3

James Angleton, The Tactician

PROBABLY THE CLOSEST confidant and subordinate of Richard Helms’s was the CIA’s eccentric, longtime chief of counterintelligence, James Jesus Angleton, a Yale graduate who was four years younger than Helms.

Angleton was born on December 9, 1917 in Boise, Idaho, the son of James Hugh Angleton of Illinois and Carmen Mercedes Moreno of Nogales, Mexico. The parents had met when the elder Angleton was serving with the US military south of the border.¹⁸¹ James Jesus was the oldest of four children, two boys and two girls.¹⁸² Their father, Hugh, a vice president at National Cash Register, moved the family to Dayton, Ohio, in 1927. The family relocated to Milan, Italy, when James was fifteen, after his father took over the company operations in that city.¹⁸³ James attended high school at Malvern in England and entered Yale in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1937.¹⁸⁴ While his future boss, Richard Helms, had found his academic niche in journalism, Angleton’s most avid interest in school was the world of poetry. He collaborated in founding a college poetry journal, Furioso, in which some of the leading poets of the day were published, including Ezra Pound and E. E. Cummings.¹⁸⁵

Angleton graduated from Yale in 1941 and went on to Harvard Law.¹⁸⁶ He left school when World War II started and was drafted into the army in March 1943.¹⁸⁷ With help from a college professor and his father Hugh, who had become an Army intelligence officer, Angleton eventually was assigned to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the CIA. He was first stationed at the Italian desk in London. It was here that the young Corporal learned the craft of counterintelligence, which is essentially keeping secrets safe, tracking down enemy spies, and neutralizing double agents.¹⁸⁸ By the end of the war, James had been promoted to First Lieutenant and was named chief of the Rome office, a position for which he had been cleared to read messages decoded from ULTRA, the famous German code that the Allies had cracked early on in the war.¹⁸⁹

Angleton’s grades in school had not been outstanding,¹⁹⁰ yet he was considered by his teachers to be highly intelligent and mature.¹⁹¹ His personality was seen as “quiet, (with) good manners.” According to one Yale classmate, he was “a mysterious person . . . with mysterious contacts,” (though it is uncertain what exactly this means).¹⁹² Another source described the young Angleton as an insomniac who would play poker all night while at Yale. One roommate said “he never thought he was wrong.”¹⁹³ It was during his college years that he reportedly became a fervent anti-Communist.¹⁹⁴ One other observed personality trait, one that would prove quite useful in his future endeavors, was the fact that he was seen as someone who had “infinite patience.”¹⁹⁵

Descriptions of Angleton’s personality while in school were similar to those exhibited in the army. One colleague in basic training considered Angleton a “genius” and very “secretive.”¹⁹⁶ A classmate in officer training described him as “extremely brilliant, but a little strange.”¹⁹⁷ Later on, when stationed in Italy, some colleagues called him “the poet” because of his choice of reading material. They also called him “the cadaver” due to his thin, pale look. Some characterized him as “weird” and said he “lived in another world.”¹⁹⁸ It was also said that he “dominated” and “intimidated” his subordinates.¹⁹⁹

It was Angleton’s unique ability to design unusual covert operations and to operate so secretly that established his place within the Agency and sustained his durable career. Israeli statesman, Teddy Kollek, once described Angleton this way: “Jim is by no means an ordinary person. He is an original thinker.”²⁰⁰ Angleton’s boss during most of his CIA years, Richard Helms, termed Angleton “a strange, strange man.”²⁰¹

As we shall see ahead, Angleton held a paranoid view of the world. At the same time, he displayed classic symptoms of someone supremely confident in his capabilities and in his ability to survive, and also dangerous to anyone who threatened his uber-right wing worldview.

