People, ideas, machines VIII: CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton, 'a wilderness of mirrors', covert operations, assassinations, moles & double agents, disinformation

Lessons from/for the deep state for those thinking about AI, power, geopolitics and security

Dominic Cummings

Jun 11, 2024

After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Think now

History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors

And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions,

Guides us by vanities. Think now

She gives when our attention is distracted

And what she gives, gives with such supple confusions

That the giving famishes the craving…

These with a thousand small deliberations

Protract the profit of their chilled delirium,

Excite the membrane, when the sense has cooled,

With pungent sauces, multiply variety

In a wilderness of mirrors…

Gerontion, TS Eliot

[T]he myriad of stratagems, deceptions, artifices and all the other devices of disinformation which the Soviet Bloc and its co-ordinated intelligence services use to confuse and split the West have confronted our policy makers with an ever-fluid landscape where fact and illusion merge – a kind of wilderness of mirrors, where honest statesmen are finding it increasingly difficult to separate the facts of Soviet actions from the illusion of Soviet rhetoric.

Angleton

Even though the President himself is very much against starting a war over Cuba, an irreversible chain of events could occur against his will… If the situation continues much longer, the President is not sure that the military will not overthrow him and seize power. The American army could get out of control.

Bobby Kennedy to Ambassador Dobrynin, October 1962

Kennedy was trying to get to Castro, but Castro got to him first.

LBJ to Howard Smith of ABC, 1968

It is inconceivable that a secret intelligence arm of the government has to comply with all the overt orders of government.

Angleton

There is always a question of whether a democratic country is capable of having an intelligence service of any great merit… It usually takes a national crisis or a Pearl Harbour before people then understand what national survival means.

Angelton

If you control counterintelligence, you control the intelligence service.

Angleton

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

Juvenal

The educated person seeks exactness in each area to the extent that the nature of the subject allows.

Aristotle, quoted by Sherman Kent of CIA

Update 6/12/2024: Final thoughts and some minor editing, typos fixed.

Update: Balance sheet on Angleton.

Update 23/7: 1975: Church hearings, Zapruder emerges, Angleton gives evidence, Colby fired

Update 22/7. Operation CHAOS & domestic surveillance. Watergate. The Church hearings. The ‘family jewels’. Nixon resigns. Angleton resigns. The ‘family jewels’ gathered. Details on assassination planning leaks everywhere, Rosselli and mafia links explored.]

James Angleton worked in the OSS during the war, switched to the newly formed CIA, then was head of CIA counterintelligence for 20 years from the creation of the post in 1954. He was present at its creation and involved in many of the most controversial episodes in its history. He is better known than many CIA directors.

A recent biography by Morley explores these controversies. And his career raises many basic questions about intelligence services:

How best to balance the core mission of ‘defend the country from the greatest perils’ and another core mission ‘defend the country’s constitution and fundamental rights of citizens’?
How far should an intelligence service be allowed to go? How to define ethical and legal limits, e.g on blackmail, murder, and torture? (The CIA not only ran assassinations but also hired the mafia to assassinate people including Castro.)
How can it be controlled? In an autocracy intelligence is controlled by the ruler but in a democracy/oligarchy how do you balance control by the executive, check and balances, the potential for abuse? Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? What defences are there against a normal problem, that the guardians/oversight itself fails and/or is corrupted?
What are common pitfalls of counter-intelligence? What is the proper relationship between a) the team trying to penetrate enemy X and b) the team defending against penetration by enemy X? How do you manage the problem of Golitsyn and Nosenko and figuring out who is genuine and who is a double/triple agent? Angleton’s approach was formed by his experience watching Bletchley and ENIGMA, watching the British deception operation for D-day (including turning Nazi agents in Britain into messengers for our deception), and the VENONA revelations of many Soviet agents at work in America. (NB. contrary to the standard media story today, McCarthy was right about widespread Soviet infiltration/subversion, and in fact under-rated the problem.) In the counter-action to Angleton after he was fired, counter-intelligence was diminished and the CIA had many disasters. How do you avoid the CIA’s problem with Aldrich Ames, a leader of CIA counter-intelligence against the KGB who was himself working for the KGB, or Robert Hansen, an FBI agent responsible for finding Soviet moles who was himself a mole and at one point was put in charge of finding himself? (Both betrayed many secrets and condemned agents to torture/execution.) What’s the right relationship between counter-intelligence and an ‘office of security’?
What sort of incentives work well? How to handle contradictory incentives of those collecting intelligence (promoted for agents recruited etc) and counter-intelligence (promoted for exposing errors, moles etc)?
How best should an intelligence agency be organised? Is the CIA model a good one? What have other services demonstrated? What are the pros and cons of having collection, analysis and operations in the same organisation? What’s the best answer to inevitable trade-offs?
How can such an agency best deal with the inevitable problems of all large organisations?
Where and how did American intelligence go wrong after 9/11? Is it better to think of ‘reforming’ the CIA or ‘replacing’ the CIA?
How should we think about ‘disinformation’ and claims of ‘disinformation’ from intelligence agencies? NB. the CIA’s evidence to the Warren Commission was disinformation. So was the CIA’s, FBI’s, NSA’s public statements about ‘Russian disinformation’ in 2020. So have been many claims from US and UK intelligence and other government sources during the Ukraine war. Although Angleton’s operation in Italy after the war was successful, generally hopes and fears about CIA psychological operations are misguided — it’s harder to persuade normal voters than the intelligentsia thinks and western intelligence services post-1945 have not been good at this (cf. Afghanistan). Though it’s easier to persuade the intelligentsia itself.
If significant elements of intelligence agencies start running disinformation campaigns against their own voters, who is responsible for doing what?! How do such agencies retain public confidence in such circumstances? (A very live issue given the behaviour of senior CIA, NSA and other officials in participating in the 2020 election to help Biden by making public claims about Hunter Biden and the Biden family’s dealings with Ukraine, supposedly on the basis of secret intelligence, that they knew were false and have had to admit were false subsequently in court under oath.)
How should governments integrate intelligence in overall policy? How to balance and integrate information across a lot of different agencies, for example the NRO, NSA, FBI and many others?
How will intelligence and counter-intelligence change as technology rapidly change the games, such as AI-enabled cyber-attacks, new surveillance, new weapons? As seen in the RVJ blog, new technology generates new forces. What sort of new forces will emerge and how will intelligence be affected? (E.g there is a strong argument for experimenting with a hybrid force that is part intel agency/special forces/psyops/AI & drone specialists, particularly given how bad the RAF and MOD have been at adapting to AI and drones. We started to discuss such a new force in No10 with parts of the deep state in 2020.)

Below I summarise this book and intersperse with notes from Legacy of Ashes (Weiner) [in square brackets] and other interesting snippets {in squiggly brackets}.

Previous in this series:

VII: On RV Jones, Scientific Intelligence in World War II, how Whitehall vandalised the successful system immediately after the war. Many issues explored in the RVJ blog are seen from a different angle in this blog.

VI: Alanbrooke diaries, incredibly relevant to today’s problems and what military ‘strategy’ really is

V: Colin Gray and defence planning

IV: Notes on The Kill Chain — US procurement horror, new technology, planning for war with PRC

III: More on fallacies of nuclear thinking / strategy / deterrence. If you read this and the earlier one you’ll see that almost everything the media says about Putin and nuclear threats is wrong / misguided and, worse, so is much of what is said by international relations/historians/military academics.

II: Thinking about nuclear weapons

I: On innovation in militaries, when does it succeed/fail — e.g why US got ahead on aircraft carriers, RAF defence in 1930s.

Prediction: 1) lessons from UKR will overwhelmingly support the arguments of those who in 2020 argued for radical MoD changes (including taking money from old tank projects that everybody privately admitted were a multi-billion pound disaster) and 2) the correct criticism of the review and connected documents will be seen as a) they did not go nearly far enough, b) the collapse of No10 follow through on defence reform in 2021 was — like the collapse of 2020 plans for planning reform, tax cuts, deregulation, Project Speed, intense focus on R&D and skills etc — a disaster for the country (and a political disaster for the Tory Party). (Me, 3/2022)

And some other related stuff pre-No10…

On high performance government, ‘cognitive technologies’, ‘Seeing Rooms’, UK crisis management (2019)

On AI, nuclear issues, Project Maven (2019

On the ARPA/PARC ‘Dream Machine’, science funding, high performance, and UK national strategy (2018)

On ‘systems engineering’ and ‘systems management’ — ideas from the Apollo programme for a ‘systems politics’ (2017)

On China vs US, the ‘Thucydides trap’ book (2017)

And obviously I think that if you’re thinking through AI and geopolitics you should study my chronology of Bismarck, a month of study and you’ll be in the top 0.01% of people who really understand high performance politics, an incredible shortcut, and one that ~100% of those in politics are too lazy or deluded to grasp!

AI, power, intelligence, security: there are no ninjas, there is no door…

You might think somewhere [in No10/Cabinet Office] there must be a quiet calm centre like in a James Bond move where you open the door and there is where the ninjas are who actually know what they are doing. There are no ninjas. There is no door. (Me, 2014)
But the scariest realization is that there is no crack team coming to handle this. As a kid you have this glorified view of the world, that when things get real there are the heroic scientists, the uber-competent military men, the calm leaders who are on it, who will save the day. It is not so. The world is incredibly small; when the facade comes off, it’s usually just a few folks behind the scenes who are the live players, who are desperately trying to keep things from falling apart. (Leopold Aschenbrenner, in a widely read paper and podcast over the last week, June 2024)

I would bet a lot that Deep Mind et al are all hacked and spied on by China and Russia (at least) so I think it’s safest to plan on the assumption that dangerous breakthroughs will leak almost instantly and could be applied by the sort of people who spy for intel agencies… Given someone can hack the NSA without their identity being revealed, why would they not be hacking Renaissance and Deep Mind, with a bit of help from a Milla Jovovich lookalike who is reading a book on n-dimensional string theory at the bar when that exhausted physics PhD with the access codes staggers in to relax? (Me, 2019)
The nation’s leading AI labs treat security as an afterthought. Currently, they’re basically handing the key secrets for AGI to the CCP on a silver platter… They measure their security efforts against “random tech startups,” not “key national defense projects.”… Currently, labs are barely able to defend against scriptkiddies, let alone have “North Korea- proof security,” let alone be ready to face the Chinese Ministry of State Security bringing its full force to bear… Too many smart people underrate espionage. (Leopold’s paper, June 2024, cf. p89ff. Leopold worked at OpenAI until recently and was removed, he says, partly for raising security issues.)

Honeytraps + blackmail = a security nightmare, real security is very very very hard and imposes a lot of friction

Like others in this series, considering the development of the CIA and Angleton’s role is also very rewarding if you’re trying to think through the incredibly complex issues surrounding AI, the top-human then super-human models that are coming (though initially only super-human in a few domains, not generally super-human), politics, geopolitics and war.

I’ve followed this since I read Bill Joy’s famous piece in Wired in 2000. I wrote about it in my 2014 essay. After the referendum I went to San Francisco and visited OpenAI. Back then the conventional wisdom in academia and Whitehall was that the claims and plans made by companies like OpenAI were laughable. Senior academics kept saying models like GPT were ‘a toy’ and they failed to update Oxford and Cambridge computer science courses (which remain behind the curve). It seemed to me likely that people like Dario, Demis and Sam were more likely to be right than the conventional wisdom. Since then much of academia and Whitehall has kept predicting ‘scaling will break’. It has not broken. Those building these models expect it to continue for at least another 2 years which will be huge even if it then does start breaking. I wore my OpenAI T-shirt on my first day in No10 in 2019 to make a point about the confluence of technology and politics/power (the political media’s response was to laugh at GPT!). In 2022 after a visit to San Francisco I predicted on this blog it would go mainstream in 2023.

But after a flurry of interest and nonsense over Chat-GPT, political-media Insiders have almost entirely returned to their default mode: no big deal, doesn’t mean any fundamental changes to politics or government, ‘AI is a hype bubble, they’re just building chatbots, the Bay Area is a cult, VCs are charlatans, GPT won’t be hacking GCHQ haha’. (NB. GCHQ recently declared a ‘critical incident’ over this subject but hasn’t remotely got the plan, people, money or freedom to build what’s needed and the Cabinet Office’s perpetual role of collectively pouring sand in everybody’s petrol tank continues, notwithstanding valiant individual efforts.) The lack of interest — even as massive amounts of capital is allocated to chip manufacture and training runs, with huge implications for energy grids and geopolitics — is the latest episode of how widely believed conventional wisdom among the SW1 Insider-herd almost always proves wrong.

I think that A) beliefs about imminent capabilities of AI, and possibilities for the PRC and Russia, will soon freak out much more of the National Security network across the world, B) it will destabilise (already destabilised and worsening) WMD deterrence as states start to fear scenarios of pre-emptive action that now seem highly implausible (e.g ‘is it possible new AI-enabled technologies will allow part X of the nuclear weapon system to be neutralised?’), C) it will become clear that cyber-defence and cyber-attack, and intelligence services more broadly, will be transformed much more rapidly than most senior Whitehall Nat-Sec types think is likely.

Covid showed how bad politics-world is at exponentials and the exponentials of model improvement are not much appreciated in Whitehall or Washington, and are wildly unknowable to those building the models! NB. a technology does not have to be deployed or even near-term-actually-feasible for it to be destabilising — an obvious example is the way Reagan’s rhetoric on Star Wars combined with US rapid advances in chips and aerospace convinced the KGB and Soviet leaders that Star Wars may destabilise deterrence.

From Leopold’s paper, forecasts vs actuality for model maths performance

There are influential voices calling for versions of nationalisation of AI labs and ‘Manhattan Projects’: i.e OpenAI, DeepMind, Anthropic getting merged, moved out to famous deep state desert bases, put behind barbed wire with extreme security, air-gapped SCIFs etc. I have discussed security with some of the top 20 most important people in this field for years and warned them of the consequences of a state deploying its most aggressive capabilities against them. For many years this field has not thought much about how extreme things will get when entities like Chinese and Russian intelligence deploy their most aggressive attacks — not just cyber attacks but honey traps, blackmail, threats against researchers’ families and so on.

AI’s security culture has been (with few exceptions I won’t name for obvious reasons) similar to other Valley startups. This problem was largely invisible until recently. A rare public case occurred recently when Google had to admit that a Chinese operation trivially evaded their security and stole a lot of sensitive IP. The lack of seriousness about security has undermined confidence in claims from some leading labs: if you publicly say ‘AI may kill vast numbers so there should be regulation for safety/security’ yet you do not actually take security seriously, then some will conclude you are either idiots or you’re lying about security to justify regulations that hurt your competitors. A lot of people at DeepMind have responded over the years ‘we have Google’s cybersecurity’. This is not a good answer. States go around such defences.

A normal corporate security culture is hopeless when issues of war, nuclear and biological attacks, state espionage, state destruction and so on are involved. And even the security culture of the actual Manhattan Project — which was run with extreme competence that it’s practically impossible to imagine Washington-as-it-exists-today mustering now — was insufficient to prevent significant penetration by the Soviets. As this blog describes below, even when the security culture is taken as seriously as America can take it, security disasters are routine. And nuclear weapons security continues to see blunders exposed by Red Teams and bio-security is farcical (cf. the recent exposure of a hidden biolab in California run by Chinese scientists experimenting on engineered viruses including Ebola and the total lack of mainstream interest).

I’ll write further (over summer if I have time) on Leopold’s paper and some other papers on AI, bio-security etc, and the attempt by some to push the UK in a better direction via the AI Task Force and Safety Institute. It’s good these issues are finally getting more discussion. The goal should be to improve western discussion — don’t worry about ‘are we alerting the PRC’ (as some have suggested to me), you should assume PRC is already highly alerted and already stealing much more than is realised!

My recent RV Jones blog on scientific intelligence in World War II and US intelligence post-1945 will also provide food for thought for those trying to get ahead on this.

Cf. my blog June 2023.

And for those thinking about Leopold’s paper, here is a paper I wrote in 2017 on ‘systems engineering’ and ‘systems management’ lessons from Manhattan, Apollo, ICBMs etc that are directly relevant to developing practical plans per Leopold’s paper and others thinking similarly about how the labs and the deep state will work together.

Similarly this blog from 3/2022 is directly relevant — how does the deep state actually get ahead of technological surprise and when/why does it fail?

The election and new parties / campaigns

The campaigns are a joke, the leaders are a joke and 99% of the ‘analysis’ is a joke. This election is the apotheosis of the rotten SW1 ecosystem I’ve watched since 1999: the blind leading the blind, only those in SW1 take it seriously, the country appalled/depressed, UK politics as an international humiliation.

One example from the Telegraph’s ‘star’ political ‘expert’. As the Tories machine-gunned themselves with blunder after blunder, she managed to conjure up ‘an extraordinary comeback’ for Sunak who promptly drove himself off a cliff by operating on the governing model of every PM since Thatcher (with the sole partial exception, hated and feared across SW1, of July 2019-Nov 2020) — No10 as Media Entertainment Service — and abandoned his government responsibilities to come home for an interview with ITV:

When you wonder why MPs constantly say and do such dumb things and ignore what’s important, remember that they orient their activity and ideas almost entirely by reading analysis like her’s to understand strategy, communication, public opinion, and what’s going on in Whitehall. She is MP-reality.

Farage’s entry has, as I said it would in an interview a month ago, made it unavoidable for SW1 to discuss the possible destruction and replacement of the Tory Party. But SW1 does not know how to analyse this.

The defining feature of the SW1 Insider network since 2016 has been the remarkable way in which it has become more and more of a denial-of-service attack against its own perceptions of reality. This is part of the crackup of elite consensus reality I’ve explored a lot on this blog but won’t go into now. (I strongly recommend reading essays by Jon Askonas, one of the very few people I think understands the media now, e.g this on John Stewart).

If you want to see the rot of the old system consider this.

A week ago (5/6/24), Putin called in the international media. He told them: NATO has given Ukraine long range missiles to strike deep in Russia, why don’t we have the right to give weapons to other regimes to do the same to NATO, we are considering such options…

And what media coverage do you see?

The old UK media almost entirely censored the event. Although widely discussed globally, it is a non-event in the UK. I’d bet >95% of MPs don’t know it happened.

Not only is our Idiocracy escalating a disastrous war they’ve blundered into, they’re censoring statements from the world’s biggest nuclear power directly threatening us with reprisals for our actions, shoving celebrity gossip onto the BBC website rather than translating Putin’s words (then they claim ‘trust the BBC not disinformation’!). And funding Ukraine which is drone-striking Russian early-warning radars for nuclear weapons, of no relevance to the UKR war.

The gap between the self-perception of our elite media and the reality has not been starker since I started watching them.

The collapse of the Tories, the imminent hard and fast failure of Starmer, and the collapse of confidence in (and audiences of) the old political media is a historic combination of events and a very rare opportunity, albeit an opportunity entangled in many nightmare scenarios. Boris squandered a similar historic opportunity in summer 2020 and set the Party on its path to disintegration.

Next week I’ll publish here next steps on The Startup Party, or, rather, the precursor steps for such a Party.

IT’S TIME TO BUILD BUILD BUILD…

(Ps. If you look at reports on the new H1N1 and H1N2 flu strains, developments are BAD. And given the pathologies I’ve described you should plan on the basis that if there’s another pandemic soon it will be handled even worse than in 2020 plus public trust in what is said will be very low given all the lies from politicians and Whitehall, the disgraceful fake inquiry, the coverups over lab leak evidence and problems with vaccines etc. So it will be even more chaotic. And it may well be worse for kids than normal adults, unlike covid, adding another nightmarish angle. As I’ve stressed repeatedly (from before 2020), a) look at what our old regimes are doing on bioterror planning, b) look how easy it is to breach supposed defences (cf. recent MIT experiment showing they can easily order ingredients to build a bioweapon, and c) imagine how these regimes will cope with the far more complex problems of AI-WMD-security…)

Angleton: background, OSS

James Jesus Angleton was born in 1917 in Boise, Idaho. {He didn’t use the name ‘Jesus’ and always signed James Angleton.} His father was a teacher then candy salesman then worked for a cash register company. His mother was a beautiful naturalised Mexican. In 1933 when Angleton was 16 the family moved to Milan where his father ran the Italian-American Chamber of Commerce and knew many of the high business and political figures of the Mussolini regime.

