The Ghost Read online

  The Zionist Jews were a different story. Angleton did not think they were greedy or amoral—far from it, in fact. The best of them were abstemious and principled, and they were nobody’s victim. With enemies on every border, they were not tempted by compromise. The Israelis, he came to believe, were a model for the United States and the West. The anti-Semitic schoolboy had grown up to be an intuitive Zionist.

  * * *

  ANOTHER SOURCE OF ANGLETON’S power was his friend Jay Lovestone, the former Communist leader turned anti-Communist operative. As executive director of the Free Trade Union Confederation, Lovestone had a secret budget from the CIA and a global network of contacts. Before long, Angleton and Lovestone effectively controlled what American labor unions had to say about U.S. foreign policy.

  “With their respective influence in the labor movement and the intelligence community,” wrote Lovestone’s biographer, “they formed a hidden power center bent on advancing a hard anti-Soviet line. [They were] particularly effective from 1953 to 1959, when John Foster Dulles was secretary of state.”30

  Angleton and Lovestone meshed personally given their unsentimental appreciation of power and dedication to the task at hand. Lovestone, an unmarried man, was romantically involved with fellow agent Louise Page Morris, but he had no family to speak of in New York City, where he lived. Three days a week, he traveled to Washington, and soon he was practically living at the Angletons’ house in Arlington. He became close to Cicely, who understood her husband’s devotion to him.

  “He thought that Jay had struggled all his life to make his ideas prevail,” Cicely said. “Many were the times when Jay came to dinner and he and Jim sat up talking into the night.”31

  Angleton’s realm was growing when his Israeli friend Amos Manor delivered a timely package in April 1956. Then his power became unparalleled.

  * * *

  IT STARTED ONE FINE spring morning in Warsaw, Poland. Wiktor Grajewski, a journalist, went to see his girlfriend for their usual morning coffee. Grajewski, an editor at the Polish news agency, stopped at the offices of the Central Committee of the Polish Communist Party to see Lucia Baranowska. She, Jewish like Grajewski, was separated from her husband, a top party official, and knew what was happening around the office.32

  He noticed (or she called his attention to) a red-covered booklet on her desk. It was emblazoned, in Russian, with the words “Top Secret” and “Comrade Khrushchev’s Report to the 20th Congress of the CPSU.” Grajewski knew the Soviet premier had recently given a speech hinting at criticism of Joseph Stalin, who had died in 1953.

  “We heard that the United States had offered a prize of $1 million to anyone who could obtain the speech,” he later recalled.33

  Baranowska agreed to lend Grajewski the booklet. Grajewski put it in his pocket and went back to his apartment.

  “On the Cult of the Individual and Its Consequences” was the title, and Grajewski read it with mounting amazement. After the wartime propaganda about “Uncle Joe,” both in Russia and the West, its candor was shocking.

  Stalin had betrayed the legacy of Vladimir Lenin, Khrushchev declared:

  Terror was actually directed not at the remnants of the defeated exploiting classes but against the honest workers of the party; against them were made lying, slanderous and absurd accusations. Mass repressions contributed to the spreading of unhealthy suspicion, and sowed distrust among communists.34

  It was incredible. The most reactionary sheets of the capitalist press might say such things about Stalin, but not the first secretary of the Communist Party.

  Grajewski took the text to the Israeli embassy in Warsaw and gave it to the first secretary, Yaakov Barmor, who sent photographs of the document to Amos Manor in Tel Aviv. With permission from Prime Minister Ben-Gurion,35 Manor passed the speech to the Israeli embassy in Washington with a note that it be delivered personally to Angleton.36

  “Jim was in seventh heaven,” Manor said. “He asked my permission to publish the material.”

  Manor consulted with Ben-Gurion, who agreed.37

  On April 17, Angleton gave the speech to Dulles.38 Two versions of the speech were released: one by John Foster Dulles at the State Department, who gave the text to The New York Times; the other version, edited by Angleton, consisted of the Times text with the addition of thirty-four paragraphs. Angleton inserted compromising remarks about the Chinese and the Indians that Khrushchev was known to have uttered at different times under different circumstances.39 Angleton thus embellished propaganda with truths that would reach tens of millions of readers in India and China.

