Checkmate. In one short conversation, Colby had maneuvered Angleton into choosing the method of his professional suicide. It was elegant. It was brutal. It had to be done. Colby took no pleasure in another man’s pain, but, as an observant Catholic who attended services at the Little Flower Catholic church in Bethesda, he was glad to have expiated the sins of the Agency.78
Angleton shuffled out of the meeting, shocked and uncomprehending. An old friend from the FBI happened to be waiting in the outer office. Behind Angleton’s horn-rimmed glasses, the usually sharp brown eyes were blurred with pain. The FBI man took him by the arm.
“Jesus, Jim, it can’t be that bad,” he said. “What’s the matter?”
“It’s horrible,” Angleton rasped. “It’s awful. You’ll soon read all about it.”79
DESOLATE
HUGE C.I.A. OPERATION REPORTED
IN U.S. AGAINST ANTIWAR FORCES,
OTHER DISSIDENTS IN NIXON YEARS
FILES ON CITIZENS
Helms Reportedly Got
Surveillance Data in
Charter Violation
The newspaper article that ended Jim Angleton’s career packed a punch for Americans who actually believed they lived in a constitutional republic. Hersh’s article described “a massive illegal domestic intelligence operation during the Nixon administration” that maintained files on at least ten thousand Americans associated with the popular movements against the war in Vietnam. These files, the story said, were controlled by a “special unit” reporting to then director Richard Helms. The Agency had also collected evidence of “dozens of other illegal activities” by CIA personnel, including break-ins, wiretapping, and the surreptitious inspection of mail.
Angleton was outraged and anguished. Helms sent a cable to the State Department denying there had been any illegal surveillance in the United States. Ben Bradlee would later say he thought it was a “hell of a story,” but at the time The Washington Post treated Hersh’s scoop with disdain.
The Post’s editorial page proclaimed, “While almost any CIA activity can be fitted under the headline of ‘spying,’ and while CIA activities undertaken on American soil can be called ‘domestic spying,’ it remains to be determined which of these activities has been conducted in ‘violation’ of the agency’s congressional charter or are ‘illegal.’”80
Subsequent investigations determined these activities and many more certainly violated the Agency’s charter and the law, though politics would preclude prosecution. While Hersh made some errors, his story has withstood the test of time. His sources were well informed about the internal complaints about CHAOS as compiled in the family jewels. Hersh’s report was mistaken in attributing the program to President Nixon, when it had actually begun under President Johnson. The story was perhaps unfair to Bill Colby. It might have emphasized more clearly that Colby had restricted some extralegal operations when he became director in 1973.
Citing his unnamed source (Colby), Hersh attributed responsibility to one man.
“The C.I.A. domestic activities during the Nixon Administration were directed, the source said, by James Angleton, who is still in charge of the Counterintelligence Department, the agency’s most powerful and mysterious unit.”
To be sure, Hersh got the name wrong. Angleton headed the Counterintelligence Staff, not the Counterintelligence Department. But the Agency’s “most powerful and mysterious unit” was an apt description of Angleton’s empire. Some would dispute that Angleton “directed” the spying on the antiwar movement, as Hersh contended. Dick Ober had directed the day-to-day business of CHAOS from 1967 to 1974.
But Hersh’s attribution of ultimate responsibility to Angleton was not misplaced. Angleton had formal responsibility for all of the Agency’s counterintelligence operations. Helms had assigned Ober to the Counterintelligence Staff precisely because Angleton’s skill in operations requiring extreme compartmentalization. According to Ober’s deputy, anyone who wanted to use CHAOS agents had to get operational approval from Angleton or his deputy Ray Rocca.81 While Angleton did not see all of the reporting that crossed Ober’s desk, he made sure that CHAOS was exempted from annual financial audits of Counterintelligence Staff operations.82
If Angleton did not run CHAOS, he approved of it in principle and in many of its details. His leading role in domestic counterintelligence was one of the major revelations of the Times story, and Hersh got it right.83
When Angleton read the story, he called Hersh and angrily told him he had blown his cover. He claimed that his wife had known nothing of his CIA work, and that she had left him because of the story. That was a lie, and not a very subtle one.