Angleton attended Malvern College in England then went to Yale in September 1937. At Yale he read English and came across Ezra Pound. When he joined his family in Milan in summer 1938, he tracked down Ezra Pound in Rapello. Angleton delved into the New Critics such as William Empson, a mathematician and poet, whose undergraduate thesis, Seven Types of Ambiguity, became a famous book. Angleton returned to Milan in summer 1939 and saw war break out.

At Yale Angleton became friends with Norman Pearson, an assistant literature professor who joined the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) founded by William Donovan (who got the nickname ‘Wild Bill’ for his aerial exploits in the First World War). Donovan knew FDR and after Pearl Harbor was asked to set up an intelligence service. He sent his new recruits to Bletchley Park for training.

In 1943 Angleton joined up as an enlisted man and married Cicely d’Autremont, the daughter of parents from two wealthy families. Pearson arranged for Angleton to join the OSS. In his introductory training he became friends with people such as Richard Helms and Bill Colby who would later run the CIA. Angleton arrived in London as the V2 missiles were landing in spring 1944.

London and Italy, 1944-47

Angleton went through an OSS training course at Bletchley. In London, Pearson arranged for Angleton to be put into the X-2 section of OSS, responsible for counter-intelligence. X-2 was the only bit of the OSS that could see raw ENIGMA traffic. Angleton became friends with Kim Philby, then in SIS. With Pearson and Philby as mentors, Angleton learned the arts of counterintelligence. Pearson sat on a committee that decided how to use ULTRA, GCHQ’s code-breaking operation. JA also learned of British operations to identify Nazi agents, ‘double’ them, then send back disinformation, a mix of true and false information (the most significant such operation was to deceive the Nazis about the D-Day landings, Operation BODYGUARD).

Angleton was posted to Italy. His mission was counterintelligence against the remnants of Nazi / fascist intelligence including spies left behind by the Germans. He was soon working with fascists to negotiate the surrender of other fascists and liaising with Alan Dulles. In September 1943 Rome surrendered to the Allies and Mussolini retreated north under German protection with the infamous ‘Black Prince’, Borghese, an effective fascist military special operations leader.

In Switzerland, Allen Dulles, former State Department official turned lawyer at the famous elite law firm Sullivan & Cromwell, worked for OSS. With Operation SUNRISE, he opened secret negotiations with Germans about surrender. (Dulles had met Hitler pre-war. He kept it very quiet. Not even Helms knew until decades later. He successfully lobbied for Sullivan & Cromwell to stop working in Nazi Germany after 1935). Dulles connected with Angleton about operations in northern Italy designed to persuade Italian fascists to break with the Nazis.

{I haven’t dug into the details of SUNRISE but it seems that Dulles probably disobeyed FDR’s instructions on such negotiations. SUNRISE is referred to in the brilliant Soviet TV show, 17 Moments of Spring, which I very strongly recommend if you want to understand modern Russia. Stalin was always paranoid about a deal between the Nazis and the West — and Dulles was exploring this.}

The Nazis wanted Italian fascists to implement a scorched earth destruction of northern Italy. Angleton negotiated with Borghese who surrendered and was spared punishment by Angleton’s intervention. Mussolini was soon captured and hung in Milan. Angleton was soon working to infiltrate Communist networks.

1947: The shift to ‘containment’ and birth of the CIA (Weiner)

[Donovan had proposed to FDR 10/44 the creation post-war of a ‘Central Intelligence Service’. The Joint Chiefs of Staff strongly opposed the idea of such an entity reporting to the President, particularly one with the wildness of OSS under Donovan; they preferred a service reporting to them, Hoover wanted the FBI to run it, and the Army and Navy wanted their own. (The military had also botched intelligence, such as breaking Japan’s cipher then not sharing it with local commanders, contributing to Pearl Harbor.)

In early 1945 FDR launched a secret investigation into the OSS by Colonel Park and it reported to Truman the day FDR died. In the meantime the White House briefed the media about plans for ‘an American Gestapo’ to scupper Donovan. Park’s report (with Hoover’s help) was devastating for OSS and Donovan and scuppered Donovan’s initial effort to create a postwar central intelligence service. It exposed many OSS operational disasters and blamed Donovan. (It was fully declassified only after 1991.) In August, Donovan told Truman that America had not had a secret intelligence service before the war and ‘does not now have a coordinated intelligence system’. On 20 September, six weeks after dropping the atomic bombs on Japan, Truman fired Donovan and ordered the OSS closed in ten days. Most of its people returned to civilian life, some went to State or the War Office. Allan Dulles returned to Sullivan & Cromwell. There could never be ‘a sadder or more tormented period in my life’ said Sherman Kent, one of the CIA’s future stars.

However, not everything was shut down. In Washington, John Magruder, Donovan’s deputy, messaged Helms and others in Berlin to hold the fort. On 26/9, six days after Truman’s order, Magruder went to see John McCloy, the Assistant Secretary of War and one of the great insiders of Washington from the 1940s to 1960s. McCloy told him to preserve certain OSS operations while he manoeuvred to create a new Service. The temporary entity was the Strategic Services Unit (SSU). McCloy worked with Robert Lovett to write a secret report on a new Service. In Berlin, Helms started building networks to spy on the Russians. But across Europe, Stalin’s intelligence apparatus exposed and crushed American networks and supporters.

In January 1946, Truman’s military chief of staff, Admiral Leahy, and others warned Truman that his hasty disbandment of Intelligence was a disaster with Stalin on the move across the world. There followed badly thought out false starts. Truman appointed an admiral, Souers, to create a Central Intelligence Group. Truman presented him and others with ceremonial black cloaks and daggers {this hardly supports the claim by Truman or Weiner that Truman did not envisage the CIA being a ‘cloak and dagger’ agency, see below}. Souers was given no clear direction, authority, or budget. The Pentagon and State refused to talk to him. All Truman really wanted, according to Weiner (p14), was a daily intelligence brief summarising a foot stack of daily cables. When someone asked Souers what he wanted, he replied, ‘I want to go home’! He left after about 3 months. He was replaced by Vandenberg (nephew of the influential Senator) who also had to scrabble for cash and was marginalised by the Pentagon. In May 1947 Vandenberg was replaced by Rear Admiral Hillenkoetter, who then became the first director of the CIA as it was legally created over 1947.

In 1947 came the big shift in US policy towards the Soviet Union including:

Truman a) announced support for the royalist Greek government after Britain said we could not do it and b) said his policy would be to support free peoples against ‘subjugation’ — ‘the Truman Doctrine’ (March)
Marshall’s famous Harvard speech announcing huge aid for Europe — Marshall Aid (June)
the National Security Act (July) which created the CIA and National Security Council (NSC)
Kennan’s anonymous ‘X’ article in the July 1947 issue of Foreign Affairs introducing
the strategy of containment against the Soviet Union (developing ideas from his ‘Long Telegram’ of 1946).

Truman insisted on the CIA not being able to conduct operations on US soil but the Act said that it could perform ‘such other functions and duties related to intelligence affecting the national security’. This ambiguity hid the assumption that, as Clark Clifford put it years later, the ‘other functions’ would ‘include covert activity’.

Dean Acheson wrote years later:

I had the gravest forebodings about this organisation and warned the President that as set up neither he, the National Security Council, nor anyone else could be in a position to know what it was doing or to control it.

Years later Truman said that the CIA was ‘not intended as a “Cloak and Dagger Outfit”! It was intended merely as a center for keeping the President informed on what was going on in the world’, it wasn’t supposed ‘to act as a spy organization’.

5% of the Marshall Plan was secretly siphoned off and given to the CIA via a laundering scheme. It was Dulles, not Hillenkoetter, who briefed Congress secretly on the plans for the CIA in summer 1947. In September 1947, Kennan wrote another paper on political warfare for Forrestal, Secretary of Defense, including the need for ‘a guerrilla warfare corps’.

On 14/12/1947 Truman issued directive NSC 4/A which gave the CIA responsibility for psychological operations. The first job was to shore up anti-Communists in Italy. The Office of Special Operations (OSO) had the job.]

{NB. It’s important to remember given the hero-worship of FDR that his particular style made Washington dysfunctional in many ways. He cultivated secrecy and chaos. Important decisions had to come to him. He said to Morgenthau, ‘I am a juggler and I never let my right hand know what my left one does.’ Many, including War Secretary Henry Stimson, complained about the chaos during the war. This motivated people like Forrestal to build a new system. Cf. a 250 page report by Eberstadt for Forrestal. Further, there was amazing penetration of Washington, and America generally, by Soviet agents and this affected advice to FDR, conduct of Lend-Lease etc which was partly manipulated by Stalin.}

Angleton shifts from OSS to CIA, covert operation on Italian election 1948

When the OSS was shut down in 9/45, Angleton was formally transferred to the War Office. His job in Italy didn’t change much except he was now targeting Communists. His marriage was already a wreck but his wife dropped divorce proceedings when she realised she was pregnant.

In November 1947 Angleton was summoned to Washington and the new agency. Angleton’s new job was Chief of Operations for Staff A which handled OSO’s foreign intelligence gathering. He inherited the files of the OSS X-2 unit. Angleton was soon sent back to Italy to stop the Communist Party winning the elections. (Bill Harvey was a FBI specialist in Soviet operations. His drinking got him into trouble with Hoover and he moved to the new CIA in 1947 where he was chief of Staff C, counter-intelligence. Harvey would later play a crucial role in assassination projects, see below.)

Angleton built a network of businessmen, Italian security forces, and allies in the British and French Services. Captured assets from the Nazis were diverted to CIA use. He spent a fortune via the Vatican Bank where he’d made friends during the war. He brought Garbo’s famous film, Ninotchka (a satire on Stalinist Russia), to Italian cinemas. He joked:

Miss Garbo will prove a most lethal weapon.

The Christian Democrats won the April 1948 elections with 48%.

[In May 1948 Kennan, now back from Moscow in the State Department, wrote a paper on the need for a full stack of ‘organized political warfare’ capabilities and a new covert organisation to conduct them. In June 1948, NSC 10/2 called for covert operations against the Soviets and authorised the creation of the Office of Special Projects which was renamed the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC) inside the CIA to run political warfare.]

Over spring to summer 1948, Stalin made his move in Czechoslovakia. Then June 1948 - September 1949 there was the Berlin blockade and airlift after the Allies introduced a new currency in west Germany. In May 1949 Congress passed an Act giving the CIA wide legal powers. A few senior members of Congress and Senate agreed the less scrutiny the better. Congress approved the budget annually but all details were kept secret.

OPC was led by Frank Wisner from 1/9/48. Wisner had been involved in intelligence in the war, left, came back to DC in 1946 and started hosting Sunday night dinner parties for insiders like Kennan, Bohlen, Angleton. As OPC grew rapidly Angleton thought it was hiring too many duffers, was insecure, was rushing operations without proper preparation. {He was right.} And he was unhappy that he was limited in his OSO role while OPC controlled political warfare.

[Helms said that Wisner burned with ‘a zeal and intensity’ that imposed ‘an abnormal strain’ on him. Wisner also reported to the Secretaries of Defense and State because the head of the CIA was still a weak bureaucratic player in DC. This continued until October 1950 when Bedell Smith, Eisenhower’s intense workaholic wartime deputy, took over the CIA, realised the director did not control OPC, and announced he was taking control of it.

The OPC was soon bigger than the rest of the CIA and set up its own units in cities across the world, often competing bitterly with the official CIA office. Wisner planned economic war, cultural war, legions of exiles to undermine the Soviets. He built military stockpiles with aircraft, arms etc.

Wisner invested in breaking communist influence over trade unions in France and Italy. He gave Jay Lovestone a lot of money. Lovestone worked with Angleton for years, see below. Wisner funded Encounter magazine, Radio Free Europe (which got help from Henry Luce and Cecil B. DeMille), and many other attempts to counter Communist cultural influence.

In early 1948 Forrestal asked Dulles to review the problems with the CIA. Dulles finished his report as the 1948 election happened, which he and others thought Truman would lose. Dulles thought he might take over the CIA. The report was classified for 50 years. It detailed the CIA’s problems and failings. But Truman won. Dulles was seen as too Republican to take over. The CIA limped on under Hillenkoetter. The NSC ordered him to implement the report. He didn’t.

Forrestal resigned as Secretary of Defense in March 1949. (Weiner says ‘resigned’ but other sources suggest Truman pushed him out.) He was consigned to a psychiatric ward in Bethseda Hospital. One night he wrote out lines from Sophocles’s The Chorus from Ajax. When he got to the word ‘nightingale’, he wrote ‘night’, stopped, walked across the corridor to find an open window, then threw himself out of the 16th floor (possibly tried to hang himself from the window first). NIGHTINGALE was the code name for an operation to insert a team of Ukrainians to fight a covert war against Stalin. Its leaders included Nazi collaborators who were wanted for war crimes having murdered thousands on the Eastern Front.

Wisner recruited from displaced-persons camps for his Ukrainian network. And from Nazis and Nazi collaborators such as Mikola Lebed. One of his battalions in the war had been the ‘Nightingale’. The CIA itself had defined Lebed’s organisation a terrorist organisation. The Justice Department said he was a war criminal who had slaughtered Ukrainians, Poles and Jews. The CIA had been given the power to grant citizenship to 100 people a year without regard to any laws. Lebed was an early beneficiary.

General Gehlen, formerly of the Abwehr, volunteered his services to the CIA to defend ‘Western Civilisation’ from the Soviets. He recruited some war criminals. Some in the CIA objected to working with former SS officers. They were overruled. {But this looks a bit complex — some sources say Gehlen hired the worst people on orders from Adenauer, understandably worried about Soviet infiltration. Some relevant records were revealed and declassified by the CIA in 2022 but I think remain unpublished.} Gehlen’s group was already penetrated by the Soviets and his own chief of counterintelligence was a Moscow mole (Heinz Felfe). This was not realised for a long time. In 1956 the Gehlen group was turned into the official intelligence service for the new West Germany.

In 1949 the CIA dropped Ukrainian networks back into Ukraine. They were rapidly eliminated. The Soviets forced some to send back disinformation — send more guns, money, men — before execution. The operation was a disaster — ‘ill-fated and tragic’ according to the CIA’s own history. (Weiner p38-45)

An Albanian operation was a similar fiasco, penetrated from the start all along the chain of people, and with Angleton discussing it with Philby who tipped off Moscow. Hundreds of Albanians were caught and killed.]

Woe to the mother, in her close of day,
Woe to her desolate heart, and temples gray,
When she shall hear
Her loved one's story whispered in her ear!
"Woe, woe!" will be the cry--
No quiet murmur like the tremulous wail
Of the lone bird, the querulous nightingale --
But shrieks that fly
Piercing, and wild, and loud, shall mourn the tale;
And she will beat her breast, and rend her hair,
Scattering the silver locks that Time hath left her there.

Oh! when the pride of Græcia's noblest race
Wanders, as now, in darkness and disgrace,
When Reason's day
Sets rayless -- joyless -- quenched in cold decay,
Better to die, and sleep
The never-waking sleep, than linger on,
And dare to live, when the soul's life is gone:
But thou shalt weep,
Thou wretched father, for thy dearest son,
Thy best beloved, by inward Furies torn,
The deepest, bitterest curse thine ancient house hath borne!

Ajax, Sophocles

1949: Kim Philby comes to D.C

In September 1949 Angleton went to London to talk to SIS, and his old wartime friend Philby, about a division of responsibilities — SIS would help with training and helping the CIA build new systems, the CIA would provide money.

In 1949 Philby came to Washington as chief liaison between SIS and US intelligence working out of the British Embassy. Angleton and Philby would lunch at the famous Harvey’s Seafood Grill on Connecticut Avenue near the White House. In August 1950 Guy Burgess moved to Washington, stayed with Philby and joined the cocktail party scene. They had met at Cambridge in 1934 where Philby was treasurer of the Socialist Society.

In autumn 1950 Ted Kollek, a British Zionist and SIS agent during the war, who knew Angleton from Rome, visited Angleton at CIA headquarters. He spotted Philby in a corridor. He'd known Philby since the 1930s. He told Angleton that Philby may have been recruited as a Soviet agent. There is no evidence that Angleton took this seriously. (Other books suggest JA did suspect Philby.)

The Soviet bomb (1949), the surprise attack on Korea (1950)

[In September 1949, a US plane detected radioactivity in the atmosphere. As the results were being analysed the CIA told the White House that the Soviets could not produce an atomic weapon for at least four years. Three days later Truman announced Stalin had done it. On 29/9 the CIA’s chief of scientific intelligence reported the section’s work had been an ‘almost total failure’. The Pentagon told the CIA to get agents into the Red Army to steal military plans. Helms later said this idea was as feasible as ‘placing resident spies on the planet Mars’.

In June 1950 North Korea invaded South Korea. The CIA did not warn Truman. Why not, asked Truman. Hillenkoetter told Congress:

You can’t predict the timing.

Truman had asked Walter Bedell Smith (BS) to replace Hillenkoetter but he was ill and declined. When news of the Korean invasion came he was in Walter Reed hospital. Truman begged, BS accepted.

BS told the five senators who confirmed him, ‘I expect the worst and I am sure I won’t be disappointed.’ At his first staff meeting he told those assembled, ‘It’ll be even more interesting to see how many of you are here a few months from now.’ (Cf. references to BS in my Alanbrooke blog.)

He explored Wisner’s sprawling, bloated, failing OPC and was enraged. In his first week he learned Wisner actually reported to the Secretaries of State and Defense (not the director of CIA), hit the roof, and told Wisner he now reported to him.

He persuaded Sherman Kent, who had returned to Yale, to come back and take over analysis. Kent created a system for Intelligence Estimates (‘estimating is what you do when you do not know’).

In October 1950 Truman went to Wake Island in the Pacific. He wanted to know: will China attack? MacArthur was pushing his troops into North Korea. He insisted China would not attack. The CIA had almost nothing in China and was getting ripped off and duped in Korea and by Chiang Kai-shek. It had 400 analysts working on daily bulletins for Truman but 90% of their reporting was rewritten State Department files. The CIA repeatedly said that it saw ‘no convincing signs’ of a Chinese attack. There were two alarms from the CIA Tokyo station: one of those warning China would attack (Bill Duggan, later chief of station in Taiwan) was threatened with arrest by MacArthur. The warnings were not relayed to Wake Island. As MacArthur’s forces approached the Yalu River, there was increasing chatter about Chinese forces. Even after 30/10 when American forces were attacked, the CIA insisted that a major intervention was unlikely. A few days later 300,000 Chinese nearly pushed the Americans into the sea.

The asset that might have saved the day had been subverted by successful Soviet espionage. America’s best intelligence came from signals intelligence. From 1945 until the end of 1949 they could decrypt Moscow cables. As Kim Il-sung was consulting with Stalin and Mao, the invaluable intercepts suddenly stopped. William Weisband, a Ukrainian immigrant, was recruited by the Soviets in the 1930s, had penetrated the code-breaking operation. BS realised something terrible had happened and alerted the White House. A consequence was the creation of the National Security Agency. Fifty years later the NSA called the Weisband case ‘perhaps the most significant intelligence loss in US history’.

{Weisband warned the NKVD that the VENONA project was on the verge of success. Weisband escaped with minimal jail time because the US didn’t want the exposure of a trial. VENONA was a project of the US Army’s Signal Intelligence Service. They started collecting Soviet messages in 1943 and gradually decrypted many. Some messages revealed penetration of the Manhattan Project (e.g Fuchs), some provided clues about American spies (e.g Harry Dexter White, #2 in the Treasury) some provided clues about Soviet moles such as Maclean. Philby was briefed on VENONA and warned that ‘Homer’ (Maclean) might be exposed, helping him escape, cf. below.}

In December 1950 Truman declared a national emergency and asked Eisenhower to come out of retirement.

