Chapter 16: DownfallJohn Denley Walker, the station chief in Israel, knew that a visit from a senior official at headquarters always meant a certain amount of extra preparation and effort. The VIP would have to be entertained and looked after.
But he was not prepared for what happened when James Angleton arrived on one of his periodic trips to Israel. The visit had come soon after Walker had taken up his duties as station chief in 1967.
At the time, Angleton was drinking heavily. The counterintelligence chief asked Walker to arrange to have a case of whiskey delivered to his hotel room.
After it arrived, Angleton told Walker he suspected the bourbon had been poisoned by the KGB. Walker tried to explain that he had bought the whiskey at the embassy commissary and had delivered it himself, but to no avail. Angleton would not be dissuaded.
To Walker, Angleton looked exhausted. The CIA station chief feared that the chief of counterintelligence was on the edge of a nervous breakdown.
"I'm sending you home," he said.
Angleton was enraged. "You can't do that," he replied.
When Walker insisted, Angleton warned angrily of retribution; he would see to it that Walker never got another decent job in the CIA. But the conversation had its effect; Angleton took some time off to rest. He went, not back to Washington, but to Elat, on the Gulf of Aqaba.
By this time, Angleton's power was beginning to unravel. His warning to the French that David Murphy was a Soviet agent had not been taken seriously by the SDECE, and eventually boomeranged to undermine the counterintelligence chief. In addition, Angleton had lost Pete Bagley, one of his closest allies and strongest supporters in the Soviet division.
CIA director Richard Helms had decided it was time for a change in the leadership of the Soviet division. Early in 1967, Bagley, then the deputy chief of the division, was offered the post of chief of station in Brussels. By September, he was in place. Bagley's exit was soon followed by David Murphy's departure for Paris.
But no one was safe from the suspicion pervading the CIA. Now, Bagley himself became a target of Angleton's mole hunters. Ed Petty, a member of the SIG, began digging into his background.
Petty fastened on an episode that had taken place years earlier, when Bagley had been stationed in Bern, handling Soviet operations in the Swiss capital. At the time, Bagley was attempting to recruit an officer of the UB, the Polish intelligence service, in Switzerland. Petty concluded that a phrase in a letter from Michal Goleniewski, the Polish intelligence officer who called himself Sniper and who later defected to the CIA, suggested that "two weeks after approval of the operation by headquarters," the KGB had advance knowledge of the Swiss recruitment attempt -- advance knowledge that could only have come from a mole in the CIA.
Bagley said it proved nothing of the sort. "I was running the correspondence phase of Sniper in Switzerland," he said. "We wrote a letter to a Polish security officer when I was in Bern station." The letter, an attempt to recruit the Pole to work for the CIA, "mentioned the man's boss. Some time later, Goleniewski wrote again, mentioning the name of the UB chief in Bern, 'whose name you already know,' which meant that Goleniewski knew of our letter. But that doesn't mean there was a mole in CIA. It means the target turned the letter in to his service and our guy [Sniper] was high up enough to know it."
Bagley said that Petty had interpreted the episode to mean that "the UB knew of the recruitment attempt in advance, which is quite different." Petty, nevertheless, wrote an analysis of the Swiss recruitment episode, and of Bagley's file, and concluded that "Bagley was a candidate to whom we should pay serious attention." The study gave Bagley the cryptonym GIRAFFE. Petty said he submitted his paper "with some trepidation" because "I was well aware that Bagley had long been a protege of Jim Angleton."
Petty turned in his report to James Ramsay Hunt, Angleton's deputy. "Hunt said, 'This is the best thing I've seen yet.'" But, Petty added, he heard nothing from Angleton.
"The Bagley report stewed in Angleton's in box for a considerable time," Petty said. "Then one day he called me in to discuss the Nosenko case. He brought up some of the points in Bagley's nine-hundred-plus-page study. And I said, 'If there is a penetration, then Nosenko could not have been genuine.'" A mole in the CIA, Petty argued, would have told the KGB of Nosenko's initial contact with the agency in 1962, and, Nosenko, had he been a true asset, would never have come back in 1964. "I said to him, 'You don't need all these points in Bagley's nine-hundred-pager -- it's much simpler than that.'"
"Angleton sat there and mulled this point over for some time. Then he said to me, 'Pete is not a Soviet spy.'"
At that moment, Petty saw the light, like Saint Paul on the road to Damascus. It suddenly hit him; not Bagley but Angleton himself was the mole. "I was flabbergasted," Petty said. "Because the subject of my paper about Pete had not arisen. It was at that point that I decided I'd been looking at it all wrong by assuming Golitsin was good as gold. I began rethinking everything. If you turned the flip side it all made sense. Golitsin was sent to exploit Angleton. Then the next step, maybe not just an exploitation, and I had to extend it to Angleton. Golitsin might have been dispatched as the perfect man to manipulate Angleton or provide Angleton with material on the basis of which he [Angleton] could penetrate and control other services."
Angleton himself must be the traitor, Petty decided. "Angleton made available to Golitsin extensive sensitive information which could have gone back to the KGB. Angleton was a mole, but he needed Golitsin to have a basis on which to act."
Petty was now sure he had unlocked the key to everything that had been going on inside the agency for the past decade. "Golitsin and Angleton. You have two guys absolutely made for each other. Golitsin was a support for things Angleton had wanted to do for years in terms of getting into foreign intelligence services. Golitsin's leads lent themselves to that. I concluded that logically Golitsin was the prime dispatched agent."
The more Ed Petty thought about it, the more convinced he became that Angleton had been the mole all along. Angleton had extraordinary access, after all. "The only place in the CIA besides the cable room where there was total access was on James Angleton's desk. From the indications we had, the penetration had to be at a high and sensitive level, and long-term. You could say the director's desk fit that description, but there were several directors. All the operational cables went through Angleton."
By now, the mole hunt had run out of control. Like a Frankenstein monster, it had finally attacked its own creator.
In 1971, Petty said, "I started working on it. Putting stuff on index cards, formulating my theory." He did not dare to discuss what he was doing with Jean Evans, then his boss. Instead he went to a close friend, a senior officer, and told him what he was thinking. "I said, 'I can't do this without some backstop.' He said he would take it to the director and a few days later he came back and told me go ahead. He said he had talked to Helms."
Helms denied that while CIA director he knew that his counterintelligence chief had himself become a mole suspect. "I never heard about it when I was in the agency," he said. "I knew Ed Petty -- he'd worked for me years before." But no one "ever told me that Petty's study was under way." Petty's conclusion that Angleton was the mole, Helms added, "didn't make any sense to me."
The senior officer to whom Petty had confided was James H. Critchfield, who had been Petty's boss in Munich years earlier and rose to head the Eastern European and Near East divisions. Critchfield said he was indeed aware of Petty's investigation, and Petty had discussed it with him. But, Critchfield added, he never told Helms about it until after he and the CIA director had both left the agency. [1]
Petty's belief that his mentor had seen the director was not far off the mark, however. For in 1974, Critchfield, as it turned out, had informed William Colby, then the CIA director, about Petty's investigation of Angleton. Critchfield was about to retire. "I conveyed that Ed Petty had told me of possible security problems in the CI Staff. Of course I mentioned Angleton. I did not want to walk out the door without bringing it to the attention of the director." [2]
Petty worked in absolute secrecy, never revealing to anyone except Critchfield that he was gathering information to accuse his own boss, James Angleton, as a Soviet spy. By the spring of 1973, after toiling for some two years, Petty felt he could not develop his theory any further. He decided to retire.
"I told my intermediary, 'I'm going to retire.' He said, 'You've got to have a talk with somebody.' By now Colby was director, but he was not available. I finally saw the assistant DDO, David Blee. I told my story and he said, 'We would like you to stay.' The clear implication was 'Keep doing what you're doing.' So I stayed and kept at it. I stayed another year."