Cicely Angleton had known her husband was a “hush hush man” before the CIA was even created. She had not left him over Hersh’s story. She had left him three years before because of his absence from their marriage. With a few phone calls to CIA sources, Hersh discovered the truth about Angleton’s marriage and was baffled by the fib. Angleton’s lie, of course, expressed a terrible personal truth: He felt utterly abandoned.
* * *
LATE ON SATURDAY NIGHT, December 21, 1974, the Times story was read with mounting fascination by David Martin, a young reporter working the overnight shift at the Associated Press office in Washington. As the junior man on staff, Martin had the chore of reading the first edition of the Sunday Times and following up on any especially newsworthy story. With a glance at the triple-decker headline and the photographs of three CIA directors above the fold of the newspaper, Martin knew he had to get to work. He knew something of the CIA world. His father worked as an analyst in the Directorate of Intelligence, but he had never heard Angleton’s name before.
Martin found Angleton’s home phone number in the Arlington phone book. He dialed the number, while another reporter listened in. They were sure that no one would answer.
“He started talking right away,” Martin recalled. “He sounded like a guy straight out of le Carré.”84
John le Carré, the SIS man turned spy novelist, spun tales of Cold War intrigue into bestselling books. His latest, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, featured a world-weary British counterintelligence officer, George Smiley, pursuing a Philby-like mole in the upper ranks of the British intelligence service.
“He had a slurred way of speaking,” Martin said of Angleton. “He was not hard to understand, but his thoughts were muddled.… He gave the impression he’d been drinking too much. We talked to him for an hour, and he complained we had made him burn his spaghetti.”
As Angleton suddenly became famous as a powerful spy, he was living the reality of an absentminded bachelor, home alone, talking on the phone to strangers.
* * *
THE NEXT DAY, ANGLETON’S home on 33rd Road was besieged by reporters. One of them was Daniel Schorr, a CBS news correspondent famous for his blunt questions. He marched up to the front door and rang the bell. A groggy-looking, stoop-shouldered man in pajamas opened the door and pointed at The Washington Post on his doorstep. Schorr was standing on it.
“I certainly didn’t expect you, Mr. Schorr, to trample on the press,” said Angleton.85
Encouraged by his sense of humor, Schorr asked if he could come in. He found himself in a house strewn with books in many languages, mementos of Italy and Israel, and pictures of Cicely and the children. Angleton agreed to talk to Schorr, but only off-camera, saying he would be in mortal danger if recognized.
Each time Schorr asked him about the allegations of improper CIA activities in the United States, Angleton digressed about the Cold War. When Schorr tried to bring him back to the question he had asked fifteen minutes earlier, Angleton said, “I am not known as a linear thinker, Mr. Schorr. You will have to let me approach your question my way.”
When he was done, Angleton donned his black coat and homburg and walked out the front door, down the brick steps, and slowly across the lawn into the wilderness of TV cameras. He stopped as if hypnotized. Schorr grabbed a microphone lying on the ground and the came
raman started filming.
“Why did you resign?” Schorr asked.
“I think the time comes to all men when they no longer serve their countries,” Angleton said.
“Did you jump or were you pushed?” someone asked.
“I wasn’t pushed out the window,” said Angleton.
He got into his Mercedes and drove away.86
That night, Christmas Eve 1974, millions of Americans heard the name James Jesus Angleton for the first time. All three TV networks reported on the Times story, along with the categorical denials of former CIA director Richard Helms.87 All three played footage of Angleton emerging unsteadily from his front door.
Angleton’s ordeal was surreal and unimaginable, except that it was actually happening: newspaper reporters camped out on his lawn, a career of secrecy expiring in the view of millions, his craft of counterintelligence scorned, his mission mocked, his Agency stripped bare by reporters he thought were righteous and ignorant.
“It was,” Dan Schorr intoned, “a personal tragedy.”
