The Ghost Read online

  As in postwar America, prosperity had bred complacency in Hadleyville.

  “But when Marshal Kane broke in upon the services at the church to ask for help, his plea fell on deaf ears,” Angleton wrote. “The banker, the merchant, the lawyer, the town clerk, all drew back. Frank Miller, they argued, was the Marshal’s responsibility—he was paid to handle it. So Kane, mindful of his duty, put aside everything he held dear—his bride, the honeymoon in which they were about to leave. He went out into the street alone and did the job.”243

  Angleton thought it was high noon in the Cold War. Like Marshal Kane, he believed the men of the CIA confronted an implacable evil foe. Like the marshal, he had to act alone because ordinary people would shy from the task. He was ready to sacrifice the comforts of family and safety so that others could enjoy their American freedoms.

  He had a proposal for Mr. Dulles.

  PART II

  POWER

  COUNTERINTELLIGENCE

  HOW DID JAMES ANGLETON elevate himself from staff functionary at a new government agency to untouchable mandarin who would have an all but transcendent influence on U.S. intelligence operations for the next two decades?

  With voracious intellect and compelling charm, said one Washingtonian who knew him late in life. He embodied the will to defeat communism. “Who presumed to rebut, watching [his] knitted, knotted, weaving, bobbing, stalking lexicon of body language of the Cold War,” wrote journalist Burton Hersh. “… Who undertook to challenge that?”1 Not many.

  No one was more captivated by Angleton than his friend and mentor Allen Dulles, now director of Central Intelligence. Like Angleton, Dulles preferred collaborating with fascists to enabling Communists. Like Angleton he had little patience for liberals who embraced slogans like “land reform,” “nonalignment,” and “peaceful coexistence,” which he regarded as so much camouflage for the confiscation of wealth. Like Angleton, Dulles was a man of action.

  He wasted no time in redirecting the CIA. Whereas Beetle Smith had vetoed the idea of launching a covert operation against the government of Iran, Dulles approved. Iran’s offense was pressing the British-controlled Anglo-Iranian Oil Company for more equitable royalty arrangements. Without much evidence, Dulles concluded this was a Soviet power play. In August 1953, the nationalist prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh, was overthrown by a joint CIA-SIS psychological warfare operation that relied on propaganda, diplomatic isolation, and paramilitary action. Iran’s parliamentary democracy was crushed by a dictatorial monarchy that lasted until 1979.

  In Guatemala, Beetle Smith had sided with the State Department in rejecting proposals for covert action against the country’s reformist president, Jacobo Arbenz, who was seeking to nationalize the unused property of the United Fruit Company. Dulles, who had done legal work for United Fruit, saw Arbenz as the first Communist interloper in the western hemisphere. In June 1954, a CIA psychological warfare operation drove Arbenz from power and replaced him with a more compliant military junta, which dismantled the country’s democratic system and exiled Arbenz.

  These operations impressed President Eisenhower, who marveled at their low-cost benefits to U.S. foreign policy. They also boosted morale in the Directorate of Plans in the CIA offices on the Mall. But they did not much affect the Agency’s main enemy, the Soviet intelligence service, the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti (Committee for State Security), or KGB, which seemed to be operating as freely as ever in the United States. According to the National Security Agency’s VENONA program, which deciphered Soviet communications, the KGB had cultivated an extensive network of informants in American institutions.

  That was Angleton’s opening. He was not an activist administrator like operations chief Frank Wisner or an efficient taskmaster like Dick Helms, Wisner’s number two. Angleton was not a covert operator in the mode of Bill Harvey, who was digging a tunnel into Soviet-occupied Berlin, or Win Scott, who would take over the Mexico City station.

  Angleton’s specialty was more refined: intelligence collection, the running of agents, and the development of a counterintelligence archive to understand the techniques of the enemy. He spent much of 1954 talking to Dulles about how to ensure the confidentiality and security of CIA operations. Angleton thought there was much room for improvement. He admired Wisner as much as anyone for his tireless idealism and his willingness to try anything, but his approach was not working.

