Spectre of the deep state

Book review of 'The Ghost: The Secret Life of CIA Spymaster James Jesus Angleton'

The Ghost

The Secret Life of CIA Spymaster James Jesus Angleton

Jefferson Morley

S Martin’s Press

328 pages; $12.99

Jefferson Morley’s biography of one of the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA’s) most powerful counter-intelligence chiefs, James Jesus Angleton, came out a few days before the release of the last batch of documents related to the assassination of John F Kennedy. With journalists and conspiracy theorists sifting through 2,800 documents – the CIA and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) redacted a small number – Kennedy’s assassination awaits a definitive verdict. 

Conspiracy theories have flourished, of course. Fidel Castro ordered it as revenge for Bay of Pigs. No, it was the Soviets for “humiliating” Nikita Khrushchev during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. Maybe Kennedy’s ambitious vice-president Lyndon B Johnson had a hand? The CIA perhaps? The FBI? The Mafia? The only conjecture that has been debunked with confidence is Donald Trump’s claim that Ted Cruz’s father dunnit. 

One fact has steadily gained credibility over half a century, however: The massive Warren Commission report on the assassination was, as Charles de Gaulle succinctly put it at the time, whitewash. “They don’t want to know,” he told aides. True enough, after apparently weighing all the evidence, the Warren Commission concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald, who had briefly defected to the USSR, acted on his own and shot the 35th president of the United States for reasons unknown. 

That “lone gunman” assumption was so manifestly inadequate even to the general public that it has been fiercely refuted ever since. Oliver Stones’ 1991 Kevin Costner-starrer, JFK, captured the controversies of the times so effectively that it became one of the catalysts for President George Bush signing into law an Act mandating the release of the Kennedy papers.
 

Few investigators have a better grasp of the murky facts surrounding JFK’s killing than Mr Morley, a former Washington Post  journalist and, among other things, editor of a blog called JFK Facts. The writing of The Ghost was an inevitable consequence of his intensive investigations because he “encountered spectral glimpses of [Angleton’s] handiwork”. As he demonstrates, however, Angleton’s presence was very tangible in a massive CIA cover-up in the months following the assassination.  

The CIA had been tracking Oswald ever since his return to the US with Russian wife in tow for a good 1,000 days before he fired the so-called fatal shot (so-called because “the second bullet theory” is alive and kicking). Yet Angleton’s department did not share much of the vital information with the FBI, such as Oswald’s visit to the Cuban embassy in Mexico City a few months before the fatal November day.

If those documents did not make it to the Warren Commission, it is possible to spot the helpful hand of Allen Dulles, Angleton’s former boss, mentor and the CIA chief Kennedy had dismissed over the Bay of Pigs fiasco. Just why this information was withheld is unclear but it certainly went beyond the usual inter-departmental rivalry. Mr Morely does not hazard guesses, merely letting the facts create the conjectures. 

Propitious timing apart revelations about JFK’s assassination are not the central point of this book. The burden of Mr Morley’s argument in the The Ghost is to highlight the overweening powers of the deep state and its invidious influence on American politics and the projection of US power abroad. Read together with The Devil’s Chessboard David Talbot’s superb biography of Allen Dulles, it provides a vivid portrait of how ideologues of alt-right persuasion established a stranglehold on the premier counter-intelligence agency, mostly without the kind of accountability to which any public servant would have been subject.  

Until Seymour Hersh inadvertently exposed one of the counter-intelligence chief’s more outrageous freelance activities – spying on US citizens without due process – Angleton enjoyed the reputation of all-seeing master spy, orchestrating global events from this smoke-filled office. 

In fact, as Mr Morley shows, Angleton was not only remarkably amoral but also exceptionally inept. He failed to discover that his British wartime colleague and drinking buddy Kim Philby was leaking US secrets to the Soviets on a sustained basis; he bungled the debriefing of several defectors; he missed warning his good friends the Israelis of the imminent two-front invasion in 1973. And, of course, he never explained how he lost track of Oswald in those fateful days before Kennedy’s assassination. His career-long obsession with a Russian mole-hunt within the agency egregiously squandered agency resources and vitiated the culture.

This paranoia may have been a character flaw accentuated by his wartime work in Italy for the OSS, forerunner of the CIA. Part Mexican (hence the middle name of Jesus), an amateur poet and acolyte of the right-wing poet Ezra Pound, Angleton’s upwardly mobile businessman father gave his son the best education money could buy — boarding school at Malvern College in England, graduation from Yale Law School.   

Talent spotted by Dulles, Angleton played a stellar role in facilitating the escape and rehabilitation of prominent Italian Nazis deemed useful to the US, just as relations with the USSR congealed into the Cold War, forging links with the Mafia, and deepening his friendship with Philby, whose betrayal caused him heartache to the end. 

His obsessions caused his wife to leave him (she returned after he was sacked) and such was the zeitgeist of the time that his daughters converted to Sikhism, acquiring the names Siri Hari Angleton-Khalsa and Guru Sangat Kaur Khalsa. In conclusion, Morley offers a kind assessment of man who was doing his job, serving (and failing) American democracy. His portrait of power without accountability, however, retains its menace.