by David Talbot
Despite his success, Maheu liked to say that he never forgot where he came from. Among the multitude of celebrity photos and gold-plated plaques hanging in his office, he claimed to cherish most of all the wood sign that said “Elm City Bottling,” his family’s mom-and-pop business. “Call it my personal Rosebud,” he wrote in his memoir.
Maheu did not socialize with the top CIA men like Helms, Angleton, and Wisner. He met Dulles only once. “It was an accident,” Maheu recalled years later. There was something about the Dulles brothers’ cozy power act that did not sit well with Maheu. “I always resented the fact that Allen Dulles’s brother was secretary of state. You can’t have respect for the diplomatic pouch and be in intelligence at the same time. The State Department should not have to know how you got the information.”
It was his CIA handlers—Sheffield Edwards, who ran the agency’s security office, and Edwards’s deputy, the hulking Jim O’Connell—whom Maheu trusted and invited to his home. These were the cops of the CIA—tough men, many of them ex-FBI and Catholic, who, like Maheu, were not afraid to get their hands dirty. The CIA had an elite reputation, but within the organization there was a distinct class system: the Ivy League types on the top; the ex-FBI hard guys and former cops in the middle ranks of enforcement; and the even more ruthless, and disposable, hired guns at the bottom.
On Saturdays, Maheu would invite Edwards, O’Connell, and other Washington security types like Scott McLeod—the zealous anti-Communist watchdog who had been hired by Foster Dulles to clean house at the State Department during the McCarthy red scare and then conveniently ditched—to watch Notre Dame football games and enjoy barbecue banquets and clambakes in his backyard. Maheu, who prided himself on his cooking skills, carefully monitored the boiling pots filled with lobsters that he had shipped from Maine. Buoyed by the free-flowing booze at the clambakes, Maheu’s regular crowd would find themselves in cheerful conversation with a curious range of special guests, from senators to gangsters. They were all part of Maheu’s colorful world, where the powerful mingled with the infamous.
Working with Shef Edwards’s team and their contacts in the NYPD’s BOSS unit, Maheu and Frank initially succeeded in containing the Galíndez story. Columbia University president Grayson Kirk—a friend of Dulles and a trustee of several foundations that served as pipelines for CIA funding—did nothing to keep the missing lecturer’s case alive, prompting charges of university “indifference.” Meanwhile, the Trujillo regime spread the word that Galíndez was “suffering from a persecution complex” and had likely disappeared for personal reasons. Phony Galíndez sightings were reported throughout Latin America and as far away as the Philippines.
At the same time, the CIA disseminated other disinformation about Galíndez to its friendly press assets, claiming that the missing scholar had absconded with more than $1 million of CIA funds, which the agency allegedly had given him to set up an anti-Franco underground in Spain. Other CIA documents, which circulated as high as Dulles’s office, tried to brand Galíndez as “a witting tool of the Communists.” The agency’s smear campaign succeeded in making Galíndez’s character the story, rather than the shocking crime, and public interest in the case began to wane.
But in December, just as the story seemed to be flickering out, Trujillo threw gas on the smoldering fire when, in predictable fashion, he went too far and ordered the murder of the young American pilot who had flown Galíndez to the Dominican Republic. Twenty-three-year-old Gerald Murphy had dreamed of being a pilot his whole life, but, prevented by poor eyesight from joining the U.S. Air Force, he pursued a career as a mercenary pilot, winding up in the Dominican Republic, flying missions for Trujillo. “It beats the hell out of Oregon,” the handsome Portland native—who affected a James Dean look, complete with Ray-Bans—told his friends about life in the tropics. But Murphy’s life took a fateful turn when he was engaged by John Frank to fly the heavily sedated Galíndez to Ciudad Trujillo.