On 4 January 1951 Bedell Smith brought in Alan Dulles from Sullivan & Cromwell as Deputy Director of Plans. The title was a front, his real job was chief of covert operations (Weiner). His first job was to get a grip of OPC and Wisner. BS and Dulles did not get along. BS expected orders to be obeyed. Dulles was a lawyer who heard an order and found a way to ‘weasel’, as an observer put it. BS’s deputy resigned, fed up of the shambles. BS appointed Dulles deputy director and made Wisner chief of covert operations. {Why didn’t he feel able to remove Wisner if so angry with him?}

Dulles and Wisner then proposed a budget for ~$600 million, an elevenfold increase from 1948, with more than 400M for Wisner’s covert operations. BS was furious and worried the ‘operational tail will wag the intelligence dog’. He also started worrying that Dulles and Wisner were keeping him in the dark. He ordered them to keep proper records of their covert operations. They did not. During the Korea War, the CIA repeated the mistake from Ukraine and Albania, sending thousands of Koreans and Chinese to their deaths. Reports were swamped by false information by conmen. Operations were thoroughly penetrated. A State Department official told the assistant secretary of state for the Far East, Dean Rusk, that it was so bad as to amount to ‘malfeasance in office’.

Dulles’ attitude was that you have to ‘have a few martyrs’. There were similar disasters in East Germany and Poland.

The CIA also set up a secret prison complex in the Panama Canal Zone to interrogate suspected double agents. There were early experiments in the use of drugs for interrogation and mind control (see below).

In 1952 BS merged OPC and OSO into a single service known as the Directorate of Plans led by Wisner. Angleton thought BS had been hoodwinked by Wisner and the CIA should focus on tighter security, intelligence collection, and understanding Soviet operations.

BS tried to shut down a number of operations before he left. Wisner successfully dragged his feet until the election knowing BS would probably be off. {A classic bureaucratic tactic — delay is more often a winner than ‘no I disagree’.}

After Eisenhower became President, he appointed John Foster Dulles as Secretary of State, shifted Bedell Smith to Under Secretary of State, and made Alan Dulles director of CIA. A week after Dulles took over, Stalin died 5 March 1953.]

1950 McCarthy’s campaign: ‘red scare’, ‘lavender scare’

In 1950 senator McCarthy launched his campaign against Communist sympathisers and agents working for the US government. This quickly led to suspicion of homosexuals, partly because of blackmail risk. {It's fashionable now to treat McCarthy as an absurd nutter but there was widespread penetration of the US government by Soviet intelligence.}

When McCarthy was attacked for a lack of specificity, McCarthy replied publicly that one known homosexual, who spent his time ‘hanging around the men’s room in Lafayette Park’, had been dismissed from the State Department only to be immediately hired by the CIA. This man was Carmel Offie. Offie referred to his bed as ‘the playing fields of Eton’. He had been the secretary to and lover of William Bullitt, the US Ambassador in Moscow. In 1943 he was arrested for propositioning a policeman in a park near the White House. Wisner hired him for OPC. Angleton referred to him as a ‘master intriguer’, a ‘superb bureaucratic infighter’, with a ‘criminal mentality’ and great at wrecking careers.

When McCarthy named Offie, the head of the CIA, Hillenkoetter, ordered Wísner to fire Offie. Wisner put him on leave instead. Angleton offered Offie a job in OSO. Given Angleton hated him, Offie asked Angleton - why? ‘That's just the reason, no one would ever suspect.’ Offie said No. He was moved to Jay Lovestone’s union operation. (Angleton said he wanted to use Offie ‘in homo circles in Europe’.)

Angleton was friends with Jay Lovestone, a former Communist turned anti-Communist, executive director of the Free Trade Union Confederation. Angleton funded him and influenced what unions said about US foreign policy. Angleton’s friend Cord Meyer ran the CIA’s International Organizations division and also helped coordinate unions, media, Hollywood. Meyer lived near Hickory Hill where Bobby Kennedy lived. Lots of the kids played together. Peter Janney was one of these kids — his father worked for the CIA and Peter later wrote a book claiming the CIA killed JFK’s mistress Mary Meyer because she’d discovered CIA involvement in the assassination of JFK (below).

1951: Burgess and Maclean skip to Moscow, tipped off by Philby

In 1951, Donald Maclean, a top official in the British Embassy, had come under suspicion of being a Soviet spy because of deciphered messages sent to the Soviets during the war and decrypted (part of operation VENONA). British officials summoned Maclean for questioning. He disappeared. Burgess had picked up Maclean in a rented car, and the two had gone to France then on to Russia. Burgess had not been suspected.

Naturally in London and Washington, it was asked: who had tipped them off? Suspicions focused on Philby. Philby had known about the codebreakers efforts to identify the Soviet agent known as ‘Homer’ and had shared his house with Burgess. Bill Harvey and Win Scott concluded Philby was a mole (partly because of Philby’s knowledge of the disastrous Albanian operations), Angleton said no. Bedell Smith told the British that the CIA would have no contact with SIS until Philby was removed from his position in Washington. Philby was recalled. He had in fact tipped off Maclean but hadn’t expected Burgess to skip too.

LSD experiments: ARTICHOKE, BLUEBIRD, MKULTRA

After watching show trials and zombie like defendants confessing to crimes, the term brainwashing became widespread. The CIA’s Office of Scientific Intelligence created operation BLUEBIRD. The goals: prevent unauthorised extraction of information; control people through special interrogation, including hypnosis, and drugs; memory enhancement; prevent hostile control of agency personnel.

After the Korean War started BLUEBIRD grew rapidly. In August 1952, BLUEBIRD was renamed ARTICHOKE and responsibility was given to the Technical Services Division (TSD) which supported CIA clandestine activities. TSD scientists were intrigued by the potential of LSD-25. The agency turned to an old friend of Angleton, a famous narcotics agent, George Hunter White, who had arrested singer Billie Holiday. In 1953 ARTICHOKE morphed into MKULTRA.

On the 28th of November 1953, Frank Olson dove out of a window in a Manhattan hotel room. The room was run by the TSD. Olson was a US army scientist. He had been given LSD days earlier to see if it would make him tell the truth about bio-weapon research. It was classed as suicide and covered up.

The LSD/MKULTRA details didn’t emerge until MKULTRA became known during the Church investigations (below). Many documents were destroyed.

‘Solarium’, Dulles expands covert action, the Doolittle Report, Angleton made chief of Counterintelligence

[Eisenhower complained after Stalin’s death that ‘all the so-called experts have been yapping about what would happen when Stalin dies and what we as a nation should do about it’ but now he’s dead ‘we have no plan’ and ‘we are not even sure what difference his death makes’.

Eisenhower’s plan was to rely on nuclear weapons and covert action rather than a huge conventional buildup he feared might bankrupt America. He revved up the NSC, which Truman had little time for, and Dulles would come once a week to the Cabinet room to sit with his brother, the Joint Chiefs et al.

{The National Security Adviser role hadn’t been part of the 1947 Act — Eisenhower created it and made Cutler the first NSA. Eisenhower created the Planning Board and the Operations Coordinating Board (OCB). I used this approach in July 2019 when I asked the Cabinet Secretary (on my first day in No10) to create two groups, XS (‘strategy’) and XO (‘operations’), for planning and executing Brexit negotiations. We pasted the same approach to the covid taskforce after the collapse of the system in 2020.}

In 1953 the CIA had another duff prediction — that the Soviets would not launch an ICBM before 1969. In summer 1953 the Soviets crushed an uprising in East Germany.

Over summer, Eisenhower ran a deeply classified project, ‘Solarium’ (named for the White House Solarium, but it was actually run at the Army War College), to explore basic strategy. Different teams worked on different approaches.

At the end Eisenhower aligned mostly with Kennan’s containment strategy though with a large nuclear buildup and continuation of covert operations. He rejected the aggressive ‘rollback’ strategy as he feared it would spark nuclear war:

You can’t have this kind of war. There just aren’t enough bulldozers to scrape the bodies off the streets.

The approach was codified in NSC 162/2.

In autumn 1953, when Dulles briefed Eisenhower on the recent Soviet atomic test, Eisenhower wondered whether he should launch a preemptive attack on Moscow: it looks as though ‘the hour of decision were at hand’, America had to defend a way of life but in doing so risked ‘our transformation into a garrison state’, and ‘the whole thing was a paradox’ (NSC minutes). He then noted the Joint Chiefs’ view:

We should do what was necessary even if the result was to change the American way of life. We could lick the whole world … if we were willing to adopt the system of Adolf Hitler.

Dulles kept in regular touch with the main media organisations: he briefed stories, requested stories pulled, hired journalists to work for the CIA etc. Many journalists had worked for Government communications during the war.

The CIA had grown far too fast with bad hiring. It was suffering from a constant string of HR problems — suicides, alcoholism, resignations of the talented, all the usual problems of big organisations compounded by bad management. Weiner: Dulles suppressed reports and the problems continued.]

Under Dulles covert action expanded.

In Iran 1953, a joint CIA-SIS operation overthrew Mohammed Mossadegh, Iran’s ruler, using propaganda and paramilitary forces. Bedell Smith had vetoed the idea. [But Weiner implies the opposite. See bottom of this section.]
In Guatemala the government tried to nationalise property of the United Fruit Company. In 1954 Dulles launched an operation to replace the government with a friendly military regime and exiled Arbenz, seen as a Communist in DC. {Gore Vidal wrote his first novel about this. One of the Watergate burglars, Howard Hunt, played a bit part.}
[Weiner says (p106) that when McCarthy told Dulles that he would pursue CIA penetration by the Soviets, Dulles organised a covert operation to bug McCarthy and told JA to feed McCarthy disinformation to discredit him when he made it public.]

[In May 1954 Eisenhower received a 6 page letter from Jim Kellis, an OSS veteran who had helped set up the CIA. It warned that the CIA was ‘rotten’ and lying in DC about its successes and sources. Dulles was ‘ruthless, ambitious and utterly incompetent’. ‘Drastic action’ was needed. Eisenhower decided to look into it secretly…]

Eisenhower appointed a committee under General James Doolittle, who had worked on Solarium, and a businessman friend [who had provided planes for the Guatemala coup], to conduct a review of CIA operations. [BS told Doolittle that Dulles was ‘too emotional’ for the role.]

Angleton told Doolittle’s committee that the current structure led to confusion, duplication, and waste. The CIA needed a staff dedicated to counterintelligence, understanding the KGB, and to combat the severe penetration of US government including the CIA. The NSA’s VENONA program, deciphering Soviet communications, suggested widespread KGB penetration of American society. Dulles agreed with Angleton. {A CIA historian says that Angleton was read into VENONA in 1951, while the story in Morley suggests Philby was briefed on it in 1950. Is this right, it seems pretty odd but not impossible that an SIS officer would be briefed before of Angleton?!}

[In October 1954 Doolittle spoke to Eisenhower. His report was bad. And he warned the relationship between the Dulles brothers was dangerous — ‘it leads to protection of one by the other or influence of one by the other’. Wisner’s operation was full of duffers and should be cut to fewer better people. And it stated baldly that America faced ‘an implacable enemy’, hitherto normal rules of conduct would have to be abandoned to subvert and destroy its enemies, and the American people should be told that a ‘fundamentally repugnant philosophy’ was necessary. Dulles buried the Doolittle report too — not even Wisner saw it — and it stayed classified until 2001. Weiner doesn’t record what Eisenhower thought of it. But Eisenhower then set up another secret review by James Killian, president of MIT. It said that the CIA had produced ‘little significant information’ and America should make a big investment in science and technology including spy planes and satellites. Bissell was put in charge; he and Helms developed a bitter rivalry.

A rare apparent success was a joint SIS/CIA operation to dig a tunnel under Berlin, copying a trick Britain had pulled under Vienna, to tap into cables carrying Soviet communications — but it had been blown from the start by George Blake, a Soviet mole in British intelligence. Weiner says Blake was so valuable the Soviets let the operation run for a year before exposing it and it remains unclear how much of the information was disinformation.]

In December 1954, Angleton became chief of the new Counterintelligence Staff and started building his empire, including access to all files including personnel files and security files. Nobody else had this level of access. {This isn’t explained in Weiner.}

Angleton developed a relationship with Hoover and became friends with the FBI liaison Sam Papich. He was described as Bureau Source 100 in FBI files.

Angleton’s new empire comprised four offices:

An office to liaise with FBI (run by Jane Roman).
An office for research (run by Ray Rocca).
Special Investigations Group (SIG) to perform investigation and analysis, including monitoring defectors (run by Birch O’Neal).
Special Projects for sensitive operations such as intercepting US mail, Lovestone’s operation, deals with Israelis etc (run by Stephen Millett). Angleton’s team took over the operation (LINGUAL) in 1955 (began 1953) and rented a room at LaGuardia airport to intercept all mail to and from the Soviet Union. LINGUAL became joint with the FBI and branched out into investigating groups such as the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC, most famous member, Lee Harvey Oswald). Hoover also developed COINTELPRO from 1956 to investigate possible Soviet influence including the Communist Party, civil rights leaders including Martin Luther King, the Black Panthers etc. LINGUAL fed intelligence to COINTELPRO.

Within 5 years Angleton’s empire consisted of 171 staff (75 clerical).

Angleton often visited Israel and developed special relationships with Mossad. He had an arrangement with Dulles whereby he was also the Israel desk officer for CIA and he controlled the CIA station in Tel Aviv. He usually stayed in Ramat Gan north of Tel Aviv, or the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. He became increasingly pro-Zionist.

In 1956 a copy of Krushchev’s ‘secret speech’ on Stalin’s crimes arrived in Poland. It was taken to the Israeli embassy in Warsaw, then sent to Mossad which passed it on to Angleton who gave it to Dulles. In April 1956 versions were published globally (including a version Angleton doctored to include passages about China and India Krushchev had said at different times).

In 1967 Angleton’s contacts helped the CIA accurately predict that Israel would launch a surprise attack and quickly defeat its enemies. This strengthened Helms’ position viz LBJ therefore also strengthened Angleton’s with Helms. Angleton may have colluded in Israel’s theft of nuclear materials from the US to help their nuclear program.

[The Iran coup…

Churchill was in the Admiralty before WW1 when the Navy converted from coal to oil. He pushed for Britain to buy 51% of the new Anglo-Persian Oil company. In WW2 British and Soviet troops occupied Iran. At the end of the war Iran had the largest known reserves and Abadan was the biggest refinery on earth. There were rows about the split of oil revenues. SIS warned UK policy was courting disaster. In 1951 Mossadeq became Iran’s PM. By June British warships were off the coast. In September 1951 Britain pushed a boycott. Churchill then returned as PM. Truman opposed a British invasion. Churchill said the price of British support in Korea was American support for Britain in Iran.

In autumn 1952, as Truman was heading for the exit, SIS talked to BS and Wisner about a coup in Iran. The plan developed. In February 1953, the new ‘C’, John Sinclair, met Dulles. Plans developed further. On 4 March 1953 there was a NSC meeting. Dulles laid out the danger of Iran going Communist and dominoes falling. Rationing would have to be introduced. Eisenhower preferred to offer Mossadeq a loan rather than overthrow him. The CIA and SIS kept pushing. Mossadeq made some tactical errors in warning of a Soviet invasion. Eisenhower gave a speech, The Chance for Peace, in which he stressed the right of peoples to form their own governments. The CIA chief in Tehran warned a coup would be a historic error and link America to the colonial tradition. Dulles removed him. An Islamic terrorist gang, the Warriors of Islam, was hired for false flag attacks posing as Communists. At a crucial moment Eden was undergoing surgery in Boston while Churchill had a major stroke which was covered up even from the CIA.

According to Weiner the coup leaked and went wrong fast, Dulles was on holiday falsely confident. The Shah fled. Wisner was in despair and thought the coup was done for. In a moment that would be hard to get past movie scriptwriters, Dulles bumped into the Shah in the lobby of the Excelsior Hotel in Rome and said, ‘After you, Your Majesty’. In the chaos sparked by the attempted coup and counter-revolution, spontaneous crowds formed amid rent-a-crowds. Among the crowd was Ayatollah Khomeini. With some luck, adaptation and errors by Mossadeq the coup came off for the CIA/SIS. The Shah returned, rigged the elections, imposed martial law, and got the CIA to help build a new intelligence agency. It was seen as a triumph for the CIA and Dulles in Washington.]

1956: Hungary and Suez

[Nasser had nationalised the Suez Canal Company. London talked to DC about assassination. Ike was opposed. SIS and CIA discussed options. Wisner flew to London. His SIS dinner date didn’t show; he was in Paris working on the operation to remove Nasser. Some evidence popped up of such a plan but Dulles and others didn’t believe it. The Israelis lied to Angleton who passed on their lies to Dulles. The CIA got another shock.

In October 1956 Eisenhower was more interested in Hungary where protests had begun. The NSC told Wisner (in London) to support the protesters. The Soviets crushed it. Wisner had spent a fortune supposedly preparing for such a moment. Nothing happened, there was nothing there. In November Dulles told Eisenhower that ‘armed force could not be used’ and 80% of the Hungarian army had defected to the rebels. Radio Free Europe encouraged the Hungarian citizens to fight. The Soviets killed tens of thousands and crushed the uprising. The CIA got another shock.

In December 1956 Eisenhower got another secret report into the CIA. After Doolittle’s report Eisenhower created (1/56) a Board to report regularly on CIA operations. The December report by David Bruce has never been declassified. A 1961 report referred to its findings and Weiner got hold of that. It was highly critical. It also pointed out that having political warfare, including coups, carried out without proper accountability inside the CIA, or from the CIA to State and the White House, undermined US foreign policy and undermined support for the US abroad.

Eisenhower would not remove Dulles and his attempts to change the CIA over the next few years largely failed.

Eisenhower used the CIA to build relations with Saudi Arabia and Jordan. The king of Jordan got cash from the CIA for 20 years. Eisenhower said he wanted to encourage a ‘holy war’ aspect whereby those two countries plus Lebanon and Iraq would resist Soviet expansion.

In 1957 Eisenhower ordered a coup in Indonesia. This was another operation based on bad analysis, bad planning, and CIA lies. It was another disaster. Eisenhower lied about US involvement. Then America officially switched sides and backed Sukarno.

Frank Wisner returned from Asia broken. He had a psychotic collapse and was removed from covert operations. He was held in a vice and electrocuted for 6 months. Then, calmer(!), he was sent to be station chief in London. {Later he fell apart again and in 1965 shot himself with a shotgun.}

Weiner reports that at one point after warnings from Dulles about Moscow, Eisenhower said to Dulles, ‘Allen, are you trying to scare me into starting a war?’

At the end of 1958 yet another secret review of the CIA (led by Robert Lovett) also criticised the way the CIA was running covert operations globally, undermining foreign policy without clear lines of responsibility, and advised an overhaul of the CIA. Dulles fended off the attack again and persuaded Eisenhower that he would replace Wisner and fix the problems.]

{Apparently no copy of this report can now be found, Schlesinger found a copy in RFK’s papers but it is now no longer there and all others have vanished.}

1959: Popov busted in Moscow

In October 1959 the CIA link to its most valuable Russian agent, Pyotr Popov (military officer), was busted in Moscow. Popov was then arrested and executed.

Angleton suspected a mole in the CIA, rather than sloppy tradecraft in Moscow, and this suspicion evolved to an all-consuming obsession. The CIA’s historian, David Robarge, said that Angleton’s ‘fixation on the mole’ started after Popov’s arrest.

1959: Lee Harvey Oswald enters the stage

In November 1959 it was reported that a former marine from Texas, Lee Harvey Oswald (who had access to classified information), had shown up at the US Embassy in Moscow to renounce his citizenship.

Immediately this was known to Jane Roman. A CIA file was opened on Oswald and controlled by Elizabeth Egerter, one of Angleton’s staff in SIG. Angleton controlled it from 1959-63. He concealed this from multiple later investigations including the Warren Commission. Oswald was added to a list of ~300 people who had all their international mail opened. His CIA file was not a regular ‘201’ file but an Office of Security file (accessible only to that office and people specifically cleared). Even now the full story of this file is not public and some files remain closed.

From May-November 1960, Angleton suffered something of a health breakdown and took months off work returning just before the election. JFK and Angleton were almost the same age and knew each socially, sometimes with Cord and Mary Meyer.