  Angleton’s oft-voiced skepticism had been vindicated in late 1952 when Wisner’s biggest operation in Eastern Europe fell apart.2 The CIA had pumped five million dollars’ worth of guns, gold, and communications gear into Poland in support of an anti-Communist army called the Freedom and Independence Movement, known by its Polish acronym, WiN. The Agency had been helping the group’s exiled leaders for years. Now with a force of five hundred soldiers and twenty thousand supporters inside the country, the CIA men felt they were ready to challenge Soviet domination of Poland.

  In fact, they were fools. The Soviet and Polish intelligence services had been baiting the trap for years. When WiN dropped its agents into the country, the Communists detained them and forced them to send back false progress reports, along with requests for more money and men. Wisner’s men had obliged all too willingly. In December 1952, the Poles went public with their ruse, revealing there was no anti-Communist opposition. To needle the United States, the Poles announced they were sending the CIA’s funds to support the Communist Party in Italy.

  In July 1954, President Eisenhower appointed a committee, headed by U.S. Army general James Doolittle, to conduct an independent review of CIA operations.3 As chief of Foreign Intelligence, Angleton was asked to brief the committee. Behind closed doors, Angleton said the Agency’s current setup had led to confusion, duplication, and waste of manpower and money. The Agency, he argued, needed a staff dedicated to counterintelligence, a staff that was knowledgeable about the KGB and its methods. Such a staff could oversee covert operations at a management level to make sure the Soviets had not penetrated the U.S. government or the CIA. Counterintelligence, he said, was both a body of knowledge and a way of seeing the world.4 The Agency needed both.

  Dulles was persuaded, and Angleton had found his mission.

  “[Angleton] brooded longest, and perhaps with the greatest penetration, over the specialized methodology of counterintelligence,” said his friend Robin Winks, a Yale historian. “… [He] was ends-oriented and could remember his own lies, surely a necessary brace of qualities for a successful spy.”5

  * * *

  COUNTERINTELLIGENCE WAS A CHALLENGE very much like the literary criticism Angleton had learned at Yale. To interpret the enemy’s communications and its documents required teasing meaning from texts that were filled with the kind of ambiguities his friend the critic William Empson delineated in poetry. Angleton’s counterintelligence was radical in the sense that it went to the root of the CIA’s functions. As one Agency chronicler put it, “Counterintelligence is to intelligence as epistemology is to philosophy. Both go back to the fundamental question of how we know things. Both challenge what we are inclined to take most for granted.”6

  Recalling a line from his favorite poem, “Gerontion,” Angleton described KGB deception operations as a “wilderness of mirrors” designed to disorient the West. Taken to its extreme—and Angleton would take it there—counterintelligence suggested that the more reliable a source appeared to be, the more likely he was to be a Soviet agent. It was poetry of sorts. The improbable but undeniable impact of Ivy League literary criticism on geopolitics was embodied in Angleton.7

  Angleton persuaded Dulles of a foundational principle: that counterintelligence, properly pursued, had to be proactive. He would have to see everything in the Agency’s archives, including the Office of Security’s personnel files. It was an unprecedented power that no one else in the Agency possessed. Angleton insisted, and Dulles approved.

  In December 1954, the orders were issued and Angleton became chief of the new Counterintelligence Staff
. He was now, in the words of one CIA watcher, “a ghost in the system, wired into the center of a Panopticon rendered in paperwork. He operated ahead of the conventional intel process, monitored all internal communications, and used a vast network extending far outside the official CIA to keep tabs on the entire intelligence establishment. From raw SIGINT [Signals Intelligence] to Special Operations, Angleton was an invisible supervisor.”8

  From this position, he built an empire, his own clandestine service housed within the CIA.

  * * *

  ANGLETON’S VISION WAS EXPANSIVE. No one was more important to his ambitions than FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. With the CIA barred by law from operating on U.S. soil, Angleton needed the FBI’s counterintelligence capabilities to keep track of Soviet spies in the United States.

  Hoover was not much interested. He ran his national police force and its thousands of field agents as an instrument of his personal and political will. He had no use for rival agencies. Hoover had welcomed the dissolution of the OSS in 1945 and resented its revival in the form of the CIA in 1947. Like Senator McCarthy, he regarded the Agency as a nest of liberals, atheists, homosexuals, professors, and otherwise feminized men who specialized in wasting the taxpayer dollar.