At age twenty-five in July 1943, after four months in the Army, Angleton married a college sweetheart, Vassar student Cicely Harriet d’Autremont, who came from a wealthy family with homes in Duluth, Minnesota,²⁰² and Tucson, Arizona.²⁰³ Although she stayed married to James until his death, they separated three times “out of frustration,” said Cicely.²⁰⁴ She added her husband worked “very strange hours,” and “you could never ask him any questions about his work.” She said that when his work associates came to the house, the phones were unplugged and the curtains were drawn.²⁰⁵

The couple had three children, a son and two daughters. But, according to Cicely, “the kids saw little of their father.”²⁰⁶ Angleton was known among close colleagues for his drinking habits, which frequently consisted of double martini lunches and Bourbon after work.²⁰⁷ Clearly, alcohol influenced Angleton’s behavior and judgment. Cicely outlived her husband by twenty-four years; he died in May 1987, and she died at age eighty-nine on September 23, 2011 at home in Virginia.²⁰⁸

Angleton settled down with his young family in Arlington, Virginia, following World War II, an ideal location to live given his new job.²⁰⁹ After having returned home from Europe on December 20, 1947, he had joined the newly created CIA.²¹⁰ His records describe him as tall and very thin, at six feet eleven inches and 150 lb.²¹¹ He was gaunt, wore thick glasses,²¹² and chain-smoked.²¹³ He also appeared “stooped,” and his voice was extremely low.²¹⁴ One historian described him as “lean, unsmiling,” and noted that Angleton had gained a “fearsome reputation” at the CIA in a few short years due to his work countering the spies of the new enemy, the Soviet empire.²¹⁵

At this point in the postwar world, the Soviets were firming up their control of Eastern Europe and making inroads in intelligence in the West. Angleton’s office led the operations to neutralize communist actions in Turkey, Greece, France, and Italy.²¹⁶ Angleton specialized in “psychological operations” which, in Italy in particular, meant fixing elections by paying off candidates in order to stop a left-wing takeover.²¹⁷ Angleton was fluent in Italian and French and could speak some German,²¹⁸ but his strongest suit was his skill at gaining information through stealth, i.e., bugging.²¹⁹ This endeared him to Allen Dulles (CIA Director from 1953 to 1961) and Richard Helms (CIA Director from 1966 to 1973)²²⁰ and enabled his rapid climb to the top ranks of the CIA. He had developed friendships with both Dulles²²¹ and Helms²²² since his OSS days, and would report intelligence scoops to them directly—even information from Washington social parties²²³—ignoring the chain of command.²²⁴

In the eyes of the rest of the Agency, Angleton came to be seen as a remote and mysterious figure,²²⁵ a “loner” who knew the details of all of the important clandestine operations ongoing.²²⁶ He was labeled “a misguided genius” by one staffer,²²⁷ and an “arrogant” individual who treated others with “disdain,” according to one Defense Intelligence Agency officer.²²⁸

In 1949, Angleton was appointed head of the CIA Office of Special Operations,²²⁹ and in 1951, in addition to his regular duties, he was given a key post, the Israeli Desk.²³⁰ CIA Director Allen Dulles, who was appointed by President Dwight Eisenhower in 1953, named Angleton chief of counterintelligence in December 1954.²³¹ The importance of this position to the Agency should not be underestimated. As Angleton once stated, “If you control counterintelligence, you control the intelligence service.”²³²

Both Dulles and Helms exerted little control over Angleton, allowing him to operate with an “unaudited funding source,” which he used to build his secret empire.²³³ All three men were strong believers in covert operations.²³⁴ Helms was “gifted at guiding and controlling covert actions”²³⁵ and Angleton was gifted at inventing them.

It was Angleton’s ability to act without accountability and with the utmost secrecy that would be crucial to his carrying out the most significant operations of the 1960s, particularly his illegal domestic forays. During these years, according to many CIA staffers, Angleton “was seldom seen.”²³⁶ However, covert operations linked to his division provide some clues as to his whereabouts, as we shall see ahead.

Angleton’s reported suspicions of a wide range of national leaders and policymakers give us a glimpse into his paranoid worldview. The personalities Angleton suspected of being Soviet spies or “moles” included British Prime Minister Harold Wilson,²³⁷ Nixon’s secretary of state Henry Kissinger,²³⁸ and JFK aide and noted historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. (Schlesinger had voiced his opposition to the CIA’s Bay of Pigs operation plan that Kennedy had inherited from Eisenhower).²³⁹ Angleton also reportedly believed President Kennedy himself was “a KGB mole”²⁴⁰ because of JFK’s secret diplomatic efforts to initiate peaceful coexistence with Russia, North Vietnam, and Cuba.