In 1961 Dino Brugioni briefed him on U2 photos of the Israeli nuclear facility at Dimona. Brugioni later said:

He was a real funny guy. I’d meet with him, brief him, he’d ask a few questions, you’d leave — and never know what he’s holding. Sometimes he’d have his office real dark and have a light only on you. He was a real spook.

1960: Beginning of operations against Castro, Gary Powers, hiring mafia hitmen

[In 1960 intellectuals such as Capote, Sartre and Normal Mailer started supporting the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. But key figures were determined to remove Castro.

Richard Bissell had been in charge of the U2 program, built by Lockheed’s famous Skunk Works, and Area 51 where it was tested. In January 1959 he replaced Wisner as Deputy Director for Plans, actually in charge of the clandestine service and covert operations. He and his deputy, Helms, disliked and distrusted each other. The same month Castro took power in Cuba. Initially many in the CIA wanted to support Castro, he visited DC and talked to the CIA(!), and it was another shock for DC to conclude that ‘with the coming of Castro, Communism had penetrated this hemisphere’ (Eisenhower Memoirs).

By Christmas 1959 Dulles and Bissell agreed on an operation to remove Castro. In March 1960 they presented to Eisenhower their plans for covert operations to build an opposition, kick off chaos and replace Castro without an invasion. Eisenhower approved but said that everybody ‘must be prepared to swear that he had not heard of it’ if it leaked: ‘our hand should not show in anything’. (Howard Hunt, the Watergate burglar who had worked on the Guatemala coup, was rehired for the task force run by Jake Esterline.)

After Krushchev visited Camp David in September 1959, there was an air of possible improvement in relations. Eisenhower feared a U2 flight would go wrong and undermine progress. He wanted to stop them. On the other hand, he wanted their intelligence to knock down the growing media stories about ‘the missile gap’ that JFK was exploiting in the campaign. (The CIA, Air Force, military companies, and politicians were pushing the ‘missile gap’ story around Washington for their own ends.) He repeatedly said ‘stop’ but each time was persuaded by Bissell to continue with ‘just one more’.

The CIA projected in 1960 to Eisenhower that the Soviets would have 500 ICBMs ready to strike by 1961. Strategic Air Command (SAC) used this to justify a secret first strike plan using over 3,000 nuclear warheads. In fact, Russia, only had four nuclear missiles, not 500 — the CIA was out by a factor of 100. {Weiner is wrong here — the estimate of 500 was from 1957, at the height of the Sputnik panic and before U2 intel updated estimates, not from 1960. The 1960 Estimate was that the Soviets had 10 and might have 50-200 over the next year. Further U2, CORONA, and Oleg Penkovsky intel improved estimates.}

Eisenhower also told Dulles that what he really wanted was espionage that could illuminate the intentions of Soviet leaders; U2 flights could not do this and, worse, they might give the Soviets ‘the idea that we are seriously preparing plans to knock out their installations’ with a sneak attack. Bissell was determined to avoid stopping the flights and even explored evading Presidential authority by having U2 missions rebadged as British. (Dulles later admitted that has been horrified to learn that the first U2 flight had passed directly over Moscow and Leningrad, which Bissell had never told him.)

Eisenhower reluctantly caved in to CIA pressure. On May day 1960, as Eisenhower had feared might happen, a U2 was shot down in Russia. The pilot, Gary Powers, was captured alive but America did not know this. Thinking he was dead, Eisenhower, the White House staff, and the CIA tried to lie their way out of the situation with a cover story that it was a NASA aircraft flying a civilian mission. The Soviets led the White House into a trap before revealing the pilot was alive. Eisenhower then had to choose between a) claiming he did not control the government and b) admitting the truth. Finally, Eisenhower — angry, depressed, ashamed — felt forced to come clean. He told his secretary, ‘I would like to resign.’ He admitted in retirement that the greatest regret of his presidency was ‘the lie we told about the U2’. The summit in Paris went ahead but was a flop given the circumstances.

That summer Bissell continued the planning to overthrow Castro. He set up bases, he recruited exiles. In mid-August, Bissell got Dulles’ approval to fix a mafia contract to kill Castro via Colonel Sheffield Edwards, the CIA’s chief of security.

{The CIA recruited an ex-FBI agent, Robert Maheu, to introduce them to Johnny Roselli, a member of the Chicago mafia. The pitch was made to Roselli at the Hilton Plaza, New York, on 15 September 1960. Roselli was told the ‘client’ was ‘international businessmen’ and US Government should not know about the plan. Roselli told Maheu that he would introduce him to ‘Sam Gold’, i.e Sam Giancana, a Chicago mafia boss. Giancana and other mafiosi had had their casinos in Cuba put out of business (cf. the plot of Godfather II) so were amenable to the idea of whacking Castro. Giancana requested poison pills and the CIA supplied them. Giancana later would share a girlfriend, Phyllis MacGuire, with JFK. Giancana was later shot dead in his home in 1975 just before he was due to give evidence to the Church Committee about his dealings with the CIA. His murder remains unsolved. Roselli gave evidence to the Church Committee but was also murdered after being recalled for further questions. His murder remains unsolved. Various people later said that Roselli told them that the assassination plot against Castro was turned by Castro into a deal with the mafia to whack JFK. This is what LBJ told various people he’d concluded. In 1970 the CIA’s then director of security wrote a memo for the director describing the 1960 decision and subsequent contacts with the mafia in pursuit of Castro’s assassination, cf. here for PDF. According to this memo, in 1962 Giancana asked Maheu to bug Phyllis MacGuire who he suspected of having an affair with a comedian. Maheu and his assistant were arrested. But when Bobby Kennedy was briefed on the arrest and prosecution in February 1962, he ordered the DoJ to drop it. Most of this backstory is not explained in either book. Discussions with Roselli and other mafia were taken over in early 1962 by Bill Harvey, cf. below.}

Bissell ran a second parallel assassination planning operation involving recruiting a Cuban sniper.

On 18 August 1960, Dulles discussed the Cuba task force with Eisenhower and asked for further money. Eisenhower approved on condition that the Joint Chiefs, Defense, State and CIA ‘think we have a good chance of being successful’.

Also in 1960 Eisenhower himself personally authorised the assassination of the new leader of the Congo, Lumumba. A local CIA chief, apparently ashamed at the order, decided not to try to poison Lumumba and buried the materials he’d been given by the CIA. But soon after the CIA funded Mobutu who killed Lumumba and ruled for decades in alliance with the CIA.

CIA efforts to drop arms to rebels in Cuba in Q3 1960 were another fiasco. Anti-Castro forces were riddled with Castro spies. The 500 men being trained in Guatemala were obviously far too few. Bissell and Esterline knew in November that their plans were unworkable but they did not tell their bosses. The plans continued with typical bureaucratic momentum.

In November JFK beat Nixon, with help from Mayor Daley. Nixon wrongly (according to Weiner) thought Dulles had helped JFK in the election.

JFK immediately announced he would keep Dulles and Hoover. Weiner says this is because Joe Kennedy knew that both had blackmail material on himself (including an affair with a suspected Nazi spy in WW2).

JFK met Dulles and Bissell in Palm Beach (Florida) on 18 November. Esterline had told Bissell in writing 3 days earlier that the planned operations could not work and Castro could not be overthrown without an American force joining an invasion. But they did not tell JFK this. They also did not brief him on other operations.

After the U2 disaster, Eisenhower had set up a Joint Study Group on the CIA. It reported on 15 December 1960. It was another litany of failure. The CIA had still made no serious effort to deal with a Soviet surprise attack, coordination of intelligence remained bad, and the CIA had not built necessary capabilities.

On 5 January 1961 the President’s Board of Consultants on Foreign Intelligence Activities also criticised the CIA. It urged the president to consider the complete separation of the Director of Central Intelligence from the CIA. It said that the current director could not run the agency while carrying out his other duties to coordinate intelligence, including the NSA and other agencies and the military. Pushing back hard, Dulles said that he’d made huge improvements and he totally rejected the idea of the separation of roles. He told Eisenhower he was responsible under the law for intelligence coordination and could not delegate that responsibility or else American intelligence would be ‘a body floating in thin air’.

Weiner writes that in response to this, Eisenhower ‘exploded in anger and frustration’ and said.

The structure of our intelligence organisation is faulty. I have suffered an eight year defeat on this. [He would leave to his successor] a legacy of ashes.

NB. When I did a search on this quote to seek a wider description of the discussion, I immediately found an article in Studies in Intelligence (Vol 51, No3, 2007) which claims Weiner, a Pulitzer winner, invented this dialogue! I have not tracked down the original source documents myself but according to this article (which looks credible), the minutes show that Dulles’s ‘floating in thin air’ comment was made on 12/1 while Eisenhower’s comment on a defeat and ‘legacy of ashes’ was on 5/1 and was made in the context of frustration about the multiple military service’s intelligence services, not the CIA’s failures! Here is a screenshot of the article:

The article is generally an interesting review of Weiner and convincingly details some errors in the book.

In his farewell address (17/1/61), Eisenhower famously warned of the dangers of ‘the military-industrial complex’:

American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions…
This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence — economic, political, even spiritual — is felt in every city, every state house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together…
The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.
Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.
It is the task of statesmanship to mold, to balance, and to integrate these and other forces, new and old, within the principles of our democratic system-ever aiming toward the supreme goals of our free society.

{Gore Vidal would often praise this speech and point out how nobody, on left or right, quoted the bit about the dangers of federal cash for universities and true scholarship.}

On 19 January 1961 Eisenhower and JFK met in the White House. Eisenhower said that America should support guerrilla operations in Cuba even if this support involved the United States publicly because ‘we cannot let the present government go on’.

JFK took office with plans for operations against Castro well-advanced, those plans were known to be doomed by those responsible for them, and JFK was not properly briefed in the transition.]

1961: JFK persuaded to approve the Bay of Pigs

[In March 1961 Bissell presented options to JFK who asked for changes. Bissell came up with the Bay of Pigs as a landing zone. The beaches were a nightmare of swampland. The forces would be greatly overmatched. None of the critical questions were dug into properly. The mafia tried to poison Castro’s ice cream. It failed: the restaurant worker in Havana shoved the poison in a freezer and left it.

In April there were further meetings with Bissell and Dulles. On 9 April Esterline told Bissell the operation had to be cancelled. Bissell said it was too late to stop, it was set to start in a week. Esterline threatened to resign, Bissell questioned his patriotism. To avoid disaster Esterline said you ‘must take out all of Castro’s air force’. Bissell promised to persuade JFK to do it but in fact he went along with JFK’s orders for a ‘quiet’ coup.

On 15 April US bombers (disguised as part of the Cuban resistance) hit some of Castro’s air force and Bissell told Adlai Stevenson to tell the UN that it was a renegade anti-Castro Cuban! (In the same week Lee Kuan Yew’s police busted a CIA operation in Singapore, after which the station chief tried to bribe LKY to keep the matter secret.)

I won’t go into the details. The operation was a total debacle. Multiple leaks from the Cuban exile network had alerted the KGB and Cubans. The CIA had also lied to the Pentagon which exacerbated the chaos. In the middle of the debacle the CIA begged the White House to authorise airstrikes. JFK refused thinking rightly he’d been promised a quiet coup. The force was killed, captured, and scattered. Over 1,000 Cubans were slaughtered.

On 19 April as the operation disintegrated, Bobby Kennedy wrote a note to his brother:

If we don’t want Russia to set up missile bases in Cuba, we had better decide now what we are willing to do to stop it.

The Cubans paraded captured rebels on TV and denounced US imperialism to the world while appearing the plucky victors. It was a disaster for America.

Morley says (p97) that Angleton blamed it on ‘penetration’ and leaks — the NYT had run a story before the invasion and ‘everybody and his mother down in Miami knew something was going on’. But my impression is that the post-mortems concluded that while the leaks were obviously bad, the core problem was that the operation was totally misconceived and would not have worked even if there’s been no leaks.

{By April there was a combination of a) bureaucratic momentum inside the CIA task force with Bissell prepared to roll the dice on an operation he knew was badly conceived, b) Dulles was prepared to let it roll and didn’t have a system to surface likely disaster, and C) there was no White House system to force the sort of rigorous thinking needed to spot and stop a thoroughly misconceived operation. JFK had dismantled or ignored much of the machinery Eisenhower had created. It’s hard to imagine Eisenhower approving such a dud amphibious landing. Weiner doesn’t mention it but Morley says the Joint Chiefs approved the CIA plan. Helms voiced scepticism internally and said it couldn’t be done without a US invasion but he did not prevail.}

Aftermath: White House doubled down on removing Castro

[Dulles had gone abroad as part of a cover story before the operation started.

JFK thought Dulles had reassured him face-to-face that the coup would succeed and had referred to his promise to Eisenhower that the Guatemalan operation would succeed. (In fact he’d told Eisenhower the chances in Guatemala were one in five at best.) When Dulles returned to Washington, Bobby Kennedy said later that ‘he looked like living death … and was always putting his head in his hands’.

JFK cursed:

I’ve got to do something about those CIA bastards. How could I have been so stupid? [I will] splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it into the wind. {NB. this is often quoted. But looking at some footnotes it seems the source is a 1966 NYT article, photo here. If anybody knows a better source please add in comments. It’s a punchy quote but anonymously sourced after JFK was dead, so unless there’s a better source we can’t be sure he said it. Though he probably did think something like this.}

On 22 April JFK told General Maxwell Taylor to work with Dulles, Bobby et al on a board of inquiry. Dulles told the board that ‘I don’t think the CIA should run paramilitary operations’. But instead of ‘destroying everything and starting all over’, we should move some things out of the CIA and ‘pull the thing together and make it more effective’, figure out a new way to handle paramilitary operations, but it won’t be easy as ‘it’s very difficult to keep things secret’. Bedell Smith, dying and dead 3 months later, told the board that:

when you are at … cold war if you like, you must have an amoral agency which can operate secretly… I think that so much publicity has been given to CIA that the covert work might have to be put under another roof… It’s time to take the bucket of slop and put another cover on it.

The report by the CIA’s inspector general concluded the CIA had failed to keep Eisenhower and JFK accurately informed about the operation. It was so bad that 19/20 copies were recalled and destroyed with the single copy put in a safe for 40 years.

JFK initially thought about closing the CIA. Then he put his brother in charge of covert operations. Weiner writes that Eisenhower undertook 170 major covert operations in eight years, the Kennedys launched 163 in less than three. (True numbers?)]

{In August, JFK summoned Dulles and told him to resign:

Under a parliamentary system of government it is I who would be leaving office but under our system it is you who must go.

JFK allowed him to stay for the dedication ceremony of the new CIA HQ at Langley on 28 November 1961. Angleton and his ~200 staff occupied the southwest corner of the second floor, Angleton’s office was room 2C43.}

[The inscription in the HQ lobby says:

And ye shall know the truth and the truth will make you free.

JFK replaced Dulles with McCone, a Republican (and Catholic) businessman who had been chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission under Eisenhower and sat on the NSC. McCone left a unique daily record of his thoughts, many first declassified in 2003. Dulles never told McCone about the illegal mail opening program at the airport (he didn’t know until it became public years later). Nor did Dulles brief him on the assassination plots against Castro about which he would not learn for two years.

JFK reestablished some of Eisenhower structures.

He started attending the NSC.
He rebuilt the foreign intelligence board of advisers.
The Special Group was reconstituted to oversee covert operations with NSA McGeorge Bundy as chairman and the Joint Chiefs as members — but the CIA chose what to inform SIG about.
Bobby created (11/61) a separate cell (Special Group, Augmented), under General Lansdale, with much tighter circulation and security, specifically to kill Castro. On 19/1/62 Bobby told McCone that ‘the top priority in the United States government’ was the overthrow of Castro, ‘no time, money, effort, or manpower is to be spared’.

{Weiner says that McCone, head of CIA, did not know about the assassination plots against Castro for ‘almost two years’ (p181), then says (p182) that McCone was briefed by JFK on the new cell on 21/11/61, then says (p187) that Helms did NOT brief McCone on ZR-RIFLE, see below. So a) McCone was briefed on general planning to remove Castro but b) NOT specific assassination planning, involving the mafia etc.}

McCone told JFK that the CIA should not continue to be a ‘cloak and dagger outfit’ and stressed his role as assembling and coordinating ALL available intelligence for the President.]

Helms took over as deputy director for plans. Helms trusted Angleton and thought him invaluable. Helms would quote an anonymous comment from his X2 days:

No intelligence service can for very long be any better than its counterintelligence component.

According to Weiner, Helms thought Lansdale’s plans were bogus but Helms was ordered by Bobby to work on it.

Helms assembled a taskforce to report to Lansdale and Bobby.
Helms put Bill Harvey in charge of planning the assassination of Castro (ZR-RIFLE). Harvey looked for criminal assassins for the job including a hitman in Luxembourg and mafia contacts. Bobby was briefed on ZR-RIFLE on 7/5/62 and was angry about the mafia element but did NOT order it stopped, and Helms did NOT inform McCone. Weiner says he asked Helms directly, did JFK wants Castro dead and Helms replied, ‘There is nothing on paper, of course, but there is certainly no doubt in my mind that he did… [T]here is always the question of who comes next. If you kill someone else’s leaders, why shouldn’t they kill yours?’ (p187). {According to Bissell’s evidence to the Church inquiry in 1975, the specific White House orders for an assassination squad had come from Bundy and Walt Rostow. But NB. such a squad had already started work under Eisenhower and had already started talking to the mafia before JFK/Bobby gave any such orders, see above, CTRL+F Roselli.}
Project MONGOOSE, a joint CIA and Pentagon secret operation, grew out of the plans for covert action begun under Eisenhower (above) and continued after the Bay of Pigs.

{Different books use different references to Operation MONGOOSE and ZR-RIFLE for some of these operations. As you can see even looking at quite a high level it is tricky figuring out who knew what when about the different coup and assassination operations.}

In 1961 according to MI5’s Peter Wright, he discussed assassinating Castro with Bill Harvey and Angleton in Harvey’s Seafood Grill. ‘Would you hit him?’ asked Harvey. Wright claims he said that ‘We’d certainly have that capability’ but ‘We’re not in it anymore, we got out a couple of years ago after Suez’. He later said there was ‘a streak of lawlessness and ruthlessness about the American intelligence community which disturbed many in the senior echelons of British intelligence’.

{NB. Many do not trust Wright’s tales. Also, at some point in late 1961 or early 1962, JFK asked to meet Harvey after being told he was the CIA’s equivalent of ‘James Bond’. Lansdale, who took him to the White House, said later that Harvey had turned up with two guns which he handed over to the Secret Service; Harvey would deny this under oath.}

The Berlin Wall went up in August 1961.

On 6/11/61 the West German head of counterintelligence, Felfe, was arrested as a Soviet agent (see above). He had blown much of CIA’s operations and networks.

1961-2: Enter GOLYTSIN AND NOSENKO: defectors, double agents, moles?

{The Golitsyn/Nosenko tale is incredibly complex and remains unresolved. I only give some outlines here and will edit what I write as I explore more stuff.}

In 1959 Popov had been blown and arrested. This, it’s widely believed, was the event that got Angleton searching for a mole inside CIA.

In 1962, Oleg Penkovsky, a colonel in Russian military intelligence who was one of SIS’s most important spies, was arrested, put on trial and executed. This strengthened fears of moles.

Penkovsky on trial

In 1961 Anatoly Golitsyn, KGB ‘resident’ in Finland, told the CIA chief in Helsinki he wanted to defect. Angleton was notified and approved. This kicked off a puzzle that remains unresolved — was he a genuine defector or a double sent by the KGB to cause chaos?

Golitsyn provided some definitely useful and genuine information but, more importantly, clues about supposed moles. He exposed a Russian spy in Britain. He provided a lot of information about the KGB. He claimed the KGB had a mole inside the CIA called ‘Sasha’ whose name began with the letter ‘K’ and had been stationed in Germany after the war. This led quickly to a suspect.

Golitsyn warned that the KGB’s Department of Disinformation planned widespread operations to undermine western culture and polities. Golitsyn said that one of these deceptions was the idea of a Sino-Soviet split which was actually fake to trick the West. Angleton had seen successful deception operations including the British operation to trick the Nazis over D-Day. He was convinced of the danger. And Golitsyn warned that defectors would be planted to discredit him. Many in the CIA were suspicious of him, as is to be expected with a defector making a lot of big claims and asking to meet JFK (he did meet Bobby).

