The Devil's Chessboard

by David Talbot

  Then there was Sirhan himself. Like Oswald, he did not claim credit for the assassination. In fact, from the moment he was taken into custody, he seemed utterly perplexed by the tragedy in which he found himself playing the starring role. The dazed Sirhan had no memory of attacking Kennedy. He struck many observers, including hypnosis experts who interviewed him, as a “Manchurian candidate”—an individual highly susceptible to mind control programming.

  A security guard named Thane Eugene Cesar who guided Kennedy into the pantry later fell under suspicion. He was seen pulling his gun as the chaos erupted that night in the cramped passageway. But investigators quickly cleared Cesar, and his gun was never tested. Over the years, Cesar’s possible role in the assassination of Robert Kennedy has been debated by researchers and lawyers associated with the case. Some—like Sirhan’s current legal team—declare that Cesar, if not the actual assassin, played a role in the plot, perhaps helping set up Kennedy as a target.

  Others, like investigative journalist Dan Moldea—author of a book on the RFK assassination—insist on the innocence of Cesar, who is still alive. “Gene Cesar is an innocent man who has been wrongly accused in the Robert Kennedy murder case, and any claim to the contrary is simply not true,” Moldea e-mailed the author in 2015, adding that he now acts as the reclusive Cesar’s spokesman and has his power of attorney.

  John Meier—a former executive in Howard Hughes’s Las Vegas organization—has tied Cesar to CIA contractor Bob Maheu, who was hired by Hughes to run his Vegas operation in the 1960s. Meier claims he was introduced to Cesar in Las Vegas before the RFK assassination by Jack Hooper, Maheu’s security chief. Meier also stated that after Kennedy’s murder, he was warned by Maheu and Hooper never to mention Cesar’s name or his connection to Maheu.

  But Maheu strongly denied the accusations. “Everything about [Meier] was a lie,” he snarled during an interview at his Las Vegas home before his death in 2008. “He was a 14-carat phony.” Cesar, too, has rejected Meier’s accusations, with Moldea—speaking on behalf of the former security guard—dismissing them as “just more garbage being peddled by Meier.”

  Maheu pointed out that Meier was accused of evading taxes on money he allegedly skimmed from Hughes mining deals and was convicted on a related charge of forgery. But it was Maheu himself who was the biggest crook in his Nevada organization, Hughes told the press after fleeing Las Vegas in 1970. Maheu was “a no-good, dishonest son of a bitch [who] stole me blind,” fumed the eccentric billionaire. While running Hughes’s gambling casinos, Maheu had made sweetheart deals with mobsters and allowed the CIA to pay off politicians with Hughes cash and to exploit Hughes’s corporate empire as a front for spy activities. While Maheu was being paid over $500,000 a year by Hughes as his Las Vegas overseer, he still treated the CIA like his top client.

  Maheu never concealed his hatred for the Kennedys. He even accused JFK of homicide during his testimony before the Church Committee, for withholding air support from the Bay of Pigs invaders. “As far as I’m concerned,” he said, “those volunteers who got off the boats that day were murdered.” But Maheu denied playing a role in the Kennedy assassinations.

  As with his brother’s death, the investigation into Robert Kennedy’s murder would become clouded with murky agendas. There were hints of CIA involvement, Mafia corruption—and once again glaring displays of official negligence. Sirhan Sirhan’s prosecution was a streamlined process, with the defendant often seeming like a confused bystander at his own trial. Just like the JFK inquest, the outcome was never in doubt. Sirhan has spent the bulk of his life in prison, with his periodic requests for a retrial routinely denied.

  Allen Dulles, who turned seventy-five in April 1968, kept up a busy schedule all that year, despite Clover and Mary’s concerns about his health. Dulles continued attending meetings of the Council on Foreign Relations intelligence study group and the Princeton Board of Trustees; there were luncheons at the Alibi Club, embassy parties and regular get-togethers with old CIA comrades like Angleton, Jim Hunt, and Howard Roman. And he continued to appear as a special guest on radio and TV shows.

  Not even the civil unrest in Washington ignited by the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. that April seemed to faze Dulles. After King’s assassination, his followers took their fallen leader’s Poor People’s Campaign to the nation’s capital, erecting a protest encampment on the National Mall that they christened Resurrection City. On June 24—after more than one thousand police officers swept into the camp, dispersing the protesters—riots again broke out in the streets of the capital, prompting officials to call out the National Guard and declare a curfew. But Dulles did not let the disturbances affect his social life. “Lest you worry at the news of a curfew in Washington,” Dulles wrote the following day to Clover, who was visiting Allen Jr. and Joan in Switzerland at the time, “you can rest assured that everything remains quiet here.” Dulles had invited their old friend, Helen Magruder—the widow of OSS deputy director, Brigadier General John Magruder—for dinner at Q Street. After supper, he wrote, “We were able to get a taxi shortly, and Helen returned home in safety.”

  That afternoon, Dulles continued, he planned to go to a CIA social gathering with Jim Hunt and his wife. “I am afraid I will have to pass up [family friend] Marion Glover’s afternoon affair, as I cannot get to both,” he told Clover. There was always too much for Dulles to do in his leisure years.

  That same month, Dulles found time to sit down and write a condolence letter to the brother of another murdered Kennedy. “Dear Ted,” he wrote the last Kennedy brother, “I join with a multitude of others in expressing to you my deep sorrow. I had the opportunity of working with Bobby on many occasions and had great respect for his dynamic approach to our national problems and for his vigor and forthrightness in dealing with them. His death is a great loss to the country and especially to those like yourself who were so close to him. I send you my profound sympathy.” Once again, Dulles’s flawless civility is chilling to behold.

  Ted Kennedy responded warmly to Dulles’s letter, in a way that the spymaster must have found reassuring. “Joan and I want you to know how grateful we are for your message,” the senator wrote on his personal stationery. “At a time of sadness, nothing is more helpful than hearing from a friend. . . . I hope we will see each other soon.” It was clear that there would be no trouble from the youngest Kennedy brother.

  On July 8, according to his day calendar, Dulles made time to meet with Dr. Stephen Chowe, an American University professor who was an expert in Chinese and Russian brainwashing techniques. Dulles had known Chowe, a former CIA researcher, for some time. The mind control expert had reached out to Dulles in June, arranging a time to discuss his latest work on “political psychology.” Then, on July 13, 1968—a few days after his meeting with Chowe—Dulles met with Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA’s pharmaceutical wizard, who was involved in the agency’s assassination and MKULTRA mind control programs. These meetings on the Dulles calendar are particularly intriguing, coming just weeks after the assassination of Robert Kennedy and the arrest of Sirhan Sirhan—a man who appeared to be in a hypnotic or narcotic state when he was taken into custody and, to some mind control experts, seemed to fit the mold of an MKULTRA subject.

  That summer, Dulles also continued to keep a close watch on Jim Garrison’s investigation. In July, Angleton deputy Ray Rocca phoned Dulles to discuss an article about the New Orleans prosecutor by Edward Jay Epstein in The New Yorker. In September, CIA mole Gordon Novel called Dulles to give him another inside report on the Garrison probe.

  The Old Man’s main social event of the fall season was the Washington fête in honor of Reinhard Gehlen, the West German spy chief Dulles had resurrected from the poison ashes of the Third Reich. On September 12, Gehlen’s U.S. sponsors threw a luncheon for him, and that night there was a dinner for Hitler’s old spy chief at the Maryland home of Heinz Herre—Gehlen’s former staff officer on the eastern front, who had become West Germany’s top intelligence l
iaison in Washington.

  That fall, Dulles eagerly anticipated the long-delayed presidential election of Richard Nixon, the Dulles brothers’ former disciple. He got involved in the Nixon campaign, joining fund-raising committees and contributing his own money. On Halloween, Nixon sent Dulles a telegram, thanking him for his support and appointing him vice chairman of the “Eisenhower Team” for the Nixon-Agnew ticket. The Old Man had visions of returning to the center of official Washington, perhaps with a prominent appointment in the new Nixon administration.

  But Clover and others close to him knew the truth—he was slowly fading away. At times, in the midst of his frenetic schedule, Dulles would suddenly seem lost. “Uncle Allen would go off to lunch at the Metropolitan Club or Alibi Club and forget how to get home,” said his cousin, Eleanor Elliott. “Sometimes he would just get lost in the neighborhood, and people who recognized him would bring him back. Clover was so worried.”

  In December—working with Howard Roman, his longtime collaborator—Dulles finished editing a collection of espionage yarns, Great Spy Stories, featuring selections by masters of the genre such as Eric Ambler, Graham Greene, Ian Fleming, and John le Carré. In the book’s foreword, Dulles offered his final observations on the stealthy profession to which he had dedicated himself. In the past, he wrote, “the spy was generally thought of as a rather sneaky and socially unacceptable figure.” But World War II and the Cold War, he observed, had turned spies into dashing heroes. “The spy has the muscle and the daring to take the place of the discarded hero of yore. He is the new-model musketeer.” None of the blood and sorrow that had flowed all around him had left a mark on Dulles. He continued to have the highest esteem for himself and his “craft.” As he neared the end of his life, there was no self-reflection, only more tale spinning for a public that could not get enough of the cool romance of 007.

  Soon after finishing the book, Dulles came down with a bad case of the flu, which confined him to bed. By Christmas Eve, the infection had settled in his chest and turned to pneumonia, and Dulles was admitted to Georgetown University Hospital. Over the following month, he struggled to recover, rallying at one point to write a congratulatory note to Nixon on his inauguration. But on January 29, 1969, Dulles died of complications from his illness.

  Even after his death, the secret organism that Dulles had created continued to pulse. A team led by Angleton swept into the Old Man’s home office, while Clover lay in bed upstairs, and rifled through his files. CIA technicians installed secure phone lines to handle the flood of condolence calls. An effusive eulogy was crafted for his memorial service at Georgetown Presbyterian Church. The soft-spoken church minister, who was used to writing his own funeral orations, balked at reading the bombastic address that had been written by longtime Dulles ghostwriter Charles Murphy, with input from Angleton and Jim Hunt. But the Dulles team quickly set the cleric straight. “This is a special occasion,” the minister was informed by an official-sounding caller the night before the funeral. “The address has been written by the CIA.”

  The next day, the minister stood up in his church—whose pews were filled with the solemn ranks of CIA spooks and political dignitaries—and recited the eulogy as instructed. “It is as a splendid watchman that many of us saw him,” he declared, “a famous and trusted figure in clear outline on the American ramparts, seeing that the nation could not be surprised in its sleep or be overcome in the night.

  “It fell to Allen Dulles to perfect a new kind of protection,” continued the preacher, not knowing how ironic the words he spoke were. “[F]or us, as for him, patriotism sets no bounds on . . . the defense of freedom and liberty.”

  Dulles’s funeral oration was a celebration of the lawless era that he had inaugurated. Under Dulles, America’s intelligence system had become a dark and invasive force—at home and abroad—violating citizens’ privacy, kidnapping, torturing, and killing at will. His legacy would be carried far into the future by men and women who shared his philosophy about the boundless authority of the national security system’s “splendid watchmen.” Dulles had personally shaped and inspired some of these watchmen, including Helms and Angleton—as well as the power players of future administrations, like William Casey, President Reagan’s defiantly lawbreaking CIA director, and Donald Rumsfeld, President George W. Bush’s smugly confident conqueror of desert sands. And though they never met, Dulles also provided a template for Bush regent Dick Cheney’s executive absolutism and extreme security measures in the name of national defense. These men, too, firmly believed that “patriotism set no bounds” on their power.