In the early 1960s, Angleton became even more paranoid when his wartime friend, a British spy named Kim Philby, turned out to be a KGB agent.²⁴¹ CIA psychologist Dr. John Gittinger has stated that this news from the Soviet Union of his close colleague’s betrayal “shattered Angleton’s life in terms of his ability to be objective about other people.”²⁴²

A succession of CIA directors all knew Angleton as someone who consistently stuck to his “unbending Cold War views.”²⁴³ At one Washington party in the mid-1960s, Angleton and one of his subordinates reportedly shocked the Canadian counterintelligence chief Leslie James Bennett with their radical, right-wing ideology. During their conversation, they spoke of how they supported the infamous Sen. Joe McCarthy and his Communist witch hunt.²⁴⁴

Indeed, according to CIA psychologist Dr. Jerrold Post, from Angleton’s point of view, there existed “a careful Soviet master plan to take over the world.”²⁴⁵ Dr. Post also has reported that Angleton tended toward a paranoid personality, adding that it may have helped him perform his job. However, he asserts that this condition, when combined with his drinking, adversely affected his powers of critical judgment.²⁴⁶

At the same time, Angleton was known for his great attention to detail. His covert operations reflected this attribute. This characteristic also emerged in his hobbies, which included making jewelry, fashioning lures for fly fishing, and growing orchids.²⁴⁷ These pastimes neatly fit his need for a “cover” or a “legend.” Such “everyman” activities helped conceal from relatives, friends, and neighbors the true nature of his business, which, of course, involved planning and participating in covert operations many times around the clock.

While Angleton was extremely secretive regarding his actual work activities, he did share with his wife at least one example of his surreptitious side. According to Cicely, one night in mid-1963, he climbed a wall and broke into the French Embassy in Washington. Once inside, he and others located the French intelligence service’s code book and other documents and photographed them. The black-bag job was ostensibly carried out to uncover potential “moles” (KGB double agents) that may have penetrated this key US ally’s ranks.²⁴⁸ However, there is another equally important reason that Angleton was so desirous of decoding French intelligence communications. President Kennedy, using his own channels (avoiding the CIA), was secretly attempting to obtain President Charles de Gaulle’s help in mediating a peace agreement with North Vietnam, a plan strongly opposed by right wingers at the CIA.

Angleton’s “mole-hunting” became legendary within the Agency, but it now appears that the campaign to oust enemy double agents was itself a cover for other more nefarious activities, as we shall see. At the end of his career, in the mid-1970s, when Angleton was asked to publicly account for his activities, he clung to his story that he had been hunting KGB infiltrators. The Director of the CIA, William Colby, at that point investigated these claims. The result: “they found not one single shred of hard evidence” against mole-hunt suspects.²⁴⁹

Beside protecting Agency secrets from its enemies, as chief of counterintelligence, part of Angleton’s mission was to penetrate the Soviet Union. Throughout the late 1950s and early 1960s, Angleton and Helms worked closely in running operations against the Soviets. Prior to spy satellites and at the beginning of the high-altitude, U-2 spy-plane missions, obtaining human intelligence on the ground was indispensable. One of the major intelligence projects of this era was Angleton’s “fake defector program.”²⁵⁰

When we examine the brief career of Lee Harvey Oswald (ahead), we can see that he was clearly a player in this counterintelligence program. Oswald “defected” at the end of 1959 to the Soviet Union. At that time, one of the main CIA contacts at the American Embassy in Moscow—for both Russian spies who were working for the United States and for fake American defectors—was a US Air Force officer named Dr. Alexi Davison.²⁵¹ It is known that the doctor was not only a top American spy, but at the same time a friendly contact of Lee Harvey Oswald during his stay in the Soviet Union.²⁵²

Defectors slipping into the United States from the Soviet Union were also handled by Angleton. One of the highest ranked was KGB officer Anatoliy Golitsyn, who defected in December 1961.²⁵³ While much of his pronouncements proved to be unfounded, Angleton and Helms used Golitsyn’s warnings of the Soviet threat to justify much of their actions in Africa, Southeast Asia, and South America.