In summer 1962 another KGB officer, Nosenko, asked the US Embassy in Geneva for money to replenish funds he’d blown on a bender and offered information in return. Nosenko defected in February 1964 after he told the CIA that he had handled Lee Harvey Oswald’s file {Morley implies defection in 1962}. He was promised all sorts and was turned over to Peter Bagley in the Soviet Division. Bagley initially found Nosenko convincing, Angleton did not and was convinced that Nosenko was a plant to discredit Golitsyn who was genuine {Bagley later changed his mind}.

Golitsyn told Angleton (according to a memo in the CIA Records Search Tool):

He [Nosenko] is a provocateur, who is on a mission for the KGB. He was introduced to your agency as a double agent in Geneva in 1962. During all the time until now he has been fulfilling a KGB mission against your country.

CIA officers were divided.

Chief Soviet delegate Semyon Tsarapkin, center, and colleague Yuri Nosenko, right, at the Geneva Disarmament Conference in February 1964. A few days later, Nosenko disappeared and later defected to the U.S

Chief Soviet delegate Semyon Tsarapkin (centre) and colleague Yuri Nosenko (1927 - 2008, right) at the Geneva Disarmament Conference, February 1964. A few days later Nosenko, a Lieutenant Colonel in the KGB, disappeared and later defected to the US. (Photo by Central Press/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Cuban Crisis, October 1962

But for Vasily Arkhipov, you might not exist

Relations between JFK and the military were bad. Eisenhower had warned of the ‘military-industrial complex’ wielding ‘the disastrous rise of misplaced power’ (above). In summer 1962, a bestseller (Seven Days in May) described how a military coup against the President could work — a book JFK read and discussed with friends. Lemnitzer, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Curtis LeMay, who had firebombed Japan, were both known around DC as critical, even contemptuous, of JFK. In retirement LeMay described JFK and his staff as ‘cockroaches’.

Not reported in this book but I read elsewhere, JFK told a friend:

It could happen — but it won’t happen on my watch.

In early 1962 the Joint Chiefs prepared and proposed Operation NORTHWOODS to JFK. Kept secret for decades it is one of those rare documents that really does read like a ‘conspiracy theory’ from a movie. (It became public as part of the declassification of documents via the JFK Assassination Records Act of 1992.) In NORTHWOODS, the Pentagon proposed a number of ideas for covert action to justify an invasion of Cuba including terrorist attacks killing US citizens (e.g downing an airliner). JFK rejected NORTHWOODS. Bobby Kennedy preferred assassination of Castro (see above).

In October 1962 the Cuban Missile Crisis broke.

{I’ve told some of this history in my blogs (early 2022) on nuclear history.

On 21/8 Bobby Kennedy asked McCone if the CIA could stage a fake attack on the American base in Guantanamo as a pretext for invasion. McCone demurred. On 22/8 McCone warned JFK that the Soviets might put nuclear missiles in Cuba and advised JFK to raise a public alarm. According to Weiner very few agreed and a CIA review later concluded ‘he stood absolutely alone’. Later that day JFK asked the CIA to bug journalists to identify a leak (to the New York Times from a highly classified CIA estimate).

After a U2 flight on 28/8, the next day the CIA concluded there was a new SAM site. JFK didn’t want the media to know with elections two months away. On 11/9 a U2 was shot down over China. U2 flights over Cuba were cancelled. There was a 45 day ‘photo gap’ in U2 flights. Four days later Soviet ships started dropping off missiles in Cuba. On 4 October Bobby Kennedy ordered the CIA to send agents to Cuba to mine harbours and kidnap soldiers for interrogation. On 5 October McCone, returned from honeymoon, asked for a resumption of flights, Bundy objected, but flights shortly resumed. On 14/10 a U2 saw a new missile base, NPIC/CIA confirmed on 15/10 (helped by materials supplied by Penkovsky), Bundy delayed notifying the White House until 16/10 (McNamara was briefed at midnight 15/16). Helms briefed Bobby at 915 in the morning. Bobby looked out the window then said to Helms, ‘Shit, damn it all to hell and back’.

Initially there were many options considered:

Different variations of sabotage of the missile bases.
A blockade with/without a declaration of war.
Invasion. JFK was urged to invade Cuba by the Joint Chiefs who badly underestimated the strength of Soviet forces on Cuba.

He initially chose a blockade without invasion but the question immediately arose: what if the Soviet ships didn’t stop? When JFK and Bobby discussed it alone on 23/10, Bobby said to him (cf. the secret tapes):

There wasn’t any choice, I mean, you woulda had a — you woulda been impeached.

There were many important errors in advice JFK was given.

In an Estimate of 19/9, the CIA concluded that putting missiles on Cuba would be ‘incompatible with Soviet policy’. (McCone, away on honeymoon, dissented from France.)
The Joint Chiefs thought there were ~15k Soviet troops on Cuba; there were 42k.
LeMay told JFK that the Soviets would not fight if America invaded. The Joint Chiefs and the US national security apparatus generally did not realise until post-1991 that there were tactical nuclear weapons on Cuba and local commanders had authority to use them if attacked.
The Joint Chiefs and the US national security apparatus generally did not realise until post-1991 how close we came to a Soviet submarine firing nuclear missiles, saved by the heroism and good sense of Vasily Arkhipov, on board the submarine, who prevented it.
The Joint Chiefs and the US national security apparatus generally did not realise until post-1991 that Castro urged Moscow to escalate throughout the crisis despite assuming he and all Cuba would be destroyed, completely contrary to mainstream western ideas about ‘rationality’.
The Joint Chiefs predicted a quick victory and the Soviets backing down. It’s clear an invasion is likely to have ignited at least limited nuclear exchange and given war plans at the time probably a general exchange.
The world was extremely lucky JFK had read over the summer Tuchman’s account of the outbreak of World War I and took a big political risk to find a diplomatic solution and make a secret deal.

In my experience few of those ‘in the room’ to discuss Ukraine and escalation are aware of basic facts about the worst nuclear crisis so far.}

One of those who analysed the U2 pictures and produced briefing for JFK on imagery of Cuban installations was Dino Brugioni who was the technical head of the CIA’s most classified photo lab {cf. below on Dino’a later absolutely shocking, in the true sense of the term, recollections about the coverups of the assassination}.

As the arguments played out, General Curtis LeMay wheeled out Munich:

LeMay: This blockade and political action, I see leading into war. I don’t see any other solution for it. It will lead right into war. This is almost as bad as the appeasement at Munich... I just don’t see any other solution except direct military intervention right now… A blockade, and political talk, would be considered by a lot of our friends and neutrals as being a pretty weak response to this. And I'm sure a lot of our own citizens would feel that way, too. You're in a pretty bad fix, Mr. President.
JFK: What did you say?
LeMay: You're in a pretty bad fix.
JFK: You're in there with me.

JFK later said:

These brass hats have one great advantage in their favour. If we do what they want us to do, one of us will be alive later to tell them that they were wrong.

At one point in the White House, Bill Harvey was pushing the White House to authorise further CIA action in Cuba, after rising disagreements he shouted at Bobby Kennedy:

If you fuckers hadn't fucked up the Bay of Pigs, we wouldn't be in this fucking mess.

McCone knew Harvey would have to be moved after this outburst.

When Bobby Kennedy spoke to Ambassador Dobrynin, he said:

The President is in a grave situation and does not know how to get out of it. We are under very severe stress. In fact we are under pressure from out military to use force against Cuba… Even though the President himself is very much against starting a war over Cuba, an irreversible chain of events could occur against his will. That is why the President is appealing directly to Chairman Krushchev for his help in liquidating this conflict. If the situation continues much longer, the President is not sure that the military will not overthrow him and seize power. The American army could get out of control.

On 27/10 Krushchev proposed a deal: he would withdraw missiles from Cuba if JFK removed missiles from Turkey. There was a lot of argument. McCone supported the deal. The deal was done but kept secret. Soviet missiles would be removed. Secretly America would remove missiles from Turkey. {I think it’s still somewhat unclear why Krushchev didn’t leak the secret negotiations.}

LeMay was furious about the deal and even urged a strike on Cuba after the deal was done and the White House announced the crisis over.

{Not in Morley.} After the crisis was resolved JFK got the generals together to say thanks and to ask them not to gloat publicly. Le May shouted:

Won, Hell! We lost! We should go in and wipe them out today! … [It’s] the greatest defeat in our history. Mr. President, we should invade today!

Weiner says that McCone told the President’s foreign intelligence board that he’d warned the White House on 22/8 about missiles and word spread around town and got into the media (e.g 4/3/63 NYT article). JFK commented, ‘Yeah he’s a real bastard that John McCone.’

According to Morley, Angleton’s view was closer to LeMay’s than to JFK’s — he thought JFK had suffered an ‘unmistakeable faltering of will at the Bay of Pigs’ in 1961 then in 1962 a failure to force ‘Castro’s expulsion from Cuba’ (p119).

In November 1962 Bill Harvey delivered a report to Helms on Cuba concluding that Castro would ‘remain in power for the indefinite future with its security and control apparatus relatively intact’.

Morley writes that the Pentagon tried to resurrect NORTHWOODS in May 1963 and recommended an ‘engineered provocation’. McNamara and JFK did not accept the proposals.

In May 1963 Angleton circulated a memo on Cuba, ‘Cuban Control and Action Capabilities’, that was distributed across CIA, Pentagon and other agencies including NSA but not the White House. He analysed all aspects of the problem and touched on the pro-Castro Fair Play for Cuba Committee (which Oswald was involved with) and the possibilities for US citizens to travel to and from Cuba via Mexico without records being kept (which Oswald did a few months later).

In summer 1963 the FBI were tracking a mafia killer, Rosselli, when they saw him arrive at National Airport in D.C, get into a car and go for dinner with Bill Harvey. An FBI agent called Sam Papich, their liaison with CIA, who was having dinner with Angleton. Angleton called the restaurant Harvey and Roselli were having dinner at and spoke to Harvey. Papich got the FBI to pull surveillance away but the FBI reported the contact up their chain of command. (Weiner says that this was a ‘farewell dinner’ before Harvey left to Rome.)

Angleton knew Harvey was still working on ZR-RIFLE, the assassination operation. Angleton was discussing assassination of Castro himself with CIA staff. ZR-RIFLE and MKULTRA came together in discussions of whether an assassin could be hypnotised to kill Castro. (An attempt to hypnotise a Mexican hitman failed.)

{The chronology is tricky here. Books suggest that Helms moved Harvey off to the Rome station, under Angleton’s influence, in 1962 after the blowup with RFK but he pops up in D.C summer 1963.}

In June 1963 JFK gave his Peace Speech at Harvard. As I’ve said before, it really should have been studied especially hard after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

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.

{Parallels with Ukraine. Maybe JFK could have got a better deal (if he’d insisted and Krushchev had folded more) but so what, that’s not the point! The real point is whether risks were justified by potential upsides and downsides. Whether Castro continued or not was irrelevant relative to nuclear war. Just as the shape of Eastern Ukraine is irrelevant relative to nuclear war. And it’s lunatic to go around trying to grab small gains on the basis that the other side will back down because you seem dangerously crazy in your threats. (It’s a bit like watching hedge funds blow up by adopting the strategy of ‘picking up nickels in front of a steamroller’ — they can grab small gains reliably but eventually something inevitably goes wrong and they’re crushed, cf. Buffett’s comments on LTCM.) These very simple fundamental points have been largely missing from discussion of Ukraine, as has an appreciation of how badly the US military understood the true situation regarding Castro’s desire for escalation up to all-out-war, the actual deployment of nukes being different to what was thought then etc.}

{From Radchenko essay in Foreign Affairs, 2023, based on newly declassified Soviet documents:

When Krushchev authorised the deployment in summer 1962 he’d bene told the missiles could be hidden by the palm trees. This was seen to be wrong in July (when the commander of the Soviets’ missile division inspected the site) but it seems this feedback never reached him and he went ahead with the plan assuming wrongly the plan would remain secret until after the missiles were installed.
Krushchev feared a US invasion and replacement of Castro.
The operation was kept secret even from the rest of the Soviet military and presented as an ‘exercise’.
The operation proceeded with little proper preparation so the logistics were bad, the weather confounded them etc.]

1963: Philby defects

After being forced out of SIS under suspicion, Philby went to Beirut and worked for the Economist. In January 1963 Philby defected, skipping out on his wife from a dinner party in Beirut and taken to Moscow. Angleton’s wife described it as ‘a terrible shock’.

The head of the Soviet section, Kisevalter, did not believe Golitsyn. Golitsyn moved to Britain in 1963. He told MI5 that Gaitskill, who had recently died of a rare condition, had been poisoned by the KGB so they could open the path for their preferred choice, Wilson. Morley claims British intelligence believed him and Angleton came to believe Wilson was a Soviet agent (p126).

Soon Golitsyn was back in America (possibly after a leak from CIA/Angleton to the Sunday Times about his presence there forcing him out) making claims about Soviet moles in British and American intelligence. Many of these claims (e.g concerning a deputy chief of MI5 to Roger Hollis) were found to be false.

1963: JFK assassinated

‘Kennedy was trying to get to Castro, but Castro got to him first.’ LBJ.

‘I am afraid to go to sleep for fear of what I might learn when I wake up. There is no human being within 500 miles to whom I can communicate anything — much less the fear and loathing that is on me after today's murder… We now enter the era of the shit-rain, President Johnson and the hardening of the arteries… Neither your children nor mine will ever be able to grasp what Gatsby was after… I was not prepared for the death of hope but here it is. Ignore it at your peril… The savage nuts have shattered the great myth of American decency.’ Hunter S Thompson, November 1963.

The FBI interviewed Oswald in August 1962 and sent Angleton’s office the report. (As a returning defector it was not odd that he was a target of interest.) An FBI report in September 1963 said that Oswald drank too much, beat his wife, and had handed out leaflets for the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. In early October Hoover sent the CIA further information about Oswald who had been arrested for handing out leaflets for the FPCC. Angleton later claimed (under oath to Church) that he didn’t know if Oswald had ever been interrogated.

On 8 October 1963 the Mexico City station chief Win Scott sent a message — a man calling himself Oswald had showed up and contacted Soviet consular staff in Mexico City. A separate message said Oswald had visited the Cuban embassy. (The dates of the calls and meetings seem to have been around 1-2/10 but it took some time for intelligence to be passed on on DC. On 2/10 he returned to Dallas.)

The reply from CIA HQ (10th) gave false information including about the state of HQ’s knowledge on Oswald. Jane Roman had just signed for a FBI report on Oswald’s arrest in New Orleans. But a few days later she told Mexico City that HQ had not received information on Oswald for over a year. When asked about the cable in retirement, Roman said, ‘Yeah, I mean, I’m signing off on something I know isn’t true.’ She was asked: what was going on?

Well, to me, it’s indicative of a keen interest in Oswald, held very closely on the need-to-know basis.

She speculated that there had been an ‘operational reason’ to lie but she had not been told about whatever ‘hanky-panky’ was going on.

On 8 October, a few days after Oswald’s visit to Mexico, Angleton’s mole hunt hit Mexico City. They polygraphed and investigated staff. It discovered little of concern and no security breaches.

{On 2 November JFK was supposed to go to Chicago. He did not go. A former marine (like Oswald), Thomas Arthur Vallee, was reported to the police there for having high powered rifles. Vallee was arrested then released, those supposedly with him were never identified. It’s extremely odd that 20 days before the assassination there was another attempted assassination in which basic features matched Oswald and Dallas on 22/11: two former Marines who’d served at a Japan base, both involved with anti-Castro Cubans, both recently worked at buildings overlooking a Presidential motorcade!? This was also not explored by the Warren Commission. When the first black Secret Service agent went public with the story, he was fired and arrested for accepting a bribe. The House Select Committee later concluded that the Secret Service had bungled the investigation and reporting of the information to other teams but nobody ever got to the bottom of the Vallee incident. A few days later a right-wing extremist was recorded saying on the phone that JFK was visiting Miami and there was a plan ‘in the working’ to kill JFK ‘from an office building with a high-powered rifle’. The House Committee concluded that the Secret Service bungled this too. Despite the Chicago and Miami incidents the Secret Service never conducted a security review of the high buildings en route in Dallas.}

On 15 November, Jane Roman received FBI reports on Oswald in Texas. Angleton’s office now knew Oswald was in Dallas.

On 22 November JFK was assassinated in Dallas. RFK was at home when he was informed by Hoover. He immediately asked McCone to come to the house. He later told Schlesinger that he’d asked McCone if CIA-backed people were responsible but McCone said No. {McCone could hardly have known much immediately after the event given the complexity of CIA operations, figuring out where everybody might be etc. A journalist, Haynes Johnson, reported that RFK called that day one of the Cuban exile network involved in fighting Castro and said, ‘one of your guys did it’. Johnson claimed to have been standing with the Cuban when RFK said it on the phone. He revealed this in 1981.}

When news hit Langley of the assassination and Oswald’s arrest, it was immediately realised they had files on Oswald. When Helms heard the news he told an aide, ‘Make sure we had no one in Dallas.’ {Morley gives as a source for this (p300, note 73) a 1992 interview by Helms with CBS (which I couldn’t see on Google) but there is no other reference to this on the internet. Has Morley got this wrong?} McCone was told about Oswald’s contacts with the Soviet Embassy in Mexico late on 22/11 and passed some of this on to LBJ next day. On 24/11 McCone told LBJ about some of the attempts to overthrow Castro but did *not* tell him about the assassination planning.

{Wiener says that Helms put John Whitten in charge of the CIA inquiry; this enraged Angleton who then kept information from Whitten, but Weiner does not give sources for this.} The CIA’s initial report given to LBJ the next day concluded that Oswald was the assassin and they’d not found evidence of a wider conspiracy but this could not be ruled out. Very quickly Oswald’s links to FPCC were in the media. CIA funded entities quickly portrayed Oswald as a tool of Castro (e.g via Cuban dissident groups funded by the CIA).

Late at night on 22 November Angleton was called by the Secret Service — they’d learned from the FBI that Oswald had visited Mexico City, what did the CIA know? Angleton shared some information on condition it was not shared further. He’d made inquiries in Mexico about whom Oswald had seen in the Soviet Embassy and investigated Vladimir Kostikov. It became known that Oswald had a relationship with Sylvia Duran, who worked at the Cuban Consulate in Mexico City. This was repeatedly covered up by the CIA over the years. (A State Department official who tried to pursue this thread, Charles Thomas, shot himself in 1971, believing his career had suffered because he’d pushed the issue.)

The day after the assassination, the CIA told the FBI that ‘an extremely sensitive source’ had told them of Oswald’s visit to the Soviet Embassy in Mexico. But the FBI concluded that ‘the referred-to individual was not Lee Harvey Oswald’.

LBJ called Hoover and asked if there was more information about Oswald’s visits to the Soviet Embassy. Hoover replied:

No, there’s one angle that’s very confusing for this reason. We have up here the tape and the photograph of the man at the Soviet Embassy, using Oswald’s name. That picture and the tape do not correspond to this man’s voice, nor to his appearance. In other words, it appears that there was a second person who was at the Soviet Embassy. [This LBJ-Hoover call was itself erased but a transcript survived and was discovered decades later. It seems the transcript is a summary, not a full transcript.]

In a nutshell: the CIA reported to the White House that Oswald visited the Soviet Embassy, but after the assassination it was concluded that someone had impersonated Oswald. This has never been resolved.

Aftermath: extraordinary discoveries about the Zapruder film taken to the classified CIA photo lab, Nosenko’s claims

Obviously I can’t go into many of the claims about the assassination, I’ll just mention some aspects relevant to understanding the history of the CIA.

According to Peyrefitte, De Gaulle told him:

All of them together will observe the law of silence. They will close ranks. They’ll do everything to stifle any scandal. They will throw Noah’s cloak over these shameful deeds. In order to not lose face in front of the whole world. In order to not risk unleashing riots in the United States. In order to preserve the union and to avoid a new civil war. In order to not ask themselves questions. They don’t want to know. They don’t want to find out. They won’t allow themselves to find out.

