Angleton was in trouble. Colby had an Ivy League and OSS pedigree similar to Angleton’s, but a very different vision of the future. Colby was tested in the summer of 1973 when the story of the Huston Plan was discovered and exposed by the Senate Watergate Committee. The investigators were appalled at the scope of Nixon’s domestic surveillance plan and the support it had gained from the CIA and other agencies. The fact that J. Edgar Hoover, of all people, had killed the domestic spying plan only highlighted how out of control the Nixon administration seemed.
Colby thought the CIA had to do a better job of explaining its actions.
At his confirmation hearings in July 1973, Colby said the Agency had to function within “American society and the American constitutional structure. And I can see that there may be a requirement to expose to the American people a great deal more than might be convenient from the narrow intelligence point of view.”50
Colby harbored “a profound certainty that there must be a ‘new’ CIA that would be much more forthcoming in its relationship with Congress and the American public.”
Such proclamations helped placate a Congress and public disillusioned about the CIA’s actions with regard to Vietnam and Watergate. They were ominous for Angleton.
* * *
ANGLETON WAS ILL PREPARED to resist Colby’s war of attrition. His father had died in March 1973 in a hospital in Boise. James Hugh Angleton was eighty-four years old.51 Angleton sometimes had let his father down. He had disappointed him by choosing a CIA career over the family business. And he never talked to his father about his working life.
The services were held at the Cathedral of the Rockies in Boise. His mother, now seventy-four, was living in Idaho. So was his brother, Hugh, still running his antique emporium. His sister Dolores Guarneri came from Florence with her Italian husband; Carmen, from Milan with her husband.
Colonel Angleton was a decorated man, the eulogists reminded the assembled mourners. He was a Mason and a member of the Methodist Church. He was president emeritus of the American Chamber of Commerce for Italy, a veteran of the OSS, and recipient of an Italian military star for valor in the field of combat.
Unspoken at the service was that the deceased was also the father of one of the most powerful men in the Central Intelligence Agency. Even among the many friends and family of the late Hugh Angleton, not many knew of that distinction. With his father dead and his family gone, Angleton had never been more alone in his pain. He took to wearing his father’s suits.52
* * *
ANGLETON HAD FEW ALLIES left in Langley. Tom Karamessines had retired with Helms. Cord Meyer was in London. With the exception of David Phillips, chief of the Western Hemisphere Division, all of the Agency’s current division chiefs disliked or mistrusted him. Among those who had worked with Angleton, he had a terrible reputation, even for his counterintelligence work.53
“Jim virtually destroyed counterintelligence at CIA,” said Carter Woodbury, a retired officer. In a letter to a colleague, Woodbury said that when he joined the CIA in 1950, every division and every station had a strong counterintelligence component. Two decades later, “there were almost no such components,” he wrote. “They had atrophied over the years as Jim focused more and more on his personal and mythical CIA preoccupations.”54
Jack Maury, former Athens station chief, who served as the Agency’s liaison to Congress, described Angleton’s search for moles in the Soviet Russia Division as debilitating “sick think.”55
Bill Colby heard many such complaints. An audit of Soviet Russia Division officers in 1973–1974 found that a disturbing proportion of them did nothing more than check out Soviet penetrations suspected by Golitsyn and Angleton. Colby concluded Angleton’s never-ending mole hunt was “seriously damaging the recruiting of Soviet officers and hurting CIA’s intelligence take.”
“Because of this we have virtually no positive ops going against our primary targets, the USSR and Soviet officers,” Colby wrote in a memo.
Colby suspended LINGUAL, saying the mail-opening operation was legally questionable and operationally trivial, having never produced much “beyond vague generalities.”56 In August 1973, he limited CHAOS activities “to a passive collection of information upon FBI request.”57
“I hoped Angleton might take the hint and retire in time to secure certain retirement benefits which closed in June 1974,” Colby explained. “But he dug in his heels and marshaled every argument he could think of to urge that such an important contact not be handled in the normal bureaucratic machinery.”58
Angleton worried that Colby was destroying U.S. counterintelligence. Colby worried Angleton was destroying himself.