Angleton was “imbued with a war psychology . . . [l]egality was not questioned . . . it was not an issue,” the FBI’s William Sullivan once said of CIA counterintelligence chief James J. Angleton.²⁵⁴ One early example of Angleton’s disregard for the law of the land was evidenced by his infamous mail-opening program known as operation HT/Lingual, designed by Angleton and approved by Helms in 1955.²⁵⁵ The operation, which was carried out without the knowledge of the US Post Office, involved opening all mail incoming and outgoing between the Soviet Union and New York. Eventually, some fourteen thousand letters per year were being steamed open, the contents photographed, and the envelopes resealed. The film was developed by the CIA and the information obtained was analyzed at headquarters. Angleton reportedly commented that the effort was “worth the risk” and that if needed, he could always blame a fall guy,²⁵⁶ a consistent theme of his. By 1971, leaks and complaints from constitutional rights groups began to reach Post Office Inspector Bill Cotter.²⁵⁷ Finally, in 1973, CIA Director James Schlesinger (February–July 1973) and deputy William Colby ended the HT/Lingual mail openings,²⁵⁸over Angleton’s objections.²⁵⁹ By then, the list of illegalities in Angleton’s repertoire also included home and office break-ins, phone eavesdropping, and the use of informants,²⁶⁰ many of whom were embedded in various political groups, universities, and the media—all within US borders.

All of these covert techniques were needed for Angleton to accomplish his most sophisticated top secret program of all, MKULTRA, the use of hypnosis and drugs to create a fall guy. By 1960, units under Angleton had begun to accelerate “operational experiments” involving hypnosis. One agency memo emphasizing the importance of this research indicated that this program “could provide a potential breakthrough in clandestine technology.”²⁶¹

The breakthrough came with the achievement of the capability of ordering a subject—under the influence of drugs and posthypnotic suggestions—to perform an action and not recall it later. For example, a subject could be controlled to the point where he would pull out a weapon and fire without remembering later what had happened. However, since the subject’s aim and reliability was far too unpredictable, this technique could not be used by itself. It would also include the use of clear-headed, well-hidden, backup sharpshooters who would carry out the actual shooting. The hypnotized, clueless “patsy” would end up being the fall guy who would be apprehended and charged with the crime, thus allowing the true assassins to escape.

Angleton’s MK operational experiments consisted of three parts: “induce hypnosis rapidly on unwitting subjects; create durable amnesia; and implant hypnotic suggestions that were ‘operationally useful.’”²⁶²

All of this research involved numerous unwitting subjects—many from the military, college campuses, and prisons to drinking establishments and places where those on the “fringes” of society would meet. To carry out these experiments and covert operations in secret, Angleton pursued his agenda by employing the panoply of illegal resources listed above in addition to unwitting drugging. As noted earlier, from the mid-1950s through the mid-1970s, hundreds of soldiers were tested with drugs at Edgewood Arsenal Laboratories in Maryland. (Many of these veterans nationwide have at this writing filed law suits against the federal government seeking medical compensation for having been used as guinea pigs.)²⁶³

Back at Langley, Angleton kept his office staff busy by having his employees spend their time studying old Soviet spy cases, according to CIA general counsel Lawrence Houston.²⁶⁴ Angleton’s chief of operations, Newton Scotty Miler, who was responsible for running the shop while the boss was away, “kept the wheels turning.”²⁶⁵ Given Helms and Angleton’s finely tuned system of “compartmentalization” of information, the home office staff was no doubt totally unaware of some of the most significant and substantive covert operations (i.e., information known by the field operatives stayed with their handlers, and very little was put in writing.).

While Angleton and Helms were developing their MK plan, they were also in the process of implementing various other assassination techniques. A variety of methods would be used in their attempt to kill Cuban premier Fidel Castro in order to take over Cuba. (The CIA’s involvement in assassination plots did not come to light until President Gerald Ford mentioned it in a New York Times interview in the mid-1970s.²⁶⁶)

In 1961, when JFK arrived at the White House, the Cuban invasion plan was already set to go. President Kennedy approved it, based on unreliable CIA assurances, and allowed the Agency to sponsor (without direct US support) a force of anti-Castro Cubans in an amphibious landing attack scheduled for Cuba’s southern shore at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961. The operation was a total disaster. Kennedy took full responsibility and eventually fired CIA Director Allen Dulles and others for the tragic miscalculations of the doomed Cuban takeover bid. Kennedy replaced Dulles with John McCone, a Republican defense contractor.²⁶⁷ Meanwhile, Richard Helms and James Angleton managed to remove themselves from the aftermath of the debacle. The furtive pair stayed on the job and avoided repercussions while quietly strengthening their clandestine operational capabilities.

