Angleton and Golitsyn went to Eilat, a resort town in southern Israel, on the Gulf of Aqaba. Angleton’s Israeli friends had invited him to celebrate his fiftieth birthday.
“We had a big party for him,” recalled Efraim Halevy.246
* * *
ANGLETON RETRIEVED THE WASHINGTON POST from his doorstep on Wednesday morning, March 15, 1968. He read the front-page headlines and flipped through the inner pages, scanning the wire-service stories and department store advertisements. He turned to page A12 and found himself reading an article from hell.
PHILBY TELLS OF HIS SPY ROLE
HERE IN BOOK RELEASED TODAY
Angleton was not entirely surprised by the news that his former friend had written a book. A few months before, The Sunday Times of London had published an interview with Philby from Moscow in which the now-famous spy said he was writing a memoir.247
Angleton was unprepared for the tenor of the Post story, which he read with incredulity mounting toward rage.
“‘My Silent War’” will be ‘must’ reading in both the CIA and the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” the Post reported, “not only for its description of clandestine operations but also for its intimate personal descriptions of the men Philby dealt with in both agencies.”
The article reported that James Angleton of the CIA was one of Philby’s chief contacts. Furious, Angleton called Ben Bradlee and demanded an explanation. The Post had blown his cover, he said. Bradlee insisted Philby’s book was news.248 By the time the conversation ended, their decade-old friendship was over.
Angleton read My Silent War not only as a friend betrayed but also as a counterintelligence professional exposed. The book was a witty, malicious account of Philby’s sixteen years in the lion’s den of the capitalist ruling class. While playing the part of an affable civil servant, Philby relished acting as silent avenger in the class struggle. He enjoyed playing his bourgeois colleagues for fools and took pleasure in sending the CIA’s foot soldiers off to certain death. His descriptions of Bill Harvey and Allen Dulles were sketched in acid. His allusions to Angleton were affectionate, condescending, and devastating. Of their last meeting in June 1951, Philby recalled Angleton wanted to convey certain concerns to colleagues in London. “I did not even take the trouble to memorize them,”249 Philby said. It was a cruel kiss-off for a former friend.
Angleton tried not to take the book personally. He concluded that Philby was targeting him in public in order to protect ongoing KGB operations. Just as he had protected Burgess and Maclean back in 1951, so Philby was seeking to protect other moles now. My Silent War, Angleton decided, was the latest gambit in the Soviet strategic deception policy.
In fact, Philby’s master conspiracy occurred only in Angleton’s wounded imagination. In Moscow, the KGB had made Philby a general but relegated him to training sessions and other nonsensitive assignments, much to Philby’s frustration. There’s no evidence Philby targeted Angleton. Philby was mostly thinking about Philby.
“The key to Philby, if there is a single one,” wrote James McCargar in The New York Times Book Review, “is less likely to be found in the surface manifestations of his ‘love’ or the faults of the [British] Establishment, than it is in a compulsion to betray and deceive which underlay all his relationships.”250
Angleton knew better than anyone.
* * *
DURING ANGLETON’S FREQUENT ABSENCES from home, Cicely and his daughters had talked about the war in Vietnam among themselves. They hated it and opposed it. Truffy and Lucy had come back from college converted. They joined in the antiwar marches that their father disdained. The counterculture had come to another CIA family.
Angleton was not fazed by the so-called Tet Offensive of January 1968. The surprise uprising of Communist forces on Tet, the country’s New Year celebration, had brought the war to Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam. A daring squad of Vietcong guerrillas breached the walls of the U.S. embassy before a larger corps of U.S. Marines annihilated them. Angleton argued, with numerical accuracy, that the North Vietnamese had suffered heavy losses in the offensive. He disputed that the Communists had scored a major psychological victory. Even his own family didn’t believe him.
* * *
ANGLETON WAS NOT A political partisan. He conceived of his job as that of serving the Agency and the president. But he knew how power was wielded or squandered. In spring 1968 he knew he would have a new boss come November, and it mattered who it was. With President Lyndon Johnson forswearing a second term, the innocuous vice president, Hubert Humphrey, announced his intention to become the Democratic presidential nominee. So did Bobby Kennedy, brother of the slain president, who was now a senator from New York while still living at Hickory Hill, in McLean. On the Republican side, former vice president Richard Nixon was running and so was California governor Ronald Reagan.