In 1974, Petty said, he reached a firm decision to retire. Blee, he said, urged him to prepare a report on Angleton. [3] "I said, 'It's only on cards.' So they sat me down with a senior officer, James Burke, and I talked to him on tape for twenty-six hours. Plus I turned over two safe drawers full of collateral material. On the tapes, I said quite clearly, to my best hypothesis, Angleton had to be the person. The penetration. We didn't say moles. I didn't say he's the only possibility. But he's the only one who has been here all that time and has seen it all. I said they should get rid of Angleton. Fire him."
***
Even before William Colby became director of the CIA, he had begun zeroing in on Angleton's counterintelligence turf. After Colby returned from Vietnam in 1971, Helms had named him executive director of the agency.
When President Nixon, in the midst of the Watergate scandal, appointed Helms ambassador to Iran, Colby, in February 1973, became the DDO under James R. Schlesinger, the new CIA director.
"I'd had minimum contact with the CI Staff," Colby said. "I knew they were highly secretive and a separate power. I'd had one contact with Angleton in Rome, in the mid-fifties. The CI Staff was running an agent, and eventually I took over the agent. I had my doubts that was the way to run a railroad." The clash in Rome was not very important, but it planted the seed in William Colby's mind that Counterintelligence had become too much a law unto itself.
Colby and Angleton did not often cross paths again until 1967, when Colby was asked to take over the Soviet division, a job that David Murphy got instead when Colby was unexpectedly sent to Vietnam. During the period when Colby was preparing for what he thought would be the post of Soviet division chief, Angleton asked to see him. "Jim invited me down for 'the Briefing.' I went through several hours of his briefing. The KGB was everywhere, it was penetrating Americans, foreign political leaders. The presumption was that the agency was the main target. Being a lawyer, I wanted to hear evidence. There wasn't any."
When Colby became the DDO under Schlesinger, he was now in charge of counterintelligence -- and had suddenly become Angleton's boss. "I began to look at it and found the CI Staff had several hundred people. I was under pressure to reduce. That seemed an awful lot of personnel slots."
Colby was DDO for only a couple of months, but in that period, he also found out that Angleton had a hammerlock on anything to do with Israel. "I discovered the Israel account was being run through the CI Staff, and to my amazement I learned that the chief of station Cairo could not communicate with the COS Israel. Everything had to go through the CI Staff."
Colby also discovered that the agency had for twenty years been opening first-class mail in violation of the law. During most of that period, Angleton and the CI Staff intercepted letters between the United States and the Soviet Union and other Communist countries. "I got into the mail-opening thing and wrote a memo saying it should be terminated," Colby said. "The Post Office guy running it was getting scared. I couldn't find it had produced anything. Angleton objected. Schlesinger cut the baby in half and said, 'Let's suspend it but not terminate it.'" [4]
In May, Colby was promoted to director of the CIA. "I began to talk to Jim about these things shortly after I took over," he said. "I raised taking away the Israel account several times and he had resisted it. I did not want to push it through. I can tell you the reason now, since he is no longer living. He was so intense I was really worried that if I got rid of him he would have done harm to himself."
Colby feared that Angleton would commit suicide?
"Yeah. So I was trying to ease him out." As part of his campaign to get rid of Angleton, Colby gradually began dismantling pieces of the CI Staff. Up to then, the counterintelligence Staff had exclusively handled liaison with the FBI. That meant that often Sam Papich, Hoover's man, dealt directly with Angleton, with whom he had developed a close personal friendship.
"I put liaison with the FBI under the DDO," Colby said. "Nobody could tell what the CI Staff was doing. Yet the FBI relationship was important. So I designated a guy on the DDO's personal staff who became liaison with FBI."
Methodically, Colby took other steps to chip away at Angleton's power. Until then, no proposed clandestine operation anywhere in the world could take place without approval of the CI Staff. Colby decided that division chiefs should make those decisions; the CI Staff "should give advice, not have a veto or approval of the operation." The Counterintelligence Staff was reduced to running name checks on people proposed to be used in operations. "They could give a clearance that there was nothing bad on someone," Colby said, "but they didn't approve the overall operation."
With operational approval removed from Angleton's domain, Colby next took away Angleton's power to review operations already in progress. According to Colby, the CI Staff and several other CIA units engaged in these periodic reviews. To an extent, he said, "these staffs had developed an operational function and were running their own operations. I thought that was a mistake. A division should run operations." Now the CI Staff was out of the business of project review.