This is what happened.

We don’t know what really happened to JFK but we do know there was a conspiracy to 1) portray Oswald as the lone gunman and 2) suppress vast amounts of evidence concerning what really happened including CIA knowledge about Oswald, and this conspiracy included LBJ, Hoover (FBI), and Dulles/Angleton (CIA).

In the week after the killing LBJ said to various people that they had to stop the idea spreading that Krushchev or Castro was responsible. {So on one hand, at the time LBJ was telling people they had to suppress the idea the killing may have been a Cuban/Soviet conspiracy, but he also told various people that he believed this might be true.}

In December 1966 in a recorded phone call with White House press secretary, LBJ said:

What raced through my mind [at the news of JFK] was that, if they had shot our President, driving down there, who would they shoot next? And what would they —what was going on in Washington? And when would the missiles be coming? And I thought that it was a conspiracy, and I raised that question. And nearly everybody that was with me raised it.

Dulles was put on the Warren Commission by LBJ partly to coverup the CIA’s role in trying to assassinate Castro, though it also seems the CIA coverup included keeping LBJ in the dark about a lot.

It’s clear now the Warren Commission was a laughable investigation in many vital ways.

Many critical figures did not believe the ‘lone gunman’ story endorsed by the Warren Report including LBJ. But the government developed the idea that discussion of a ‘conspiracy’ to kill JFK was ‘a conspiracy theory’, an example of how a government runs a campaign to call discussion of something ‘disinformation’ where the real ‘disinformation’ is the government’s claim of ‘disinformation’.

{We saw a similar example recently where the CIA and other parts of the US intelligence network labelled the Hunter Biden laptop ‘Russian disinformation to undermine the 2020 election’ when in fact the laptop was genuine and the actual ‘disinformation’ was the CIA claims of ‘disinformation’, and those who spread the 2016 Russia hoax (itself about ‘disinformation’) amplified this disinformation — another example of what Angleton called the ‘wilderness of mirrors’.}

The Zapruder film was taken secretly by the Secret Service to CIA’s NPIC lab just after the assassination

The official story of what happened to the famous Zapruder film is false. A simple version of a complex, false official story…

Three copies were made on the Friday, the Secret Service sent one to Washington and another to the FBI.
Zapruder then on Saturday did a deal with Life magazine, in the presence of Secret Service officials.
Life bought rights to stills and supposedly kept control of the original from Saturday until after the funeral.
On Sunday evening Life offered to buy the video rights too.
They then sat on it, never published the video and only published some stills until, after a decade, bootleg copies surfaced and it was finally shown on TV by Geraldo in 1975.
The Warren Commission studied the video but did not publish it.

Already weird! But it turns out there was a hidden story. Decades later the Oliver Stone movie JFK caused Congress to pass the Assassination Records Act requiring agencies to produce documents related to the assassination and created the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB). This process unearthed a story that sounds like it’s out of the X-Files.

It turns out that over the weekend between JFK’s assassination (on Friday 22 November) and burial — i.e 23-24th — the Secret Service brought the Zapruder film to the CIA’s secret photo lab, NPIC (National Photographic Interpretation Center at building 213 in the Washington Navy Yard). NPIC was the lab used for dealing with one of its most secret programs, the U2 and SR-71 spy planes spy planes and the newly created spy satellites (CORONA).

The film was analysed on the Saturday by the lab’s highly honoured and respected technical head Dino Brugioni (a sort of CTO equivalent, in modern terms, of NPIC). Brugioni had worked on the secret U2 images of Cuba in the 1962 crisis, for which JFK presented him with an award. (He also uncovered photos taken of Auschwitz during the war that, for reasons I haven’t tracked down but seem to be a normal bureaucratic SNAFU, were not passed on to those tasked with bombing the facility.) Janney and Horne interviewed Brugioni in 2009 and again in 2011 on video. This interview sits on the internet, almost totally ignored for years, and I’d bet 99% of Congress are unaware of its existence.)

Brugioni was told to report to the lab on the Saturday evening by the head of NPIC, Arthur Lundahl, where he met the Secret Service agents. Brugioni told Horne that 1) the public version of the Zapruder film is not the version he saw the Saturday after the assassination, 2) it has been edited, and 3) the original version was clearer than the version we have that JFK was shot from the front. He said that Lundahl came in at 8ish on the Sunday morning, collected the materials, and left to brief McCone. Dino went for breakfast then home to bed.

He describes how he saw a ‘white cloud’ erupt from JFK’s head for more than one frame

I remember all of us being shocked…it was straight up [gesturing high above his own head]…in the sky…There should have been more than one frame… I thought the spray was, say, three or four feet from his head … what I saw was more than that [than frame 313 in today’s film] … it wasn’t low [as in frame 313], it was high … there was more than that in the original… It was way high off of his head … and I can’t imagine that there would only be one frame. What I saw was more than you have there [in frame 313].

Dino apparently wrote a one page synopsis of this event for the official NPIC history in the 1980s after he retired. Where is this document?!

It further turned out that, unknown to Brugioni himself for decades, a second team at his CIA lab examined the Zapruder film the next day. Homer McMahon and Ben Hunter, two of those involved in the second session, gave interviews to Douglas Horne, the chief analyst of military records at ARRB, in 1997. They’d also made briefing boards for the CIA director and Secret Service. They are now available to view in the National Archives. These boards clearly refer, in frame numbers etc, to the extant version of the ‘original’ Zapruder in the archives, i.e the one we see today. The Secret Service agent who brought the film to these two said it had been developed at another lab, the Kodak ‘Hawkeye works’ lab in Rochester which had a classified part of the building for top secret work.

Dino revealed that as part of the investigations into the CIA in 1975, NPIC was asked for any records. He told the new NPIC boss, Hicks, that the briefing boards he had made in 1963 had been returned to NPIC when McCone left the CIA, and that Lundahl had told him to lock them up. He’d done so in a special cabinet only he and Lundahl had access to. He got them out, showed them to Hicks, who went crazy. ‘Goddammit, what the hell are you doing with that? Get the Goddamn thing outta here!’ And Dino packed them up and sent them to the new director of the CIA, Colby. After which it all vanished. And Hicks covered it all up: he didn’t tell Dino about the second event, which he’d learned about, and didn’t tell the inquiry about the first event with Dino. (Bear in mind at this point in 1975 Dino had no idea about the other team.)

So there were two separate sets of documents and briefing boards made for the director of the CIA. The ones from the second team (Sunday) turned up decades later. Those made by Dino (Saturday) and sent to the CIA vanished and copies held in NPIC vanished after they were sent to the office of the director of the CIA in the 1970s. Neither team was told about the other team. There are many inconsistencies between the Brugioni story and the records from the Sunday. (E.g The film Dino examined was different to that described by Homer McMahon and Ben Hunter — Dino examined an 8mm film, the second team a 16mm film.)

On 9 October 1964 Jane Roman asked Papich for the FBI’s copy of the Zapruder video. It was sent. Presumably Angleton saw it then but there is no record of his view of it. As far as I can tell, there is no evidence concerning whether Angleton ever knew about the NPIC episode.

This episode is also an interesting example of how in news, context and timing dominates. If this had become public in a different context, it would have been global news, but as it is almost nobody has noticed. It’s also an interesting aspect of how culture can shape politics — we only know about this because public pressure generated by Oliver Stone’s movie pushed Congress into passing a law regarding assassination records. This search turned up many thousands of documents including regarding the CIA coverup and the Zapruder film’s journey to NPIC.

Sometimes it is a conspiracy! And government is many hundreds of conspiracies operating in parallel per day. Because of friction and the fog of war, much goes wrong. What becomes public tends to be the cockups while the successful conspiracies remain, by definition, secret — often for a long time, sometimes for ever.

1964: Nosenko’s claims re JFK, Nosenko confined to a black site

Nosenko defected in 1964 (see above).

In February 1964 Nosenko claimed to have seen the KGB file on Oswald before and after the assassination, that the KGB had been happy when Oswald and his wife left Russia and had nothing further to do with him, and the Soviet Union had nothing to do with the assassination. This was kept out of the Warren Commission.

{Wiener says that Angleton’s judgement that Nosenko was lying on the KGB interest in Oswald was ‘disastrous’. But it was reasonable to think it very implausible that the KGB had not been interested in Oswald given he’d worked at a secret U2 base: Angleton’s view seems prima facie reasonable to me. Wiener reports Helms’ secret testimony on this, declassified 1998, in which Helms said: if Nosenko was lying and Oswald was a KGB agent, then it might imply ‘the Soviet government ordered President Kennedy assassinated’ with ‘cataclysmic’ implications.}

In April 1964 Nosenko was confined in a ‘black site’ for years. Later Nosenko complained that he had been given LSD in captivity. {He was not. Wiener says Nosenko got ‘the treatment his fellow Russians received in the gulag’ — an absurd comment that makes Wiener’s judgement generally unreliable.}

In 1964 Angleton persuaded McCone to authorise a joint CIA-FBI inquiry (HONETOL) into Golitsyn’s claims of KGB penetration.

The internal CIA war over Nosenko continued for years with duelling reports claiming he was a legitimate defector while Angleton and Bagley insisted he was a double agent still working for the KGB. Eventually Helms transferred Nosenko to the Office of Security and he was eventually released with a payoff in 1969.

Helms said later there was no clear system for dealing with someone like Nosenko: the CIA could not legally keep him confined yet if he had released him people would have said ‘you fellows should have had more sense than to do that. He was the whole key to what happened to President Kennedy.’ Helms’ view was that only Soviet archives would resolve the question. This has not happened. It remains unresolved whether each of Golitsyn and Nosenko were genuine or plants. Nosenko did provide a lot of useful information.

{Bagley wrote a 800 page report in 1967 listing many supposed contradictions and lies of Nosenko and concluding he was a plant and remained a KGB agent. A secret 180 page CIA history titled The Monster Plot written by John Hart, a CIA officer in the Soviet division who had studied the Nosenko case for Richard Helms, was declassified with a batch of JFK assassination files recently. Hart concluded that Nosenko was genuine. Cleveland Cram, a CIA officer, was asked in 1978 by the Directorate of Operations to write a history of the agency’s Counterintelligence Staff. He also concluded Nosenko was genuine. Of course, it’s also possible that Nosenko was genuine and lied about some things including JFK.}

In October 1964 J Edgar Hoover wrote that the FBI had ‘failed in carrying through some of the salient aspects of the Oswald investigation. It ought to be a lesson to us all but I doubt if some even realize it now.’

In October, JFK’s girlfriend, Mary Meyer, was killed while walking down a towpath. Later that day Angleton took a call from a friend of Mayer’s who told him she’d kept a diary. There are conflicting stories about this episode. Bill Bradlee (made famous by the Watergate story) later said (1995) that he went to her house the next day to look for the diary and found Angleton looking for it; they failed to find it; the next day Bradlee returned to pick a lock and found Angleton picking the lock; he later found the diary and handed it over to Angleton who read it (she claimed she’d taken LSD with JFK). Bradlee was Mary’s brother-in-law and Angleton was godfather to her child.

The murder was unsolved. There was an attempt to railroad a black man, Ray Crump. He was acquitted. Bradlee’s stories about the whole affair can’t be trusted either and it seems he lied on the witness stand. Mary’s private life, and details such as the CIA’s head of counterintelligence being found picking locks to find her diary hours after her murder, were not aired in court.

From 1967 the media started reporting on JFK’s assassination in ways that were increasingly difficult for the CIA and Angleton. E.g in 1967 it leaked that the CIA had been working with assassins such as Rosselli and speculation grew that the CIA’s assassination operations for Castro had somehow become entangled in JFK’s assassination. [Weiner says LBJ first found out about the Roselli and mafia plots from a journalist in February 1967 then asked Helms to produce a report. The report was silent on the question of Eisenhower’s and JFK’s authorisations. What insights does Caro’s biography have on this?]

Jim Garrison was investigating the CIA source Clay Shaw. Helms formed a group to deal with Garrison’s inquiries led by Angleton. Mainstream media discredited Garrison’s claims but key CIA operatives such as Rocca thought at the time that the courts might conclude the CIA had been involved in the conspiracy to assassinate.

In 1971, Win Scott who had worked in the CIA’s Mexico City office wrote a book including a chapter on the assassination which exposed all sorts that had been hidden from the Warren Commission. Angleton and others were appalled. Scott was highly respected and could not easily be discredited — Helms had just given him the CIA’s highest award. It was a big problem.

Scott suddenly dropped dead of a heart attack at the kitchen table. Angleton went to Mexico City. He seized Scott’s papers including the book manuscript. Some of his friends suspected foul play. Scott’s son claimed a CIA officer had told him his father had been killed. Papers, photos and tape recordings, including much information on Oswald, was taken from Scott’s study back to Angleton’s office.

The Warren Commission (p777) claimed the CIA had not known before the assassination about Oswald’s visit to the Cuban Consulate. Scott pointed out that this was false. He had tapes of Oswald to prove it.

A few impressions

My impression is that the evidence that’s emerged does NOT prove ‘elements of the CIA killed JFK’ as often claimed. But it is unarguable that:

Dulles and the CIA successfully conspired to coverup the CIA’s role in assassination planning, the CIA’s procurement of assassination from the mafia, the CIA’s surveillance of and knowledge about Oswald, Nosenko’s claims, and much other important evidence relevant to a serious investigation.
The CIA’s control of the Zapruder film the weekend after the assassination, NPIC’s work on it and Brugioni’s views concerning it were clearly kept secret from almost everybody in the CIA and it’s unclear who, if anybody, in the White House knew about it. As far as I know, experts still disagree on the chances of the film being edited.
The Secret Service withheld many documents from inquiries and after being ordered to transfer those documents (after the Records Act) they told the Assassination Review Board that they had destroyed (in 1995) documents concerning JFK’s trips from 9/9/63. Among many things, the really weird and suspicious circumstances surrounding the Thomas Arthur Vallee arrest in Chicago weeks before JFK’s assassination were never properly investigated and were kept secret. The Secret Service’s role was clearly shocking. Their duty was to protect JFK then to honestly investigate his killing. They destroyed documents and misled the investigation.
Many key players including LBJ thought that the assassination a) was not a lone gunman and b) was connected to the multiple CIA operations against Castro, including their work with mafia bosses such as Giancana, and people in the CIA-mafia-Cuban network participated in the assassination. This does not imply that Dulles, Angleton or Helms were involved or knew what happened. (A week after the assassination, Bobby Kennedy and Jackie sent a private message to Krushchev that they did not believe the Soviets were involved and they believed JFK had been killed by domestic opponents. LBJ said a few times after Dallas that Dallas was divine retribution for the assassination of the Diem brothers. )
Many eye witnesses on the day including doctors who treated JFK said he’d been shot from the front and the doctors reported exit wounds at the rear of his skull.

I’m suspicious that the full interviews with Brugioni do not seem to be public and it’s possible Horne has edited them to portray what he wants to believe. But Dino is a highly credible witness. He was one of a handful of the best qualified photographic experts on the planet for many years including the year in question. He was much decorated and there’s no signs in the public record of anything suspicious — he’s the sort of person a court would take incredibly seriously given his career and expertise. There is practically zero chance that Dino invented his story, he is clearly not senile, and aspects of it can be corroborated from other sources. It’s possible he misremembered details. If you assume he has remembered wrong some details and the film he saw is the one we see, it still seems likely that the conclusion he drew that JFK had clearly been shot from the front was a disaster and that someone senior at the CIA, in the chaos of that weekend, ordered the second team to produce a report that was easier to handle.

There remains some CIA documents regarding the assassination that are still classified and unpublished. Trump has hinted about their contents. It will be interesting to see if he wins and orders them published…

[Added 6/12/24. A few weeks after the assassination, Truman wrote an interesting article in the Post. He said he was ‘disturbed’ that the CIA had evolved into ‘an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the Government’ running ‘peacetime cloak and dagger operations’ which is now seen as ‘a subverting influence in the affairs of other people’.

But there are now some searching questions that need to be answered. I, therefore, would like to see the CIA be restored to its original assignment as the intelligence arm of the President, and that whatever else it can properly perform in that special field — and that its operational duties be terminated or properly used elsewhere.
We have grown up as a nation, respected for our free institutions and for our ability to maintain a free and open society. There is something about the way the CIA has been functioning that is casting a shadow over our historic position and I feel that we need to correct it.

According to some accounts, Dulles called Kathleen Graham and got her to pull it from subsequent editions. Further he tried to portray Truman as senile. I have not checked this out.]

Vietnam

{In 1954 at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu, the French conventional forces were defeated by Vietnamese communist guerrillas effectively ending a century of French colonial rule. It led to the effective division of Vietnam between North and South. Ho Chi Minh ruled the North from Hanoi. The CIA supported the Diem brothers as rulers of the South in Saigon.

In 1963 the CIA switched to support a coup against the Diem brothers. (The Catholic brothers had started attacking Buddhists and were clearly hopeless.) In August JFK authorised a coup by the military. {There was a row over the cable when McCone, Maxwell Taylor and others complained to JFK at having been cut out of the loop by State but they declined to insist on overturning it.} On 2 November 1963 they were arrested and killed in South Vietnam. JFK was shocked by the killing which he was initially told was suicide. (They were stabbed and shot in the back of a truck.)

In December 1963 LBJ and McCone discussed the CIA and covert operations. LBJ said he wanted it to shift from ‘cloak and dagger’ and McCone said he agreed and wanted to return to its core legal functions. LBJ said a few times after Dallas (Wiener) that Dallas was divine retribution for the assassination of the Diem brothers.

But LBJ was also torn over whether to double down in Vietnam or get out.

According to Wiener, in 1964 McCone and others in the CIA contradicted a lot of optimistic ideas and plans from the Pentagon and as a result LBJ stopped listening to McCone and the CIA. McCone stopped getting invited to White House meetings.

There remained a fundamental tension: legally the director of the CIA’s role was to coordinate all intelligence and intelligence agencies, but the Pentagon and other entities fought against this. The President’s board of intelligence had argued for years that the director should focus on coordination and let someone else run the CIA day-to-day. Dulles had refused and was focused on covert action. (In 1964 the clandestine service had about two-thirds of the budget and 90% of McCone’s time.) The Pentagon rejected the core legal fact and used Vietnam to increase its own powers regarding intelligence. The NSA was nominally under the supervision of the CIA director but the Pentagon controlled its budget. And the Pentagon controlled the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) created after the Bay of Pigs. The NRO, created in 1962 to run spy satellites was another battleground between CIA and Pentagon.

McCone tried to resign in summer 1964 but was told to stay until the election.

In August 1964 the White House claimed an unprovoked attack by North Vietnam and passed the Gulf of Tonkin resolution. Wiener says the truth did not emerge until 2005 when an NSA document revealed the lies. McNamara had given LBJ a raw intelligence document. LBJ was looking for an excuse, had had a resolution drawn up in June awaiting the right moment, and used this ‘attack’ to order air strikes on the North. The information McNamara provided LBJ turned out to be wrong. US claims about the unprovoked attack were false. The NSA knew they were false and there’d been a chaotic blunder. It was all covered up. The House voted 416-0, the Senate 88-2. The then deputy director of CIA, Ray Cline, called it ‘a Greek tragedy’.

McCone resigned again in April 1965. He’d been largely ignored by LBJ. He told LBJ that ‘We are becoming progressively more divorced from reality in Vietnam’ and were getting dragged into a situation where they couldn’t win militarily. He was replaced by a LBJ crony, former Admiral Raborn. It was a disaster. He was clearly hapless and LBJ almost immediately got into trouble listening to him and stopped calling. LBJ doubled down in Vietnam and responded to Communists insurgency with thousands of troops and bombing.

In June 1966 Helms took over. Apart from Vietnam the CIA was engaged in Laos (failing to cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail), Indonesia (supporting anti-communists) and Thailand (trying to fix the elections).

There was a structural tension inside CIA: the analysts were supposed to give the best analysis, the clandestine service was supposed to help win the war. Guards stood between the two sections. Helms and Colby gave the White House the good news it wanted.

