that Murphy had agreed so readily to the hostile interrogation of Nosenko. Maybe he was protecting the mole by confining Nosenko so he couldn’t be followed, Golitsyn said.
Golitsyn had no real evidence for this theory, but Angleton was persuaded, at least enough to ask Helms to transfer Murphy to a less sensitive position. Murphy was assigned to be station chief in Paris.228 He was suspected of being the mole he had been attempting to find.
* * *
IN OCTOBER 1967, HELMS overruled Angleton for the first time. Vexed by the impasse over Nosenko’s bona fides, Helms transferred responsibility for the case to the Office of Security. Nosenko was moved to a safe house in Washington.229 He was scheduled for controlled release to civilian life in January 1969.
Angleton had lost control of his prize prisoner. He feared the KGB was prevailing. He believed he knew who was responsible: Kim Philby.
TWO BOXERS
UNTOUCHABLE AND ISOLATED IN his work and family, Angleton grew more angular, a stork among men. His suits grew baggier, his eyes more hollowed. Most days he arrived at headquarters midmorning and read through stacks of files. He favored long liquid lunches, often with Ray Rocca, other colleagues, or foreign friends. He returned to the office late in the afternoon and worked at his desk until the late hours of the night.
Angleton traveled often. He went to London to see top MI6 men. He stopped in Rome to see old friends. He spent time in Pretoria, then under apartheid. He attended conferences in New Zealand and Australia. And he always returned to Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. He took his vacations at the family homes in Tucson and Wisconsin, or on remote rivers in Idaho or the Adirondacks. At the house on 33rd Road in Arlington, he liked to spend time in his steamy greenhouse conceiving intricate plans to bring forth perfect beauty. As his orchids bloomed, his mood blackened.
Intoxicated with alcohol and Anatoly Golitsyn’s theories about KGB moles, Angleton saw suspects everywhere. He thought Americans at the highest levels of power were succumbing to the “monster plot” of Soviet strategic deception. The forces of despotic communism, led by a masterful KGB, were advancing, and the free world was in retreat. The Russians, he feared, had even penetrated CIA’s headquarters.
In violation of the law and all security procedures, Angleton shared sensitive CIA personnel files with Golitsyn, who used them to finger more suspected spies. Their methods were sloppy, speculative, and not subject to review. The mole hunt had become a witch hunt.
Angleton concluded Vasia Gmirkin, a Russian-born officer, might actually be a KGB sleeper agent. He wasn’t, but Angleton blocked his promotion for years. Angleton became convinced, on the slightest of evidence, that Leslie James Bennett, a senior counterintelligence official for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, was a Communist spy. Angleton hounded him into retirement. Bennett was innocent. Angleton insisted that Yuri Loginov, a KGB officer who defected in South Africa, was just another dispatched agent and returned him to his former colleagues. Loginov was a genuine defector; rumor had it the KGB sent him to a firing squad.230
Angleton was a lethal man who had real reason to worry about the lingering suspicions surrounding the assassination of President Kennedy. A series of popular books in 1965 and 1966 challenged the findings of the Warren Commission. The editors of two of the country’s most popular magazines, Life and Look, called for a new investigation of the Dallas tragedy. In March 1967, syndicated columnist Drew Pearson reported that the CIA had enlisted Mafia figures, including Harvey’s pal Johnny Rosselli, in a plot to kill Fidel Castro. The column offered the opinion that Castro had learned of the plot and struck first. It was a sensational story and, as Angleton knew full well, accurate, at least with respect to Harvey and Rosselli.
Worst of all, New Orleans district att
orney Jim Garrison had arrested a local businessman, Clay Shaw, and charged him with conspiring to assassinate President Kennedy, with the help of Lee Harvey Oswald and others. Garrison didn’t know much about how the clandestine service actually operated, but he was correct that Shaw was a CIA operative. As a traveling businessman, Shaw had been periodically debriefed by the Agency’s Domestic Contact Service between 1949 and 1956.
