Those CIA types are strange. Check out this obituary:
Starting from the corn fields of Indiana, Samuel Smith set out on a mission around the world. His job with the CIA took him and his family to far-off destinations before Clermont became his retirement haven…
…”He was pretty high-ranking and involved in communications,” said son Craig Smith of Clermont. “There was not a lot he could tell us.”
…Craig Smith said the family followed Samuel Smith wherever he was stationed, including Germany, France, Thailand and Turkey.
When the family took vacations, they often went to exotic destinations in foreign countries, Craig Smith said.
Todd Smith said their father often worked nights, meaning he would sleep during the day, but the family always had evenings together and had time to go to ballgames.
“He said he worked for the government, and that seemed boring enough. We didn’t ask any questions,” Todd Smith said.
I’m glad I didn’t grow up in a family like that. In other CIA news: President George W. Bush did not include Libby on his list of pre-Christmas pardons, and the Justice Department said he does not have a pending pardon application on file. That’s a relief.
You can read an account of the now infamous Milan kidnapping of Abu Omar al Masri,
There is an interesting leaked report that shows that the CIA accurately predicted the breakup of Yugoslavia and even the rise of Albanian separatists in Kosovo. The State Department (Jim Baker) pretended not to notice.
There was a Walter Pincus piece last Thursday on how Michael Hayden is settling in at the Agency.
I saw The Good Shepherd a couple of days ago and it is pretty good. I didn’t find a whole lot to quibble with. I’ll probably have more to say about the movie in the future.
would never be able to ask someone else – “and what do YOU do?” knowing the question would be returned. And how to fill up that small talk time? “Oh yes, we took a vacation to “far out and off the beaten track”, doesn’t everyone?” And if someone were to ask “hows your job treating you?” What would they say “so so, but I am not looking!” Or maybe: “we get some great bennies so I can’t complain! You know how the government is!”
Now you’ll all understand why I’ve only been able to disclose just a few details about myself, but perhaps I’ve already said too much…
I’ve never seen you at the company picnics.
LOL, Omir.
Yeah – anyone can pretend to be anyone here.
Boran – I don’t know whom you are, other than from your writings. That’s all that carries weight here anyway. There’s no “pudding’ online to get “proof” out of, so we just have to take everything and everyone with a certain amount of skepticism and never bow to an authority just because one is unilaterally declared. I realize, of course, that you were likely speaking in jest. I’m just saying.
My son, the movie critic, said he saw the movie too and really enjoyed it. So this tells me I have to see it too. Larry Johnson had a review of the ppl depicted in it recently. It was good to read, as well. I knew a sppok once and he was someone I would care to know more than in the working fashion I knew him in. They are all strange if you ask me…:o) Now does that throw you all off my track or what…:o) just kidding….I think it has to be hard being a person woking for the company and have a family to boot.
I’m watching The Fog of War.
When my stepdad returns from New Orleans, I am going to ask him whether he’d like a copy.
What’s really interesting are those taped phone calls between Johnson and MacNamara.
Back on topic.
I just completed a 13-page article on Ford, which, not inappropriately, is in part, a history of the CIA. Ugh. How to make a post from that? I’ll deal with that in the morning.
I saw the film a few days ago with a spook and a fellow Kennedy researcher. Found myself distracted in the film by all the false history, when the REAL history of Angleton, the Bay of Pigs, Nosenko, Golitsyn and more is so incredibly interesting.
It’s also the first time Matt Damon did nothing for me. There’s inscrutable, where you can’t tell what someone is feeling, and then there’s just emotionless, where there’s no feeling whatsoever. James Angleton, on whom Damon’s character is based, is such a character – how could he portray him, or frankly ANY covert operator, so blandly? Seriously – these are some of the most colorful people I’ve ever met, and I’ve met several now. Full of emotion, most have a huge romantic streak, which is why agency work appeals to them in the first place.
The Bay of Pigs mole stuff is fictitious. There was a plot to sabotage the Bay of Pigs from within the CIA, if one of my fellow researcher’s sources is right, but that’s for that person to disclose, since it’s not my original work.