John Frank told Murphy that Galíndez was a wealthy invalid who wanted to visit Dominican relatives one last time before he died. But after photos of Galíndez began appearing in the press, the pilot figured out the true identity of his passenger. Given to reckless chatter when he was drinking, Murphy began boasting in Ciudad Trujillo watering holes about the big story that he was sitting on, and his chances of striking it rich by making a deal with the Dominican regime to stay quiet. Trujillo, however, preferred a more certain method of ensuring the pilot’s silence. Frank brought Murphy to the National Palace, telling him he had been granted an audience with El Jefe himself. It was the last time the pilot was seen. On December 4, the young American’s Ford was found on a cliff near a slaughterhouse, where the offal that was dumped into the sea attracted swarms of sharks. Known as the “swimming pool,” the lagoon was a favorite disposal site for Trujillo’s enemies.
Murphy’s suspicious disappearance ignited a new uproar, with his Oregon congressman, Charles Porter, demanding that the Eisenhower administration get to the bottom of this latest Trujillo-related mystery. In March 1957, even Stuyvesant Wainright, the wealthy Republican congressman from Long Island’s Gold Coast, waded into the growing controversy, writing directly to his neighbor Dulles and asking for more information about the Galíndez affair, which he called “an incredible invasion of a human being’s personal protection in our country.” Wainright told Dulles that he felt a personal connection to the case, since Murphy had flown Galíndez to his fate from a Long Island airport. Dulles blandly replied that the CIA had no jurisdiction on American soil, so the congressman’s inquiry about the case was better directed to the FBI.
The Galíndez case, in fact, was turning into a major source of friction between the two federal agencies. Hoover, who informed Attorney General Herbert Brownell Jr. that Galíndez had been a valued informant for the FBI, took his probable murder personally. Hoover was further enraged by the suspicious disappearance of young Gerald Murphy and the new round of embarrassing political fallout from the case. To make matters worse, the FBI soon tied John Frank to the crimes, a man who was not only a former bureau agent, but, like his boss, Maheu, was now part of the shadowy CIA orbit that operated serenely above the law. As was common when Hoover sought revenge in Washington’s political wars, he leaked much of the Galíndez story to the press. In late February, Life magazine ran a dramatic version of the affair under the headline “The Story of a Dark International Conspiracy.”
The Eisenhower Justice Department knew that despite the sensitive national security ramifications, someone had to take the fall in the sensational case, and John Frank was the obvious choice. But, as federal prosecutors began to build a case for conspiracy, kidnapping, and homicide against Frank, the CIA’s general counsel, Lawrence Houston, and Dulles himself huddled anxiously with the attorney general. Brownell assured the CIA that he would keep the case tightly held to avoid further press leaks because he realized that the affair involved “keen” national security interests. Brownell’s deputies grew frustrated as they tried to peel away the layers surrounding the case. In March 1957, Assistant Deputy Attorney General Warren Olney III complained in a memo to Brownell, “In my opinion the information given to you by CIA is vague and uncertain and does not resolve the question as to whether [Frank] has in fact been used in any capacity by CIA.” Olney recommended that the CIA “be requested directly and definitely” to state its exact relationship with the man at the center of the Galíndez mystery.
After intricate negotiations between the Justice Department and the CIA, John Frank was finally charged with an astonishingly light offense: failure to register as a foreign agent. “I fully appreciate that to indict a person involved in a possible murder and kidnapping for violation of the Registration Act is like hitting a man with a feather when he should be hit with a rock,” acknowledged one chagrinned Justice Department official. But considering the highly charged political atmosphere surrounding the case, he observed, it was the only way to ensure that “the subject will [not] escape scot-fre
e.”