In addition, Colby removed the small international Communism unit from Angleton's fiefdom. As each of these offices were plucked out, the size of Angleton's staff dwindled from hundreds to some forty people.
"Taking away FBI liaison and the other units was designed to lead him to see the handwriting on the wall," Colby said. "He just wouldn't take the bait."
Angleton, of course, realized what was happening, as did Scotty Miler. Colby did not explain his changes, Miler said, "but it was clear why. He felt CI approval for each operation was inhibiting ops. It got rid of people looking over the operators' shoulders. There was nobody second-guessing them. To use extreme language, it got rid of the Gestapo.
"There was a direct connection between Colby's dislike of the mole hunt and his decision to break up CI in 1973," Miler continued. "Colby didn't understand CI. And he said every case officer will be his own CI officer. Jim's reaction? 'There goes counterintelligence.'
"We knew the handwriting was on the wall," Miler went on. "Jim and I talked about it. This was the first step toward firing Jim. I saw little future for CI. At age forty-eight I presumably had some places to go. But we certainly realized that CI as Jim conceived of it, and as I did, could not function under the reorganization."
When Colby had finished, Angleton and his staff had little to occupy themselves. "We were left with penetrations and double agents, a few of which CI ran," Miler said, "and we were left with approval of double-agent operations, and day-to-day oversight. Maybe a couple of dozen such operations. We were turning more to research and analysis, and we reexamined the penetration cases to see if we had missed anything."
Recalling the curtailment of Angleton's power, Colby was frank about what he had done and why. "As DDO and then as director, I sliced into his empire. He'd developed a direct relationship with Dulles, Helms, and McCone. He tried it with Schlesinger." It had not worked under Schlesinger, and Angleton knew there was no hope of maintaining the same kind of clout under Colby.
"I determined a long time ago I had to get rid of him and the question was how," Colby said. "I thought it essential to run a clear-cut organization where different parts worked together. His idea was to be totally secretive and cross lines all over the place. Second, I found several hundred people in there. I honestly couldn't figure out what the devil they were doing. What benefits was this giving us? I couldn't find any.
"I finally decided if I was to be responsible for CI, I had to have control over it. And I didn't have confidence I had control with him there. Counterintelligence needed a sweeping with a good new broom."
In Colby's view, the mole hunt had hobbled CIA operations and all but destroyed its main mission at the time, spying on the Soviet Union. "I couldn't find we'd identified any penetrations. And I concluded his work had hampered our recruitment of real agents. I'd be happy to get two false agents if I could get three real ones. We weren't recruiting any because of the negative effect of the super-suspicion. I said that has to stop. We've got to get agents. We've got to recruit Soviets. That's what the agency's in business for."
Angleton, Colby concluded, had stopped the agency dead in its tracks. "The big factor was what he was doing was counterproductive. If you find a reason to reject everyone you want to recruit, you don't have ops. Jim thought the fact you can get at a potential Soviet agent means he's being manipulated from the other side. The most important thing was the lack of agent recruitment, and from a discipline point of view the way he worked in total secrecy. I thought his fixation on the wily KGB was exaggerated and out of the real world. We shouldn't have anything as important as this in the hands of anybody so intense. And then, there was the question of fairness to my officers. I couldn't accept that they be placed under suspicion for inadequate reasons."
Finally, there was the embarrassment of the David Murphy episode. When Alexandre de Marenches took him aside and said Angleton had warned that David Murphy was a Soviet spy, Colby said, "I was infuriated. How can a service operate if a man is sent as COS Paris and another man goes over and tells the French he is a Soviet agent?"
For Colby, it was the last straw. "I had already come to a decision we had to make a change, and this was one other factor, a big one. It was another indication that Jim seemed totally out of control. By then it was a question of how to do it."
