Morley continues trying to spin gold out of a lot of straw and still ignores, embellishes, or misstates many things I wrote—not the least of which is overstressing my use of the word if in a point I made about his discussion of Angleton supposedly using Oswald to hunt for moles in Mexico City.
I was merely addressing a logical contradiction in Morley’s argument. Yet he teases out of that one word my supposed acknowledgement of, concession to, and acceptance of his assertions—which I flatly deny now. Moreover, he undercuts his claim by stating that “It is impossible to say whether the Mexico City mole hunt was prompted by concerns about Oswald.” With evidence lacking, he then falls back on his frequently-used tactic of conjecture: “It might have been.”
Morley makes a major admission when he agrees with my point that “the US government did not have actionable information that Oswald was a clear threat to the president before 22 November 1963.” By accepting that, he markedly reduces the importance of the CIA’s pre-assassination information on Oswald in potentially preventing JFK’s killing. He tries to maintain his much-weakened position, however, through more retrospective wisdom: anachronistically claiming that “Oswald fit the current definition of a security threat” [emphasis added] and labeling Oswald as a “presidential assassin” with a “threat profile” because of “smoking gun proof” collected six weeks before the assassination.
The same fallacy applies to Morley’s contention that “the mail opening operation . . . delivered specific actionable intelligence” about Oswald; nothing “actionable” in the sense of being assassination-related was in the material. And the “some other reason” why Oswald’s presence in Mexico City did not cause the excitement Morley would expect it to might have been because Angleton (assuming he was personally engaged) and a few members of the Counterintelligence Staff (everything was highly compartmented there) concluded that a disgruntled and estranged Oswald was up to something comparatively mundane: trying to re-defect after his attempt to start another life in the United States had failed. That makes as much sense as Angleton’s presumed but—as Morley concedes—unproven mole-hunt machinations.
Morley persists in grossly overstating Angleton’s involvement with the Kennedy administration’s Cuba policy. Angleton appears in very few of the tens of thousands of documents about US-Cuban affairs in the early 1960s that have been declassified over the years. He had little to do with the activities of William Harvey’s Task Force W and Desmond Fitzgerald’s Special Affairs Staff, which ran the CIA’s anti-Castro operations under Pentagon and White House supervision.
Morley obstinately refuses to accept the facts I presented on why the CI Staff wrote and distributed its memo about Cuban intelligence for the US Intelligence Board. Of course it was intended to “inform and support US policy” toward Cuba; that is why the National Security Council directive mandated its preparation. But Morley still does not demonstrate its relevance to any decisions the Kennedy Administration made about removing Castro.
To argue that NORTHWOODS must have been implemented because the Joint Chiefs of Staff approved it is specious; civilian control of the military aside, JFK would never have given the military such license, considering his and especially his brother’s fixation on controlling anti-Castro operations after MONGOOSE’s failure and their distrust of the JCS after the Cuban missile crisis. And again I ask—can Morley produce a scintilla of evidence that any of the outrageously provocative actions proposed in NORTHWOODS were ever carried out? His attempt to link it with a post-assassination propaganda activity of a CIA-backed Cuban group by saying the latter “resembled the template of the NORTHWOODS schemes” is tortured to say the least.
I stand by my previous points on most of what Morley terms “less important matters,” which include some he earlier tried to deflect as “alleged” errors. (He mentions fewer of them this time, so presumably he admits making the others.) Several are worth dealing with again, however.
The book’s organization. Being “zealous about recounting the events in Angleton’s life story in the order that they occurred” is not a virtue for the biographer if it means flitting from topic to topic in a series of disjointed serial accounts instead of crafting a cohesive and analytical narrative that illuminates the subject’s character—especially necessary for one as complicated as Angleton’s. Journalism written in the past tense is not history, and I still contend that The Ghost reads like a lengthy clipping file.
Use of sources. Prominent and respected people often say uninformed things, and journalists and historians have a responsibility to verify or parse them instead of using them indiscriminately for literary effect. The reputations of Thomas Hughes and Thomas Moorer cannot alone substantiate their unfounded statements.
The Liberty cable. Morley might want to “believe” that Angleton had “decisive input” into it, but CIA assessments at that time were not prepared in coordination with operational offices in order to protect analysts’ independence.