Helms and Angleton had at this time also secretly initiated a plan in which they had enlisted the support of the Mafia without presidential knowledge. The plan involved one of Helms’s top lieutenants, William Harvey, who was given the responsibility of hiring mobster Johnny Rosselli to have Castro poisoned.²⁶⁸ When Attorney General Robert Kennedy discovered the Agency’s mob ties, he ordered the relationship to cease. His order was ignored.²⁶⁹ Evidence of mob links later surfaced in both the JFK and RFK assassination cases, as we shall see ahead.

In 1962, after Soviet missiles were found on the island of Cuba, President Kennedy famously negotiated withdrawal of the weapons by the Russians. But in the midst of JFK’s efforts to obtain a peaceful resolution, the CIA’s William Harvey launched an undercover operation involving sending in teams to support a military strike inside Cuba. When Robert Kennedy learned of this, he had Harvey removed from covert ops. Helms reassigned Harvey to a new post as station chief in Rome.²⁷⁰

By 1963, both William Harvey and Johnny Rosselli loathed Bobby Kennedy.²⁷¹ CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton’s worldview also was diametrically opposed to John and Robert Kennedy’s leadership. Angleton did not believe that diplomacy with the Soviet Union would win the Cold War.²⁷² Rather, he was convinced that his Agency covert operations alone could save democracy across the globe.²⁷³

While many voters believed President Kennedy, too, was a “Cold Warrior,” over time he had grown into the office of the presidency and had matured in his perspective on international relations. His evolved Cold War strategy included quietly expanding negotiations with the Russians, the Cubans, and the North Vietnamese. In Kennedy’s American University speech of June 1963, we can see how his view of reality stands in stark contrast to James Angleton’s paranoia.

“So, let us not be blind to our differences—but let us also direct attention to our common interests and to the means by which those differences can be resolved. And if we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.”²⁷⁴

On the day of President Kennedy’s assassination, Angleton’s whereabouts have been officially reported as his having been at a meeting with French officials regarding a suspected KGB mole in the French intelligence service.²⁷⁵ Again, much of Angleton’s double agent “mole hunt” pronouncements have rung hollow for many observers over the years. This is primarily because, as CIA Director William Colby once stated, the CIA never caught a spy on Angleton’s watch.²⁷⁶ It is much more likely that the mole hunt stories were a cover for his actual primary activities.

In hindsight, rather than hunting moles, as one of the planners of MKULTRA, he was guiding the search for unwitting fall guys, overseeing their conditioning, and devising their missions. In conjunction with such operations, it was also necessary to direct the hunt for anyone who may have had knowledge of his programs, and particularly any information relating to President Kennedy’s assassination—knowledge that differed from, or contradicted, the official version. A similar, massive cover-up was carried out several years later in the wake of Sen. Robert Kennedy’s assassination. To conceal the true facts concerning these plots, it was necessary to keep a tight lid on numerous individuals including eyewitnesses, investigative reporters, law enforcement officials, courageous politicians, and a host of others, all seeking the truth. The number of those who were “neutralized” for their knowledge over the years is statistically shocking. Author Peter Janney, in his book Mary’s Mosaic on the death of JFK’s friend Mary Pinchot Meyer, cites writer Jim Marrs’s 1989 analysis of some one hundred individuals who knew some aspect of President Kennedy’s murder conspiracy and who died within twenty years of the assassination. “More than thirty people on this list had been killed in violent gun-related circumstances.”²⁷⁷ Why?

One month after the JFK assassination, counterintelligence chief James Angleton sought and was given by Richard Helms the job of liaison to the Warren Commission investigating the president’s death. Angleton continued to manage JFK assassination matters for the CIA until the end of his career.²⁷⁸ It is now known that much of the information he gave to the Warren Commission, and to Congressional hearings later on, was false. He protected the Agency at every turn.

When Angleton was asked by one Congressional committee investigator to describe the nature of counterintelligence, he responded: “to construct a ‘Wilderness of Mirrors’ in which the opponent would be forever lost and confused.”²⁷⁹ If there were an assassination cover-up manual, what approach could be more fitting than this?