Angleton was “getting to the point where he had some difficulty separating reality from fiction,” said Robert Gambino of the Office of the Security. “I had personal information and personal experience with Angleton during his latter days—he was slipping off the edge. I don’t want to suggest he was, you know, that he was having serious mental problems or anything like that. Let me just say, I think it was time for him to go.”59
* * *
ON SATURDAY, OCTOBER 6, 1973, as Israeli Jews observed Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the Egyptian army launched a massive surprise attack across the Sinai Desert, retribution for the surprise Israeli attack of June 1967. The Egyptian invasion penetrated deep into Israeli territory and inflicted unprecedented losses on the unprepared Israeli Defense Forces.
“We were very close to disaster,” recalled Efraim Halevy. “After the first week, we lost a third of our air force and close to a third of our tanks. We had over two thousand dead and ten thousand injured. I remember those days vividly because I was there when the U.S. was groping to find out how much damage Israel had suffered.”60
Over the course of the next three weeks, the United States resupplied Israel while President Nixon managed a geopolitical crisis. As the IDF regained lost territory, the Soviet Union threatened to protect its ally, Egypt, from another humiliation, with nuclear weapons if necessary. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger demanded the Israelis accept a cease-fire, which they reluctantly did.
* * *
PRESIDENT NIXON FOUND THE CIA’s performance unacceptable. The Agency had not alerted the White House that another war in the Middle East might be in the offing, much less that it would lead to a nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union.
It was a classic case of getting too close to a source. Robert Morris, a staffer at the National Security Council, said “the worst common flaw in the reading of the intelligence was an abiding cultural, perhaps racial, contempt in Washington and Jerusalem for the political posturing and fighting skills of the Arabs.”61
Kissinger diagnosed the CIA’s problem with asperity. “The U.S. definition of rationality did not take seriously the notion of [the Arabs] starting an unwinnable war to restore self-respect,” he fumed. “There was no defense against our own preconceptions or those of our allies.”62
As the CIA’s most faithful messenger of Israeli thinking, Angleton had contributed to the fiasco. Worse yet, he had made an enemy of Kissinger, the most powerful man in government after Nixon.
Angleton’s continuing obsession with Soviet deception operations did not help his credibility. His claim that British prime minister Harold Wilson was a KGB agent of influence was baseless. Yet Len McCoy heard Angleton make the point at length in a speech to senior CIA officers in March 1974.
“What he said was that … Wilson was a Soviet agent,” McCoy recalled. “That control of Wilson was exercised by a senior KGB officer or officers and that this relationship went back to the time when he was traveling in and out of the Soviet Union on personal assignment.”
The CIA never found any evidence to support Angleton’s theory.
McCoy thought Angleton’s mind-set fit the definition of paranoia: He was incapable of distinguishing what was possible from what was probable. Yet McCoy did not challenge him. “One was a bit cowed in the man’s presence,” he admitted.63
And then an obnoxious newspaper reporter gave Bill Colby the opportunity he had been waiting for.
SMOKING GUN
IN THE SPRING OF 1974, the recurring banner headlines on the front page of The Washington Post that Angleton picked up on his doorstep told the tale of a White House besieged.
PRESIDENT HANDS OVER TRANSCRIPTS
NIXON DEBATED PAYING
BLACKMAIL, CLEMENCY64
People went about their business in the capital with only three syllables on their lips: Wa-ter-gate. The scandalous spectacle of White House aides, charged in a court of law, with diverse counts of conspiracy, perjury, and obstruction of justice preoccupied official Washington. Federal prosecutors and senior editors were pursuing a lawless chief executive who had just won the largest number of votes of any American president.
The discovery of an audiotaping system in the White House created a vast new body of evidence. Nixon said the tapes could not possibly be made public without damaging the presidency. The prosecutors insisted and the court agreed: Nixon had to produce the tapes for the trial of the Watergate defendants.
