Jim DiEugenio reviews Jeff Morley's The Ghost

[James DiEugenio]

I finally had the time to read the whole book and to take notes.

The strength of the book is how it outlines Angleton's relationship to the Oswald file.  I do not understand why he left out the Hunt  memorandum.

https://kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-reviews/jefferson-morley-the-ghost-the-secret-life-of-cia-spymaster-james-jesus-angleton

 

[Thomas Graves]

6 hours ago, James DiEugenio said:

I finally had the time to read the whole book and to take notes.

The strength of the book is how it outlines Angleton's relationship to the Oswald file.  I do not understand why he left out the Hunt  memorandum.

https://kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-reviews/jefferson-morley-the-ghost-the-secret-life-of-cia-spymaster-james-jesus-angleton

 

 

James,

 

Here's the short "review" I wrote about it on Amazon on 11/30/17:

This book is reasonably well written as far as the prose is concerned, but to anyone who has read (former CIA Soviet Russia Division counterintelligence officer) Tennent H. Bagley's "Spy Wars," Jefferson Morley comes across as being unreasonably biased against Angleton, as exemplified by the way he selectively presents facts surrounding the incredible challenges Angleton was up against trying to counter the Soviets' intelligence services during the Cold War.

Here's one small example: True KGB defector Pyotr Deriabin interviewed controversial defector Yuri Nosenko for many hours after Nosenko defected to the U.S. in January,1964, and came to the unshakable-for-him conclusion that Nosenko was "fake," yet in Morley's book, Deriabin is mentioned only once, and not to criticize Nosenko or to support Angleton or to support Angleton's (and Bagley's) favorite defector, Golitsyn, but to point out, on page 107, that Golitsyn had, in so many words, a reputation back in the KGB to exaggerate and brag a lot. One wonders how much time Morley had to spend to find that "anti-Golitsyn" quote by Deriabin, and how he could, in good conscience, not mention that, especially as regards the all-important "Golitsyn versus Nosenko" issue, Deriabin was an Angleton supporter, not an Angleton detractor as Mr. Morley would apparently like for us to infer from his book.

Like I said, just one small example. The book is full of them.

 

--  TG

 

 

PS  Going from memory here, but doesn't it say in the Mitrokhin Archives that the Hunt Memorandum was a KGB forgery?

 

PPS  Maybe-off-topic-but-not-off-subject, but you do realize, don't you, that our very own patron, John Simkin, believes that Alger Hiss was a spy for the Soviets?

 

 

 

Edited March 31, 2018 by Thomas Graves

[Michael Clark]

4 hours ago, Thomas Graves said:

 

James,

 

Here's the short "review" I wrote about it on Amazon on 11/30/17:

This book is reasonably well written as far as the prose is concerned, but to anyone who has read (former CIA Soviet Russia Division counterintelligence officer) Tennent H. Bagley's "Spy Wars," Jefferson Morley comes across as being unreasonably biased against Angleton, as exemplified by the way he selectively presents facts surrounding the incredible challenges Angleton was up against trying to counter the Soviets' intelligence services during the Cold War.

Here's one small example: True KGB defector Pyotr Deriabin interviewed controversial defector Yuri Nosenko for many hours after Nosenko defected to the U.S. in January,1964, and came to the unshakable-for-him conclusion that Nosenko was "fake," yet in Morley's book, Deriabin is mentioned only once, and not to criticize Nosenko or to support Angleton or to support Angleton's (and Bagley's) favorite defector, Golitsyn, but to point out, on page 107, that Golitsyn had, in so many words, a reputation back in the KGB to exaggerate and brag a lot. One wonders how much time Morley had to spend to find that "anti-Golitsyn" quote by Deriabin, and how he could, in good conscience, not mention that, especially as regards the all-important "Golitsyn versus Nosenko" issue, Deriabin was an Angleton supporter, not an Angleton detractor as Mr. Morley would apparently like for us to infer from his book.

Like I said, just one small example. The book is full of them.

 

--  TG

 

 

PS  Going from memory here, but doesn't it say in the Mitrokhin Archives that the Hunt Memorandum was a KGB forgery?

 

PPS  Maybe-off-topic-but-not-off-subject, you do realize, don't you, that our very own patron, John Simkin, believes that Alger Hiss was a spy for the Soviets?

 

 

 

Tommy, do you think that, perhaps, you mistook your single paragraph for two? Do you think it is correct to start-off a paragraph with "Here's one small example:"? And lastly, do you think maybe your penchant for using long, rambling, difficult-to-follow sentences ends-up cunfusing, ahum, even, ..gasp.., you?

 

 

******edit   So as not to derail this thread, I "answered" Tommy's questioning of my educational credentials, openly, on the forum, here. 

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/topic/23839-research-storage/?page=3

 

Edited March 31, 2018 by Michael Clark
Switched "sentence" for "paragraph".

