Biography Ebooks: Free ebook sample of "James Jesus Angleton: was He Right" by Edward Jay Epstein

After his death, his actual achievements were eclipsed by his legend. In the media, he was transmogrified into the CIA’s version of a Captain Ahab wreaking destruction of all around him by his pursuit of his own phantasmagorical great white whale. Books on the CIA depicted him as a paranoid mole hunter obsessively searching for non-existing spies planted in the heart of the CIA and non-existing deception plots aimed at the American government. His legend also became the stuff of fiction. He was the basis for a deranged and paranoid spy hunter in everything from movies, such as The Good Shepherd (where he is played by Matt Damon) and TV mini-series, such as The Company (where he is played by Michael Keaton) to novels, such as Norman Mailer’s Harlot’s Ghost. Like many legends, his portrayal had some basis in reality. It is true that he had deep-seated suspicions about KGB operations that could be construed as paranoia. It is also true that he conducted a 20 year long mole hunt, that he believed both the CIA and FBI were vulnerable to Soviet penetration at the highest level, and that KGB passed disinformation through intelligence channels to the White House. Even though these contentions of a state-sponsored conspiracy to manipulate Presidents of the United States made him the object of ridicule in the media, the question remains: Was Angleton right?

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PART ONE DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE

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[1]

Flowers of Deception

I first met James Jesus Angleton in February 1976. At that time, I knew nothing about his secret world of deception. Nor had I even heard of the concepts of "disinformation", "dangles" "false flags" or "penetrations," which were central elements in it.

I had just begun a book on Lee Harvey Oswald, the alleged assassin of President John F. Kennedy. Although Oswald was investigated by the Warren Commission, the FBI, and other intelligence services, there was still a missing piece in the jigsaw puzzle– the nearly two years that he had spent in the Soviet Union before he returned to the United States in 1962. What had happened to Oswald during this period? Had he had connections with Soviet intelligence during this Russian period? Had the KGB sponsored his return to the US? Had he been given any mission in America?

I had now been offered an opportunity to exclusively interview a man who supposedly could provide definitive answers to all these questions– Yuri Nosenko. He was the KGB officer who had not only superintended Oswald's handling in Moscow in 1959 but had also reviewed his entire file KGB after the assassination. He then defected to the CIA. Not even the Warren Commission had been allowed to interview him. Now Donald Jamison, who was handling Nosenko on behalf of the CIA, was making him available for a book I was writing for the Reader’s Digest Press. “Nosenko is utterly reliable on the subject of Oswald,” Jamison assured me, “He had full access to his KGB records.” How could I refuse such an offer?

I had begun my interviews with Nosenko in January 1976. After I had completed six hours of interviews with Nosenko, I found several of the assertions he made about the KGB's treatment of Oswald inconsistent with other evidence furnished the Warren Commission. Even though I was assured by his CIA handler that he was utterly reliable on the subject, and had full access to KGB records, as he claimed, I was not completely satisfied. His insistence that the KGB had never contacted Oswald during his stay in the Soviet Union seemed implausible since Oswald had loudly advertised on his arrival that he had some secret information of special interest to the Soviet Union.

My doubts were not entirely alleviated. I had lunch later that week with a Soviet diplomat in Washington, Igor Agou, to facilitate getting a visa to go to Russia. When I told Agou that I wanted to interview a number of Russian citizens who had been acquaintances of Oswald, he replied, "there is no need for you to go to Russia.” He then, lowering his voice to a whisper, added, “the best source on Oswald's visit there is in America. He is Yuri Nosenko." I found it curious that the Soviet Embassy would recommend that I see a Soviet traitor: indeed, the same traitor the CIA had also recommended to me.

Disquieted by this coincidence, I went back to see Jamison. I pressed him about why, if Nosenko was such a valuable source, the Warren Commission had not called him a witness in 1964. After all, the Commission noted in its report that it lacked access to the Soviet files on Oswald. According to both Jamison and Agou, Nosenko could have filled that gap.