While Colby was pondering how to get the reluctant Angleton to walk the plank, the problem solved itself in the person of Seymour M. Hersh. A brilliant and tireless former police reporter from Chicago in the tradition immortalized in The Front Page, Hersh had come to national prominence in 1969 when he broke the story of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam for an obscure news service, for which he Won the Pulitzer Prize. He then joined the New York Times, where his reporting on Watergate in the early 1970s helped that newspaper to keep up with, and occasionally even surpass, the stories broken day after day by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein in the Washington Post.
While covering Watergate in 1973, Hersh said, "somebody I was dealing with told me there was a big problem inside the agency. Muskie had hearings on reorganizing the intelligence community in the fall of '74. There was a witness there and I was talking to him afterwards. I said to him, 'What the hell is the problem inside the agency?' I started meeting this person."
That was when Hersh learned about the Family Jewels.
In May of that year, Schlesinger -- shocked by the wigs, spy gadgets, and other support that the CIA had given to Nixon's White House plumbers -- issued a decree forbidding illegal activities by CIA employees, and requiring that they report any knowledge of past or present violations of the agency's charter. Thus was born the "Family Jewels," an agency euphemism for a 693-page compilation of the worst skeletons in the CIA's closet. The list included assassination plots against foreign leaders, drug tests on unsuspecting Americans, mail intercepts, and Operation CHAOS, a program of domestic spying on Americans opposed to the war in Vietnam.
Hersh soon heard of this extraordinary list and managed to learn part of its contents. "I eventually got in contact with someone who had access to the Family Jewels," he said. "I got hard numbers on how many mail openings, wiretaps, unauthorized break-ins there were, and, of course, the domestic spying. I remember talking to Angleton, and he initially said he had nothing to do with it."
Angleton also cast a lure in front of Hersh, with no effect. "Angleton said, 'Look, forget what you're working on, I have a better story for you.' And he told me about two [espionage] nets, in North Korea and a net in Moscow. 'Trap lines' he had laid in Moscow. I called Colby and told him what Angleton had said, and I thought I heard him gasp, suck in his breath. That Angleton would say that on an open phone line.
"By the time I got ready to see Colby I had hard numbers. I called up Colby and he agreed to see me on a Friday morning at the agency, and I laid out what I knew. I just came off a very hot year, all of Watergate, and Colby had sat down with me on the Glomar Explorer, and we held it, which by the way was not my decision. [5]
"He simply reviewed my domestic spying story with me. I said there were so many mail openings, so many break-ins, and he went over the numbers, in general reducing them. The big number was the ten thousand files -- I said they were dossiers -- on American citizens. He said, 'Sy, they were more like files.' If I said there were sixty-two break-ins he said, 'No, there were nineteen.' From his point of view it was damage limitation. But he was also confirming everything."
As soon as he got out of the building, Hersh telephoned Abe Rosenthal, his editor at the New York Times. "I said, 'Abe, I got it. I don't have him on the record but he confirmed it.' I remember being amazed I got that detail out of him. I went into the office on a Friday and wrote it and they ran it on Sunday."
Colby described how, in his meeting with Seymour Hersh, he had tried his best to downplay the CIA's role. "He came to me with what he said was a story bigger than My Lai. That we were engaged in a massive domestic intelligence operation. I said, 'Sy, you've got it all wrong.' He asked me about wiretaps. I said we weren't wiretapping a lot of people, a few cases of CIA employees or ex-employees who were suspect. He said we were opening the mail. I said it was very, very limited. Just a small amount of mail to and from Moscow."
Colby realized that he had not succeeded in throwing Hersh off the scent -- an impossible task, in any event. "I had a sense he was going to run with something," Colby said laconically. With one of the CIA's most onerous cats about to poke its whiskers out of the bag, Colby determined he could delay his dismissal of Angleton no longer.
"Some time before," Colby said, "I had pointed out to Angleton that if he left before a certain day, he would get a better pension arrangement. He said no the first time I raised it. It came up again in December of 1974, before I saw Sy. I had a session with him a few days or maybe a week before. I pointed out it was time to go on, and if he didn't want to retire I had this other job of writing a history of his contribution to the agency. It was a way to keep him gainfully employed. He turned me down on that, too. I said, 'Well, think about it, Jim.' I said I wanted him to leave by the end of December."
