The Cost of Women War Criminals’ Gendered Defenses

 

Izabela Stefjia and Jessica Trisko Darden, Women as War Criminals:

Gender, Agency, and Justice

(Stanford Briefs/Stanford University Press, 2020)

Most people, female as well as male, think of war crimes as the ignominious reserve of the male of the human species.  But in Women as War Criminals: Gender, Agency, and Justice, Izabela Stefjia and Jessica Trisko Darden, professors at Tulane and Virginia Commonwealth  University, respectively, contend that the gender “violence gap” in war crimes – the difference between the rate at which men and women commit violent acts – is “not as wide as is often thought, in part because women’s historical participation in wartime violence has willfully been ignored” (p.122).  Women war criminals, the authors contend, have gone unnamed or been underestimated, all part of an attempt to “preserve archetypal images of women as victims and men as perpetrators” (p.122; the authors cite Wendy Lower’s seminal work,  Hitler’s Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields, a nuanced study of women who joined the Nazi cause and in surprising numbers abetted willingly and enthusiastically the Holocaust, reviewed here in 2016).

While no single document defines war crimes, the 1899 and 1907 Hague Conventions, the 1949 Geneva Convention, and the 2002 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court all identify and prohibit behaviors in the conduct of international and domestic conflicts that transgress internationally accepted norms, including torture, forced displacement and genocide.  Women as War Criminals revolves around four women charged with war crimes.  The four cases illustrate in different ways how gendered stereotypes can distort the outcome in proceedings to address those crimes, and how specific social and political contexts influence the construction of gendered arguments.

Stefjia and Trisko Darden bring to their work a perspective that could be described as both feminist and prosecutorial.  Violence by women, they argue, should be treated when proven as a prosecutor would treat it: an “autonomous choice clearly indicative of the human capacity for violence” (p.9).  The four cases are intended to demonstrate how gendered arguments in legal proceedings almost invariably deny or lessen women’s agency, often resulting in women being treated more leniently and escaping full accountability for their crimes.  Women who are “willing to cater to gender stereotypes through compliance, obedience, and apology are more likely to evade the full weight of their crimes” (p.126), the authors write.  However, context is critical in assessing women accused of war crimes.  In some contexts, gendered arguments can result in women being treated more harshly than men for similar offenses.  Focusing on women as war criminals, the authors add, does not “diminish the important and well-established fact that women are among the greatest victims of armed conflict” (p.121-22).

The first two of the four cases involve women accused of war crimes during the 1990s: Biljana Plavšić, charged with participation in the ethnic cleansing of Bosnian Muslims in the former Yugoslavia; and Pauline Nyiramasuhuk, indicted as an architect of the genocide against ethnic Tutus in Rwanda.  Each was a high-level official in her government and both were well into their adult years when they were implicated in war crimes.  Their cases, tried before recently established United Nations international tribunals, the International Criminal Court for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the International Criminal Court for Rwanda (ICTR), reflect the optimism of the 1990s that such tribunals could assign responsibility for war crimes in an unbiased fashion and thereby ameliorate the post-conflict political conditions in the two countries.

The last two cases involve women who found themselves engaged on opposite sides of the 21^st century American-led “global war on terror” in the Middle East: Lynette England and Hoda Muthana.  Both were 20 when they entered conflict, decades younger than Plavšić and Nyiramasuhuk, and both were at or near the bottom of their respective organizations.  Both, moreover, became pregnant by male co-perpetrators and gave birth while in service to their organizations.

England was the US Army soldier famously photographed in 2004 abusing suspected terrorists captured in Iraq.  She faced a military court-marital in the United States.  Muthana was an American-born Muslim woman who traveled to Syria to join the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) during the 21^st century’s second decade.   While with ISIS, she allegedly incited violent acts against civilians, including urging the killing of Americans and the assassination of then-President Barack Obama.  Muthana married three times during her ISIS tenure, earning her the media moniker of “ISIS bride.”  Her first two husbands died in conflict.

Despite apparent similarities between England and Muthana, and between Plavšić and Nyiramasuhuk, each woman’s case is significantly different from the other three.  If there is a common denominator among the four, it lies in the readiness of all to downplay their own agency by arguing in their defense that they had been manipulated by males and predominantly male institutions.  These gendered defenses, the authors contend, disguise the “noteworthy ideological commitment to the cause they took up.”  All four believed, “with conviction, that they were fighting for the right side” (p.123).   Until we recognize that women can be as violent as men, capable of committing such heinous crimes as torture, rape, enslavement, mass murder, ethnic cleansing and genocide, the authors suggest, “we cannot expect their equal treatment under the law or in society” (p.131).

* * *

Biljana Plavšić was an accomplished agricultural scientist who held a PhD and had been a Fulbright scholar.  In 1992, she became co-president, along with the notorious war criminal Radovan Karadžić,  of Republika Srpska, the Serbian entity created within the larger state of Bosnia and Herzegovina.  She was the only woman among 16 individuals indicted by the ICTY on war crimes charges involving the ethnic cleansing of non-Serbs.  Unlike the 15 males, Plavšić surrendered voluntarily and did not use the tribunal theatrically, either to ridicule it as the “ultimate enemy of their people” or to “express extreme nationalist narratives” (p.18), as did several of her male co-defendants.  She was originally indicted on nine counts, but eight, including genocide, were dropped in exchange for a guilty plea to one count of persecution on political, racial and religious grounds.

At her sentencing, Plavšić’s lawyers presented their client as the compliant “Mother of the Serb nation.”  Her lawyers seemed to be “seeking to prove that Plavšić was an obedient and virtuous woman” (p.27).  She regretted publicly the role she had played in heinous war crimes.  She too was a victim, she argued, “not of The Hague [or] the international community but of the political elite in Republika Srpska” and its “rogue leadership” (p.28) which she left.

Portraying Plavšić as a woman who was duped by her male peers proved to be an effective defense, as she was given a modest sentence, 11 years in prison minus 245 days spent in pre-trial detention.  She was released in October 2009 for good behavior, after serving about two-thirds of her sentence.  Many men considerably lower in the hierarchy and facing less serious charges received longer prison terms.  But rather than being duped by her Republika Srpska peers, Plavšić might better be seen as the woman who duped the ICTY and the international community.

While in prison, Plavšić wrote a scorching two-volume political memoir in Serbian, never translated into other major European languages, in which she all but admitted that her defense at the ICTY had been an act – that she fully supported the aims of Bosnia’s Serbian nationalists, even if she didn’t admit explicitly to participation in the specific war crimes of which she was accused.  Her memoir dismissed Serbian atrocities as a “fabrication;” portrayed NATO as the enemy of the Serbs; and contended that the United States sought to eradicate Serbia.  Diverging drastically from the image Plavšić sought to create at the ICTY, the memoir  demonstrated “disrespect and disregard for international criminal law and displayed extreme nationalism and racism” (p.38).   The ICTY, the authors note woefully, clearly “did not manage to convert a key female perpetrator into a reconciliatory figure through leniency and a reduced sentence” (p.42).

* * *

The Rwandan genocide of ethnic Tutsis in 1994, one of the most infamous episodes of mass violence and war crimes in modern history, was organized by a small group from the Hutu ethnic group that had been excluded from and disagreed with a power sharing agreement executed in 1990 between Hutus and Tutsis, Rwanda’s two major ethnic groups.  Three quarters of Rwanda’s Tutsi population were killed in the genocide, along with others who either “looked Tutsi” or were more moderate Hutus.

Pauline Nyiramasuhuko, the Rwandan Minister of Family and Women’s Development, was one of the key inner circle members of the government which planned the massacre of Tutsis and opposition Hutus.  Nyiramasuhuko was tried at the ICTR in a group of six, with five men, all considered to be at the top of the criminal pyramid.  Like the five men, she was accused of crimes against humanity that included aiding and abetting in the slaughter of Tutsis.  She allegedly encouraged men, including her son, to commit rape of Tutsi women.

At Nyiramasuhuko’s trial, her lawyers cast her as an “unaware, uninformed, innocent victim of male leaders,” suggesting that she was a “passive participant” (p..62).  They sought to normalize her image by “portraying her as a pious and devoted mother” (p.46).  But for her victims and the accusers, Nyiramasuhuko was “especially guilty and vicious because she [was] a woman and a mother” (p.59).  That she was a mother made her participation worse for her victims and accusers, the authors sardonically observe, “as if somehow being a father and a perpetrator is not a common characteristic of male genocidaires” (p.54).