The Italian election operation. Angleton left Italy in November 1947 and was not sent back there before or during the April 1948 elections mainly because of health issues, as family correspondence quoted in Michael Holzman’s book on Angleton (pp. 91-92) shows. Whatever contact Angleton had with events in Italy would have been second-hand through his colleague Raymond Rocca or his father, both of whom were in the country in early 1948. The most recent (2014) study of the election operation, The United States, Italy and the Cold War: Waging Political Warfare, 1945-1950 by Kaeten Mistry, concludes that Angleton’s role is “exaggerated and difficult to verify” (p. 136). Morley’s main source, Robin Winks, states that “some commentators would declare that the election was bought by the Americans and would credit, or discredit, this largely to Angleton. Certainly this is a gross exaggeration” (p. 385).
MHCHAOS. Morley’s dismissal of Frank Rafalko, who participated in the operation and makes important clarifications about its purpose, scope, and use of collected information, as “not the most disinterested source” exemplifies his previously-noted tendency to ignore inconvenient or contrary evidence instead of dealing with it directly.
Finally, Morley deceptively implies that I agree with everything else in The Ghost that I have not explicitly taken issue with. That is not the case; I could have raised a number of other questionable points and mentioned other errors (the Liberty was not a frigate, and the CIA auditorium is not on the first floor of the headquarters building, to name just two) but chose to concentrate on the most egregious ones.
James Angleton worked for the Central Intelligence Agency for thirty years, twenty of those in the same position.
Married, with three children, he lived in a rather ordinary house in suburban Arlington, Virginia, for nearly all that time. Unless traveling on business or on vacation, he drove to his office each morning, worked at his desk or attended meetings (including lunch meetings) and returned home, often rather late at night.
His non-work-related activities included fishing, breeding flowers, making jewelry from semi-precious stones, socializing and reading. It was a life not unlike those of hundreds of other governmental employees in Washington during the years after World War II.
But unlike most, perhaps any, of his peers three or four layers down in the vast federal bureaucracy, there have now been at least four full biographies written about James Angleton, as well as a large number of chapters in books, many magazine articles, and not a few fictionalized portrayals in novels, movies and television series. The Ghost: The Secret Life of CIA Spymaster James Jesus Angleton, by journalist Jefferson Morley, is the most recent biography.
The Central Intelligence Agency is an instrument of government, or, more precisely, an instrument of the president. Its activities are ultimately those that the president has ordered it to undertake or those its staff believe necessary in order to achieve the goals the president has set out for it. Part of the CIA steals secrets and another mixes those with publicly-available information and analyzes the result for use in policy formation. A third section engages in activities ranging from quasi-military operations to assassinations. Supporting these three main divisions, the agency has groups ranging from tinkerers with bits of electronics to public relations, publications, security, and counterintelligence.
The purpose of the counterintelligence staff is to ensure that the agency’s own secrets are not discovered by similar, foreign, organizations. And, of course, there are “other duties as assigned.” Angleton was chief of the counterintelligence staff, reporting through two or three layers of the bureaucracy to the director of Central Intelligence. It seems that there were no complaints about Angleton as a supervisor from any of the two hundred members of his staff. Perhaps more importantly, as far as is known, there were no cases of foreign governmental organizations “penetrating,” as it is said, the CIA while he was chief of the counterintelligence staff. There were quite a few after he left the Agency.
Morley’s main interest in The Ghost, following on his book about Winston Scott, the CIA’s station chief in Mexico City at the time of the assassination of President Kennedy, is that traumatic event. Morley wants us to know what Angleton knew about Lee Harvey Oswald before November 22, 1963, what he did with that knowledge, and how he performed his assigned additional duties as CIA liaison to the Warren Commission. He makes the case that Angleton knew as much about Oswald as anyone in the CIA and that he told the Warren Commission for the public record as little as possible of that. Oswald was a defector, who re-defected. He was a Communist sympathizer during the waning years of the second Red Scare. He had made connections with the Cuban embassy in Mexico City and was a very public member of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. As a US citizen who had lived in the Soviet Union, tracking his activities came within the remit of the CIA in partnership with the FBI. Oswald was likely a candidate, however minor, for the latter organization’s list of 10,000 Americans to be placed in concentration camps whenever J. Edgar Hoover could persuade the president to declare a national emergency.
As for Angleton’s role with the Warren Commission, he was a delegate, not an independent agent. He was carrying out an assignment given him by the director of Central Intelligence, an assignment given the director, presumably, by the president.