With the Hersh story about to explode, Colby telephoned Angleton and told him that the Times was on to Operation CHAOS, the domestic surveillance program, and other potentially embarrassing secrets. "I called Jim up. I said, 'I'm sorry this has happened. It really doesn't relate to our discussions. You and I know we've had these discussions over a long period of time. But I insist you go now.' I wasn't going to go into the uproar that was coming with Jim there and have to defend him and work with him. Because some of the Jewels were things he did, like the mail opening. I said, 'There's not a person in the world going to believe us, Jim, that it wasn't caused by Sy.'"
But, in retrospect, Colby agreed that the "precise timing" of his dismissal of Angleton was indeed a result of Hersh's story in the Times. He had, after all, fired Angleton in anticipation of its appearance. [6]
Hersh's story led the paper on Sunday, December 22, 1974, under a four-column headline: "HUGE CIA OPERATION REPORTED IN U.S. AGAINST ANTIWAR FORCES, OTHER DISSIDENTS IN NIXON YEARS." The Times story reported that the CIA, in violation of its charter, had conducted "a massive illegal domestic intelligence operation" against the antiwar movement, and had engaged in break-ins, wiretaps, and "the surreptitious inspection of mail." [7]
Hersh's story set off a political chain reaction. President Gerald R. Ford, skiing in Vail, Colorado, announced he would tolerate no illegal spying and ordered Colby to prepare a report on the CIA operation. Colby ordered the DDO, William E. Nelson, to draft it. "By eight A.M. Monday," Miler said, "I had been advised I was to stand by to review some material being prepared by Nelson's office for the White House about the Hersh article. We had to review the Family Jewels report about mail opening and other things for the report that Colby flew out to Vail. Then I was told to be in Nelson's office at seven o'clock that night.
"During the day Jim called in me and Ray Rocca, and explained he was retiring." Rocca was the deputy chief of the CI Staff. Also present at the meeting in Nelson's office that night, Miler said, were Angleton; Nelson, slim, blond, well-tailored and smooth of manner; and Nelson's deputy, David Blee.
"Nelson explained Jim was retiring, they were making big changes in CI, Rock [Raymond Rocca] and I were no longer to be in CI. Then he turned to me and said, 'What are you going to do?' 'I guess I'll retire.' 'Good.' He turned to Rock and he said, 'I guess I'll retire.' That was it."
Two days later, Hersh reported the resignation of James Angleton, and soon after, of Rocca, Miler, and William J. Hood, another Angleton deputy and a thirty-year veteran of the OSS and the CIA. Hood, a latecomer to Angleton's inner circle -- he had joined the staff as executive officer only in 1973 -- had planned to retire anyway, Miler said, but was caught up in the mass departures.
On the day that Angleton's dismissal became known, Daniel Schorr of CBS News received a telephone call from his office at 6:00 A.M. A camera crew was on the way to Angleton's home in Arlington, and Schorr was instructed to meet it there. Schorr vividly recalled what turned into an off-camera interview that lasted four hours. "I arrived, he opened the door, sleepy-looking, wearing a robe over pajamas. He invited me in. He sat down and we talked for a long time. 'I've been up all night,' Angleton said. 'My family is away, but I can offer you apple juice or Sanka.'
"He was emaciated-looking, and his glasses came down over his nose, and he sometimes tended to look over them. He was soft-spoken. He talked at enormous length about Yasir Arafat. How Arafat went to Moscow and laid a wreath on Lenin's tomb. He showed me a photograph of a beaming Arafat at the tomb. 'The man standing next to Arafat at Lenin's tomb is his KGB case officer,' Angleton said. 'Petrovakov. He was head of KGB headquarters in Karlshorst when Blake was in Berlin.'"
No pictures, Angleton told Schorr; the camera crew would have to remain outside. "He said, 'You've blown my cover, I sent my family to several states, they're scattered all over, because of the story. It's caused me a lot of trouble. If my picture is taken, my wife will be killed. My wife of thirty-two years is gone, and here I am.' He went on, bewailing his troubles. Then back to Arafat again."