The ICTR didn’t buy gendered arguments from either side.  The court was “not open to the argument that Nyiramasuhuko was a woman duped by genocidal men” (p.62).  It convicted her of genocide, conspiracy to commit genocide, violence to life, and outrages against personal dignity, along with the crimes against humanity of extermination, persecution and rape.  She became both the “only woman tried and convicted by an international court for the crime of genocide” and the “only woman to be tried and convicted by an international criminal trial for rape as a crime against humanity” (p.49), thereby “shattering the image of men being exclusive perpetrators of rape” (p.55).  The ICTR gave Nyiramasuhuko and her son life sentences, with her sentence reduced in 2015 to 47 years.

The ICTR’s rejection of gender-related arguments cast the court as an “objective legal institution, interested only in the facts” (p.64).  But the authors nonetheless characterize the court’s avoidance of gender as a missed opportunity to probe more deeply into how masculinity and femininity in the Rwandan context affected the horrific violence.  Treating Nyiramasuhuko’s case as no different from that of her co-accused males, the authors contend, resulted in the court fitting her into what they characterize as the “violent ‘African savage’ stereotype” (p.70).  The ICTR case against Nyiramasuhuko was thus “influenced by ingrained biases about how African actors behave in conflicts” (p.46).

“Relying exclusively on gender to understand female war criminals diminishes their social, political, and material motives,” the authors conclude in their summary of Nyiramasuhuko’s case.  But removing gender entirely, as the ICTR did,“denies the gendered context in which the crimes took place” (p.65).

* * *

Lynette England gained notoriety in the spring of 2004, when renowned investigative reporter Seymour Hersh reported in the New Yorker magazine on torture and extensive prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, the Iraqi prison that was once home to Saddam Hussein’s torturers and became, as the authors put it, “synonymous with the excesses of America’s War on Terror” (p.71).  Among the photos accompanying Hersh’s article was one of England in a t-shirt and fatigues, “holding what appeared to be a leash wrapped around the neck of a naked man” (p.72).

England, who grew up in Appalachia, had been diagnosed with a learning disability as a child.  While in high school, she signed up for the U.S. Army Reserves.  After graduation, she married her boyfriend and mobilized with her reserve unit for deployment.  Shortly after her arrival in Iraq, England, still legally married, met Charles Graner.  Contrary to Army regulations, England and Graner began a sexual relationship which resulted in England’s pregnancy.  She gave birth to her son, Carter, about six months after the abuse scandal had broken.

After a first court-marital, in which the military judge refused to accept her guilty plea, England’s second court-martial generated far more media attention than those of the males who were more deeply involved in abuse of Iraqi prisoners.  In that proceeding, England’s defense team “intentionally used her gender and status as a mother to minimize her role in the abuse by depicting her as sexually and emotionally exploited by an older, higher ranked man” (p.73-74).  England was portrayed as an “uncivilized, promiscuous Hillbilly-turned-Torturer” (p.79), at the bottom of both the American social hierarchy and the military hierarchy – “incapable of making good decisions as evidenced by her divorce, pregnancy, and participation in torture” (p.80).  As a so-called “Hillbilly,” England’s social status was “seen by some observers as enforcing her culpability” (p.81).

For institutional as much as strategic reasons, England’s defense team did not seek to question the military’s role in creating conditions conducive to torture and perhaps even in directing soldiers to commit abusive acts.  The overall objective of the Abu Ghraib courts-martial , the authors contend, was to “deflect blame away from the Army and toward the individual perpetrators rather than establishing a broader system of accountability” (p.88).  The prosecution too, while recognizing England’s agency, “failed to consider the broader social and institutional environment that the abuse occurred in” (p.88).

England was found guilty on 7 of 8 counts and sentenced to three years in military prison.  The male soldiers’ sentences varied based on their cooperation with the investigation.  Graner received the stiffest sentence as the ringleader of the abuse.  There were a few soldiers higher up in the chain of command who had their career advancement blocked, but most escaped punishment.  The lesson to be derived from England’s court martial, the authors conclude, is that when women soldiers face military justice, they will be judged for “failing not only as soldiers, but as women” (p.94).