  Hoover responded to Angleton’s overture with disdain. He sent a junior agent to serve as a liaison with Angleton’s office. Angleton responded by loading the young man with drinks and reams of high-quality reporting.9 Hoover, who loved having dirt on his enemies, responded grudgingly. Angleton had only one requirement for his secrets: He did not want to be identified in FBI documents as the source of the information. Typically, the Bureau described information from the CIA as “Confidential Informant T-2, an agency of the U.S. government that conducts personnel and intelligence investigations.”

  Angleton refused the designation. The recipients of the documents, he noted, would inevitably surmise that the information came from the CIA. Angleton asked the Bureau to identify him only as “Bureau Source 100.”

  Hoover approved.10

  * * *

  ANGLETON MOVED INTO A suite of offices in the L Building on the Mall. He now had several secretaries working for him,11 along with a deputy, Herman Horton, who handled the daily issues of the office.12 The staff’s charter, written by Angleton and published in March 1955, established four offices in his new domain.

  Angleton needed a liaison officer to handle daily contacts with the FBI and the other federal agencies. He brought on Jane Atherton Roman, who had worked with him in OSO. She was as reliable as they came. A graduate of Smith College, she married, divorced, and joined the OSS in 1944, where her research assignments in the X-2 branch took her to London and Berlin and then back to Washington.13 In 1954, she had married a colleague, Howard Roman, an assistant to Dulles.14 She was, in the words of Bill Hood, “a superadministrative, high-level secretary and desk operative. She was very experienced. Her job was to monitor the FBI. And the information that we passed to the FBI would go through her.”15

  Angleton established an office for research. He wanted to compile a body of knowledge about Soviet intelligence operations, with files on history, techniques, and personnel. For this job, he recalled Ray Rocca from the Rome station and named him chief of Research and Analysis.

  He created an office, the Special Investigations Group, SIG, dedicated to looking for security breaches inside the Agency. The task of the SIG was to “perform the CI investigation and analysis of any known or potential security leak in the Clandestine Services organization, whether in headquarters or in the field.”16 Concerned that no office in the U.S. government kept track of Americans who defected to the Soviet Union, Angleton assigned the SIG to monitor defectors, as well. Angleton called on Birch O’Neal, a former FBI man who had most recently served as station chief in Guatemala, to serve as chief of the SIG.

  Finally, Angleton set up a Special Projects office to handle sensitive missions such as opening U.S. mail or doing deals with the Israelis.17 For these tasks, he relied on Stephen Millett, a fair-haired and tight-lipped CIA man from Bristol, Rhode Island, who was working with Jay Lovestone and Carmel Offie at the Free Trade Union Confederation.18

  Roman, O’Neal, Rocca, and Millett would work for Angleton for the rest of their careers. They carried out his orders and kept his secrets. They were loyal and discreet. They trusted his genius.

  * * *

  AS J. EDGAR HOOVER SENSED the advantages of working with Angleton, he sent a senior agent, Sam Papich, to serve as liaison with the Counterintelligence Staff. For the grouchy FBI director, this was an expression of respect, if not warmth. Papich, of course, was under strict orders to disclose as little as possible to the CIA while defending the Bureau’s prerogatives at every turn.

  In his first day on the new assignment, Papich was ushered into Angleton’s office, a large corner room where a row of windows looked out on the Lincoln Memorial—or would have if the venetian blinds had not been shut against the light.19

  Angleton lit a cigarette. He asked Papich about a recent case that he said the Bureau had mishandled. Papich took exception to Angleton’s tone. Angleton barked at him; Papich shouted right back, then got up and walked out. An unpretentious man from Montana, Papich wasn’t going to back down from this Ivy League bully.