As a budding screenwriter, I can see how hard it is to pick and choose what events to use, what to discard, and how to compact the story to get the most out of your two hours (or three, if you’re Robert DeNiro doing a film about the CIA. Too long!) So I’m sympathetic to the artists involved in crafting the story. But with a little more homework, they could have told such a more interesting story. And with a LOT of homework, they could have told us some of the truth about the Kennedy assassination, although I don’t expect to see that again on film, accurately, in my lifetime. JFK was a freak anomaly – some truth escaped – and I’m sure the agency is hard at work in Hollywood to ensure that doesn’t happen again.
Let me just take the Nosenko case, as an example. In the movie, to simplify the issue, they had this big Soviet defect (ostensibly Anatoli Golitsyn) and then this skinny fellow (ostensibly Yuri Nosenko) next.
In real life – Golitsyn came over, puffed up his KGB credentials, and — unfortunately for the sake of our country — hit it off with Angleton. Angleton practically fell in love with this “prize” as he saw it, and wouldn’t listen to any challenges re G’s credibility.
Nosenko had tried to defect in 1962, but the CIa urged him to stay in place, figure out what he could, and keep talking to us. But after Kennedy’s assassination, he defected anyway, and came to America as a high-level KGB defector (long since acknolwedged as being genuine by all but Angleton’s diehard supporters).
But the key was this.
Angleton appears to have been the one who sent Oswald to Russia. Oswald was a dangle. The CIA wanted to find out what the Soviets knew about our U2 program, and Oswald was the bait. The Soviets, however, spotted Oswald for a CIA agent right away, and a very poor one at that, and had no interest in him.
Nosenko came over and said he had personally seen Oswald’s KGB file, and the KGB had no interest in Oswald. They had not debriefed him.
Now, this gets hilarious. The CIa argued that the KGB MUST have debriefed Oswald, even while claiming they had no reason to debrief him themselves when he returned to the states. In other words, they put themselves in a classic fork. If he was interesting enough to have mandated a Soviet debrief, then surely the CIA would have wanted to find out what the Soviet union asked him about. But the Soviet union never did take the bait, and the CIA secretly really did debrief Oswald, according to released documents, when they returned, although they claimed they didn’t and had no interest in him.
Are you starting to see through this? Wait – it gets better.
So Nosenko comes over here and basically blows the Oswald-as-Soviet-agent story, which was what Angleton and others were using to threaten the Warren Commission with. While publicly saying there was no conspiracy, privately Angleton wanted to lead our leaders to believe that the Soviets were behind the assassination to ensure the cover-up – no one wanted to engage in a nuclear showdown over Kennedy’s death.
So what did the CIA do?
They disbelieved Nosenko, took away all his possessions, put him in a cell where he was essentially in complete sensory deprevation, and tried to break him.
They gave him a lie detector test, and he passed. So after a long period of torture and ill treatment, they brought him back for a second lie detector test. Guess what? They asked him MANY MORE QUESTIONS about Oswald in the 2nd test. They also stimulated his anus in a vulgar manner in a deliberate attempt to elevate his blood levels, piss him off, and get him to look like a liar on the test. So of course, he spiked all over the place.
Years later, he was given a third test under humane conditions, and passed. He was clearly telling the truth, and the Soviets were shocked and probably pleased that the CIA went so long without taking advantage of his knowledge. It was ten years before Nosenko, finally freed, was invited to brief the Agency on Soviet intelligence operations. When he did so, he received a standing ovation from the agency employees who attended. (See Cold Warrior, by Tom Mangold, for all the details. Also see my two articles on Angleton, where I dissect the Nosenko story in greater depth, in my book “The Assassinations.”)
In the film, they simply have Nosenko and Golitsyn arguing over which is the right person for a given name. Oversimplified, in my opinion, but with all they were trying to take on in the film, I can see why they did that.
But then – the screenwriter did something really egregious, in my opinion. He combined Nosenko with an American, Frank Olson, who, OVER TEN YEARS EARLIER, was given LSD by the CIA and then was said to have jumped out a window to his death. While Nosenko was given LSD in the hopes of making him crazy, or making him say the Soviets debriefed Oswald, of course, Nosenko never jumped out a window. Neither, most researchers believe, did Frank Olson. The better argument is that he was starting to object to the drug testing and mind control experiments, and was pushed out his window and simply SAID to be suicide. His family is still fighting this battle. Lots of data on the case used to be at their Web site at http://www.frankolsonproject.org, but the site now appears to be down at the moment, if not permanently.