In August 1966, a top secret CIA study on Vietnam concluded the US strategy was failing. It was sent to LBJ and McNamara. McNamara asked to see the CIA’s senior person on Vietnam who happened to be away. His deputy, George Allan, spoke to McNamara instead. He told McNamara: stop sending troops, stop bombing, start negotiating. McNamara wobbled. He said to LBJ that they should consider stopping the bombing and a force ‘ceiling’ instead of just more and more and more. There followed a struggle between some of CIA and the Pentagon over the strength of the Vietnam enemy. Westmoreland was committed to the strategy and argued for low numbers that would support the story that they were winning. They were also considering how the media would report the story as Westmoreland’s team was trying to persuade the media they were winning. Helms caved in and accepted fake numbers. But he also sent a super secret report to LBJ the existence of which he warned should be kept secret (and which he promised not to give to ‘any other official of the Government’): Implications of an Unfavorable Outcome in Vietnam. The report concluded that US power was not structured to fight such a guerrilla war.

LBJ said in later years that he’d had a recurring dream in which every time he faltered Bobby Kennedy haunted him with a campaign and everyone shouted as they rushed at him: ‘Coward! Traitor! Weakling!’ When talking about intelligence, he told a story of his days milking cows (recalled by Helms):

One day I’d worked hard and gotten a full pail of milk but I wasn’t paying attention, and old Bessie swung her shit-smeared tail through the bucket of milk. Now you know, that’s what these intelligence guys do. You work hard and get a good program or policy going and they swing a shit-smeared tail through it. {Sir David Ormand misquotes this as coming from Reagan.}

Helms later said that the CIA ‘could not determine what was going on at the highest levels of Ho’s government, nor could we learn how policy was made or who was making it’. Further America was undermined by ‘ignorance of Vietnamese history, society and language’ and this led them to ‘mis-assess, not comprehend, and make a lot of wrong decisions’.]

{The history of the Tonkin resolution and the disasters over Vietnam ought to have been a lesson when considering the intense propaganda on Ukraine but the big lesson of history is almost nobody learns from history, that’s why it rhymes. Much of the Vietnam debacle has been repeated on UKR: institutionalised lying from the White House and No10, the DoD and MoD, ‘mainstream’ media; the corruption of intelligence analysis; constant fake narratives about ‘the tide is turning’ to justify vast resources down the drain; fundamental inability to not fool themselves about ends, ways and means and what level of escalation is worth what political ends.}

Israel

I won’t go into this in detail.

It’s fascinating that Jews ran private global fundraising efforts to fund their nuclear research, organised partly by Shimon Peres.

And fascinating they seem to have stolen nuclear material from a US company to get their research going at Dimona.

Morley implies Angleton knew about the theft and approved it but does not provide evidence.

It seems reasonable to assume Angleton favoured the Israeli project.

In 1966, there were expectations of a Israel-Egypt war. In May 1967 Helms and Angleton discussed the CIA assessment. Angleton advised a clear argument: that Israel would strike first and quickly prevail over Egypt and other Arab states because of superior arms and training. Helms backed Angleton’s judgement. He was proved right, almost to the day.

Like his coup with the Secret Speech (above) this strengthened Angleton’s power in the permanent bureaucratic war. And Helms’s access in the White House improved, he was invited to regular Tuesday lunches with Rusk and McNamara.

Morely implies a) Angleton repositioned a naval SIGINT ship off Israel in 1967 without NSA knowledge and b) after this ship was destroyed during the conflict and Israel claimed it was an accident, Angleton went along with false Israeli claims. The CIA’s historian, Robarge, says these claims are baseless (see below).

Operation CHAOS

In 1967 there were growing anti-war and civil rights protests and riots. In October, LBJ asked Helms for help in figuring out the threat and the extent of Soviet involvement. And aspects of Angleton’s operations started to leak, e.g his funding of Jay Lovestone, of the National Student Association, and operations of Cord Meyer, see above. Soon the subsides for Radio Free Europe and many other things started to leak. {Operational security had been poor for years but they had avoided thinking through the inevitable dynamics of what would happen when stories were written.}

Angleton set up operation CHAOS to penetrate and analyse the US anti-war movement. Over 300,000 Americans were indexed in the operation’s files, dozens of domestic organisations were investigated. The NSA was also deployed.

By this time the Vietnam war was so unpopular that senior CIA figures like Angleton were arguing with their families at home about it. Interestingly Angleton’s kids fell under the sway of one of the Indian ‘spiritual Yogi’ that popped up around then, influenced by the Beatles etc.

In January 1968 North Vietnam struck with the Tet Offensive. Increasingly key people were prepared to tell LBJ that Westmoreland’s strategy was failing.

On 20 February, Eisenhower told LBJ that Westmoreland didn’t know who the enemy is.

On 27 February, Walter Cronkite famously ended a broadcast from Vietnam declaring that:

To say that we are closer to victory today is to believe, in the face of evidence, the optimists who have been wrong in the past. To suggest we are on the edge of defeat is to yield to unreasonable pessimism. To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, yet unsatisfactory, conclusion. . . . But it is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could.

On 4 April 1968 Martin Luther was shot.

On 5 June Bobby Kennedy was shot. Angleton thought RFK had been killed by the mafia (cf. his 1975 statement to a Church Committee investigator).

There were more riots. Domestic political divisions became more entangled with the Vietnam divisions. University campuses were chaos. In 1970 the Weathermen started blowing things up.

CHAOS was connected to the FBI’s Operation COINTELPRO also targeting domestic ‘subversive’ elements such as the Black Panthers. LINGUAL helped both.

By 1972 CHAOS accounted for >20% of Counterintelligence staff (Morley).

Nixon, Kissinger, domestic intelligence

Three days after winning the 1968 election Nixon asked LBJ whether he should keep Helms and, despite their differences, LBJ said Yes, ‘he’s extremely competent. He’s succinct. He tells you as it is and he’s loyal.’

In January 1969 Allan Dulles died. The CIA sent a team from its Office of Security to clear out his study and return documents.

In June 1970 Nixon brought together the heads of the FBI (Hoover), CIA (Helms), DIA (Bennett) and NSA (Gayler) to discuss the domestic unrest and terrorism and demanded a joint plan.

The CIA had never told Nixon about LINGUAL (the mail opening operation) or some other operations. Angleton suggested the White House be told that there had been an operation but it had closed and could be ‘re-activated’. Nixon approved and lifted legal restrictions on domestic intelligence collection, including:

warrant-less NSA surveillance
extension of CHAOS
authorisation for Angleton’s mail intercepts etc
Angleton and Sullivan (FBI) would oversee a new Intelligence Evaluation Committee in the White House to attack domestic subversion.

But they hit a snag. Nobody had explained it all to John Mitchell, the Attorney General! The plan unravelled. Hoover demanded written authorisation from Nixon. Mitchell told Nixon not to do it. Hoover said the FBI would not participate. Angleton ignored the collapse of legal authorisation and carried on with what he wanted.

Later in 1970 Nixon and Kissinger ordered the CIA to stop Allende in Chile with a coup if necessary. It was another disaster in which CIA hired assassins killed a general (Schneider). Nixon blamed lefties in the CIA. Schlesinger was asked to review the CIA and recommended a Director of National Intelligence in the White House to oversee intelligence with the CIA chopped up and covert action given to someone else.

Watergate and the CIA, attempted pressure over ‘the whole Bay of Pigs thing’

[By 1971, the CIA and NSA were spying on American citizens. The Joint Chiefs were spying on Kissinger. And Nixon improved the super secret White House taping system JFK had started and was wiretapping his own aides and reporters. Leaks continued. Nixon asked Ehrlichman to stop the leaks and Ehrlichman set up a team called the Plumbers led by Howard Hunt, recently retired from the CIA. Ehrlichman asked Cushman, Nixon’s stooge in the CIA, to help Hunt who was doing things for Nixon.

Late on the night of 17 June 1972, Helms was called at home by the chief of the Office of Security and told that the Watergate burglars had been arrested.

Former CIA men had participated in Watergate, including James McCord, recently retired from the Office of Security. Howard Hunt, a veteran officer, was also implicated (CTRL+F above for references).

Helms later said that he’d called the acting director of the FBI (Hoover had recently died) and told him that the Watergate burglars had been hired by the White House but the CIA had nothing to do with it.

Helms told senior staff that they would ‘catch a lot of hell’ because former staff were involved in the burglary and ‘we knew they were working for the White House’ (according to Colby who had returned from Vietnam and was now ‘executive director’). {Morley suggests this meeting was after the Post story but Weiner says it was at the 9am staff meeting on 19 June before the Post story.}]

On 23 June 1972 Nixon told Haldeman to call in Helms and convey a clear message that Helms should close down the FBI investigation of Watergate:

We protected Helms from one hell of a lot of things. You open the scab there’s a hell of a lot of things and that we just feel that it will be very detrimental to have this thing [Watergate investigation] go any further…
When you get these people in [i.e Helms], say, ‘Look, the problem is that this will open up the whole Bay of Pigs thing, and the president just feels that’ - uh, without going into detail – don’t, don’t lie to them to the extent to say there is no involvement – but just say ‘this is sort of a comedy of errors, bizarre’, without getting into it. ‘The President believes that it is going to open the whole Bay of Pigs thing up again.’

When Haldeman spoke to Helms and conveyed the message, an enraged Helms stood up and shouted back —

The Bay of Pigs hasn’t got a damned thing to do with this!

According to Haldeman ‘the whole Bay of Pigs thing’ was Nixon’s code for the CIA’s involvement in assassination operations that may have blown back on JFK. It’s obviously interesting that when Nixon, someone who understood power and the deep state, wanted to exert pressure on the CIA, he chose ‘the whole Bay of Pigs thing’ as a shorthand he knew would be understood and decoded.

[Weiner says that on 27 June, John Dean, Nixon’s counsel, ordered Walters at the CIA to come up with cash from its black budget and deliver it to the White House. Helms and Walters were the only people who could legally deliver a suitcase with cash to the White House secretly. But Helms said later that he knew if he’d done it he would have gone to jail and the CIA would have been destroyed. He refused to authorise it and went on a three week foreign tour. Although Walters had told Gray (FBI) to stop the investigation, Gray now demanded the order in writing. After discussion, Gray called Nixon and said that some of your staff are trying to manipulate the CIA. After a long silence, Nixon told Gray to continue the investigation. Meanwhile White House staff told McCord to blame the CIA in court for the operation and promised a Presidential pardon! McCord wrote in a letter to them, ‘If Helms goes and the Watergate operation is laid at the CIA’s feet, where it does not belong, every tree in the forest will fall. It will be a scorched desert.’]

After his landslide re-election Nixon replaced Helms with James Schlesinger. Helms shredded many files such as MKULTRA and destroyed/removed secret tapes of his own conversations.

[Nixon initially promised to let him stay until his 60th birthday in March 1973 but broke that deal. Helms believed Nixon fired him because he refused to take the blame for Watergate. Nixon later said that the CIA had the ‘motive’ to remove him from office as he planned a major shake-up.]

In 1997, Helms said:

The only remaining superpower doesn’t have enough interest in what’s going on in the world to organise and run an espionage service.

[Schlesinger was DCI for 17 weeks. He fired hundreds. He got death threats and added armed guards to his security detail. He put Colby in charge of the clandestine service but said it was time to ‘change the concept of a “secret service”’. Hiring was tough because of Vietnam. Angleton persuaded Schlesinger of much of his view on Soviet operations. Schlesinger tried to shift his own role to a director of national intelligence, as he’d suggested to Nixon, focusing more time on NRO satellites and the NSA while his deputy ran CIA. But Watergate scuppered his plans.]

Colby takes over, Nixon resigns, Angleton resigns, gathering ‘the family jewels’: ‘a lot of dead cats will come out’ (Helms)

By April 1973 Nixon had to remove Haldeman and Ehrlichman.

On 27 April 1973 the Department of Justice made a disclosure to the judge in the trial of Daniel Ellsberg who had been charged under the Espionage Act for leaking secret Pentagon papers to the New York Times: one of the Watergate burglars, Howard Hunt, had also burgled the offices of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist on the orders of the White House. The judge dismissed the case against Ellsberg.

Schlesinger, alarmed, asked William Colby to investigate possible CIA action outside its legislative charter. [On 9 May 1973 Schlesinger wrote to every CIA employee asking for evidence of things ‘that might be construed to be outside the legislative charter of this Agency’. Shortly after a special prosecutor was announced to investigate Watergate.] Colby started gathering what became known as ‘the family jewels’ (Ivy League slang for testicles). This was threatening for Angleton particularly because of CHOAS and LINGUAL.

Suddenly Nixon moved Schlesinger to the Pentagon and put Colby in charge of the CIA. Colby and Angleton had never seen eye to eye.

Colby suspended LINGUAL and limited CHAOS. He reviewed operations and concluded Angleton’s mole hunts were paralysing activity. A lot of people thought it was time for Angleton to retire including the then head of the Office of Security (Gambino). Colby wanted Angleton to ‘take the hint’ and retire. He did not.

On 6 October 1973 the Israelis were shocked by the Yom Kippur attack. The CIA had also failed and told the White house ‘there will be no war’. Angleton was responsible for Israeli affairs. After initial disaster the IDF fought back and America supplied them. The Soviets threatened to protect Egypt from attack. Kissinger demanded the Israelis accept a cease fire.

Kissinger concluded:

The US definition of rationality did not take seriously the notion of [the Arabs] starting an unwinnable war to restore self-respect. There was no defense against our own preconceptions or those of our allies.

As Kissinger and Nixon pursued détente, Angleton saw it as weakness in the face of a sham: the Soviets had not changed their goals but were using détente to undermine us. He was alarmed in April 1974 that in West Germany Willy Brandt’s close aide, Guenter Guillaume, was revealed to be a spy — the sort of penetration he feared had happened in D.C.

In summer 1974 the Supreme Court forced the White House to hand over the tapes that had been revealed and among them was Nixon’s discussion about ‘the whole Bay of Pigs thing’ (see above) and trying to use the CIA to stop the Watergate inquiry. Nixon was forced to resign on 8 August.

Seymour Hersh, then at the New York Times, was put on the scent of Angleton’s domestic spying. By now Colby did not want to try to deny everything nor expend his own capital defending Angleton. After calls came into the CIA from Hersh, Colby summoned Angleton and told him he’d have to resign as head of counterintelligence.

Hersh’s story on 22 December 1974 also led to Angleton being door-stopped and broadcast on the news (these days officials of his seniority would have their own drivers and security details etc). But although Angleton was forced out of his official role he was secretly kept on as a consultant.

[Weiner says Colby spoke to Hersh on 20/12 and implies he fired Angleton after the story broke. On 24/12 Colby gave Kissinger a summary of the family jewels and Kissinger passed on to Ford his own summary but did not include some of the worst. In early January the White House learned of the whole family jewels documentation sitting in Colby’s safe. The Attorney General demanded it be handed over and Colby agreed. Documents showed Helms had lied to Congress over the coup in Chile and other matters. Helms was in danger of prosecution for perjury. ]

Angleton was replaced by George Kalaris. He went to Angleton’s office, Room 43 on C corridor. Kalaris went through files. He found files on JFK’s assassination (never given to the Warren Commission) and RFK’s assassination including autopsy reports. Kalaris destroyed some files and put others into the main CIA filing system. Kalaris ordered a review of HONETOL.

Cheney and Rumsfeld came up with the Rockefeller Commission to try to control the scandals, stop Congress running out of control, and show that Ford was restoring integrity to the government.

There was a wave of emotions and theories connecting the assassinations, Vietnam, Watergate, Nixon’s resignation, and emerging CIA scandals. Congress tried to show it could respond. The media was frenzied. Everyone called for inquiries. The White House wanted to preserve the President’s power while Congress wanted to show that it was controlling parts of the system that had run out of control. The deep state was in chaos with the CIA itself split — Helms and the old guard wanted to circle the wagons, Colby was more inclined to cooperate with Congress, come clean, and change the basis of CIA operations and legality.

Morley writes that Helms said to Kissinger:

If allegations have been made to Justice, a lot of dead cats will come out. I intend to defend myself. I don’t know everything which went on in the Agency. Maybe no one does. But I know enough to say that if the dead cats come out, I will participate. [In US elections people would throw dead cats at rival candidates.]

But Weiner says Helms said this in the Oval Office to Ford on 4 January. And the next day Helms told Kissinger that Bobby Kennedy had personally managed the assassination plots against Castro. Ford, who had served on the Warren Commission, now started to realise there were all sorts of aspects that the Commission had never been told.

1975: Church hearings, Zapruder emerges, Angleton gives evidence, Colby fired

The story about assassinations grew partly because of incompetent White House media briefing. In a meeting with the NYT {16/1}, President Ford was asked what he was worried about emerging and Ford blurted out ‘assassination’ then gabbled it was ‘off the record’. (The NYT didn’t run it but the story emerged anyway.)

In January 1975 the Senate set up the Church Committee to investigate the CIA and multiple allegations of illegality and perjury.

More leaks continued including CIA involvement in the assassination of foreign leaders.

In March 1975 Geraldo Rivera screened the Zapruder film. It seems amazing in our time that a video of the JFK’s assassination could have been known to exist yet remain unshown for a decade. (Cf. above for the story of how this happened, with Life magazine, owned by someone friendly to CIA, quickly buying the rights from Zapruder then NOT showing it.)

In April Helms gave evidence to the Rockefeller Commission. As he left he was doorstepped by Dan Schorr of CBS. Helms said Schorr was a ‘cocksucker’.

[In April 1975 Kissinger refused to negotiate with North Vietnam as it became clear the situation was collapsing. The CIA and others had to start planning for the collapse of Saigon. Weiner says Colby’s warnings did not register. Soon there was chaos, panic and the famous evacuation of the US Embassy in Saigon. (Weiner says the famous photo of the helicopter above a building was mislabelled globally as a picture of the Embassy but was actually a CIA safe house.)]

More and more leaks came. E.g a memo from Hoover to the CIA from 6/1960 asked whether an ‘imposter’ might be using Oswald’s birth certificate. It became hard to defend the Warren Commission with a straight face. There were further calls for a fresh inquiry and deep state panic about what would come out.

In October 1975 Ford reorganised his Cabinet with Schlesinger dismissed, Rumsfeld moved to Defense, and replaced Colby with George Bush. Bush had no intelligence background.

In 1976 Bush approved ‘Team B’, a Red Team to question official estimates of Soviet strengths. According to Weiner, a post-1991 study found Team B had been wrong on the important things. Both Abbot Smith and John Huizenga who headed the Office of National Estimates told oral historians that intelligence became corrupted particularly from 1969 when Nixon forced the CIA to change its numbers. Bush was removed by Carter after the 1976 election.

When Angleton faced the Church hearings under oath on 24 September, Angleton was confronted with the evidence about Nixon ordering domestic surveillance expanded then the plan was aborted (above). Church pointed out that Nixon had changed his mind and ordered the mail opening (LINGUAL) to stop but ‘the CIA did not pay the slightest bit of attention to him’. Angleton accepted that ‘I have no satisfactory answer for that’.

Morley writes that at this session on 24th Church confronted him regarding his evidence a few weeks earlier on 12th regarding the CIA failing to destroy stockpiles of biological weapons per instructions from Nixon. Angleton could have ducked the question but ‘he wanted to make his point’ (Morley) and had said:

It is inconceivable that a secret intelligence arm of the government has to comply with all the overt orders of government.

Morley says they were ‘the most notorious words Angleton would ever utter’. Now, on 24th, he tried to withdraw them.

{In the transcript of 24th, contra Morley it is not Church who asked him this. A different Senator says to Angleton these words were in your deposition on 12th, Angleton replies ‘Well, if it is accurate it should not have been said’, and there is a dispute over whether he had been given a chance to review the transcript of his previous evidence. He’s then asked whether he actually believes that statement and he replies, ‘Well, I would say I had been rather imprudent in making those remarks.’ There is then fencing with Church. Then Angleton says ‘I withdraw that statement’ .

