Click here to read the review, “Angleton Unrevealed.”
Click here to read Morley's response.
Jefferson Morley’s response to my review has as many shortcomings as his book.
Besides the many comments I made that he ignores and presumably concedes are correct, he insufficiently addresses some of my criticisms, restates or abridges others in ways that make them easier to deflect, reiterates the points he made in the book without dealing with what I wrote, and refuses to admit some errors. I will address my points and his responses in the order in which he presents them except for a few that I will discuss at the end.
Erratic organization. Morley says The Ghost is organized chronologically. It is to a fault. Effective biographies strike a balance between recounting their subject’s lives sequentially and providing more detailed examination of topics and themes across time so readers can make sense of significant aspects of the subject’s experiences without having to revisit the same stories in different periods and contexts. The Ghost’s five sections are subdivided into 56 chapters and subchapters that average fewer than five pages apiece. The constant switching of focus leaves the impression that one is reading a large clipping file of separate accounts assembled into a book rather than a cohesive narrative—one of the several shortcomings of journalistic history that I mentioned, and which Morley does not dispute.
Insufficient discernment among sources. Morley’s listing of a number of his sources does not address my point that he often uses them—especially interviews—without adequately considering their accuracy, access, reliability, or agendas, and that he routinely quotes the passages that are most critical of Angleton.
Quoting an anonymous blogger. Morley does more than quote four words that he considered a “nice turn of phrase.” See page 70 in The Ghost for the whole far-fetched excerpt, which he used without qualification notwithstanding his reservations about the blogger—another example of his reliance on sources without discernment just because they say or write something catchy.
Angleton was not the “miracle worker” of the 1948 Italian election operation. Morley’s referencing 37 pages of Robin Winks’s book is misleading because only two of them concern that operation, and Winks states on page 385 of Cloak and Gown that “Angleton’s role in the 1948 Italian election is, of course, not clear.” Assets that Angleton had previously developed were used, but he was not in Italy at the time to direct them, and the operation had multiple elements that make it hard to give primary credit to any particular one. Moreover, when Winks writes that Angleton’s legend was born in Italy, he clearly is referring to Angleton’s work there with the OSS during World War II, not with the CIA in the election operation.
Angleton had no “supporting role” in MKULTRA. Morley does not mention that I noted Angleton’s six meetings with George White, referring to them as “a brief relationship.” As even Morley concedes, considering that Angleton had nothing else to do with MKULTRA after late 1952 and that Sidney Gottlieb was its driving force, it is an exaggeration to claim that Angleton “help[ed] give birth to it.” Also, Morley offers no substantiated evidence that Angleton “pursued the use of psychoactive drugs for intelligence work.” As I noted, John Marks’s work draws on anonymous interviews for its brief coverage of this subject.
An Israeli diplomat was not Angleton’s “man in Havana.” Morley again does not quote my entire comment, which adds that “the diplomat declined Angleton’s request to contact CIA agents in Cuba,” indicating a less-than-controlled relationship. Even if the diplomat later described himself as Angleton’s “man,” it sounds too much like late-in-life overstatement—another example of Morley not using sources circumspectly.
Operation NORTHWOODS was not carried out. Morley challenges me to produce evidence that this provocative US military plan to overthrow Castro was cancelled. Finding evidence for events that did not occur is difficult by definition, but I am not aware of any account of US-Cuban relations during the Kennedy administration that says that any of the operations described in the original 1962 NORTHWOODS memo—such as staged bombings, riots, and attacks on US warships, and faked aircraft shootdowns—were ever conducted. It is hard to imagine that they could have been without leaving any traces. If Morley has evidence that they were, I hope he will produce it.
As I stated in my comment, policy is what is done, not what is said or put on paper, so I do not think that even “reasonable people can differ” on what the US covert policy toward Cuba was in 1962-63. The policy followed the lines of the CIA’s AMWORLD project, not the US military’s NORTHWOODS plan. He is correct that “that is where the declassified paper trail ends”—as well as all other trails. Additionally, having already rejected the plan once, and given how untrusting Kennedy was of the Joint Chiefs after the Cuban missile crisis, does Morley consider it at all plausible that the president ever would have authorized it?
Angleton stressed Oswald’s Cuban ties so NORTHWOODS would be activated. See the passage in The Ghost on 147 that begins with “Like the CIA-funded Cuban students, he [Angleton] was not averse to linking Oswald to Castro.” After quoting an Angleton recollection, it goes on to say, “He, too, wanted to preserve the US ‘freedom of action’ in the wake of JFK’s death. The CIA’s gambit wasn’t hard to figure. It was the NORTHWOODS concept: If the crime in Dallas could be blamed on Castro, the United States would have justification for the overdue elimination of the Communist regime in Havana.” Morley insists that he did not write and does not believe that the White House “activated” NORTHWOODS, which contradicts what he said in the previous response: “How do we know that NORTHWOODS ‘was never carried out’?”