Angleton rambled on circuitously, the conversation disjointed. He had been to Israel thirty times. He had never met Howard Hunt, the Watergate burglar. Then a long dissertation on how Georgi Malenkov had taken over in Moscow, and other Kremlin maneuvers, all controlled by the KGB. Dzerzhinsky ran four thousand agents, Stalin changed the OGPU to a terror organization.
"He talked about Watergate," Schorr said. "He said, 'When Watergate occurred, Helms was deeply victimized. Helms was set up as the scapegoat for President Nixon.'" Angleton was disturbed by detente. "'Public opinion favors detente, everything swirls around detente, which is just another word for peaceful coexistence, used by Stalin. The Nixon-Kissinger detente bothers me deeply.'
"'For twenty-two years I handled the Israeli account. Israel was the only sanity in the Middle East. They wanted to transfer this account -- that was unacceptable.' Colby was planning a trip to Israel, and Kissinger forbade him to go to East Jerusalem, because it would recognize Israeli control, and Colby canceled it. Angleton was furious at this.
"Angleton said the Yugoslav break with the Soviet Union was false, as was the Sino-Soviet split -- neither happened, it was all part of KGB disinformation designed to mislead us. They remained under central control. That's when I decided he was really crazy. I said, 'Mr. Angleton, do you really believe that?' He didn't answer, and went on speaking almost as though I wasn't there. He was talking as though he was looking into his own mind.
"Then Angleton said he was leaving. I said, 'Mr. Angleton, you realize there are sixteen cameras out there. You've just told me if your picture is taken your family will be killed.' He went out anyway and seemed mesmerized by the cameras. He spoke for some time. Then he got into his blue Mercedes and drove away."
***
Colby's broom had now made a clean sweep of the leadership of the Counterintelligence Staff. But the fallout from Hersh's story was just beginning. President Ford named an eight-member commission headed by Vice President Nelson A. Rockefeller to investigate the charges. By early in 1975, a full-dress inquiry had begun in the Senate under Frank Church, the Idaho Democrat. In the House, a similar investigation was conducted by Representative Otis G. Pike, a Democrat from Long Island. [8]
James Angleton reluctantly emerged from the shadows for a memorable appearance before Senator Church's Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. It was the first time he had ever testified in public. As the cameras clicked and whirred, the tall stooped figure was sworn in at the witness table under the bright lights of the chandeliered Senate caucus room.
After some initial sparring between Angleton and Church, Senator Richard Schweiker, a Pennsylvania Republican, began questioning the former counterintelligence chief. At an earlier, executive session, the senator pointed out, Angleton had been asked why the CIA had failed to comply with a presidential order to destroy the deadly shell-fish toxin that it used to coat the microscopic missiles fired by its dart guns.
Angleton had replied: "It is inconceivable that a secret intelligence arm of the government has to comply with all the overt orders of the government." Had Angleton really said that? Schweiker asked. "Well, if it is accurate, it shouldn't have been said," Angleton replied.
That wasn't enough for Schweiker. Did Angleton believe the CIA had to obey the President or didn't he? The remark was "imprudent," Angleton said; he wished to withdraw it.
Senator Church joined the questioning. "Did you not mean it when you said it the first time?" he asked.
"I do not know how to respond to that question," Angleton replied. "I said that I withdrew the statement."
"But you're unwilling to say whether or not you meant it when you said it?"
"I would say the entire speculation should not have been indulged in."
Senator Robert Morgan of North Carolina was troubled by Angleton's answers. He wanted to know how "the actions of that Central Intelligence Agency can be monitored in such a way as to protect the fundamental rights of the American citizens of this country? ... How can we act if ... the intelligence agencies refuse to obey the guidelines? ... what assurances do we have that an intelligence agency would follow any mandate of the Congress or the President?"
"I have nothing to contribute to that, sir," said James J. Angleton.
***
In the days immediately before the fall, Miler said, "Jim was very discouraged. What was going to happen to CI? What was going to happen to efforts to keep the government from being penetrated? There were many nights we would go to the Shanghai for dinner, out on Lee Highway. Or Jim would go to La Nicoise, a restaurant in Georgetown." [9] Over lunch there the two men would talk about the dim future of counterintelligence.