On April 4, 1968, TV broadcasters announced the news that Martin Luther King, Jr., had been shot to death as he stood on the balcony of a Memphis motel. The Angletons lived in tranquil, tree-lined north Arlington, but they saw on their television what was happening not five miles away in Washington, D.C. Crowds of black people were avenging King’s death by smashing windows and looting stores up and down the Fourteenth Street commercial corridor. Hunter S. Thompson’s fear and loathing had come to the nation’s capital.
Like everyone else, Angleton struggled to comprehend the latest news. On June 5, Robert Kennedy, walking off from a victory speech after winning California’s Democratic presidential primary, was shot in the crowded kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, apparently by a Palestinian waiter named Sirhan Sirhan. RFK died the next morning. Angleton suspected organized crime figures were behind the assassination.251
The secrets and suspicions and cigarette smoke saturated and overwhelmed Angleton. One evening when visiting a friend, he began coughing up blood.252 He was taken to the George Washington University Hospital, where he was diagnosed with a bleeding ulcer.
* * *
“ANGLETON WAS AT THE zenith of his power, although the strain was beginning to tell on him,” Peter Wright wrote of his American friend. “… [H]e was making enemies throughout the CIA in the Soviet Division … and among those officers whose promotion prospects he had adversely affected,” Wright said. “He was safe while Helms was director, but the war in Vietnam was rapidly altering the face of the Agency.”253
Angleton’s suspicions had effectively stunted or ended the careers of colleagues who were guilty of nothing. Peter Karlow had been forced into retirement. Paul Garbler had been dispatched to a backwater station in the Caribbean. Richard Kovich had been relegated to a Camp Peary teaching job. David Murphy had been shunted to the Paris station. J. Edgar Hoover had withdrawn the FBI from the HONETOL committee, but Angleton’s mole hunt continued.254
One evening, Angleton and Peter Wright traded conspiracy theories until four in the morning at a Chinese restaurant in Arlington. As Cicely Angleton said of her husband and his colleagues, “Their nerves were shot.”255
“We were both on the rack,” Wright wrote. “So much depended on making the right assumptions about the defectors—for him the assassination of the President; for me the next move in the mole hunt.”256
The two men walked back to Angleton’s Mercedes. It was parked near the Iwo Jima Memorial, adjacent to Arlington National Cemetery. Angleton was staunch in his reverence for the American flag and patriotic symbols like the statue of U.S. soldiers planting the flag of victory over Japan. He paused to look at the marble men bathed in the glow of spotlights. His own silent war against the KGB was never-ending.
“This is Kim’s work,” Angleton muttered. His betrayed love had curdled into mad obsession.257
PART IV
LEGEND
NIXON
WHEN ALLEN DULLES DIED at age seventy-five in January 1969, Angleton responded with practiced tradecraft. He led an Office of Security team, which passed through Dulles’s home in Georgetown. Angleton secured classifi
ed papers in the office, while technicians installed secure phone lines to handle the expected flood of condolence calls.
A few days later, Angleton carried the ashes of his friend in a wooden box as he walked out of Georgetown Presbyterian Church and into the rainy Washington morning of February 1, 1969. Allen Welsh Dulles, the friend, mentor, and father figure he had met in that Rome hotel room so many years ago, was gone. In the ritual of memorial, Angleton was given an honored role: to hold the box of dust to which the great man had returned. Angleton emerged from the white church with a full head of gray hair, a distinguished brow, large black-rimmed glasses enlarging his eyes, and a tightly knotted tie. He was not one to let his sadness show.
The CIA men gathered on the cobblestone street outside and in the church’s cool wooden interior, spare in the way of Presbyterians. There was the suave Dick Helms, the unpretentious Tom Karamessines, the stoic Cord Meyer, and the dashing David Phillips, who had dubbed Dulles “the Great White Case Officer,” an epithet that captured the Anglo-Saxon chauvinism that suffused his career.