  Papich returned the next day. The men managed to be cordial in their meetings. Papich disclosed his fondness for fly-fishing, and Angleton was glad to discourse on a favorite hobby. Angleton invited Papich to go fishing for brown trout in West Virginia one weekend. Papich marveled at how carefully Angleton surveyed the stream, stalked the riverbank for insects, and then crafted lures to imitate the species he found. Papich realized Angleton was a master fisherman. The two men became friends.20

  * * *

  FROM THIS MODEST BEGINNING, Angleton’s empire began to grow. He won authorization from Dulles to hire the necessary complement of secretaries, translators, typists, clerks, accountants, and the like. Within five years, the Counterintelligence Staff employed 171 people—96 professionals and 75 clerical workers.21

  With this apparatus, Angleton would move the world. He had evolved from precocious youth to Cold War mandarin, a functionary who impressed presidents and prime ministers. Once raw and ingenuous, he was now sleek and refined. His small sculpted head—with each hair combed back—exposed his Edwardian integrity. As Burton Hersh observed, “When Angleton spoke, his mocha eyes shone, and as his lips parted, without warning, a grin would irradiate his hollow face.” He was winning in every sense of the word.22

  ZIONIST

  THE LAND AND PEOPLE of Israel had captured Angleton’s imagination. The revelations of the Nazis’ extermination of the Jews during the war and his now regular visits to the newly created Jewish state had dissolved his inherited anti-Semitism. By the mid-1950s, Angleton liked nothing better than to leave the cramped office politics of Washington for the austere frontier of the Holy Land.

  On his visits, Angleton stayed in Ramat Gan, on the suburban coastal plain north of Tel Aviv, the home to many Israeli intelligence officers and diplomats. When he traveled up to the hills of Jerusalem, he favored the plush elegance of the King David Hotel. The King David had been Britain’s headquarters during its control of Palestine, which is why Zionist commandos planted a bomb there in 1947, killing scores of people and hastening the British departure.

  The hotel’s terrace offered Angleton a lovely view of the walls of the Old City, the ancient seat of both Christianity and Islam that the Zionists claimed as their modern capital. He saw the sandstone parapets adorned with barbed wire. He saw history in the making.

  The Mossad had a new chief. Israeli prime minister David Ben-Gurion had replaced the furtive Reuven Shiloah with Isser Harel, an outgoing man and intuitive spy who believed secret intelligence was key to the survival of a small nation surrounded by enemies. Born to wealthy parents in tsarist Russia, his original name was Isser Halperin. His family fled to Lithuania after their vinegar business was confiscated by Russian revoluti
onaries, prompting Harel’s lifelong aversion to Marxism.23

  “Jim had enormous admiration for Isser, as he always called him,” said Efraim Halevy, the Mossad veteran. “He often talked about Isser to me and to others as the epitome of Israel’s success in collection and foreign intelligence operations.”24

  Angleton also bonded with Amos Manor, who served under Harel as the chief of Shin Bet, Israel’s equivalent of the FBI.

  “In Jim’s eyes Isser was the ‘ultimate’ intelligence officer, just as Amos was the ultimate security chief foiling Soviet espionage and catching traitors and spies,” Halevy said.

  Angleton took to grilling Manor about his work.

  “It wasn’t easy to persuade the anti-communist Angleton that we could be friends,” Manor recalled. “Even I was suspected by him—that I was a Soviet spy.”25

  In Manor’s apartment in Tel Aviv, Angleton talked late into the night while sipping whiskey. “I didn’t understand how a person could drink so much without getting drunk,” Manor said.26 Angleton later admitted to Manor that he was examining him all the while to see if he might be a spy himself.27

  “Jim’s initial attitude toward us was very wary, but later he became a devoted admirer of Israel from an American standpoint,” said Memi de Shalit, an Israeli diplomat. Angleton “changed his attitude toward us when he began to get to know people here and gradually grew stronger in his conviction that there was no great danger of Israel turning communist.”28

  Manor persuaded Angleton that Israel, with its population of immigrants from the Soviet Union and its East European satellites, was not a breeding ground for spies. Rather, it was an indispensable source for everything that interested the U.S. government about the Communist world, from the cost of potatoes to plans for new aircraft and ships.29

  Angleton returned to Washington edified by these adepts and changed in his thinking about the Jewish people. It was true he had no qualms associating with, even helping, anti-Semites like Ezra Pound, Valerio Borghese, and Eugen Dollmann. It was true he did not care for Jewish businessmen—he found them grasping. He abhorred Jewish Communists for their amoral atheism.