Agency officials would later tell reporters that Shaw was an unpaid informant, but that was a cover story. Kenneth McDonald, a CIA historian who reviewed Shaw’s file in the 1990s, described him as “a highly-paid contract source.”231
The growing skepticism about the Warren Commission had even infected Win Scott in Mexico City. Angleton’s friend from OSS days had served as chief of station in the Mexican capital since 1956. Under State Department cover, Scott had built one of the most effective CIA outposts anywhere. In a country where nationalist resentment of Yanqui power was the norm, Scott charmed three Mexican presidents onto the CIA payroll and made friends everywhere he went. He had reported on Lee Harvey Oswald in a timely way both before and after JFK was killed. He had cooperated with the Warren Commission without compromising any Agency operations. Needless to say, he was well-informed and nobody’s fool. Elena Garro de Paz, a poet and friend of his wife, told Scott she had seen Oswald at a party in Mexico City and that Oswald had had a brief affair with Sylvia Duran, a receptionist in the Cuban consulate. Scott initially dismissed the story, but Charles Thomas, a State Department officer in Mexico, had also heard the story and did some investigating on his own. He found reason to believe the story of an Oswald-Duran fling, and Scott came to believe it, too.232 “That Sylvia Duran had sexual intercourse with Oswald … is probably new but adds little to the Oswald case,” he advised headquarters.233
Angleton was not happy when Scott shared his view of the JFK case with a longtime British friend Ferguson Dempster, the chief of the SIS station in Mexico. When Dempster wrote a letter to his bosses in London summarizing Scott’s JFK thoughts, someone at the CIA—probably Angleton—managed to obtain two pages of the letter.234
Dick Helms was not happy, either. He ordered Bill Broe, chief of the Western Hemisphere Division, to reprimand Scott. Broe sent Scott a blind memo under his cryptonym, “Thomas Lund.”
We have received from a very sensitive source two pages only of a letter almost certainly by LIOSAGE [the CIA’s code name for Dempster] to his home office reporting on comments he claims made by you. We recognize that any such remarks by you could well be taken out of context no matter how carefully made.… Nevertheless, you should be aware the letter was written and be guided accordingly.”235
Scott did not fail to appreciate the sharp edge sheathed in his bosses’ politesse: “be guided accordingly.… It would be most unfortunate if there should ever be any leak.”
Scott had clashed with Angleton before. In 1961, the counterintelligence chief sought to set up offices in Mexico City that would report to Angleton directly. Scott objected vehemently, and their friendship cooled.236
“They were like two boxers in the ring, eyeing each other, who’s going to strike,” said one station officer who knew them both. “They were two tigers who are looking at each other, who was going to pounce first. Win didn’t say much about Angleton. He wasn’t someone to make statements about other people that were derogatory. He was a very fair guy, but I don’t think he trusted Angleton.”237
Angleton’s message to Scott was clear: Shut up about JFK or else.
* * *
IN SEPTEMBER 1967, DICK Helms convened a committee of CIA men that came to be known as the Garrison Group for its close attention to the New Orleans district attorney, who was trying to prove a JFK conspiracy. The Garrison Group was controlled by Angleton. The executive director was his friend Wistar Janney. His deputy Ray Rocca was the most active member.
The Garrison Group did not investigate the conspiracy theories that Angleton would espouse later in life. Mostly, it sought to gauge what Garrison had learned about CIA operations in New Orleans in the summer of 1963, a point of vulnerability for both Helms and Angleton.
Ray Rocca feared the worst. At the group’s first meeting in the fall of 1967, Rocca opined that “Garrison would indeed obtain a conviction of Shaw for conspiring to assassinate President Kennedy,” a prediction that was noteworthy less for its inaccuracy (Shaw would be acquitted) than for the fact that it was made at all.238 At a time when many in the Washington press corps, relying on government sources, publicly dismissed Garrison’s case as flimsy, one of Angleton’s top deputies said privately that Garrison might be able to persuade a jury that a CIA man had connived with Oswald.
HEIST
AS THE CIA’S ISRAEL desk officer, Angleton was responsible for reporting on the Jewish state’s continuing efforts to secure a nuclear arsenal. He didn’t do a very good job. The last chapter of the great Israeli uranium heist took place on his watch, and he was apparently none the wiser.