Morley has subsidiary interests in the usual list of Angleton’s more dramatic activities: the opening of international mail, the spying on and disruption of the anti-war movement, the assistance to the Israeli nuclear program. There were other activities, of less interest to Morley, such as Angleton’s pre-CIA involvement with Axis “rat-lines” conveying war criminals to quiet retirement in Argentina and Brazil and his later creation of the “Five Eyes” international network of secret intelligence services. All these, as well, were undertaken with the knowledge and largely at the bidding of his supervisors, with the probable exception of his role in the development of the Israeli atomic bomb, which Morley underestimates. It was activities like these that William Colby used to force Angleton’s retirement.
And then there is, as always with books about Angleton, the "mole hunt," David Wise’s phrase that clings to Angleton like a Homeric epithet. A “mole,” the term drifting into intelligence studies from popular fiction, is a spy who has gained access to, preferably employment in, a foreign intelligence service. The exemplar was H. A. R. “Kim” Philby, Jr., a Soviet agent who rose high in the British secret intelligence service, which seems to have been a particularly comfortable environment for such people.
If Angleton had a position description in CIA, as he most probably had, the first item on it was to prevent agents of foreign intelligence services from gaining employment or other access to the agency. His efforts along this line made him unpopular with those CIA officials who, because of the importance of their positions and the harm they might have done if they were foreign agents, attracted the attentions of the counterintelligence staff.
Angleton took the view that even if guilt could not be proven, the possibility of guilt was sufficient for the agency to exercise caution, leading from careful reviews to transfers from more to less delicate positions to forced retirement. Those closely watched, transferred, or retired early naturally resented this and eventually much of the agency was split between those who thought Angleton was overly zealous and those who thought he was professionally thorough. Each group enlisted allies, including journalists. Angleton’s career was reduced by many of the latter to the years and activities of “the great mole hunt.”
Was the mole hunt that important? A few years earlier the Red (Communist) and Lavender (homosexual) scares resulted in the firings of hundreds of American foreign service career officers, crippling the State Department for decades. Similar actions had similar results in American university science, humanities, and social science departments. Half a dozen damaged careers in the CIA are small beer by comparison and unlike those purged in other institutions, it was not a matter of public disgrace. They did not have to resort to selling stationery or encyclopedias for a living. One might say that all this fuss about the mole hunt is making a mountain of . . . something relatively unimportant in the great scheme of things.
Morley shares the tendency of other writers about Angleton for psychologizing comments about his subject. Angleton was “paranoid” or “haunted by his betrayal by Philby” and so forth. James Forrestal, the first secretary of Defense, was paranoid. We know this because he jumped out of a window in a mental hospital. Frank Wisner was mentally ill. We know this because he was diagnosed as a manic depressive and committed to a mental hospital. Apparently the government of the day was not reluctant to provide psychiatric services as needed by high officials. The only hospitalization provided to Angleton was for his recurrent tuberculosis. As for Philby, it is not unusual for a person who’s trust has been betrayed by a friend to feel badly about that, to take it as a lesson to be more careful in the future. There were others, much more seriously affected by Philby’s activities, such as Philby’s colleagues in MI6, who are not constantly described as “haunted” by the affair.
Jefferson Morley writes vividly and except for a penchant for tagging sensational, italicized labels on Angleton (Machiavelli! Svengali! Iago! Golem! Ghoul!) this well-researched book identifies many hitherto little known aspects of Angleton’s career. It is regrettable, however, that he follows many of his predecessors in failing to contextualize that career. Morley judges Angleton and finds him ethically flawed, excessively suspicious, and secretive. All probably true, as with many employees of the Central Intelligence Agency and its foreign equivalents. And yet . . .
Frances Stonor Saunders concluded her study of the Congress for Cultural Freedom by pointing out that “the same people who read Dante and went to Yale and were educated in civic virtue recruited Nazis, manipulated the outcome of democratic elections, gave LSD to unwitting subjects, opened the mail of thousands of American citizens, overthrew governments, supported dictatorships, plotted assassinations, and engineered the Bay of Pigs disaster . . . In the name of what? . . . Not civic virtue, but empire.”
So it was with James Jesus Angleton. His justification for the actions Morley condemns was the cause of the American empire. If that cause seems now unjustified, the prosecution must look beyond the chief of the counterintelligence staff of the Central Intelligence Agency for the chief culprits.
Michael Holzman
Posted by: Michael Holzman | 08 January 2018 at 09:19 AM