Veteran journalist and author
Joseph Goulden offers a negative review of Jefferson Morley's The Ghost: The Secret Life CIA Spymaster James Jesus Angleton in the Washington Times..
As a holiday gift, permit me
to save you 28 bucks and however much time you might waste on the sorriest
excuse for an investigative book that has ever crossed this desk.
Jefferson Morley sets out to
prove that James J. Angleton (seen in the below photo), the longtime — and controversial — head of
counterintelligence for the Central Intelligence Agency — was guilty of a
medley of sins, including complicity in the murder of President Kennedy.
His “research” consists
chiefly of sweeping up every bit of anti-Angleton dung he could in previous
books. The more damning the allegation — and the more ridiculous — the better.
One must blink at some of Mr.
Morley’s outlandish claims. An example: that Angleton had a homosexual
relationship with Kim Philby (seen in the below photo), the British intelligence officer who also spied
for the Soviet Union.
To be sure, the two men knew
one another: Angleton was Philby’s liaison for CIA when the latter was assigned
to Washington. They had many a chat over a bottle and lunch.
Mr. Morley’s evidence? A
comment made by another officer to another author of another book. No substance
is visible, just a suspicion. No matter; such is enough for the likes of a
“historian” such as Mr. Morley.
To be sure, Philby’s
treachery damaged Angleton. He spent his last years searching for “moles” in
the CIA, an ill-guided effort that smeared many innocent people. He eventually
was fired.
But Mr. Morley has little
favorable to say about a career that began in the OSS and had a number of high
spots. Brief mention is made of his acquisition of the famed “Stalin speech” in
which successor Nikita Khrushchev shook communism to its core.
Why such a book? Mr. Morley
is prominent in a claque of deniers who have spent decades trying to prove that
someone other than Lee Harvey Oswald (seen in the below photo) killed Kennedy.
Their campaign even reaches
the White House. Donald Trump’s intimate friend Roger Stone published a book in
2014 blaming Lyndon Johnson for the murder.
But the main target has been
— and will be for eternity, it appears — the Central Intelligence Agency.
For the media, CIA is an easy
target. Journalists love writing about “CIA murder plots” against foreign
leaders, ignoring the fact that orders came from the White House.
Too, a deceased target can do
nothing to rebut outlandish lies. For that matter, even living officers have
trouble gaining redress from courts that hold them to be “public figures.”
Enter the deniers and their
politics. A strong element among the deniers, like Mr. Morley, are on the
far-left of the political spectrum. Hence, they are incapable of fingering a
leftist for the most outrageous crime in American history.
Thus their need for a
scapegoat, and the utility of Angleton. As Mr. Morley writes, carefully casting
his accusation in the form of a question, “Was Angleton running Oswald as part
of a plot to assassinate President Kennedy? He certainly had the knowledge and
ability to do so.”
You can read the rest of the
review via the below link:
