Click here for Morley’s response to this review.
Click here for Robarge’s rejoinder to Morley.
Click here for Morley’s response to Robarge’s rejoinder.
Click here for Robarge’s 2nd rejoinder.
The Ghost: The Secret Life of CIA Spymaster James Jesus Angleton
Jefferson Morley
St. Martin’s Press. 336 pp. $27.99.
By David Robarge
Readers who pick up The Ghost, hoping finally to have a comprehensive and objective treatment of James Angleton, the Agency’s long-time, shadowy, and controversial chief of counterintelligence, will be sorely disappointed.
What they will find is an erratically organized account of most of the key events in Angleton’s life, along with an agglomeration of often badly sourced suppositions, inferences, allegations, and innuendoes frequently cast in hyperbolic or categorical language.
The Ghost displays the most prominent shortcomings of journalistic history: reportage substitutes for cohesive narrative, with vignettes and atmospherics stitched together with insufficient discernment among sources. One of Morley’s more dubious ones—an anonymous blog post with no citations, from which he pulls an outlandish quote—inadvertently provides an insight into what his ulterior motive in writing The Ghost appears to be: “This is not about who James Angleton was so much as what James Angleton had to be” (emphasis in the original).[1]
In pursuit of a story he seems to have already written in his mind, Morley manipulates historical facts, engages in long leaps of logic, and avoids inconvenient contradictory evidence and interpretations to produce yet another superficial caricature of a deeply complicated personality.
Questionable Logic
The most problematic feature of The Ghost is Morley’s penchant for reaching grandiose conclusions based on sketchy or no evidence, contorted reasoning, or unfamiliarity with intelligence processes and the history of the events in which he places Angleton. To cite just three from among numerous instances:
- Morley overstates Angleton’s part in the Italian election operation—he hardly was its “miracle worker.”
- No persuasive evidence shows that Angleton had a “supporting role” in the MK/ULTRA project, that he “help[ed] give birth” to it, or that he “pursued the use of psychoactive drugs for intelligence work,” other than a brief relationship Angleton had with a colleague who worked on the program.
- An Israeli diplomat is alleged to have been “Angleton’s man in Havana.” But they met only a few times, and the diplomat declined Angleton’s request to contact CIA agents in Cuba.[2]
Morley’s highly dubious rendering of the Kennedy administration’s policy toward Cuba, and Angleton’s involvement with it, is more troublesome. For starters, the United States did not have “two divergent Cuba policies” represented by the Joint Chiefs of Staff’s “engineered provocation” plan called NORTHWOODS and the White House’s “autonomous operations” using Cuban exiles, possibly in conjunction with the assassination of Castro.[3]
The administration’s policy was what it did, not what was said in meetings or written about in plans and memoranda. NORTHWOODS was never carried out, and the CIA’s integrated covert action program codenamed AM/WORLD became the focus for the rest of Kennedy’s presidency. Morley later asserts that Angleton stressed Lee Harvey Oswald’s Cuban ties so the White House would activate NORTHWOODS, but he presents no evidence besides Castro’s suspicions, which corroborate nothing.