[Thomas Graves]

2 hours ago, Michael Clark said:

Tommy, do you think that, perhaps, you mistook your single paragraph for two? Do you think it is correct to start-off a sentence with "Here's one small example:"? And lastly, do you think maybe your penchant for using long, rambling, difficult-to-follow sentences ends-up cunfusing, ahum, even, ..gasp.., you?

 

Michael,

 

My, how insightful.  (Actually, I tried breaking it up so even you could read it.)

Regardless, would you care to comment on Deriabin's concluding that Nosenko was a false defector, and "Jeff" Morley's somehow failing to mention that in his book although he somehow had the presence of mind to use a quote from Deriabin to impugn the character of another Nosenko critic, Golitsyn, in said book?

 

--  TG

 

Is that too long a sentence for you, oh allegedly an English Literature major at one of the 64 CUNY campuses?

 

 

Edited March 31, 2018 by Thomas Graves

[James DiEugenio]

Its pretty obvious to anyone who read the book that Morley was not very interested in the whole Nosenko imbroglio.

He does not even devote a full chapter to it.  So there I did not go into any depth on that issue.

[Paul Brancato]

Reply to Tom on Nosenko - I’m neutral on him. He may very well have been sent post assassination because the USSR wanted to distance themselves from Oswald. That doesn’t necessarily mean Oswald was the KGB’s guy. At least Nosenko didn’t come swearing that all subsequent defectors would be false ones, didn’t start naming names in a way sure to divide western powers and keep them scrambling for decades. That was Golitsyn.

Jim - I get, and years ago got from you, your well taken point that JFK did not need Mary Pinchot to teach him a more peaceful approach to US foreign policy. But I think it’s likely that the LSD story is real. Whatever their relationship was or wasn’t, Angleton cared too much about it for me to think it unimportant. I read your review and agree with it generally - thanks for the link. 

[Thomas Graves]

2 hours ago, Paul Brancato said:

Reply to Tom on Nosenko - I’m neutral on him. He may very well have been sent post assassination because the USSR wanted to distance themselves from Oswald. That doesn’t necessarily mean Oswald was the KGB’s guy. At least Nosenko didn’t come swearing that all subsequent defectors would be false ones, didn’t start naming names in a way sure to divide western powers and keep them scrambling for decades. That was Golitsyn.

  .......

 

Paul,

Tennent H. Bagley, himself, didn't think KGB had sent Nosenko to try to "fool" us into thinking Oswald hadn't killed Kennedy for the KGB, but did think Nosenko was trying to prevent or discourage CIA from looking into the possibility that Oswald had had a relationship with the KGB before he defected to the USSR in 1959.

Regarding Golitsyn, you need to realize that "vintage" Golitsyn (pre mid-1964, iirc) was "gold," and that he got a widdle carried away after that, and things kinda started going sideways.

--  TG

 

Edited March 31, 2018 by Thomas Graves

[Rob Couteau]

Nice work, Jim. A fair and balanced review that gets to the heart of the matter. One thing that greatly disappointed me about the book was the lack of info about Dulles and his relationship to Angleton.

[James DiEugenio]

Rob:

 He mentions it, but does not go into any real depth about  the relationship between Dulles and Angleton.

Again, I don't know why.  Another thing I could have brought up was that he did not go into any real depth about Angleton's victims.  But he could probably argue that if you want to hear that then buy Molehunt.

[Paul Brancato]

10 hours ago, Thomas Graves said:

 

Paul,

Tennent H. Bagley, himself, didn't think KGB had sent Nosenko to try to "fool" us into thinking Oswald hadn't killed Kennedy for the KGB, but did think Nosenko was trying to prevent or discourage CIA from looking into the possibility that Oswald had had a relationship with the KGB before he defected to the USSR in 1959.

Regarding Golitsyn, you need to realize that "vintage" Golitsyn (pre mid-1964, iirc) was "gold," and that he got a widdle carried away after that, and things kinda started going sideways.

--  TG

 

TG - Thanks for clarifying. Is it your opinion, and/or Bagley’s, that when Golitsyn got ‘carried away’ it was on his own and not KGB inspired? It looked to me like he first established his bonafides and once settled comfortably he proceeded to sow division. One could look at Angleton as a victim of paranoia created by Golitsyn. I’m not saying that’s true, just possible. 

[James DiEugenio]

Paul:

I am surprised that you would say that.

The whole MM/Leary/ drug angle was suggested as a way of showing how the alleged Cold Warrior Kennedy suddenly transformed himself in the White House.  Once one realizes that that paradigm is complete crap, then the whole scenario should collapse.  Janney tried to sustain it by using the worst possible sources about who Kennedy was prior to 1961. In other words, he cut out the key character of Edmund Gullion.  And he did not tell the reader about Kennedy's anti colonial  foreign policy speeches from 1951-57; culminating in the great Algeria speech of 1957.  So the idea that somehow Tim Leary opened up JFK's vision through Mary Meyer is simply not supportable by the record.