A prime example of Angleton’s strategy following the president’s murder in Dallas is revealed in the case of Yuri Nosenko. The Warren Commission had just begun its investigation when a Russian KGB agent named Yuri Nosenko, thirty-seven, defected to the United States in February 1964 and claimed that he had firsthand knowledge of Lee Harvey Oswald’s stay in the USSR. Nosenko, the son of a high-level Soviet bureaucrat, had been serving in the USSR’s SCD (KGB internal security), similar to the FBI.²⁸⁰ In fact, he had been a deputy in the division that monitored foreigners in the country.²⁸¹ In that position, Nosenko reported that he had reviewed information concerning Oswald upon Oswald’s arrival in Moscow in October 1959 and also examined follow-up files after the JFK assassination. Nosenko stated that he was certain that the KGB had no involvement with Oswald nor any connection with the murder of President Kennedy.²⁸² While Helms and Angleton had accepted Nosenko’s request to defect, after he arrived in Washington they claimed they did not believe his Oswald story.²⁸³ Clearly, Angleton wanted Oswald to be seen as a possible Soviet agent and Nosenko to be viewed as having been sent by the KGB to deny Soviet involvement in the assassination. Consequently, Helms and Angleton in March 1964 had Nosenko locked up illegally²⁸⁴ and had the Warren Commission keep Nosenko’s testimony secret. The Warren Report was issued on September 28, 1964;²⁸⁵ it contained no reference to the Soviet defector’s assertions.

Nosenko was imprisoned for nearly five years and for much of that time he endured the mental torture of solitary confinement—no human contact, little food, little sleep, no medical care, no books, and no TV.²⁸⁶ He was kept for more than two years in a windowless cell at Camp Peary, Virginia, and for the rest of the time in safe houses in the Washington, DC, area.²⁸⁷ All the while, the Agency tried to break him through interrogations, to get him to “cooperate,” ²⁸⁸ i.e., to get him to sign statements declaring that he was a “mole.” He refused. Angleton and Helms could build no evidence against him.²⁸⁹ By June of 1966, Helms had become CIA director.

Finally, in March 1969, nine months after Robert Kennedy’s assassination, Helms allowed Nosenko to be released. His decision followed a Security Office report by the CIA’s Bruce Solie in 1968 stating that Nosenko was a “bona fide” defector, and that some of his leads were excellent.²⁹⁰ Another CIA report by John Hart in December 1976 also showed that Nosenko was indeed who he said he was.²⁹¹ Other legitimate Soviet defectors confirmed that Nosenko was not a fake defector,²⁹² and in September 1978, then CIA Director Stansfield Turner said that Nosenko’s statements, and in particular his statement regarding Oswald, had been made in good faith.²⁹³

Angleton obviously knew Nosenko was not a KGB double agent, yet he termed the clearing of Nosenko “a whitewash”²⁹⁴ and during the CIA hearings in the late 1970s, he even denied that he was responsible for imprisoning and nearly killing Nosenko. Yet, as Director Turner pointed out, Angleton was at Camp Peary and only Angleton could have approved these actions.²⁹⁵

Most likely, Angleton wanted to hold Nosenko as a fake in the event the JFK plot unraveled because he could then say Oswald was a KGB pawn and that Nosenko was sent to cover up Oswald’s mission. As one British intelligence expert has been quoted as saying, “Angleton was more than capable of manufacturing evidence where none existed.”²⁹⁶

The response of CIA Director William Colby in 1973 to the story of Angleton and Helms’s jailing of Yuri Nosenko was clear: “that kind of intelligence service is a threat to its own people.”²⁹⁷ Upon his release, Nosenko received at least some redress. He was hired as an independent CIA consultant,²⁹⁸ and in the fall of 1975 (after Angleton had been replaced by George Kalaris at counterintelligence), was brought back to Agency headquarters to speak about his life. He received a standing ovation.²⁹⁹