* * *

Hoda Muthana was born in New Jersey in 1994 to immigrant parents from Yemen.  Her father was a Yemeni diplomat who chose to remain in the United States after his diplomatic tour ended.  After graduation from high school, Muthana enrolled in business school at the University of Alabama.  In 2014, she left university to join ISIS in Syria, where she became one of its public spokespersons.  On social media, she took the name of Umm Jihad, Mother Jihad.

Early in her tenure with ISIS, Muthana married a 23-year-old man from Australia, of Middle Eastern background.  Her husband was killed in battle less than three months after their marriage and, after a period of mourning, she married a 19-year-old Tunisian who too was killed in combat, when Muthana was 7 months pregnant.  She gave birth to a son, Adam, and remarried still another time, but little detail is known about her third husband.

Muthana fled ISIS-controlled territory in mid-December 2018.  Stressing her youth and  her status as a mother, she described herself as having been “brainwashed,” “traumatized, and “manipulated” by ISIS (p.105).  In January 2019, Muthana surrendered to opposition Kurdish forces and was placed in a holding camp.  As of the authors’ writing, she and her son lived in a tent, along with about 4,400 other women and children affiliated with ISIS.  She expressed publicly a desire to return to the United States to face potential criminal charges for her actions in Syria.  But that path seems to be legally foreclosed.

In 2016, the State Department sought to strip Muthana of her of US citizenship based on a revised understanding of her father’s diplomatic status.  He was still subject to diplomatic immunity when she was born, the Department argued.  Muthana’s father sued in federal district court to challenge that decision, with the case centered around what his daughter had done for ISIS.  The district court affirmed the State Department’s decision, thereby denying Muthana American citizenship.  Last month, the Supreme Court turned down the request to review the district court decision, and it is unclear whether Muthana will ever be called to account in a legal forum.

The authors manifest little sympathy for Muthana’s claims of brainwashing and manipulation while with ISIS, but would plainly like to see those claims and the accusations of terrorist acts attributed to her subject to the scrutiny of a legal proceeding.  Yet she still warrants study as an example of the gendered stereotyping baked into the term “ISIS bride.”  The term attaches a woman to a man’s agenda, they contend, thereby acknowledging women’s agency “only within the framework of marriage” and downplaying the “very real engagement of these women with ISIS’s ideology” (p.102).

There is no evidence that Muthana joined ISIS because she was “persuaded to by a man,” or that she did so for the “primary purpose of getting married” (p.102), the authors argue.  And  there is ample evidence of her strong ideological convictions: she viewed her actions in Syria as in line with God’s laws, in which the founding of a Muslim state or caliphate is an obligation of every Muslim, regardless of gender race, or nationality.  These ideological convictions were wholly absent in media reporting about Muthana and those of other so-called ISIS brides.  That the women of ISIS, and not the men, are able to press claims of youth, manipulation and victimization reflects the “deeply gendered bias in both media portrayals and the legal treatment of ISIS members” (p.108).

* * *

The four cases, disparate as they may be, reveal women war criminals to be like their male counterparts,  Stefjia and Trisko Darden write,  “political actors willing to act on their convictions and use their trials and notoriety to further their messages” (p.123). Women implicated in war crimes, moreover, are uncomfortably similar to other women across the globe in at least one sense – they too are “committed to making a mark and having a voice in a man’s world” (p.123).

Thomas H. Peebles

Bordeaux, France

February 1, 2022

 

 

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Misjudgments and Misdeeds of an Unseen Power Broker

Jefferson Morley, The Ghost:

The Secret Life of  CIA Spymaster James Jesus Angleton

(St. Martin’s)

James Jesus Angleton served as the Central Intelligence Agency’s head of counterintelligence — its top spy and effectively the number three person in the agency — from 1954 until he was forced into retirement in 1975.  Although his name is a less familiar than that of the FBI’s original director, J. Edgar Hoover, I couldn’t help thinking of Hoover as I read Jefferson Morley’s trenchant biography, The Ghost: The Secret Life of CIA Spymaster James Jesus Angleton.  Both were immensely powerful, paranoid men who repeatedly broke or skirted the law to advance their often-idiosyncratic versions of what United States national security required.  Throughout their careers, both were able to avoid almost all attempts to hold them accountable for their misdeeds.  With the passage of four decades since Hoover’s death in 1972 and Angleton’s departure from the CIA three years later, we can see that the two men seem  embodied what has recently come to be known as the “Deep State,” a nearly independent branch of government in which officials secretly manipulate government policy, as Morley puts it, “largely beyond the view of the Madisonian government and the voting public” (p.xi).

