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.