The results were dispiriting to the Congress and the public. The vigilant editing of the transcripts could not disguise the constant cursing. The censor’s euphemism, “expletive deleted,” entered the lexicon of a disillusioned nation.
Angleton had other worries. He saw more important stories buried by the Watergate coverage.
WILLY BRANDT RESIGNS
OVER SPY SCANDAL
Willy Brandt, chancellor of West Germany and leftist advocate of Kissinger-style détente, had quit after one of his closest aides, Guenter Guillaume, had been exposed as an East German spy.65 Guillaume was exactly the sort of long-term penetration agent that Angleton feared was working somewhere in Langley. It was time to expand the use of counterintelligence tools, said Angleton, not discard them.
Angleton still had a vision, even as he was losing his empire. Whatever Nixon’s abuses of power, he believed the country still needed more vigorous defense. Kissinger’s pursuit of détente had only benefited the Soviet Union, he said. The surge of technological innovation that had lifted the United States and its allies (like Israel) to military ascendancy after World War II had been squandered. Beginning with JFK, he said, U.S. presidents and policy makers had traded the sound policy of containment of the Soviet Union for the illusory benefits of peaceful coexistence, in which the West relaxed its guard while the Communists pursued class warfare ever more vigorously. He thought Harold Wilson’s election and Willy Brandt’s disgrace showed that détente did not modify Soviet strategy against the West.66
As for Vietnam, Angleton thought the United States had peace but hardly with the honor Nixon and Kissinger claimed. The superior resources of the American fighting forces—and, worse still, their spirit—had been wasted in Southeast Asia “for want of a strategy calculated to stand and hold.”
“Kissinger diplomacy has not deflected the Kremlin for its basic objectives,” Angleton insisted. “Détente is a sham, a tactic; it is Soviet communism’s Potemkin Village for waging Cold War.”67
He was a visionary. He was a crank. He was a victim of his own mentality.
* * *
ANGLETON, WHO HAD STUNTED or ended the careers of so many colleagues, suddenly found his own loyalties called into question. Unable to find a KGB spy anywhere in the Agency, one of Angleton’s mole hunters finally turned his attention on the counterintelligence chief himself. Clare Edward Petty, a career officer on the Counterintelligence Staff, concluded his boss was either a giant fraud or a KGB agent.68
Petty’s methodology deserves the adjective Angletonian. Assuming the CIA had been penetrated at a high level, Petty considered the possibility that both Anatoly Golitsyn and Yuri Nosenko had been sent by the KGB under the guidance of the real mole: Angleton himself. Through this analytic lens, Petty saw new meaning in all the anomalies of Angleton’s career: his strange indulgence of Philby, his promotion of Golitsyn, his irrational insistence that the Sino-Soviet split was a ruse. Every decision he made seemed to impede U.S. intelligence operations, Petty noted. Perhaps it was intentional.
This was speculation as counterintelligence. Petty took a semiplausible scenario based on a superficial fact pattern and used it to confirm a logical conclusion that flowed from untested assumptions.69
As Angleton’s mole hunt culminated in absurdity, Nixon’s presidency came to an end. It was no coincidence. The spymaster and the president embodied American Cold War policy from its ascendancy after World War II to its failure in Southeast Asia. Angleton and Nixon shared a determination, verging on hatred, to defeat their enemies. They shared a dogged belief in the necessity of domestic counterintelligence—what the liberal headline writers called “spying on Americans.” Their willingness to act on that belief, even when it conflicted with the law, ended their long public careers in the span of four months.
* * *
NIXON’S LIMITED RELEASE OF the transcripts of the White House tapes did not satisfy the Watergate special prosecutors or the courts. On July 24, 1974, the Supreme Court, by a unanimous vote, upheld the validity of the prosecutor’s subpoena seeking additional tapes of fifty-six White House conversations, including the phone calls in the immediate aftermath of the Watergate burglary.
Their release brought another banner headline in the Post that had concussive effect on Washington.