He answered that there had been some "minor problem" with Nosenko at that time. They were “technicalities” about his defection that had now been cleared up. When I asked further about the problem, he said that it was "too sensitive" to be discussed. He closed the issue by saying "In any case, it is not relevant to your book. Don’t worry about it further."

But I did. I began looking for an ex-CIA officer who would know about the problem with Nosenko in 1964. In 1975, the investigative reporter Seymour Hersh had published a story in the New York Times reporting an illegal CIA counterintelligence activity that resulted in the firing of a number of CIA executives. The most prominent among them was James Jesus Angleton, who, on checking his name, I found that he had also been a liaison with the Warren Commission..

Making contact with Angleton was not difficult; he was listed in the Virginia telephone directory. When told him on the phone that I had interviewed Nosenko ,he said “I wouldn’t have thought they would be letting him out so soon– but I would be very interested in what he has to say.” He agreed to meet me for dinner at the Madison Hotel, which he chose because it had a “secure garage.”

He arrived in a black homburg, looking like someone that Central Casting might have chosen for the part of a counterintelligence chief. He was ghostly-thin , with deep-set eyes accentuated by arched eyebrows. He had an enigmatic smile, and a finely-sculptured face which, I later learned, had been proposed half-facetiously as an appropriate logo for the CIA.

He lit a cigarette as we sat down at the table and coughed. He explained that he suffered from emphysema and ulcers. A quarter of a century in counterintelligence had evidently exacted some toll.

Since Angleton's counterintelligence staff had the responsibility for evaluating information supplied by KGB defectors, I assumed that he would be in a position to clarify what Nosenko had been telling me about Oswald and the KGB. I had no idea then that Nosenko had been the subject of a bitter ten-year battle inside the CIA that had been buried, along with a half-dozen careers, but not settled. I merely wanted to know why the Warren Commission had not called Nosenko. So I asked him "Was there any problem with Nosenko's veracity?".

Angleton answered, with a thin smile, suggesting a deliberate understatement, "There are always problems when it comes to defectors." He explained that his job was establishing the bona fides of defectors. And that was not always possible.”

“Did you award Nosenko his bona fides?” I asked.

He replied that he could not discuss individual cases, and with that, he abruptly cut off the conversation about Nosenko , and effortlessly moved on to another subject of which I had no understanding at all: orchids.

“There are over ten thousand identified species of orchids divided into tribes,” I heard him say. He was describing orchid tribes, growing at different levels of a rain forest, with such exotic names as Dendrobian, Phalaenopsis, Cattleya, Cymbidian, and Brassia. He then invited me to accompany him to an orchid supplier called Kensington Orchids in Maryland

I met him there the following week. He talked as we walked through the steamy greenhouse as if he were conducting a lecture tour.

What fascinated him about these orchid were their deceptive qualities. As he explained it, it has not been the fittest but the most deceptive orchid that has survived. The perpetuation of most species of orchids depends on their ability to misrepresent themselves to insects. Having no food to offer the insects, they had to deceive them into landing on them and carrying their pollen to another orchid in the tribe. Orchids are too dispersed in nature to depend on the wind to carry their pollen.

To accomplish this deception, orchids use color, shape and odor to mimic something that attracts insects to their pods of pollen. Some orchids play on the sexual instincts of insects. The Trichoceros orchid, for example, so perfectly mimics in three dimensions the underside of a female fly, down to the hairs and smell, that it triggers mating response from passing male flies. Seeing what he thinks is a female fly, the male fly swoops down on the orchid, and attempts to have sex with it-- a process called pseudo-copulation. The motion causes the fly to hit the pollen pod, which attaches itself to his underside. The fly thus becomes an unwitting carrier. When it then passes another trichoceros orchid, and repeats the frustrating process, it pollinates that orchid.

Other orchids play on the survival instinct of insects. Some oncidium orchids have an almost exact replica of a bee's head on their petals. When a passing wasps sees this image of danger lurking behind it, its survival mechanism is triggered. The wasp plunges its stinger through its illusionary foe. The stinger passes through the petal into the pollen pod, which then adheres to it. When the wasp sees another Oncidium orchid, which provokes the same response, it pollinates the orchid. Angleton called this process of provocation, "pseudo-attack".