Dulles’s widow, Clover, sat in the front pew with daughter Joan and son Allen Macy. The Angletons, the Truitts, and the Bradlees mixed with the CIA families and several hundred mourners from the many walks of Dulles’s life. In every pew sat columnists and editors, ambassadors and bankers, senators and congressmen, painters and novelists. There was Robert McNamara, the former defense secretary, looking haunted, and William Rogers, the new secretary of state. The corpulent and corrupt vice president of the United States, Spiro Agnew, attended as the representative of newly elected President Richard Nixon.
The eulogy, written by retired diplomat Charles Murphy, with contributions from Angleton, was read by Dick Helms.
“Perhaps we can now find it in ourselves to say that we shall always be with him,” Helms declaimed. “To say that for us, as for him, patriotism sets no bounds on the wider pursuit of truth in the defense of freedom and liberty.”
That was the consoling message for the mourners, a fitting benediction in the church of spies, a celebration of a patriotism that “sets no bounds on the wider pursuit of truth.” Like Dulles, Angleton set no bounds on his patriotism, and, like Dulles, he was glad Richard Nixon was in the White House.1
* * *
“I KNOW HOW VITALLY important the work of this organization is,” President Nixon said to the crowded auditorium on the first floor of CIA headquarters in Langley. It was March 7, 1969, a spring day with a hopeful warmth, outside and in. In the first months of his administration, the thirty-seventh president made the rounds of the largest federal agencies. Nixon wanted to introduce himself to the men and women of the CIA, and in the case of Angleton, to reintroduce himself.
“I also know that this organization has a mission that, by necessity, runs counter to some of the very deeply held traditions in this country and feelings, high idealistic feelings, about what a free society ought to be,” Nixon said to the sea of faces before him.
The audience included Helms and Angleton and their top deputies, as well as various division chiefs and their assistants. These were the men and women who spied on America’s friends and enemies, stole secrets, opened mail, intercepted radio signals, dispensed with unfriendly governments, organized armies, controlled newspapers, burglarized embassies, and assassinated terrorists.
The Ivy League panache of the CIA men made Nixon sweat. But on this day, he commanded them by embracing their truth: a mission that, by necessity, runs counter to some of the very deeply held traditions in this country. Nixon was calling their attention to the obvious, if unspoken, business at hand: The CIA was a law-breaking agency responsible for defending a law-abiding democracy.
“This is a dilemma,” Nixon admitted, his jaw jutting. He was a hard man, a plain man, a salesman. “It is one that I wish did not exist.”
A humble man, Nixon knew how to flatter.
“I look upon this organization as not one that is necessary for the conduct of conflict or war,” he said, “… but, in the final analysis [it] is one of the great instruments of our Government for the preservation of peace, for the avoidance of war.… I think the American people need to understand—that this [Agency]”—he looked around the auditorium of the clandestine service—“is a necessary adjunct to the conduct of the Presidency.”2
Nixon’s words echoed Angleton’s conception of the CIA. One of the great instruments of our Government … a necessary adjunct to the conduct of the Presidency. Angleton thought Nixon measured up to past presidents. He did not have the gravitas of a Dwight Eisenhower—nor the complacency. Nixon had none of the charisma of Jack Kennedy—and none of the weakness, either. He had little of Lyndon Johnson’s crude forcefulness—and rather more subtlety. After eight years of JFK and LBJ in the White House, Angleton regarded Nixon as a welcome improvement. No president, he believed, better understood the threat of communism in all of its dimensions than Richard Milhous Nixon.
Nixon and Angleton had more than a working acquaintance, dating back to their discussions about getting tough on Cuba. They shared an instinct of impatience, an abhorrence of liberal illusion, an intolerance for disorder, a dedication to action, a love of America, and a thirst for information about their enemies. They shared a mission higher than law, and they would share a common fate.