In the same year that Nosenko had defected to the United States, another intriguing case involving James Angleton occurred—one that was even more sinister. On October 12, 1964, Mary Pinchot Meyer, forty-three, ex-wife of Cord Meyer, a CIA colleague of James Angleton, was found murdered near her home in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington. The case was never solved.³⁰⁰ Mary was a beautiful woman, the daughter of a wealthy attorney, a Vassar graduate, journalist, and later in her life, an artist. Her sister, Tony, was married at the time to Ben Bradlee of the Washington Post. And, although only a very few knew at the time, Mary had had an ongoing affair with President Kennedy.³⁰¹

The day after her murder, Bradlee and his wife went to her home to search for her diary, which they had learned about from another of Mary’s close friends. To their surprise, they found family friend James Angleton inside. He, too, was searching for the diary. (Angleton’s wife Cicely was also a friend of Mary’s.) After the diary was eventually discovered in Mary’s backyard studio, Tony gave it to Angleton to have it destroyed. The diary reportedly did allude to Mary’s relationship with the president, but he was not named in it. According to Bradlee, he and his wife later found out that Angleton had not destroyed the diary, and Tony asked for it back. She then burned it herself.³⁰²

At least two sources have stated that Angleton had to have been aware of Mary’s affair with the president. Joe Shimon, a Justice Department and CIA operative,³⁰³ and artist Kenneth Noland, another former lover of Mary’s,³⁰⁴ have stated that Angleton had had Mary’s phone bugged. This was typical of Angleton’s style—he would have wanted to know what the president was telling this woman, particularly since both she and Kennedy had serious reservations regarding the activities of the CIA.

Some historians feel that the release of the Warren Commission Report in September 1964 may well have been seen by Mary Pinchot Meyer as a massive cover-up of the assassination, and that this may have been a catalyst for her possibly planning to go public with her views of the president’s murder. Mary had called another friend following the president’s death, LSD guru Timothy Leary, to share her suspicions, her grief, and her fear. She told him, “They couldn’t control him anymore. He was changing too fast. They’ve covered everything up. I gotta come see you. I’m afraid. Be careful.”³⁰⁵

In the spring of 1965, six months after Mary’s murder, Joe Shimon, who was also a CIA-mob liaison, reportedly confided to his daughter, Toni, what he knew about her death. After her many questions, Toni, then a college student and very close to her father, finally heard him say, “She (Mary Meyer) was eliminated because she knew too much.”³⁰⁶

An intensive cover-up of assassination conspiracy information—related to both Kennedy brothers’ deaths—took place during the years 1964 through 1970. Not so coincidentally, this is the same time period in which Angleton carried out his famous mole hunt,³⁰⁷ an intensive search for KGB double agents who might have penetrated the CIA ranks. The mole hunt actions were directed domestically, toward Agency staff and others, in order to determine if any operatives were working for the enemy. For Richard Helms and James Angleton, did the enemy also include anyone working to uncover the truth in the Kennedy assassination cases? Angleton’s boss, Richard Helms, fully supported the mole hunt, allowing Angleton to run his operations and investigations without close supervision. Interestingly, over its six-year existence, the mole hunt turned up not one penetration of the CIA.³⁰⁸ However, numerous individuals who knew too much about the assassinations turned up dead.³⁰⁹

In the midst of this “purge,” during these same years, grassroots opposition to the government began to emerge on college campuses and in urban churches as thousands took to the streets to condemn the war in Vietnam and also to voice their support for civil rights. Protests, ranging from nonviolent demonstrations to riots, exploded across the land.

In the face of this challenge, Richard Helms, who had been sworn in as Director of Central Intelligence on June 20, 1966, handed James Angleton a special, and illegal, assignment: to infiltrate the liberal Catholic publication Ramparts, a national magazine emanating from Berkeley that had been running anti-Vietnam War articles.³¹⁰ Angleton called the Ramparts articles “a Soviet plot,” yet his covert investigation of the magazine’s staff, editors, and writers ended with no foreign financial links being found.³¹¹

The Ramparts operation was but one small example of a nationwide program managed by James Angleton, a plan dubbed Operation CHAOS. Officially launched in 1967, the operation was ostensibly intended to determine if foreign governments were behind the antiwar protests and the civil rights movement. Under Operation CHAOS, Angleton monitored peace activists, radicals, and black leaders, infiltrating and penetrating their organizations.³¹² The unit Helms and Angleton set up to carry out this domestic spying operation was called the Special Operations Group (SOG). In addition to investigating activists, their work also included “monitoring and harassing” numerous newspapers.³¹³

In all, some six hundred names of Americans were on CIA watchlists.³¹⁴ The lists also included members of Congress. The SOG obtained information on these individuals through a variety of means: the use of informants, phone bugging—wiretaps and illegal entries—and home and office break-ins.³¹⁵ The methods used against protestors were also the essential tools needed for Angleton’s MKULTRA operation, i.e., finding subjects, drugging them, conditioning them, and framing them.

