“The Ghost” is a page-turning biography of an eccentric spy hunter
When Americans think about the CIA today — if they think about it at all — they probably picture a secluded compound in Langley, Va., where Matt Damon matches wits with Joan Allen.
But those who grew up in the 1960s and 1970s conjure a different image: an agency shrouded in rumors of LSD experiments, foreign assassination plots and booby-trapped cigars — all of which seemed thoroughly outlandish until proven true by the relentless investigators of the Senate Intelligence Committee and Seymour Hersh of the New York Times.
Jefferson Morley is of that generation, and he has brought the investigative tools of a veteran journalist to that murky era — specifically, to the career of James Jesus Angleton, the CIA’s legendary chain-smoking, orchid-growing, poetry-quoting chief of counterintelligence.
The result is “The Ghost,” a page-turning biography of an eccentric spy hunter. But it’s also a carefully documented argument that the CIA, an agency created to defend the ideals of democracy from fascism and communism, wound up tarnishing those ideals instead.
Morley spent 15 years at the Washington Post, where he sharpened his interest in national security. In Angleton, he has a character beyond the imagination of John LeCarré, perhaps even of Patricia Highsmith.
The son of a wealthy expatriate American businessman, Angleton grew up in Milan and studied English at Yale. He talked his way into a job with U.S. Army intelligence as World War II broke out.
Sent to Italy at the war’s conclusion, Angleton befriended a group of fascist henchmen — war criminals, almost certainly — and protected them from prosecution because he thought they would be valuable allies in the looming Cold War.
Back in Washington in the early 1950s, he helped oversee the CIA program known as MKUltra, which experimented with hallucinogens and hypnosis to brainwash foreign agents. When an Army scientist named Frank Olson exited Manhattan’s Statler Hotel via a 10th-floor window and a shower of broken glass while tripping on LSD, Angleton discovered that covering up the CIA’s secrets mattered as much as exposing those of the Soviets.
Morley makes a gripping yarn of this material, but he also weaves a deeply tragic weft.
In what may be the book’s bombshell, Morley details Angleton’s early surveillance of Lee Harvey Oswald, but shows that his paranoia led him to misread Oswald’s motives.
In September 1975, Angleton was called before the Senate Intelligence Committee in an appearance that would make headlines around the world. Under blistering questions from Sens. Frank Church and Walter Mondale, the broken spymaster could not deny, or even defend, CIA tactics that violated its charter and federal law. Instead, he prevaricated:
“It is inconceivable,” he insisted, “that a secret intelligence arm of the government has to comply with all the overt orders of government.”