Morley demonstrates that the notorious COINTELPRO operation, associated today with Hoover and arguably his most dubious legacy, actually began as a joint FBI-CIA undertaking that Angleton concocted.  COINTELPRO aimed to infiltrate and disrupt dissidents and included among its targets Dr. Martin Luther King, left leaning organizations, and Vietnam anti-war protestors.  The original idea that Angleton sold to a skeptical Hoover, who considered the CIA a “nest of liberals, atheists, homosexuals, professors, and otherwise feminized men who specialized in wasting the taxpayer dollar” (p.71), was that the Bureau would target subjects within the United States while the Agency would take the lead in targeting subjects outside the United States.

From there, the CIA and FBI collaborated on LINGUAL, an elaborate and extensive program to read American citizens’ mail, which Morley terms perhaps Angleton’s “most flagrant violation of the law” (p.82); and on CHAOS, an operation designed to infiltrate the entire anti-Vietnam war movement, not just people or organizations that engaged in violence or contacted foreign governments. Post-Watergate hearings brought the existence and extent of COINTELPRO, LINGUAL and CHAOS  to light, along with numerous other chilling exercises of authority attributed to the FBI and CIA, leading to Angleton’s involuntary retirement from the agency.

Morley, a freelance journalist and former Washington Post editor, does not make the Hoover comparison explicitly.  He sees in Angleton a streak of Iago, Othello’s untrustworthy advisor: outwardly a “sympathetic counselor with his own agenda, which sometimes verged on the sinister” (p.158).  Angleton served four American presidents with “seeming loyalty and sometimes devious intent” (p.159), he writes (of course, the same could be said of Hoover, who served eight presidents over the course of a career that began in the 1920s).

Writing in icy prose that pieces together short, punchy vignettes with one word titles, Morley undertakes to show how Angleton was able to elevate himself from a “staff functionary” at the CIA, a new agency created in 1947, to an “untouchable mandarin” who had an “all but transcendent influence on U.S. intelligence operations for two decades” (p.67).  At the height of the Cold War, Morley writes, Angleton became an “unseen broker of American power” (p.158).

But Morley’s biography might better be viewed as a compendium of the misjudgments and misdeeds that punctuated Angleton’s career from beginning to end.  Angleton’s judgment failed him repeatedly, most notoriously when his close friend and associate, British intelligence agent Kim Philby, was revealed to have been a Soviet spy from World War II onward (I reviewed Ben McIntyre’s biography of Philby here in 2016). The Philby revelation convinced Angleton that the KGB had also planted an agent within the CIA, precipitating a disastrous and abysmally unsuccessful “mole hunt” that paralyzed the CIA for years and damaged the careers of many innocent fellow employees, yet discovered no one.

The book’s most explosive conjuncture of questionable judgment and conduct involves Angleton’s relationship to Lee Harvey Oswald, President John F. Kennedy’s presumed assassin.  Angleton followed Oswald closely from 1959, when he defected to the Soviet Union, to that fateful day in Dallas in 1963.  Thereafter, Angleton tenaciously withheld his knowledge of Oswald from the Warren Commission, charged with investigating the circumstances of the Kennedy assassination, to the point where Morley suggests that Angleton should have been indicted for obstruction of justice.  The full extent of Angleton’s knowledge of Oswald has yet to come out, leaving his work laden with fodder for those of a conspiratorial bent who insist that Oswald was something other than a lone gunman, acting alone, as the Warren Commission found (in 2015, I reviewed Peter Savodnik’s biography of Oswald here, in which Savodnik argues forcefully for the lone gunman view of Oswald).

* * *

Born in 1917 in Boise, Idaho, Angleton was the son of a prosperous merchant father and a Mexican-American mother (hence the middle name “Jesus”).  At age 16, the young Angleton moved with his family to Milan, where his father ran the Italian-American Chamber of Commerce and was friendly with many leaders in the fascist regime of Benito Mussolini.  For the remainder of his life, James retained a fondness for Italy, Italian culture and, it could be argued, the Italian brand of fascism.

Angleton attended boarding school in England, then went on to Yale as an undergraduate.  At Yale, he demonstrated a keen interest in poetry and came under the influence of the poet Erza Pound, who later became notorious for his Nazi sympathies (after an investigation led by J. Edgar Hoover, Pound was jailed during World War II).  Poetry constituted a powerful method for Angleton, Morley writes.  He would come to value “coded language, textual analysis, ambiguity, and close control as the means to illuminate the amoral arts of spying that became his job.  Literary criticism led him to the profession of secret intelligence.  Poetry gave birth to a spy” (p.8).

During World War II, Angleton found his way to the Office of Strategic Services, the CIA’s predecessor agency.  He spent the later portion of the war years in Rome, where he developed a friendship with Junio Valerio Borghese, “perhaps the most famous fascist military commander in Italy” (p.21).  Angleton helped Borghese avoid execution at the hands of the same partisan forces that captured and executed Mussolini in 1945.  Thanks to Angleton’s efforts, Borghese “survived to become titular and spiritual leader of postwar Italian fascism” (p.27), and one of the United States’ key partners in preventing a Communist takeover of postwar Italy.

Angleton prepared for his assignment in Rome at Bletchley Park in England, the center of Allied code-breaking operations during World War II.  There, Angleton learned the craft of counter-intelligence under the tutelage of Kim Philby, who taught the young American “how to run double agent operations, to intercept wireless and mail messages, and to feed false information to the enemy.  Angleton would prove to be his most trusting friend” (p.18).  After the war, Philby and Angleton both found themselves in Washington, where they became inseparable buddies, the “closest of friends, soul mates in espionage” (p.41).  Each saw in the other the qualities needed to succeed in espionage: ruthlessness, calculation, autonomy, and cleverness.

The news of Philby’s 1963 defection to Moscow iwas “almost incomprehensible” (p.123) to Angleton.  What he had considered a deep and warm relationship had been a sham.  Philby was “his friend, his mentor, his confidant, his boozy buddy,” Morley writes.  And “through every meeting, conference, debriefing, confidential aside, and cocktail party, his friend had played him for a fool” (p.124).  Philby’s defection does not appear to have damaged Angleton’s position within the CIA, but it set him off on a disastrous hunt for a KGB “mole” that would paralyze and divide the agency for years.

Angleton’s mole hunt hardened into a “fixed idea, which fueled an ideological crusade that more than a few of his colleagues denounced as a witch hunt” (p.86).  Angleton’s operation  was multi-faceted,  “consisting of dozens of different mole hunts – some targeting individuals, others focused on components within the CIA (p.135).  Angleton’s suspicions “effectively stunted or ended the career of colleagues who were guilty of nothing” (p.198).  To this day, after the opening of significant portions of KGB archives in the aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Union, there is no indication it ever had a mole burrowed into the CIA.  Angleton’s mole hunt, Morley concludes, “soaked in alcohol” and permeated by “convoluted certitudes,” brought Angleton to the “brink of being a fool” (p.126).

Just as Angleton never gave up his (witch) hunt for the KGB spy within the CIA, he became convinced that Harold Wilson, British Labor politician and for a while Prime Minister, was a Soviet Spy, and never relinquished this odd view either.  And he argued almost until the day he departed from the CIA that the diplomatic sparring and occasional direct confrontation between the Soviet Union and China was an elaborate exercise in disinformation to deceive the West.

While head of counterintelligence at the CIA, Angleton served simultaneously as the agency’s desk officer for Israel, the direct link between Israeli and American intelligence services.  Angleton was initially wary of the Israeli state that came into existence in 1948, in part the residue of the anti-Semitism he had entertained in his youth, in part the product of his view that too many Jews were communists. By the mid-1950s, however, Angleton had overcome his initial reticence to become an admirer of Israel and especially Mossad, its primary intelligence service.