Misunderstanding the purpose of Angleton’s analysis of Cuban intelligence. Morley repeats the point that I criticized without answering my comment about why Angleton’s staff prepared the analysis and distributed it only to certain recipients. He offers no evidence for the additional assertion in his response that Angleton was trying to “forge an inter-agency consensus around a more robust policy aimed at what we now call ‘regime change.’”
Misrepresenting Angleton’s supposed “epic” counterintelligence failure. Morley does not address my fundamental criticism about much of the literature about the JFK assassination: that the US government did not have actionable information that Oswald was a clear threat to the President before 22 November 1963 and that reading Oswald’s malevolent intent into the disparate information then available about him is retrospective wisdom—an intellectual trap historians must strive to avoid. They must fairly assess why people acted based on what they knew at the time and not make judgments about what they could or should have done because of how events played out.
Angleton and the CI Staff supposedly were, or should have been, preoccupied with Oswald. Morley denies that he ever wrote that, but then how can he declare that Angleton’s “preassassination interest in Oswald” indicates his “culpability in the wrongful death of President Kennedy”? If Angleton was using Oswald for the limited purpose of helping him conduct the molehunt, then why blame him for an “epic” counterintelligence failure by not stopping Oswald? Morley does not try to resolve the logical contradiction he sets up in his description of the CIA’s mail-opening operation: either it was all-pervasive mass surveillance that preoccupied Angleton and his staff, or they should have been watching one relatively insignificant person and ignoring the others being monitored.
Unskeptical use of Scott’s memoir. Morley mentions a CIA inspector general’s critique of Scott’s memoir that he cited in his book Our Man in Mexico, but in my review, I cite a different document written soon after the memoir was taken from Scott’s home. It is available in the JFK assassination records collection, so Morley must have overlooked it.
Quoting Thomas Hughes’s speculation about Angleton and the attack on the Liberty. This is a blatant example of Morley’s credulous of sources. Whatever Hughes’s reputation, his comment is fanciful at best and should not have been included.
Bagley’s report on Nosenko not used. Morley says that he used and cited the document, but the reference on page 187 (not 168, as in his response) is to an article that mentions the report (see page 306, note 225) and not to the report itself. Morley stacked his sources on the Nosenko episode in favor of Angleton’s critics and should have given some consideration to Bagley’s viewpoint, as Bagley expressed it both in his report and his book Spy Wars, instead of relying on paraphrases from a critical interpretation.
MI5 officer Peter Wright conveniently quoted even though often considered unreliable. Probably the best place to start for historians’ consensus on Wright’s views on Soviet counterintelligence operations is with Christopher Andrew, the official historian of MI5. On page 282 of Defend the Realm (which Morley uses elsewhere), Andrew calls Wright and [MI5 counterintelligence officer Arthur] Martin the “most damaging conspiracy theorists in the history of the [British] Security Service.” In several other places, Andrew expresses similar conclusions, especially in the litany of fabrications in Wright’s book Spycatcher on page 520.
Angleton’s colleague John Hadden’s accusations of his treason or incompetence. If alternative explanations exist for how Angleton handled Israel’s alleged theft of nuclear material, Morley should have suggested some instead of relying solely on a sound bite—another instance where he used an interview uncritically.
Overuse of unreliable histories. Historians should not draw from bad books, and Morley could easily have found much better sources for the material he cites from Trento, Holzman, and Weiner. I would also add two more of his sources, David Talbot’s The Devil’s Chessboard and H.P. Albarelli’s A Terrible Mistake, to the list. I appreciate that he used my work on Angleton, but he completely ignored the analysis in the chapter on the JFK assassination in my book on John McCone, which tells a different story than his.
Angleton did not cooperate in preventing criticism of Israel after the Liberty incident. The document Morley cites from the State Department’s Foreign Relations of the United States series, as indicated in the footnote to it in the volume where it appears, is an analytical paper that the CIA’s Directorate of Intelligence prepared at President Johnson’s request. It is not “the first CIA cable about the attack,” and Angleton would not have been involved in its preparation. At that time, CIA analytical products were written independent of the operational offices.
Use of fiction to recount Angleton’s relationship with a Shin Bet officer. With the other, more reliable sources he cited available to him, I question why also Morley used a fictional account (by Michael Ledeen, not Reuel Marc Gerecht, as he says in his response) here. He also did so two other times that I mentioned in my review, which he does not try to justify.
Ignoring reliable sources that contradict Morley. If Morley read Halpern’s and Peake’s article about who ordered Nosenko’s confinement, as he says he did, he should have referenced it and addressed its conclusions. Also, in my review, I noted that he did not use Frank Rafalko’s book on MHCHAOS and my own analysis of CIA and the JFK assassination (except for some factual citations), but he left that out of his quotation of my comment.
“Alleged” errors. I will discuss only those that Morley disputes. (The quotation marks are his.)