PRESIDENT ADMITS WITHHOLDING DATA;
TAPES SHOW HE APPROVED COVER-UP
THE PLAN: USE CIA TO BLOCK PROBE70
The Post said the tapes proved that Nixon had ordered a cover-up of the Watergate burglary six days after it occurred. The June 23 tape, in which Nixon invoked the “whole Bay of Pigs thing,” was a proverbial “smoking gun,” incontestable proof of Nixon’s guilt.71
The end was near. As crowds gathered in vigils outside the White House, the last vestiges of support for Nixon vanished. The eleven Republicans on the Judiciary Committee who had just voted against articles of impeachment announced they would change their votes.72 Facing all but certain conviction by the Senate, the president had run out of options.
In August, Nixon wrote a letter of resignation to Secretary of State Kissinger. He bade farewell to the White House staff in an emotional ceremony, then flew off to Southern California. Vice President Gerald Ford was sworn in as president before the end of the day.
* * *
SEYMOUR HERSH DIDN’T KNOW much about James Angleton besides his name. Hersh was a thirty-seven-year-old reporter for the New York Times. He had won the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on how U.S. soldiers annihilated several hundred residents of a Vietnamese village in March 1968, raping the women, killing the children, and disemboweling both. His pitiless reporting seared the words My Lai into the soft tissue of the American self-regard and won him a job at America’s newspaper of record.
Hersh was a genially abrasive man, a kvetcher, and a workaholic.73 He had no time for politics, only a nose for abuses of power. He exemplified a resurgent, morally confident—some said self-righteous—brand of American journalism that, in a break with the past, dared to publish stories objectionable to senior officials in Washington.
Hersh was hearing from his sources that the CIA had spied on the antiwar movement, something his leftist friends insisted was endemic. People were telling him about Dick Ober’s Special Operations Group. They talked about how Tom Huston’s plan had stoked CIA action against domestic radicals. They talked about how the mail of certain congressmen had been opened, all of which was true. These stories echoed (or were based on) the family jewels documents that Colby had compiled in May 1973.74 Many CIA hands objected to CHAOS, saying the Agency was spying on their own wives and children.
When Hersh mentioned Angleton’s name in his interviews, he heard expressions of fear and awe. He heard about the man’s passion for orchids, his poetry magazine at Yale. He heard that he was an unrelenting Cold Warrior, that he was convinced that the Soviet Union was playi
ng a major role in the antiwar protests, that his reports on the student movement had been forwarded to Nixon and Kissinger.75
When Hersh called, Angleton did not hesitate to engage him. Hersh asked if the Counterintelligence Staff had operated in the United States. Angleton denied it. “We know our jurisdiction,” he said.
Hersh called Colby, who confirmed the story in its broad outlines, while insisting he had put an end to Angleton’s abuses. In December 1974 the reporter then put in a call to Ambassador Dick Helms in Tehran and left a blunt message. The Times, he said, “was going to press within six hours with a story very damaging to Mister Angleton.”76
* * *
ANGLETON EXPECTED NOTHING GOOD when Bill Colby asked to see him in his office. Twenty years of rivalry and resentment ended in a terse confrontation.
“I called Angleton to my office to talk the matter out with him,” Colby wrote in his memoir, “saying that I had come to the conclusion that a change was necessary in both jobs, the Israeli liaison and counterintelligence but that I wanted to retain his talents for the Agency, and especially his experience. I offered him the prospect of separate status, where he could summarize for us the main ideas he had and conclusions he had reached about counterintelligence and where he would be consulted on, but no longer in charge of, our Israeli liaison.”
Angleton scoffed. The imperative of counterintelligence required that he stay on. Did Colby understand what the KGB was doing under the guise of détente?
Colby pressed on without pity. He informed Angleton that The New York Times was about to publish an article linking him to domestic spying activities. He had no choice but to resign, Colby said. Otherwise, people might think that he had been fired because of the Times story.
“I asked him to think over the matter for a couple of days, to decide if he would like to say on in the way I described,” Colby recalled, “or whether he would choose to retire completely.”77
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