In December 1957, Frank was convicted of multiple counts of violating the Registration Act and sentenced to a maximum eight months to two years in federal prison. But the following year, his conviction was overturned by a federal appeals court in the District of Columbia that ruled that Frank had been denied a fair trial because of “the prosecutor’s attempt to connect him in the jury’s mind with the Galíndez-Murphy affair.” As he entered the second round of his legal battle, Frank made it clear that he was not going to be the fall guy for the CIA on the Galíndez case. Before his new trial began, Frank played his trump card, making it known that his line of defense would be that he had been working for U.S. intelligence throughout the affair. When Frank’s lawyer issued subpoenas for several CIA witnesses to appear in court, agency officials quickly moved to block them from testifying, thereby aborting the trial. The Justice Department was forced to strike a plea bargain with Frank, and in March 1959, he paid a modest fine, signed an agreement not to work as a foreign agent, and walked out of court a free man. Nobody was ever charged in the murders of Jesus de Galíndez or Gerald Murphy.
Allen Dulles’s CIA believed in the power of ideas. It was easy for Dulles’s Ivy League–educated executive team to understand why the Trujillo regime became so obsessed with a doctoral dissertation written by an obscure academic. They knew that ideas mattered: they floated like seeds on the wind, over mountains and seas, and took root in the most unexpected places. The Cold War was, in fact, a war of ideas, fought primarily in the realm of the symbolic, through propaganda campaigns and “proxy” conflicts, instead of on battlegrounds where the superpowers clashed head-to-head.
Joseph Stalin, too, understood the power of words, calling writers “the engineers of the human soul.” The Soviet leader had a way of expressing himself with industrial bluntness. “The production of souls,” he stated, “is more important than the production of tanks.” Stalin engineered a conformity of Soviet thought by executing writers, intellectuals, and artists who did not toe the party line, or by exiling them to the gulag’s frozen extremities.
The CIA’s methods of cultural engineering were far more subtle but no less effective. The agency spent an inestimable fortune on the war of ideas, subsidizing the intellectual and creative labors of those who were deemed politically correct and seeking to marginalize those who challenged the “crackpot realism” of Cold War orthodoxy. The main front organization used by the CIA to spread its largesse and influence was the Congress for Cultural Freedom, “a kind of cultural NATO,” in one critic’s words, founded in 1950 to counter the propaganda efforts of the Soviet bloc. The Congress for Cultural Freedom grew to become one of the biggest arts patrons in world history, sponsoring an impressive array of book publishing start-ups and literary magazines—including the influential Encounter and Paris Review—as well as art exhibits, literary prizes, concert tours, and international conferences held in Paris, Berlin, and the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio retreat overlooking Lake Como.
There was a seductive appeal to the CIA’s cultural patronage, for it offered not only the satisfaction of doing one’s patriotic duty and resisting Stalinist tyranny, but also a comfortable reprieve from the financial anxieties of the freelance, creative life. “These stylish and expensive excursions must have been a great pleasure for the people who took them at government expense,” remarked Jason Epstein, former Random House editorial director and cofounder of The New York Review of Books. “But it was more than pleasure, because they were tasting power. Who wouldn’t like to be in a situation where you’re politically correct and at the same time well compensated for the position you’ve taken?”
Many leading artists and intellectuals fell into the ranks of the CIA’s generously funded culture war, including Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Mary McCarthy, Robert Lowell, Dwight Macdonald, Daniel Bell, Isaiah Berlin, George Plimpton, Peter Matthiessen, and Mark Rothko. But the recipients of CIA sponsorship paid a price: their intellectual independence. As historian Frances Stonor Saunders observed, “The individuals and institutions subsidized by the CIA were expected to perform as part . . . of a propaganda war.” Those who took agency funds became “cheerful robots” of the Cold War, in C. Wright Mills’s memorable phrase. Mills, one of the few prominent American scholars to actively resist the siren calls of the Cold War intelligentsia, was predictably attacked in these circles. While Mills was coming under fire in the pages of CIA-funded publications like Encounter, he was embraced by leftist intellectuals in Europe such as Ralph Miliband (father of British Labour Party leader Ed Miliband) and historian Edward Thompson, who declared, “Wright is fortunate in his enemies.”