But beyond that, its  clear that Leary manufactured the story to sell his book Flashbacks. People like Collier and Horowitz, and Paul Hoch,  swallowed this without any analysis.  Since I knew about Gullion at this time, and I knew about the censorship of his name and his role in JFK's foreign policy, I suspected it was really  BS to camouflage the real facts about Kennedy.  So when I began work on this subject back in the nineties, and since I knew there were suspicions about Leary being a  CIA agent, I looked at it critically.  Her is what I wrote back then:

"According to Leary, Mary Meyer was consulting with him about how to conduct acid sessions and how to get psychedelic drugs in 1962.  Leary met her on several occasions and she said she and a small circle of friends had turned on several times.  She also had one other friend who was a "very important man" whom she also wanted to turn on.  After Kennedy's assassination, Mary called Leary and met with him.  She was cryptic, but she did say, "They couldn't control him anymore.  He was changing too fast......"  The implication being that a "turned on " JFK was behind the moves toward peace in 1963....Leary had fulfilled his own fantasy by being Kennedy's guide on his magical mystery tour toward peace.

But there is a big problem with Leary, his story, and those who use it....Leary did not mention Mary in any of his books until Flashbacks in 1983, more than two decades after he met Mary.  It's not like he did not have the opportunity to do so.  Leary was a prolific author who got almost anything he wanted published.  He appears to have published over 40 books.  Of these, at least 25 were published between 1962, when he says he met Mary, and 1983, when he first mentions her.  Some of these books are month to month chronicles e.g. High Priest.  I could not find Mary mentioned, even vaguely, in any of the books. This is improbable considering the vivid, unforgettable portrait that Leary drew in 1983.  This striking-looking woman walks in unannounced, mentions her powerful friends in Washington, and later starts dumping out the CIA's secret operations to  control American elections to him.  Leary, who mentioned many of those he turned on throughout his books, and thanks those who believed in him, deemed this unimportant.  That is, until the 20th anniversary of JFK's death."

I will never forget that afternoon, driving around to different libraries trying to find just one mention in any of Leary's published books of that incident that he now said in 1983  had made such a memorable impression on him back in 1962. He had over twenty opportunities to talk about it, but he never did.  Sort of like Givens finally recalling how he saw Oswald on the sixth floor. 

BTW, in Flashbacks, one MM was not enough.  According to Leary, he also had an affair with Marilyn Monroe. If you believe that, I can sell you some swampland in Florida.

 

 

 

Edited March 31, 2018 by James DiEugenio

[Paul Brancato]

Jim - I get your point. For me JFK’s turn towards peaceful coexistence and away from Cold War thinking was gradual, and many things contributed to it. Surely being president accelerated that process. I don’t need LSD to explain that. I just don’t rule it out.

Leary might have been making his Mary Pinchot story up. There’s no real proof one way or the other. I met him once in 1964 at his Millbrook NY estate because I went to an arts camp with his daughter Susan, and visited her there afterwards along with another camper who had a crush on her. I was 16 and not yet a hippie. I sat on their veranda at sunset and listened to him and two of his associates talk about things I had little inkling of, while listening to the sounds of a high trumpet in the distance - Maynard Ferguson was his neighbor. Later that year when I starting smoking pot and using LSD I learned who Leary was. So perhaps it gave me a little more interest in him. I wondered later why, when he avoided prosecution by leaving the US, he ended up hanging out with Eldridge Cleaver, a man who in my opinion fits the profile of Agent Provocateur. 

Forgive the digression. 

[James DiEugenio]

By the way I should add the name of a book that does not get mentioned enough.

It was not until I read Acid Dreams that I began to have some doubts about Leary.  

And that is when I began to question the whole MM/JFK/Leary construct.

Its really kind of puzzling to me that Morley accepted it.

[David Andrews]

Is it possible to separate the degrees and duration of anti-Communism ("Cold Warrior") in Kennedy from those of anti-colonialism? 

The latter ideals are part of the Roosevelt strain in the Democratic Party, and would have been opposed by the same Western corporatists who would have opposed Roosevelt in these matters had he lived into the post-war world.  (Except perhaps the imperative of stripping England of her Eastern colonies, to make them fair game for exploitation by the rest of the capitalist world, and make the US the only economic superpower for a time.)  Of course, Kennedy was his own man and was influenced by experts such as Gullion and by persisting and changing conditions in the third world.

The issues of anti-Communism and anti-colonialism would obviously intertwine in Kennedy's administration and in the worldviews of business and government.  But even when they do, Kennedy's attitudes toward each should be considered.

 

 

Edited March 31, 2018 by David Andrews

[James DiEugenio]

After Kennedy met Gullion in Saigon in 1951, he pretty much began to make these statements and speeches which condemned both political parties' orthodoxies about the Third World.

By 1953, he was saying that the war in Vietnam was not really about democracy vs communism, it was about nationalism.