Following Richard Helms’s resignation (Helms was appointed ambassador to Iran by President Nixon) and the appointment of James Schlesinger as the new director of the CIA in early 1973, Schlesinger ordered Angleton to end Operation CHAOS.³¹⁶

It is unknown whether the Watergate break-in in June 1972, carried out by a team mostly made up of CIA operatives, was in fact an Operation CHAOS mission. The goal of the failed burglary was to plant listening devices in the Democratic National Headquarters offices. But it is unclear who ordered the break-in or why. If indeed the order came from James Angleton, the purpose of the bugging may well have been to find out if the Democrats had obtained any information concerning who killed the Kennedys and if the leads were pointing in Angelton’s direction.

The media’s discovery of the CIA’s Operation CHAOS and its spying on anti-war protestors began with a leak at the Justice Department. The New York Times’ Seymour Hersh interviewed DCI Schlesinger’s successor William Colby, who confirmed the leaks were indeed factual.³¹⁷ (Schlesinger had been appointed secretary of defense by President Nixon and William Colby had moved up to director of Central Intelligence on July 1, 1973.) On December 22, 1974, the Times published its story on Operation CHAOS along with the breaking news on HT/Lingual, the CIA mail-opening operation.³¹⁸ James Angleton, the chief architect and overseer of both operations, was interviewed two days later by CBS news correspondent Daniel Schorr. Angleton denied everything.³¹⁹ That day, December 24, 1974, DCI Colby fired James Angleton.³²⁰

In addition to Angleton’s role in the CIA’s years of illegal operations, Colby criticized Angleton’s division for being “secretive and self-contained” and stated that he found “a total lack of cooperation.”³²¹ Colby questioned Angleton’s career, saying, “No one knew what he had done. I didn’t.”³²² It is known that the majority of Angleton and Helms’s MKULTRA records were destroyed by Helms days before Helms departed the CIA.

Angleton stayed on at the agency for nine months following his forced resignation to “clear out his files.” Hence, his actual retirement date was in September 1975.³²³ During that year, then President Gerald Ford asked Vice President Nelson Rockefeller to investigate the stories by Seymour Hersh, and as a result, the select committee headed by Idaho senator Frank Church was established, as well as a House select committee.³²⁴ During the hearings, Angleton reportedly met with the CIA liaison to Congress, Walter Elder. Forever believing the best defense is a strong offense, Angleton delivered his standard ploy: he cautioned Elder of a Soviet plot and advised him that the Church committee was “serving as the unwitting instrument of the KGB.”³²⁵ Thus, he maintained his “cover” until the end.

As if to publicly deny the relevations and accusations against the Agency, in 1975, the CIA awarded Angleton its highest medal for distinguished service.³²⁶ For the next twelve years, Angleton operated in retirement nearly as secretively as he had while working.

On May 11, 1987, Angleton died of lung cancer in Washington, DC, at the age of sixty-nine. He is buried in Boise, Idaho.³²⁷

This glimpse into the life and times of Richard Helms’s right-hand man, longtime CIA chief of counterintelligence James Angleton, serves as a backdrop to our understanding of the lives of Lee Harvey Oswald and Sirhan B. Sirhan, detailed ahead.

Angleton was the genius behind the MKULTRA, unwitting, fall-guy plan, devising with Richard Helms the operational strategy and implementing it through sympathetic Agency and mob allies. Angleton also used his powerful arm of the Agency to carry out sustained and far-reaching covert actions designed to cover up the conspiracy through disinformation campaigns, domestic spying, break-ins, intimidation, and ultimately, the untimely deaths of numerous witnesses. Indeed, James Angleton was Richard Helms’s secret weapon dedicated to the mission of making the 1960s assassination plots work.