- Bletchley Park was not an OSS training school. I cannot think of a single source that would agree with Morley’s description of Bletchley Park, the cryptanalytic facility where the ENIGMA encryption system was broken, as “a British intelligence installation where all OSS officers were trained.” Nearly all of the OSS’s 14,000 personnel received their training at facilities in the United States, Camp X in Canada, or Milton Hall in England.
- DCI Hillenkoetter was not “brought on” to CIA when it was created. My point was that Hillenkoetter was not an outsider with an agenda when Truman appointed him. Morley goes on to claim that Truman chose Hillenkoetter to protect the CIA from political influences, but considering that Hillenkoetter was part of Truman’s “Missouri Gang” of cronies, just the opposite was possible.
- DCI Smith, not DCI Dulles, merged the CIA’s espionage and covert action components. The merger that Smith ordered in 1952 was well in train when Dulles took over a year later. Also, Anne Karalekas was not a “CIA historian.” She was an academic whom the Church Committee retained to write a history of the Agency for its report.
- Angleton did not enable an NSA spy to plead guilty and avoid a public trial. On page 519 of the article Morley cites, the author writes: “Petersen was allowed to plead guilty on the least important count to avoid the need to disclose secret information at the trial.” Morley claims that was what he wrote, but on page 105 of The Ghost, he asserts that “Angleton allowed Petersen to plead guilty”—which is not what the article’s author stated.
- Penkovksiy’s reporting was not called “The Penkovskiy Papers.” It is not “pedantry” to point out that the information from Penkovskiy that Morley rightly mentions as so valuable during the Cuban missile crisis came from his documentary material and his debriefings, called IRONBARK and CHICKADEE, respectively, and not from “The Penkovskiy Papers,” a memoir-of-sorts published a few years after the crisis that contained no intelligence reporting.
- Public Law 110 was not a “secret arrangement.” Even if “it was secret to 99.9 percent of Americans” because they were not aware of it—which could be said about most of the US government's overt work—the law was passed in open congressional session and promulgated in the publicly available Federal Code. It never was classified nor hidden from anyone who needed or cared to know about it.
- MHCHAOS did not and could not “spy on and infiltrate the entire antiwar movement.” Morley should have consulted chapter 3 of Rafalko’s book on MHCHAOS for details on what was in the files the CIA compiled, where the information came from and how it was used, and how big the operation was. Most of what the CIA had in its files was FBI material on American citizens’ foreign travels, which CIA could legally possess. According to Rafalko, MHCHAOS had fewer than 20 active agents, and most of its reporting assets (including those in liaison services) were based overseas—hardly enough to monitor an estimated quarter million American antiwar protesters.
- Nosenko was not given psychoactive drugs during his detention. Morley’s CIA source, an Agency psychologist, had no direct knowledge that Nosenko was drugged, and the documentary record contradicts the charge. Nosenko’s own accounts of his treatment over the years varied with the telling, and he had every reason to embellish what the CIA did to him to justify its exoneration of him for being a dispatched deception agent.
- Loginov was not executed. If “it is also true that Loginov was not executed,” as Morley admits, then he should have said so in the book instead of writing that Loginov’s execution was “rumored” and leaving the implication hanging that Angleton was complicit in his death.
Sensationalist style. Morley does not dispute my characterization of numerous passages and his overall literary technique of using exaggerations, unfounded allegations couched in conditionals, and sweeping but unsubstantiated conclusions. The fact that other authors or sources he cites make such wholesale statements does not exempt him from qualifying their hyperbole. His penchant for the colorful phrase too often overrides historical precision and detracts from the reliability of his book’s narrative and conclusions.
I overstated a few of my criticisms and qualify or withdraw them now. Morley did not get his information about Angleton and World War II war criminals “mainly” from a recent interview with a veteran or about MKULTRA “mostly” from Albarelli’s book. But I still do not believe he should have used the latter as a source because it often is unreliable and better sources are available. References to unsourced blog postings do not “abound,” but two internet sources Morley used strike me as conspiracist even though he denies they are: Bill Simpich’s book State Secret: Wiretapping in Mexico City, Double Agents, and the Framing of Lee Oswald on www.maryferrell.org (the title is sufficient to make the point, but the full work is an exemplar of the genre) and the USS Liberty Memorial site, which, among other unproven assertions, contends that the US government contrived a cover-up of the incident because of pressure from the “Jewish Lobby.” Two of the mistakes I cited—about missiles in Cuba and the espionage of a Soviet operative—did not appear in the published version of The Ghost, and I am glad that Morley could correct them. I was working from the galley proofs; that is not unusual for reviewers and is neither “symptomatic of bias” nor lacking in “professional courtesy,” as Morley claims.
Morley closes his response with a characteristically unfounded leap of logic by suggesting that my “grudging statement” that some of his research adds a small degree of insight to our knowledge of Angleton means that I accept several of his conclusions about Angleton. Not necessarily—especially that Oswald “allegedly killed Kennedy,” which to me needs no qualifier.
©2017 by David Robarge