But Angleton’s judgment in his relationship with Israel frequently failed him just as it failed him in his relationship with Philby.  He did not foresee Israel’s role in the 1956 Anglo-French invasion of Suez (the subject of Ike’s Gamble, reviewed here in 2017), infuriating President Eisenhower.  After winning President Johnson’s favor for calling the Israeli first strike that ignited the June 1967 Six Day War (“accurate almost down to the day and time,” p.181), he incurred the wrath of President Nixon for missing Egypt’s strike at Israel in the October 1973 Yom Kippur War.  Nixon and his Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, were of the view that Angleton had grown too close to Israel.

Angleton, moreover, was almost certainly involved behind the scenes in a 1968 Israeli heist of uranium enriched nuclear fuel to build its own nuclear reactor, lifted from a Pennsylvania power plant known as NUMEC.  A CIA analyst later concluded that NUMEC had been a “front company deployed in an Israeli-American criminal conspiracy to evade U.S.. nonproliferation laws and supply the Israeli nuclear arsenal” (p.261-62).  Angleton’s loyalty to Israel “betrayed U.S. policy on an epic scale” (p.261), Morley writes.

* * *

Morley’s treatment of Angleton’s relationship to to Lee Harvey Oswald and Fidel Castro’s Cuba raises more questions that it answers.  The CIA learned of Oswald’s attempt to defect to the Soviet Union in November 1959, and began monitoring him at that point.  In this same timeframe, the CIA and FBI began jointly monitoring a pro-Castro group, the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, which would later attract Oswald. Although Angleton was a contemporary and occasional friend of John Kennedy (the two were born the same year), when Kennedy assumed the presidency in 1961, Angleton’s view was that American policy toward Fidel Castro needed to be more aggressive. He viewed Cuba as still another Soviet satellite state, but one just 90 miles from United States shores.

The Kennedy administration’s Cuba policy got off to a miserable start with the infamous failure of the April 1961 Bay of Pigs operation to dislodge Castro.  Kennedy was furious with the way the CIA and the military had presented the options to him and fired CIA Director Allen Dulles in the operation’s aftermath (Dulles’ demise is one of the subjects of Stephen Kinzer’s The Brothers, reviewed here in 2014). But elements within the CIA and the military held Kennedy responsible for the failure by refusing to order air support for the operation (Kennedy had been assured prior to the invasion that no additional military assistance would be necessary).

CIA and military distrust for Kennedy heightened after the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, when the United States and the Soviet Union faced off in what threatened to be a nuclear confrontation over the placement of offensive Soviet missiles on the renegade island.  Although Kennedy’s handling of that crisis was widely acclaimed as his finest moment as president, many within the military and the CIA, Angleton included, thought that Kennedy’s pledge to Soviet Premier Khrushchev of no invasion of Cuba in exchange for Soviet withdrawal of missiles had given Castro and his Soviet allies too much.  Taking the invasion option off the table amounted in Angleton’s view to a cave in to Soviet aggression and a betrayal of the anti-Castro Cuban community in the United States.

In the 13 months that remained of the Kennedy presidency, the administration continued to obsess over Cuba, with a variety of operations under consideration to dislodge Castro.  The CIA was also  monitoring Soviet defector Oswald, who by this time had returned to the United States.  Angleton placed Oswald’s’ name on the LINGUAL list to track his mail.  By the fall of 1963, Oswald had become active in the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, passing out FPCC leaflets in New Orleans.  He was briefly arrested for disturbing the peace after an altercation with anti-Castro activists.  In October of that year, a mere one month before the Kennedy assassination, the FBI and CIA received notice that Oswald had been in touch with the Soviet and Cuban embassies and consular sections in Mexico City.  Angleton followed Oswald’s Mexico City visits intensely, yet withheld for the rest of his life precisely what he knew about them .