Mills was fortunate in other ways, too. His intellectual gifts and personal fortitude allowed him to carve out a prominent public position for himself, even at the height of Cold War conformity in America. But most of those who challenged the era’s mandatory spirit of American triumphalism soon found themselves intellectually isolated and professionally invisible. Under the reign of CIA-approved thought, unpleasant realities about the U.S. imperium were considered out-of-bounds for scholarly or journalistic exploration, including the bloody regime changes in Iran and Guatemala and the boiling cauldron of racial injustice at home. The grants, literary prizes, journalism awards, and academic endowments went to those who saw America as the hope of the world, not to those who focused on its deep flaws.
Those CIA-approved intellectuals who dared to assert their independence soon found that once-welcoming doors were closed to them. In 1958, Dwight Macdonald—a frequent intellectual sparring partner of his friend Mills—broke out of the Cold War thought bubble with a cranky article for Encounter titled “America, America,” in which he railed against the idiocy of the country’s mass culture. There was nothing particularly surprising about Macdonald’s highbrow lament about the spread of primitivism in pop culture. But the article was deemed unacceptable by the editors of Encounter, and though Macdonald was a former editor of Encounter, the magazine refused to publish it.
Like many of the CIA-sponsored literary projects, Encounter reflected the aesthetics of James Jesus Angleton, the CIA’s unofficial cultural commissar. As a Yale undergraduate, Angleton had founded the avant-garde literary magazine Furioso and befriended Ezra Pound and e.e. cummings. The spy wizard was a devotee of the modernist school of poetry—particularly its high priest, T. S. Eliot—and the pages of Encounter were dominated by an Eliotic sensibility, though Eliot himself shunned the London-based publication as so “obviously published under American auspices.”
A new generation of Beat poets led by Allen Ginsberg was beginning to challenge the reign of literary modernism, invoking the lush populism and unabashed deviancy of Walt Whitman. As the Beats laid siege to Eisenhower-era cultural banality, the CIA-funded poetry establishment struggled to keep these barbarians outside the gates. Years later, Ginsberg imagined a confrontation between himself and Angleton’s favorite poet on the fantail of a boat in European waters. “What did you think of the dominance of poetics by the CIA?” Ginsberg asks Eliot. “After all, wasn’t Angleton your friend?” The old master admits he knew of the infamous spook’s “literary conspiracies” but insists they were “of no importance to Literature.” But Ginsberg passionately disagrees. The CIA, he tells Eliot, secretly funded a “whole field of Scholars of War” and “nourished the careers of too many square intellectuals,” thereby undermining efforts to “create an alternative free vital decentralized culture.” The result, as Ginsberg wrote in his 1956 masterpiece, Howl, was the unchallenged rise of the American Moloch, “vast stone of war . . . whose soul is electricity and banks,” and a culture that devoured the souls of its own children.
Angleton carried an elaborate portfolio at the CIA, from the politics of art to the metaphysics of assassination. In December 1954, Dulles officially named him chief of counterintelligence, the department tasked with blocking enemy penetration of the agency. But, in reality, his manifold duties were as hard to get a hold on as the smoke curli
ng up from the chain of cigarettes he inhaled throughout the day. “I remember Jim as one of the most complex men I have ever known,” recalled Dick Helms, one of Angleton’s vital defenders and patrons within the agency. “One did not always have to agree with him to know that he possessed a unique grasp of secret operations. As a friend remarked, Jim had the ability to raise an operational discussion not only to a higher level but to another dimension. It is easy to mock this, but there was no one within the agency with whom I would rather have discussed a complex operational problem than Angleton.”
Angleton’s activities ranged from purloining documents at foreign embassies to opening the mail of American citizens (he once jocularly referred to himself as “the postmaster”) to wiretapping the bedrooms of CIA officials. It was his job to be suspicious of everybody, and he was, keeping a treasure trove of sensitive files and photos in the locked vault in his office. Each morning at CIA headquarters, Angleton would report to Dulles on the results of his “fishing expeditions,” as they called his electronic eavesdropping missions, which picked up everything from gossip on the Georgetown party circuit to Washington pillow talk.