"He was very concerned we hadn't found the mole," Miler said. "He asked me, 'Where should we be looking? What should we be doing? Did we miss something? What were we doing wrong?'"
_______________
Notes:1. Petty kept Critchfield informed. "He used to stop by my office from time to time," Critchfield said, "and tell me about fragments of information that led him to believe there was a penetration. Angleton was one of the common denominators that ran through the cases. I listened because it seemed important and because of my respect for Ed Petty, who had been one of my two chief analysts."
2. Colby said he did not specifically remember Critchtield's visit, but had been told of the Petty study by William E. Nelson, the DDO, after it was finished. "I said, 'Aw, c'mon. It was nonsense." The Petty study, Colby said, was a "nonstarter" and did not affect his later decision to dismiss Angleton.
3. Blee, who was later to head the Counterintelligence Staff, regarded Petty's study of Angleton as a serious effort that would have to be carefully considered, not simply filed and forgotten. Without taking a position on whether Petty's conclusion about Angleton was valid, he moved to make sure that the study was preserved.
4. The Post Office, however, refused further complicity in the illegal program, and on February 15, 1973, the mail-opening program in New York, the largest of four such programs run by the CIA over the years, was shut down. During the twenty years from 1953 to 1973 that the CIA opened first-class mail, under the code name HTLINGUAL, 28 million letters were screened, 2.7 million envelopes were photographed, and 215,000 were opened in New York City alone.
5. The Glomar Explorer was a CIA ship operating under cover as a Howard Hughes mining vessel supposedly searching for minerals in the deep ocean floor. Its true purpose was to recover a Soviet submarine that had sunk in the Pacific. The CIA had named the supersecret operation Project Jennifer. In February 1974, Co1by learned that Hersh was investigating Project Jennifer. He went to the New York Times Washington bureau and met with Hersh and Robert H. Phelps, the Times Washington editor, pleading with them to wait. Colby was given no commitment ("We didn't offer any promise whatsoever," Phelps said), but Hersh, busy covering Watergate, did not yet have enough information to write about the submarine project anyway. A year later, after the story briefly peeped out in the Los Angeles Times. Colby, on grounds of national security, asked the New York Times (as well as several other newspapers and television stations) to hold off on further coverage. The Times agreed, but Hersh, who by now had prepared his story about Project Jennifer, protested vigorously. All the news media went along with the CIA request until columnist Jack Anderson broke the story on his national radio program on March 18, 1975.
6. Hersh suspected that Angleton's indiscretion in telling him about CIA networks in North Korea and Moscow was the real reason that Colby finally dismissed the counterintelligence chief. Remembering Colby's gasp when he related this conversation to the CIA director, Hersh said. "I think that's why he fired Angleton." Time magazine reported that Angleton himself claimed that "his resignation was solely because of an indiscretion in the course of an interview with the Times that could have jeopardized a U.S. agent in Moscow." However, Colby said he had no memory of Hersh telling him about Angleton's lapse. "Maybe he did," Colby said. "But it wasn't a factor in firing Angleton. I determined a long time ago I had to get rid of him and the question was how."
7. Colby's adversaries in the intelligence community later launched a whispering campaign that the CIA director had leaked the mail-opening program to Hersh to torpedo Angleton. Both Hersh and Colby firmly denied it.
8. The Rockefeller Commission and the two congressional committees reported wide-spread abuses by the CIA and other intelligence agencies, including assassination plots by the CIA against foreign heads of state. As a result of these investigations, Congress belatedly established permanent intelligence committees in the Senate and House to watch over the CIA and the other intelligence agencies. And the President was required to inform Congress of covert operations. Efforts to pass broader "charter" legislation, defining the tasks of the spy agencies and setting strictly defined limits on their activities, failed to pass, however, Despite this, the myth arose that the Church committee and other investigations had somehow hobbled the intelligence agencies.
9. La Nicoise, where Angleton lunched regularly, was notable for the odd fact that in the evening the waiters wore roller skates.