From the moment Kennedy was assassinated, Angleton “always sought to give the impression that he knew very little about Oswald before November 22, 1963” (p.140).  But Angleton and his staff, Morley observes, had “monitored Oswald’s movements for four years. As the former marine moved from Moscow to Minsk to Fort Worth to New Orleans to Mexico City to Dallas,” the special group Angleton created to track defectors “received reports on him everywhere he went” (p.140-41).  Angleton clearly knew that Oswald was in Dallas in November 1963.   He hid his knowledge of Oswald from the Warren Commission, established by President Lyndon Johnson to investigate the Kennedy assassination. What was Angleton’s motivation for obfuscation?

The most plausible – and most innocent – explanation is that Angleton was protecting his own rear end in an “epic counterintelligence failure” that had “culminated on Angleton’s watch. It was bigger than the Philby affair and bloodier” (p.140).  Given this disastrous counterintelligence failure, Morley argues, Angleton “could have – and should have – lost his job after November 22 [1963].  Had the public, the Congress, and the Warren Commission known of his pre-assassination interest in Oswald or his post-assassination cover-up, he surely would have” (p.157).

But the range of possibilities Morley considers extends to speculation that Angleton may have been hiding his own involvement in a Deep State operation to assassinate the president.   Was Angleton running Oswald as an agent in an assassination plot, Morley asks:

He certainly had the knowledge and ability to do so.  Angleton and his staff had a granular knowledge of Oswald long before Kennedy was killed.  Angleton had a penchant for running operations outside of reporting channels. He articulated a vigilant anti-communism that depicted the results of JFK’s liberal policies in apocalyptic terms. He participated in discussions of political assassination. And he worked in a penumbra of cunning that excluded few possibilities (p.265).

Whether Angleton manipulated Oswald as part of an assassination plot is a question Morley is not prepared to answer.  But in Morley’s view, Angleton plainly “obstructed justice to hide interest in Oswald.   He lied to veil his use of the ex-defector in later 1963 for intelligence purposes related to the Cuban consulate in Mexico City. . . Whoever killed JFK, Angleton protected them. He masterminded the JFK conspiracy and cover up” (p.265).   To this day, no consensus exists as to why Angleton dodged all questions concerning his undisputed control over the CIA’s file on Oswald for four years, up to Oswald’s death in November 1963.  Angleton’s relationship to Oswald remains “shrouded in deception and perjury, theories and disinformation, lies and legends” (p.87), Morley concludes.  Even though a fuller story began to emerge when Congress ordered the declassification of long-secret JFK assassination records in the 1990s,” the full story has “yet to be disclosed” (p.87).

* * *

The burglary at the Democratic National Headquarters in the Watergate Hotel in June 1972 proved to be Angleton’s professional undoing, just as it was for President Richard Nixon.  The burglary involved three ex-CIA employees, all likely well known to Angleton.   In 1973, in the middle of multiple Watergate investigations, Nixon appointed William Colby as agency director, a man determined to get to the bottom of what was flowing into the public record about the CIA and its possible involvement in Watergate-related activity.

Colby concluded that Angleton’s never-ending mole hunts were “seriously damaging the recruiting of Soviet officers and hurting CIA’s intelligence intake” (p.225).  Colby suspended LINGUAL, finding the mail opening operation “legally questionable and operationally trivial,” having produced little “beyond vague generalities” (p.225). At the same time, New York Times investigative reporter Seymour Hersh published a story that described in great detail Operation CHAOS, the agency’s program aimed at anti-Vietnam activists, attributing ultimate responsibility to Angleton.  Immediately after Christmas 1974. Colby moved  to replace Angleton.

For the first and only time in his career, Angleton’s covert empire within the CIA stood exposed and he left the agency in 1975.  When Jimmy Carter became president in 1977, his Department of Justice elected not to prosecute Angleton, although Morley argues that it had ample basis to do so.  In retirement, Angleton expounded his views to “any and all who cared to listen” (p.256).  He took to running reporters “like he had once run agents in the field, and for the same purpose: to advance his geopolitical vision” (p.266).

* * *

Angleton, a life-long smoker (as well as heavy drinker) was diagnosed with lung cancer in 1986 and died in May 1987.  He was, Morley concludes “fortunate that so much of his legacy was unknown or classified at the time of his death..”  Angleton not only “often acted outside the law and the Constitution,” but also, for the most part, “got away with it” (p.271).

Thomas H. Peebles

La Châtaigneraie, France

June 10, 2020