It happened on September 10, 1968, when four men arrived at the two-story brick building in Apollo, Pennsylvania, that housed the offices of the Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation. Across the street was the long, low-slung building where NUMEC packaged and stored enriched uranium.
The four men were authorized by the U.S. government to visit NUMEC. The company’s president, Zalman Shapiro, had written to the Security Office of the Atomic Energy Commission seeking permission to host a group of Israeli scientists. The men were visiting the facility “to discuss thermoelectric devices (unclassified),” he wrote.
Shapiro lied to the AEC, albeit plausibly. The four men who got out of their cars could have passed for scientists. One of them, Avraham Hermoni, actually was a scientist. He served as scientific counselor at the Israeli embassy in Washington. He came to that position from serving as technical director of Israel’s national center for weapons development, known as RAFAEL.
Hermoni was accompanied by Dr. Ephraim Biegun. According to Shapiro’s paperwork, he supposedly worked for the “Department of Electronics at the Ministry of Defense” in Israel. Actually, Biegun ran the technical department of Shin Bet, the Israeli domestic security force. He was a master of things “we had only read about in books,” said his colleague Avraham Bendor.
Bendor was the third man in the crew. He also worked in the Electronics Department, according to Shapiro. In fact, he was on special assignment to LAKAM, the Science Liaison Bureau, a secret Israeli operation, which had responsibility for stealing nuclear technologies and materials.
The fourth man visiting NUMEC that day was Rafael Eitan. He was not a “chemist” as Shapiro claimed. He was the mastermind of the whole operation.
Eitan was a small man with an outsized reputation for trickery. Of Russian ancestry, he grew up in Palestine and joined the Haganah as a boy of twelve. In the 1948 war, he fought under the command of Yitzhak Rabin. He joined the Mossad and distinguished himself on dangerous operations, such as the kidnapping of Adolf Eichmann. He came to Apollo, Pennsylvania, in September 1968 to advance another operation in defense of the Jewish people.
Zalman Shapiro didn’t talk about such things. After meeting with the four Israelis, Shapiro informed the AEC via letter that his “[d]iscussion with Israeli nationals concerned the possibility of developing plutonium fueled thermoelectric generator systems.”239
The presence of Rafi Eitan was the tip-off to U.S. officials in the know.
Anthony Cordesman, a former Defense Department official, said the meeting in Apollo constituted “extremely hard evidence” that Eitan was operating with Israeli intelligence in the United States. “There is no conceivable reason for Eitan to have gone [to the Apollo plant] but for the nuclear material.”240
John Hadden, now working for Angleton in Washington, concluded Eitan was the mastermind of the great uranium heist. Absconding with a couple hundred pounds of contraband from an unguarded facility, Hadden noted, was an easier task than absconding with a war criminal.241
But neither Shapiro nor Lowenthal could explain why Rafi Eitan and company had visited the NUMEC plant in 1968 disguised as nuclear scientists.
“It was obviously some intelligence operation, a special operation,” says historian Avner Cohen. “Rafi Eitan, he is not a scientist. He is not directly related to the nuclear project. He is an operational person, a secrecy person, if you do something that you need a great deal of secrecy.… This is a signal that the Mossad is involved in something, which is probably extraordinary.”244
KIM AGAIN
AS HIS FIFTIETH BIRTHDAY approached, in December 1967 Angleton took refuge in Israel, where his troubles seemed farther away and his friends closer. For companionship, he brought along his intellectual soul mate Anatoly Golitsyn. Upon arrival, Angleton was greeted by John Denley Walker, a career officer who had succeeded John Hadden as chief of the Tel Aviv station.
Angleton asked Walker to arrange to have a case of whiskey delivered to his hotel room. When it arrived, Angleton told Walker he suspected the liquor might have been poisoned by the KGB. Walker explained he had bought the whiskey at the embassy commissary and delivered it himself. Angleton would not be dissuaded. When Walker said Angleton was on the verge of a nervous breakdown and insisted he go home, Angleton shouted he would make sure Walker never got a decent assignment again. Walker relented.245
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