  President Eisenhower was pleased; Dulles, delighted. Obtaining Khrushchev’s secret speech was “one of the major intelligence coups of my tour of duty in intelligence,” Dulles wrote in his memoirs.40 Ray Cline, chief of the Directorate of Intelligence, went further. He called it “one of the CIA’s greatest coups of all time.”41

  * * *

  OTHERS MISTRUSTED ANGLETON’S LIAISON with the Israelis. A few months later, in October 1956, the State Department learned that Israel was calling up its armed forces, including reserves, for unknown purposes. Robert Amory, an analyst in the Directorate of Intelligence, went to Dulles and called for an emergency meeting of the joint committee of all U.S. intelligence agencies. If war was going to break out in the Middle East, Amory wanted to make sure the president was informed.

  In the meeting, Angleton and Amory both spoke. Amory predicted the Israelis would strike Egypt. Angleton countered by assuring those in the room that his Israeli friends were simply bolstering their border defenses with Jordan. Amory scoffed at the idea and called Angleton a “co-opted” Israeli agent to his face.42

  Amory was right, at least about Israeli intentions. Within days, the Israeli Defense Forces had invaded Egypt’s Sinai Desert, where they joined French and British forces who claimed to be protecting the Suez Canal from nationalization. They planned to decapitate the Egyptian government of Gamel Abdel Nasser and install a more cooperative regime.

  Eisenhower was furious. He had not been consulted and he had no intention of compromising U.S. prestige to back up such a colonialist adventure. In the face of Washington’s opposition, the Anglo-French-Israeli gambit was unsupportable. The Israelis had to surrender at the bargaining table what they had won on the ground. Angleton’s confidence in his Israeli sources was unshaken.

  FISHERMAN

  THE ANGLETON HOME ON 33rd Road in north Arlington was unpretentious and comfortable. Jim and Cicely and the kids lived amid the clutter of his hobbies and her eclectic interior decorating, informed by her childhood in the deserts of Arizona. When Angleton was not at the office, he was clattering around in his workshop in the basement, where he perfected silver tiepins and cuff links as gifts for friends. On weekends, he spent long hours in the greenhouse working on his orchids.

  Angleton’s family was far away. His parents still lived in Rome, where his father still ran his business. His sister Carmen pursued the intellectual and literary interests Jim might have pursued if he had not joined the CIA. She became close friends with the novelist Mary McCarthy. His younger sister, Delores, married Luciano Guarnieri, a painter. Brother Hugh, a diminutive, elegant man, had divorced his wife and returned to Boise, where he opened a gift emporium called Angleton’s. Impeccably dressed in suit and tie, Hugh Junior served as a kind of showroom director for an establishment overflowing with rare china, jewelry, and art objects.43

  Among Angleton’s closest friends was his new colleague Cord Meyer, who lived in McLean, Virginia. On the weekends the Angleton children, Jamie, Helen, and Lucy, played with the Meyers’ boys, Michael, Mark, and Quentin, while the adults smoked and drank.

  Cord Meyer had also gone to Yale, graduating after Angleton. After World War II, Meyer made his name as an eloquent student advocate of world government along the lines of the United Nations. When the Cold War extinguished that dream, he moved to the CIA to pursue a different vision of world government. In 1954, Allen Dulles persuaded hi
m to take over the Agency’s International Organizations division. In consultation with Angleton, Meyer orchestrated the Agency’s covert funding of labor unions, newspapers, magazines, TV stations, and Hollywood movies. With the help of poets, painters, and editors, these two intellectuals disseminated the CIA’s preferred narratives around the world.

  Both Cord and his wife, Mary, came from families with money. The Meyers lived comfortably in a farmhouse deep in the woods. The next driveway down the road led to Hickory Hill, the estate where Robert and Ethel Kennedy and their growing brood lived. Bob was a staff attorney on Capitol Hill, and his brother John was the junior senator from Massachusetts. The neighborhood was full of paths and tree houses, gardens and hideaways.