* * *
ON MONDAY MORNING, THE senior CIA staff met as scheduled in a conference room in Langley. Angleton filed in along with two dozen colleagues for the daily rundown of coming activities and events. The meeting opened with a shocking announcement: James Angleton had resigned as chief of the Counterintelligence Staff.
No one said anything, recalled David Phillips, the chief of the Western Hemisphere Division. Angleton lit one of his Virginia Slims filter cigarettes and began to speak one last time to his colleagues.
“It was a gloomy forecast,” Phillips said. “We were uncomfortable; while most of us felt the counter-espionage expert to be inordinately inflexible, we also knew he possessed an incubus of deep secrets and a better understanding of the Soviet Union’s intelligence operations than many in the West. When the meeting was over we all left hurriedly, almost as if escaping.”
That evening, as Phillips was leaving the office, he encountered Angleton in the parking lot.
“I had never seen a man who looked so infinitely tired and sad,” he said. “We shook hands. And I got into my car, backed out of the parking space and drove towards the exit. In the rear-view mirror I could see Angleton’s tall, gaunt figure growing smaller and smaller. He was still standing beside his car looking up at the building.…”88
* * *
BILL COLBY MOVED TO dismantle the last vestiges of Angleton’s empire and eradicate his influence. He replaced Angleton with a longtime colleague, George Kalaris. Originally from Montana, Kalaris had started his Washington career as a civil servant–lawyer in the Labor Department before joining the CIA in 1952.89 In the course of his tours in Asia, Kalaris became one of Colby’s trusted regional specialists. During the Vietnam War, his acquisition of the manuals for the Soviet SA-2 missile was credited with saving literally hundreds of pilots and countless aircraft over Vietnam.90
Colleagues described Kalaris as a dependable and fair administrator, someone who grasped complex problems quickly and made shrewd judgments. He had not been part of the Counterintelligence Staff during the Angleton years, nor had he been involved in any of its internal politicking about the mole hunt. With no small amount of trepidation, Kalaris went to Angleton’s office in room 43 on the C corridor.91 He talked to his staff and flipped through the office files. Kalaris called it “a desolate situation.”
“Mountains of traffic were coming in to the staff but none of it seemed of much importance,” he reported in a memo for the record. “The staff had no relation with the Soviet Division.”
The Counterintelligence Staff was supposed to prevent KGB penetration of CIA operations against the Soviet Union. How could it serve its function without communicating with the people running the operations? It made no sense. The office atmosphere, said Kalaris, was “conditioned by double think and mirrors.”
Kalaris was disturbed to find Angleton’s files on the assassination of President Kennedy and his brother Robert. This was material that had never been incorporated into the CIA’s central file registry. It had been concealed from the Warren Commission. Kalaris was stunned to open one file and find autopsy photographs of the naked remains of Robert F. Kennedy. How did the counterintelligence chief obtain the photos? And why? The implications disturbed Kalaris. He thought it was “bizarre” that Angleton had the photos.
He consulted with David Blee, chief of the Near East Division. They agreed that Nosenko’s account of the KGB’s response to Oswald’s defection might explain Angleton’s interest in JFK’s assassination. They could not think of any reason why it was appropriate for the Counterintelligence Staff files to hold the RFK autopsy photos. Kalaris ordered them destroyed.
As for Angleton’s JFK files, they told a story that the CIA, as an institution, preferred not to share. Kalaris ordered some to be shredded and the rest integrated into the Agency’s file registry. Thus the many CIA documents held by Angleton’s Special Investigations Group from 1959 to 1963 were preserved, complete with routing slips. When the Oswald file was declassified thirty years later, the story of Angleton’s preassassination interest in Oswald finally emerged, indicating possible culpability in the wrongful death of President Kennedy.
In another dispiriting moment, Kalaris found Angleton’s files on the mole hunt, otherwise known as the HONETOL cases. Here was the evidence, such as it was, that Angleton and Golitsyn had used to blight the careers of those blameless CIA officers: Peter Karlow, Richard Kovich, Igor Orlov, Vasia Gmirkin, and David Murphy, among many others. Kalaris assigned a staff attorney to review the forty files for any evidence of possible Soviet penetration. The task took a year.