Mr. ANGLETON. I withdraw that statement.
The CHAIRMAN. Do you withdraw that statement?
Mr. ANGLETON. I do.
The CHAIRMAN. Did you not mean it when you said it the first time?
Mr. ANGLETON. This was stated before the hearings, before you held your hearings on this matter?
The CHAIRMAN. Yes, but when you said it to us, did you mean it or did you not mean it?
Mr. ANGLETON. I do not know how to respond to that question.
The CHAIRMAN. You do not know how to respond to the question?
Mr. ANGLETON. I said that I withdrew the statement.
The CHAIRMAN. Very well, but you are unwilling to say whether or not you meant it when you said it.
Mr. ANGLETON. I would say that the entire speculation should not have been indulged in.
The CHAIRMAN. I see.

My impression is that he regards the statement as imprudent but not false.}

When asked about JFK, Angleton told Congress (kept classified for many years):

I don’t think that the Oswald case is dead. There are too many leads that were never followed. There’s too much information that has developed later.

He pointed to the interest of the Department 13 in KGB in Oswald. He said that he would not claim the Soviets did it but ‘there’s an awful lot of doubts in my mind regarding the whole assassination’.

Balance sheet on Angleton?

Pros?

As far as we know there was no serious penetration of the CIA by KGB while he ran Counterintelligence. In the 1980s and 1990s US intelligence was discovered to be thoroughly penetrated. Aldrich Ames at the CIA and Robert Hanssen at FBI were revealed as Russian agents who had caused untold damage and betrayed many to KGB torture chambers. Angleton would say that this proves the dangers as soon as his supposed ‘'paranoia’ were removed.
Many of its most respected figures respected his creation of the CI Staff and improvements in security of western intelligence.
He uncovered many Soviet operations.
He was right to stress that the CIA was surrounded by people including politicians who underrated the push by KGB to penetrate and subvert US society and NATO.
He had watched successful disinformation campaigns from the Soviets and British and was right to encourage the CIA to be on guard for them.

Cons?

He consistently covered up the CIA’s knowledge about Oswald. He lied to the Warren Commission and the Church hearings. He also lied to Church about the timing of the plots to assassinate Castro, claiming he was ‘certain’ it was ‘well after’ the Warren Commission. He’d discussed it with Harvey in 1961 and in June 1963 he knew about Harvey’s discussions with the assassin Rosselli (above).
He seems to have declined psychologically post-Philby.
While the molehunt’s negatives have been exaggerated, it did cause unnecessary trouble.
The Golitsyn/Nosenko mysteries remains unsolved after the opening up of Russia and some archives. He was too indulgent of Golitsyn, to say the least.
He was wrong to maintain that the Sino-Soviet split was a disinformation operation.
He pushed multiple operations for domestic surveillance that were somewhere between illegal and against the spirit of the CIA charter. Some of this resulted in illegal and unethical FBI behaviour (e.g COINTELPRO). But after 9/11 the intelligence services got greater freedom including over domestic surveillance which surpassed anything Angleton had done by orders of magnitude and still does.

David Robarge says that until and unless Counterintelligence archives are opened, it is impossible to resolve many issues and come to a clearer judgement on Angleton. How do you weigh the harm he caused with molehunts against the harm caused by the likes of Ames?

Towards the end of his life he supposedly said:

Fundamentally the founding fathers of US intelligence were liars. The better you lied and the more you betrayed the more likely you were to be promoted. These people attracted and promoted each other. Outside of their duplicity the only thing they had in common was a desire for absolute power. I did things that, in looking back on my life, I regret. But I was part of it and loved being in it…
Allen Dulles, Richard Helms, Carmel Offie, and Frank Wisner were the grand masters. If you were in a room with them, you were in a room full of people that you had to believe would deservedly end up in hell. I guess I will see them there soon.

He died in 1987.

Morley’s book is poor. He makes many comments he cannot stack up. He makes non sequitur dramatic comments.

But the subject is fascinating and important, hopefully you’ve found it interesting, especially with the extra stuff from Weiner…

Final thoughts

Big organisations have inherent problems. Many of the problems are inherent in a large permanent government organisation with very complex legal controls and civil service HR developing over decades. Reforms short of a major shakeup leave problems untouched, the bureaucracy bends and re-forms. Reforms with a major shakeup create big counterforces that politicians rarely want to face. And even when people do resolve to insist on big changes, the permanent nature of the bureaucracy means officials ‘consent and evade’ as they say in Whitehall, delaying everything so energy dissipates and is overwhelmed by new crises.

Startups are path dependent. It was set up in chaos without a clear plan and with a duff first leader. Serious problems emerged immediately and remained for decades. E.g in the definition of the role of DCI, cf. below.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? How to deploy ‘power to halt power’? The ancient problem hasn’t been solved with the CIA. Spies and the people they work with are always going to do things the masters do not want — and wise masters know that they need people who will sometimes go too far. But you want this to be kept to a tactical level. The odd tactical blowup is inevitable and no big deal. But having an intelligence agency where the political masters fear it is out of control of the masters and even its own management is clearly a disaster and encourages a spirit of ‘everybody can blame everybody else without taking responsibility’.

Dulles clearly evaded Presidential control. Eisenhower bears responsibility for forming repeated reviews which told him the same problems repeatedly but he did not insist on change and allowed Dulles to consent and evade. The CIA had gone badly wrong by the time JFK was led into the Bay of Pigs disaster. The lack of accountability was so bad that U2s flew over Moscow without either Dulles or the President knowing, Bissell just did it! The lack of proper analysis and authorisation of the U2 flights contributed to what Ike called the ‘worst mistake’ of his Presidency, the lies over Gary Powers.

Collection/analysis. There has been astounding improvements in collection with new technologies. But analysis remains a constant disappointment to the White House. People who’ve worked there recently have told me the same. E.g we got astonishing intercepts on X’s phone calls while we were negotiating with them, but the CIA analysis of what they were thinking was consistently bad. (Similarly the UK intelligence community delivered useful/interesting collection on Brexit (despite successive PMs imposing ludicrous restrictions on them) but I was not generally impressed with their analysis.)

Counter-intelligence and security. After Angleton was fired, counter-intelligence was diminished. The CIA had many disasters with Aldrich Ames, Robert Hansen etc. A few years ago they suffered a disastrous roll-up of networks in PRC. People now criticise Angleton for insisting on access to security files but this seems reasonable if you are optimising for ‘do not get penetrated’.

Contrary to the standard media story today, McCarthy was right about widespread Soviet infiltration/subversion. America was thoroughly penetrated from Hollywood to Los Alamos to the White House, and under-rated the problem. And even when security was taken more seriously and DC has far better talent density there were huge security failures, e.g Manhattan’s penetration. FDR and his network were naive about (and some were corrupted by) Stalin and Stalin’s intelligence services.

Britain also suffered humiliating counter-intel disasters with the Cambridge spy ring.

No final judgement on Cold War CIA counterintelligence is possible until/unless files are open.

Disinformation. The success of British disinformation in WW2 led Angleton and others to obsess over it. And the CIA itself spread disinformation. The CIA’s evidence to the Warren Commission was disinformation as was their media campaign to spread the idea of ‘a conspiracy theory’ — there was a conspiracy to spread ‘conspiracy’ as disinformation. So was the CIA’s, FBI’s, NSA’s public statements about ‘Russian disinformation’ 2016-20, and Hunter’s laptop in 2020. So have been many claims from US and UK intelligence and other government sources during the Ukraine war. Generally hopes and fears about CIA psychological operations are misguided — it’s harder to persuade normal voters than the intelligentsia thinks and western intelligence services post-1945 have not been good at this (cf. Afghanistan). It’s easier to persuade the intelligentsia.

Coups / political warfare. The history of the CIA is very poor on this. I think it’s inherent in democracy. Britain built an empire and could do political warfare. But it requires that both the subject (Britain/America) and the object (say Afghanistan) believe that the subject is serious on a generational scale. As Lee Kuan Yew has said, inherent in the American system is its unreliability on foreign policy. Political warfare is hard anyway but it approaches impossible when everyone knows things can change dramatically every couple of years and Congress can stick its nose in. (Britain now is also thoroughly useless at thinking about such things partly because of the rot of Whitehall, partly because the people in charge do not believe in ‘imperial’ projects spanning generations, partly because of the same democratic unreliability and inability to keep anything secret etc.)

Examples:

Operation NIGHTINGALE, the operation to drop Ukrainian Nazis into Ukraine to undermine Soviet rule — a total ethical and operational and political disaster.
Albania was a similar disaster.
The 1953 coup in Iran went haywire but they got lucky and it seemed like a success.
The Indonesia coup was another disaster.
The Chile coup went haywire and killed the wrong person.
The Bay of Pigs was a total disaster. Bissell went rogue and there was no proper supervision of him by Dulles or anybody else so JFK was told the operation would be quiet and NOT do various things (like airstrikes) while those involved were told it WOULD do those things. The CIA lied to everybody about almost everything.
Post-Pigs assassination plans for Castro were also badly conceived and executed. The details of mafia engagement are complex and have never been definitively investigated.
This obviously is entangled with the JFK investigation. The CIA lied and covered up a huge amount about their knowledge of Oswald. Dulles helped fabricate the Warren report. Privately crucial senior figures including LBJ himself did not believe the Warren report and as LBJ said assumed it was a conspiracy, perhaps involving blowback from the Castro assassination attempts involving the US mafia. Hopefully Trump will publish the last of the secret CIA files on JFK and Oswald as he has promised.

NB. Today much of the CIA paramilitary work is contracted out to ex-military, ex-JSOC etc who have left government service. This means the CIA can draw on government trained specialists but has deniability about operational details. I don’t think this has worked well either and will return to the subject.

DNI? The director of CIA was supposed to be in charge of coordinating intelligence from across the entire system and presenting it to the President. But the CIA also grew fast into an entity running operations. There was constant tension about whether the DCI could both run the CIA and perform the coordinating role.

The last of Ike’s reviews concluded that running the CIA and coordinating the rest of US intelligence was too big a role and it should be broken up. Dulles resisted. After 9/11 this happened with the DNI’s creation. I haven’t studied this carefully but the existence of Clapper seems like proof the DNI role has failed, possibly criminally so given Clapper’s behaviour over Hunter’s laptop.

Also, despite the DCI’s legal obligation to coordinate all intelligence, the Pentagon successfully resisted coordination from the start to today. The Pentagon spends more on intelligence than the CIA. And only shares some of it with CIA and DNI. E.g The NSA was nominally under the supervision of the CIA director but the Pentagon controlled its budget.

Fears over the deep state. Eisenhower gave a famous farewell speech about the dangers of the military-industrial complex becoming a ‘disastrous rise of misplaced power’ and threat to constitutional freedoms and to the free economy, and the danger of public policy becoming ‘the captive of a scientific-technological elite’. In office he worried about the dynamics of Cold War spending and weapons pushing America towards a ‘garrison state’.

Military-civilian relations. Anybody who looks at Curtis Le May must be worried about the attitude of some generals to civilian power and the potential for disaster in a nuclear crisis. He explicitly developed his own war plan and intended to launch nuclear weapons on his own authority in some circumstances. JFK and RFK feared a military coup in 1962-3. The military gave JFK unanimous advice in the Cuban crisis that we now know was entirely misconceived and would have led to nuclear weapons fired. And RFK warned the Soviets that if there wasn’t a deal over Cuba there might be a military coup. Tapes also show him and JFK discussing possible impeachment.

Later Presidents have also worried about the tendency of the Pentagon to ignore Presidential orders. And we have the clear examples of parts of the intelligence community and FBI acting illegally in investigations, in use of FISA search systems, and leaks in their opposition to President Trump.

Operation NORTHWOODS reads like a movie script and explicitly involved the Pentagon planning to destroy US civilian planes killing everybody involved to justify an invasion of Cuba. This remains underrated. There is a mafia aspect to parts of the American system. This is partly why I think it would be good to close the CIA and create something new.

Groupthink, power/influence and careers. Obviously there are important examples of groupthink. E.g a persistent failure to face reality on Vietnam. This was so strong that attempts to challenge the conventional wisdom with Red Team exercises led to such exercises being closed down. And after then DCI McCone told LBJ things LBJ did not want to hear, McCone lost bureaucratic influence.

There is therefore both (A) a career incentive to ‘maintain influence’ and (B) a practical incentive for people genuinely trying to serve the public interest and good decisions — a fear that telling the truth will lead to being ignored and therefore worse decisions, so ‘aim off’ a bit ‘to maintain influence’. And of course it’s easy to fool yourself that you are a good person grappling with (B), not a bad person succumbing to (A)!

Incentives generally. I’ve found no hint of an internal study on incentives for CIA staff, it would be interesting to see. E.g what do you give bonuses for and how might this go wrong?

Secrecy corrupts. Organisations that are secret tend to use secrecy to avoid facing their failures and learning. I saw this with the secret world on, e.g PRC penetration of critical infrastructure.

Important failures

Penetration by Soviets. E.g Harry Dexter White, senior Treasury official was a Soviet source. Our few crucial spies were busted, e.g Popov, Penkovsky.
CIA told Truman the Soviets could not build an atom bomb for 4 years — after it had already been tested.
CIA failed to give warning on Korean invasion then failed to warn China would join in.
William Weisband, a Ukrainian immigrant recruited by the Soviets in the 1930s, was allowed to penetrate critical code-breaking operations (including warning that VENONA was working) leading to Soviet signals going dark. NSA says it might be the worst disaster in US intel history.
In 1953 the CIA predicted that the Soviets would not launch an ICBM before 1969.
Dulles told Ike that the Soviets would not crush the Hungary uprising with troops.
CIA advice on chances of nuclear missiles deployed to Cuba was wrong. But, relevant to the collection/analysis point, NPIC’s work with U2 and spy satellites was very valuable.
The NSA covered up LBJ’s lies on the Gulf of Tonkin. But see below.
CIA couldn’t penetrate the Kremlin, North Vietnam government, PRC. This problem is exacerbated by the problem of getting true experts involved, people who speak local languages like natives, can pass as natives, who understand the culture as natives etc.
CIA political warfare repeatedly failed (above).
Détente. There was a huge amount of naivety in DC and the West generally about Soviet intentions — ‘really’ they believe in peace, not violence and revolution etc.
Ames and Hansen were disasters that showed CIA and FBI counterintelligence standards were dreadful.
The 9/11 plot.

There were successes. E.g In 1967 Angleton’s contacts helped the CIA accurately predict that Israel would launch a surprise attack and quickly defeat its enemies. This strengthened Helms’ position viz LBJ therefore also strengthened Angleton’s with Helms.

The unavoidable centrality of Presidential character. The President is the only individual who can insist on senior intelligence figures being removed and controls appointments. If a President is determined to act unlawfully, to order assassinations, to manipulate and lie about intelligence (e.g LBJ with the Gulf of Tonkin), to order various acts that are of unclear legality/constitutionality, then intelligence services are inevitably going to be pulled in those directions. Exceptional people may resign or threaten to resign. But few do. And there is always the temptation of ‘if I resign he’ll replace me with someone worse … so my duty is to keep power’. And even the best get appointments wrong! E.g LBJ was an extremely astute politician and he appointed Raborn to DCI.

America won the Cold War despite intelligence failures. Over the long arc of 1945-1991 it seems to me that the critical things were:

successful alliances
superior economic performance
superior creativity and execution in science and technology
avoiding disasters, with some good luck in a few nuclear near misses and
we got very lucky in the Cuban crisis which could easily have become a nuclear war.

Intelligence services were in many ways systemically flawed regarding their core tasks of defence against Soviets and helping political leaders understand what was happening and might soon happen. But errors such as naivety vis détente proved less important than the good luck of dodging nuclear crisis.

A startup intel agency. My hunch is the answer to the CIA is similar to many things in government.

a/ Build a classified archive, transfer documents, build a great and dedicated library staff connected to teams responsible for training, Red Teams etc.

b/ Create a new entity with a different legal structure, HR rules including pay, procurement rules etc.

c/ Make ~99% of the staff of the CIA reapply for jobs in the new thing.

d/ Close the legacy CIA after the transfer.

e/ Assume you’ll have to do the same thing again in 30 years and build that in legally.

f/ Do not transfer CIA paramilitary activities to the new thing. Create a specific part of JSOC with responsibility for such ventures and the freedom to hire whoever they want to build relevant teams. This will ensure proper military chain of command and legal accountability. The new intelligence coordination entity, originally conceived as the CIA but now the DNI, should be separate from coups and political warfare. If the President wants to do a coup, he can order JSOC to do it and JSOC can build the team with a mixed military, intelligence, technical etc team including civilians.

Similarly with drones, I’d create a Drone Force. I would not try to battle with the USAF on ‘reform so it does drones properly’. Cf. my blog — On innovation in militaries — on military technology and career structures. If you become an admiral by commanding a carrier, don’t expect naval officers to admit carriers are not the future.

Big picture lessons vis Putin and Xi?

US priorities should be:

Successful alliances.
Superior economic performance.
Superior innovation.
Avoiding disasters, err on the side of caution, losing influence in some secondary place is 100000x less important than avoiding nuclear war. Taiwan is not the place to draw a line on Chinese aggression, it is not the equivalent of the Rhineland- counterfactual when the West should have invaded and removed Hitler.
Avoiding disasters like Vietnam also makes it easier to maintain public support.
Do not rely on winning the intelligence war. The base case assumption should be that US intelligence continues to operate far from the ‘high performance frontier’. America has many strengths but intelligence is not one of them and arguably this is inherent in democracies. The PRC can deliver capabilities for intelligence services that American cannot do without changing its constitution and its basic nature.

Learning from history.

As others in this series have shown, very few can learn from history.

Much of the Vietnam debacle has been repeated on UKR:

institutionalised lying from the White House and DoD;
the corruption of intelligence analysis;
constant fake narratives about ‘the tide is turning’ and fake use of ‘body counts’ to justify vast resources down the drain;
failure of the ‘mainstream’ media to challenge lies and nonsense when they become obvious (e.g the media memory-holes each time it turns out Zelensky lied, the DoD lied etc);
fundamental inability to not fool themselves about ends, ways and means;
difficulty modern western bureaucracies have in understanding other cultures, ironically we’re worse at this since we told ourselves ‘we’re less racist and we’re more open’!
failure to face realistically what level of escalation is worth what political ends.

Dominic Cummings substack

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Dominic Cummings substack

People, ideas, machines VIII: CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton, 'a wilderness of mirrors', covert operations, assassinations, moles & double agents, disinformation

Lessons from/for the deep state for those thinking about AI, power, geopolitics and security

CONTENTS

AI, power, intelligence, security: there are no ninjas, there is no door…

Angleton: background, OSS

London and Italy, 1944-47

1947: The shift to ‘containment’ and birth of the CIA (Weiner)

Angleton shifts from OSS to CIA, covert operation on Italian election 1948

1949: Kim Philby comes to D.C

The Soviet bomb (1949), the surprise attack on Korea (1950)

1950 McCarthy’s campaign: ‘red scare’, ‘lavender scare’

1951: Burgess and Maclean skip to Moscow, tipped off by Philby

LSD experiments: ARTICHOKE, BLUEBIRD, MKULTRA

‘Solarium’, Dulles expands covert action, the Doolittle Report, Angleton made chief of Counterintelligence

1956: Hungary and Suez

1959: Popov busted in Moscow

1959: Lee Harvey Oswald enters the stage

1960: Beginning of operations against Castro, Gary Powers, hiring mafia hitmen

1961: JFK persuaded to approve the Bay of Pigs

Aftermath: White House doubled down on removing Castro

1961-2: Enter GOLYTSIN AND NOSENKO: defectors, double agents, moles?

Cuban Crisis, October 1962

1963: Philby defects

1963: JFK assassinated

Aftermath: extraordinary discoveries about the Zapruder film taken to the classified CIA photo lab, Nosenko’s claims

Vietnam

Israel

Operation CHAOS

Nixon, Kissinger, domestic intelligence

Watergate and the CIA, attempted pressure over ‘the whole Bay of Pigs thing’

Colby takes over, Nixon resigns, Angleton resigns, gathering ‘the family jewels’: ‘a lot of dead cats will come out’ (Helms)

1975: Church hearings, Zapruder emerges, Angleton gives evidence, Colby fired

Balance sheet on Angleton?

Final thoughts

Further reading

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