  “The Meyers’ house in McLean, it was beautiful,” said Peter Janney, another CIA kid who played with the Angleton and Meyer children. “It was literally next door to Hickory Hill and just a lot of woods back there, and space. A great place to be a kid growing up.”44

  Janney remembered the fathers in this crowd, all of them highly accomplished men. His father, Wistar Janney, had gone to Princeton and won a Navy Cross as a fighter pilot before joining the CIA. Cord Meyer, who had lost an eye in combat, was not shy about his certainties. Angleton was perhaps the most intimidating of all of them. In Janney’s young eyes, he resembled no one so much as Ichabod Crane in “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”

  “He was always obsessed with whatever he and Cord were talking about or laughing about,” Janney recalled in an interview. “You would never see Jim and Cord without both of them smoking and both of them having a drink in their hand.… Those two things were extensions of their bodies.”

  Janney was friends with the Meyer boys.

  “As I got older,” he said, “Michael and I would sometimes browbeat Cord to take us fishing down along the Potomac. A couple of times Jim came along. Jim, of course, was a master angler.… We would be casting these snag hooks out into the river to see if we could snag herring.… When Michael and I were doing it, we were constantly being criticized by Cord and Jim. We could never do it right, no matter what we did.”

  In this forest of towering masculine personalities, Peter found respite in the attentions of Mary Meyer, Michael’s mother. Unlike Cord and Jim, Mary Meyer actually paid attention to Peter. She didn’t live in another world like the dads, or even his own mom.

  “You really felt she was there,” Janney said. “She was listening to what you were saying. She responded to what you were saying.… You knew you were dealing with someone substantial who wasn’t just blowing you off because you were a child.”

  Mary Meyer was a different kind of presence, a female one, and the boy sensed it. She had been born Mary Pinchot, the daughter of Amos and Ruth Pinchot, an established and progressive couple in Pennsylvania. Amos Pinchot spent his family fortune on conservation of nature. He and his wife raised their two daughters, Mary and Tony, without regard for conventional expectations of women.

  Mary was an aspiring painter, and she made everyone around her feel good. Peter sensed she was especially close to Cicely Angleton, whom she took care of.

  “I always had the impression that Cicely Angleton was somehow underwater,” Janney said. “By that, I mean she was not terribly happy with her family and her family life.”

  Cicely was not socially ambitious. She avoided the Washington social circuit in favor of the company of a few good friends, such as Mary; Mary’s sister, Tony Meyer Bradlee; and their friend Anne Truitt, all classmates from Vassar. Tony, the younger of the two Meyer sisters, had divorced and was now married to Ben Bradlee, a well-bred wise guy from Boston who had just joined Newsweek’s Washington bureau. Anne was married to James Truitt, a hard-drinking Newsweek correspondent who collected Asian art.

  The Angletons, Meyers, Truitts, and Bradlees grew close, bound by interests in work, culture, and art.45 Angleton was an entertaining friend, a man with “a very fascinating, romantic, Bohemian side,” said one friend of Mary Meyer’s. He sometimes played the piano after dinner.46

  Cicely didn’t always feel as smart as these accomplished people. In fact, she often felt exhausted, “worn to the bone,” as she put it.47 During the school year, she ran the car pool. In the summer, she arranged vacations in Arizona and northern Wisconsin, where the family had a home on the Brule River. In the summer, they visited with families she had known since childhood and Jim taught the kids how to cast a line and tie a fly. Those were the times Cicely liked the best.

  * * *

  CAROLINE MARSHALL SAW A different Jim Angleton than Peter Janney.48 Her family had a house on the Brule River, where, as a little girl, she met Angleton for the first time. On lazy summer days, he taught her about the ways of the great brown trout, and she was fascinated. She felt welcomed by his attention and stimulated by his generous intelligence.

  “Browns are vicious, atavistic creatures,” Angleton said, gently letting the girl know about the gross realities of nature. “They eat mice and frogs, baby chipmunks, their own kind.”

  “They’re shy,” he said of the great browns. “One feeding during the day, and the mere suggestion of a shadow passes—gone.”

  Angleton spoke with awe of these creatures. The sensitive little girl also heard his cunning.