“Nothing of merit was found in any of them,” Kalaris said.
Angleton’s mole hunt was over. At CIA headquarters, it was a moment of reckoning. The Times story documented how legitimate foreign counterintelligence operations had evolved into illegal domestic spying. The Times story only hinted at the existence of the LINGUAL operation. And there were the “skeletons” in Angleton’s closet that the Times and the Congress and the president knew nothing about: the AMLASH conspiracy to kill Castro; the reckless MKULTRA experiments; the lawless detention of Yuri Nosenko. The multiple congressional investigations into the CIA that followed in 1975 led to what official Washington called “the Year of Intelligence.”
Behind Angleton’s personal tragedy was a professional travesty. And the travesty invited disturbing questions about everything from unconstitutional spying to extralegal detention to the violent deaths of John and Robert Kennedy.
In this desolate situation, one ambitious young man in Washington knew exactly what to do.
CHENEY
ON THE WEEKEND THAT The New York Times broke the story of CIA domestic spying, President Gerald Ford was headed for one of his favorite places in the world, the ski slopes of Vail, Colorado.92 The athletic president had a passion for sport that could not be denied. The only work on his schedule were meetings about his upcoming State of the Union address. Ford’s chief of staff, Donald Rumsfeld, accompanied him on the trip and protected his privacy during the holiday.
As the gatekeeper of the president’s time, Rumsfeld brought a gregarious personality and versatile expertise ranging from budgets to engineering. When he read the Times sensational headlines on the CIA, he sent a message to the White House Situation Room. The president wanted Bill Colby to address the allegations in writing within forty-eight hours and provide a copy to his deputy, Richard Cheney.
Dick, as he preferred to be called, was thirty-three years old, a native of Wyoming who had come east to Washington to intern for a Republican congressman and never left. An enthusiastic supporter of the U.S. war effort in Vietnam, Cheney used graduate school deferments to avoid getting drafted himself. Rumsfeld was the latest in a series of bosses who were impressed by Cheney’s incisive memoranda and prodigious work ethic. Cheney, the junior man in the relationship, did not have Rumsfeld’s bluff charm, but he had the more precise mind. Cheney became Pres
ident Ford’s point man on the Angleton story.
The revelations in the Times article confounded Ford’s advisers. An agitated Henry Kissinger called television journalist Ted Koppel to warn him off the story. Kissinger insisted the CIA had merely assessed “the degree to which foreign countries were infiltrating foreign student movements,” which wasn’t close to true. “I am so sick of these things,” Kissinger said. “They have been in the newspapers thousands of times.”93
In fact, Hersh’s reporting was read with appalled interest on Capitol Hill, in newsrooms, and in living rooms precisely because it documented allegations of surveillance and infiltration that the government had long denied.
In this crucible, Dick Cheney grasped that the issue was neither simply one man nor the spying on Americans. At stake was the power of the president to use the CIA as an instrument of national policy as he saw fit. Cheney did not think small. He pulled his thoughts together in a memo that historian John Prados calls “one of the most significant—and completely ignored—artifacts of the Year of Intelligence.”94
Cheney’s paper disclosed that his acute political instincts were already well developed.95 He suggested Ford “take the lead in the investigation” and accept “the responsibility for making certain the CIA is adhering to its charter.” He proposed public release of all or part of Colby’s report. He recommended creating a “special group or commission” to investigate the Times’ charges. This would demonstrate leadership, Cheney wrote, and convince the nation that government “does indeed have integrity.”
A blue-ribbon commission “offers the best prospect for heading off Congressional efforts to further encroach on the executive branch,” Cheney added, an argument that would become second nature as he went on to serve as a congressman, secretary of defense, and vice president. Ford accepted Cheney’s idea of a commission and named Vice President Nelson Rockefeller to head it. Cheney’s strategy was not totally successful.96 The creation of the Rockefeller Commission did not head off separate investigations by the Senate and the House of Representatives, but Cheney did prove an able advocate of unbridled presidential power.
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