* * *
A DEVASTATING EXPLOSION AT 18 West Eleventh Street in New York City on the night of March 6, 1970, gutted the four-story brick town house in a thunderous few seconds. The sound was heard miles away. In Washington, the explosion on the genteel Greenwich Village street would set off something close to panic among the U.S. government’s top law-enforcement and intelligence professionals.
The building was the home of Cathy Wilkerson, a college student and member of a revolutionary group that called itself the Weathermen or the Weather Underground.3 As federal agents sifted through the smoldering rubble and interviewed Wilkerson’s parents, they obtained a more frightening understanding of the group’s intentions. The brownstone had been a haven for men and women who styled themselves after Che Guevara and Ho Chi Minh. The FBI counted twenty-one members of the Weather Underground at large who spoke of “bringing the war home.” They were violent, elusive, and sure to strike again.
A couple of them had been working in the basement of the town house, preparing a homemade explosive device equipped with several pounds of dynamite.4 They planned to plant it on the U.S. Army base in Fort Dix, New Jersey. One of the bomb makers made a mistake: A crossed circuit? A stray spark? A drug-induced stumble? The explosives detonated and the bomb maker was obliterated. Three people in the house were killed instantly. Two women climbed out of the ruins and ran away before police or ambulances arrived on the scene.
The top men at the FBI and CIA were disturbed. The antiwar movement had been growing for years and becoming more violent. The civil rights movement had generated the black nationalist insurgency that dismissed the polite agenda of the late Martin Luther King, Jr., in favor of nothing less than reclaiming city streets from white cops. In early 1969, J. Edgar Hoover had reported more than one hundred attacks by “black extremists” on police, double the rate of the previous six months.5 The Bureau, in league with local police officers, had responded with COINTELPRO measures to harass, disrupt, discredit, and, in Hoover’s ominous word, “neutralize” black leaders. None of it seemed to be doing much good to stem the tide of violence in America.
The nation’s college campuses were more tumultuous than ever. Eight leaders of the protests at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago had been indicted on conspiracy charges, although what they had conspired to do was hazy. In Santa Barbara, California, an antiwar crowd torched a Bank of America branch office. In New York, the offices of IBM, Socony Oil, and General Telephone & Electric were bombed. In May, four students were shot dead by National Guardsmen at Ohio’s Kent State University. The nation’s campuses overflowed with talk of revolution, and the radio airwaves resounded with a dirge of protest
: “Four dead in O-hi-o.”
Neither the CIA nor the FBI had any sources in the Weather Underground. The group seemed to have logistical support across the United States and internationally. They proclaimed their intention to inflict violence on American targets, and the U.S. government had no solid information about their plans, capabilities, or weaponry—except for what Angleton maintained in his LINGUAL files.6
As President Nixon demanded action to combat the tide of what he called “revolutionary terrorism,” Angleton was ready to help, along with his friend Bill Sullivan, assistant director of the FBI. With Tom Huston, an aide to Nixon, they developed a proposal for unifying the government’s domestic counterintelligence apparatus to deal with the growing crisis.
Their proposal became known as “the Huston Plan,” and it generated headlines when exposed by Senate investigators three years later. But Huston was not its intellectual author. A young attorney, Huston was an Indiana political activist who had worked in the White House for little more than a year. He was not the source for the detailed counterintelligence information that filled his memoranda. Huston was schooled by the two men whose policy positions he shared and articulated. If the proposal had been named for its intellectual authors, the Huston Plan would have been called “the Sullivan-Angleton Plan.”
* * *
THE GERMINATION OF THE Huston Plan went back to Nixon’s vision for the CIA. He saw the Agency as an adjunct to the presidency, an instrument of White House power. He expected the Agency to serve. As chief executive, Nixon preferred to insulate himself from cabinet officers and officials by sending his orders through his chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, and White House counsel John Ehrlichman.7 They, in turn, used their assistants to deliver Nixon’s commands to the offices of the government.
In the summer of 1969, Huston, who worked for Ehrlichman, called on Sullivan at FBI headquarters. He told him that the president was dissatisfied with the work of the Bureau, particularly in regard to antiwar militants. Who was watching them? Who was reporting on their foreign contacts?
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