  “The patient game of waiting, silent, for the trusting quarry to expose itself, that is the game of fishing Jim Angleton played in the summer,” Marshall later recalled. “How it might be said to resemble his other life with the CIA.”

  For Marshall, one memory of Angleton endured.

  “I saw him one night when I was a child—coming suddenly wet, slippery, and silent as a huge brown, [coming] in from the dark, trailing rain, his fedora pinched and dripping, pulled low over his eyes, a fisherman wholly unlike others.”

  COINTELPRO

  AT THE OFFICE, ANGLETON was voracious for information. As he built the Counterintelligence Staff, he ordered Steve Millet’s Special Projects office to take over a sensitive program known by the code name LINGUAL. It would prove to be one of Angleton’s greatest sources of power and perhaps his most flagrant violation of the law.

  Surveillance of the U.S. mail was first proposed by officials in the CIA’s Soviet Russia Division and the Office of Security in February 1952. They wanted to scan the exteriors of a handful of selected U.S. letters mailed to the Soviet Union and to record the names and addresses of the correspondents. The goal was to provide “live ammunition for psychological warfare,” to identify possible agents with contacts in the Soviet Union, and to produce documentary material and intelligence. The letters themselves were not opened. The program was approved in 1953.49

  In 1955, Angleton asked to take over this limited mail-surveillance program. In a memo to Dick Helms, he requested that the Counterintelligence Staff “gain access to all mail traffic to and from the U.S.S.R.” He recommended the “raw information acquired be recorded, indexed, analyzed and various components of the Agency furnished items of information which would appear to be helpful to their missions.” Most important, he proposed that the letters be opened and copied, something that had never been done before.50 The expanded version of the mail-surveillance operation was approved in December 1955.

  Angleton rented a room at New York’s LaGuardia Airport to house the necessary staff and equipment. They proceeded to process two to six bags of mail every day. Selected letters were opened with the old-fashioned “kettle and stick” method. The glue on the envelope was softened by the steam from a teakettle and the letter was pried open with a stick.51 The most skillful of the “flaps and seals” artists, as they were known, could open a letter in five to fifteen seconds.52

  Under Angleton’s direction LINGUAL burgeoned. In 1956, 832 letters were opened. In 1958, more than 8,000 letters were opened.53 Angleton surely read many of them.

  * * *

  J. EDGAR HOOVER HAD MUCH the same idea about postal surveillance. In 1958, he sought authority from the postmaster general to open the mail of Communists and o
ther people he regarded as a threat to the American way of life. When Angleton heard of the plan, he took Sam Papich aside and informed him, “on a personal basis,” that the CIA was already conducting an extensive mail-opening operation.54 Papich worried that “all hell was going to break loose” because the CIA was operating on U.S. soil, a violation of its charter and, worse, intruding on Hoover’s domestic turf.

  Angleton’s response was deft. On February 6, 1958, he wrote to Hoover and offered to respond to FBI requests for mail opening. They would call it “Project HUNTER.”55 Hoover welcomed the gifts of “Bureau Source 100.”

  “Ours was shotgun treatment,” Angleton later explained. “Theirs was rifle treatment.… We were covering a vast amount of mail. The Bureau’s treatment was more or less pinpointed on matters that came as a result of a breakthrough or identification of some active case.”56

  Angleton was well aware that opening U.S. mail violated federal law.

  “Existing federal statutes preclude the concoction of any legal excuse for the violation,” wrote his deputy Jim Hunt in 1961 when the Office of Security expressed concern about the “flap potential” of the LINGUAL operation.

  “No cover story is available to any government agency,” Hunt warned.57

  Hoover knew what he wanted to do with the HUNTER intelligence take. In 1956, he had revived the Bureau’s Counterintelligence Program, known as COINTELPRO, originally created to counter pro-German subversives during World War II.58 Hoover’s first target was the American Communist Party, a shrinking organization discredited by Khrushchev’s secret speech and American prosperity. With the bounty of personal information from LINGUAL/HUNTER, Hoover was able to expand the list of COINTELPRO targets in the years to come to include such enemies of the people as civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Nation of Islam, the Black Panthers, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, as well as the Socialist Workers Party and Women’s Strike for Peace.