  Today, other faceless security bureaucrats continue to carry on Dulles’s work—playing God with drone strikes from above and utilizing Orwellian surveillance technology that Dulles could only have dreamed about—with little understanding of the debt they owe to the founding father of modern American intelligence. Dead for nearly half a century, Dulles’s shadow still darkens the land.

  Those who enter the lobby of CIA headquarters are greeted by the stone likeness of Allen Welsh Dulles. “His Monument Is Around Us,” reads the inscription underneath the bas-relief sculpture. The words sound like a curse on the men and women who work in the citadel of national security, and on all those they serve.

  Epilogue

  After Dulles, James Angleton soldiered on for several more years in the CIA’s counterintelligence department until his gloomy paranoia seemed to threaten the gleaming efficiency of a new espionage era and, in 1975, he was forced to retire. Angleton remained a loyal sentry of the Dulles legacy for many years. He had carried the master’s ashes in a wooden urn at Dulles’s funeral. Their stories had been long entwined, from the days of the Nazi ratlines in Rome through the assassinations of the 1960s. Dulles was Angleton’s revered monarch, and he was Dulles’s ghostly knight.

  When Angleton’s successors cracked open his legendary safes and vaults, out spilled the sordid secrets of a lifetime of service to Allen Dulles. Among the trove of classified documents and exotic souvenirs were two Bushmen bows and some arrows—which the CIA safecrackers wisely tested right away for poison, knowing Angleton’s reputation. The safecracking team was also horrified to find files relating to both Kennedy assassinations and stomach-turning photos taken of Robert Kennedy’s autopsy, which were promptly burned. These, too, were mementoes of Angleton’s years of faithful service to Dulles.

  But as he crept toward death in 1987, Angleton was less bound by the loyalty oaths of the past, and he began to talk about his career with a surprisingly raw clarity. By then, his lungs were cancer-ridden from a lifetime of incessant smoking, and his sunken cheeks and receding eyes gave him the look of a fallen saint. The Catholic Angleton had always needed to believe in the holiness of his mission. And now, as he faced the final judgment, he felt compelled to make confessions, of sorts, to visiting journalists, including Joseph Trento. What he confessed was this. He had not been serving God, after all, when he followed Allen Dulles. He had been on a satanic quest.

  These were some of James Jesus Angleton’s dying words. He delivered them between fits of calamitous coughing—lung-scraping seizures that still failed to break him of his cigarette habit—and soothing sips of tea. “Fundamentally, the founding fathers of U.S. intelligence were liars,” Angleton told Trento in an emotionless voice. “The better you lied and the more you betrayed, the more likely you would be promoted. . . . Outside of their duplicity, the only thing they had in common was a desire for absolute power. I did things that, in looking back on my life, I regret. But I was part of it and loved being in it.”

  He invoked the names of the high eminences who had run the CIA in his day—Dulles, Helms, Wisner. These men were “the grand masters,” he said. “If you were in a room with them, you were in a room full of people that you had to believe would deservedly end up in hell.”

  Angleton took another slow sip from his steaming cup. “I guess I will see them there soon.”

  Notes

  The pagination of this
electronic edition does not match the edition from which it was made. To locate a specific passage, please use the search feature on your e-book reader

  Abbreviations Used

  AMD Allen Macy Dulles Jr.

  AS Arthur M. Schlesinger

  AWD Allen W. Dulles

  AWD calendars Allen W. Dulles calendars, Seeley Mudd Library, Princeton University

  AWD correspondence Allen W. Dulles correspondence, Seeley Mudd Library, Princeton University

  AWD interview, JFD OH Allen W. Dulles interview, John Foster Dulles oral history project, Seeley Mudd Library, Princeton University

  AWD OH, JFK Library Allen W. Dulles oral history, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston

  AWD OH, Mudd Library Allen W. Dulles oral history, John Foster Dulles collection, Seeley Mudd Library, Princeton University

  AWD papers, Mudd Library Allen W. Dulles papers, Seeley Mudd Library, Princeton University