Angleton also believed Golitsyn when he said there was a high-level mole in the CIA. Angleton destroyed many careers in his hunt for the mole, which was never found. One person on Angleton’s staff put together on Angleton the same kind of evidence Angleton put together on others and decided Angleton was himself the mole, but the evidence was really not credible, and no high level person at the CIA ever believed that.
Angleton had a penchant for not just growing, but breeding orchids. It takes 12 years to breed an orchid. He used to give accolytes lectures about how growing orchids required light and darkness, and used that as a metaphor to talk about the agency.
And naming Angleton’s wife “Clover,” which was really Allen Dulles’s wife’s name? Was that really necessary? It was like saying to the audience, yeah, I read a few books. But it was distracting to the three of us who knew the truth. Why not make up a truly made up name, rather than swapping one CIA man’s wife for another (not that that didn’t happen often, no doubt. But that was in person – not in name only!)
And “Wild Bill” Donovan?? What was “wild” about DeNiro’s reserved portrayal? And of course, Donovan had little contact with Angleton.
And why not show Angleton taking info from the New York Times, repacking it as a report from a special asset, and passing it off as super secret information? He did this to one guy who lost his career over it. Angleton had no remorse, and felt, as did others, that the guy was too “Christian” to be a true member of the CIA. (See Miles Copeland’s “The Real Spy World” for that story.)
And why not show the REAL origin of the CIA, how they blackmailed themselves into existence? That will be in my post tomorrow or when I get to it. Fascinating. Much more interesting than a Skull and Bones dinner, of which there were too many.
That said, of course, some of it was good. I especially loved the line where when asked why people say “CIA” and not “the CIA” the reply was, something like, you don’t say “the God” you just say “God.” There was another good line when asked why the CIA was so filled with white protestants when America was made up of Irish, African, Mexican, and other people. The Angleton character in the film responded as many in the agency might have thought – with a racist slur. But Angleton himself would not have said this – his mother was Mexican and he was himself a half-breed, if you will.
Anyway – this was one case where I think the more people know about the CIA, the less they like the film, and the less they know, the more they like it. I was too distracted by all the false history to be able to enjoy the story. But others not so steeped in this tell me they really liked it.
i noted most of the inaccuracies you note and more. But I didn’t have a problem with them. Matt Damon wasn’t strictly playing Angleton, and it was too long as it was.
They were trying to unsettle people by portraying the agency in very harsh terms. I think they succeeded in ways that were basically fair.
I was most bothered by Angleton’s operational role in the Bay of Pigs. That would have been Bissell.
I thought there was too much of his love life and not enough about what goes into counterintelligence.
But overall, it was a successful movie, IMO.
The LSD thing bugged me too. It seemed like a cheap trick.
Angleton was definitely not in charge of the Bay of Pigs, but he was more operational than the books have let on. Some of that is in the files released by the ARRB (Assassination Records Review Board – for once, our tax dollars truly at work!) and some of that info comes from people I know who knew Angleton.
I’m glad you liked it. I really wanted to like it, and was so looking forward to it. And if it helps people see how the world of intelligence has the potential to corrupt all who enter it, it will have been a good contribution.
The screenwriter has written both one of my favorite, and my LEAST favorite scripts. Eric Roth penned the wonderful “Forrest Gump,” but he is also responsible for that piece of dreck “The Postman.” I’d put this one somewhere between the two. 😉
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Site http://www.frankolsonproject.org is down or does not exist anymore. The last pages created were from Februari 2006. There are some pages to be found in archive. The Cold War Darkest Secret.
Olson’s son Eric: “I think in his last trip to Germany when he witnessed interrogations that were terminal, and he came back and told his colleague, Norman Conayer, ‘Norman, have you ever seen somebody die?’And Norman says, ‘No.’ And he says, ‘Well I did and it’s rough.'”
In addition, evidence has now surfaced that Frank Olson was the not just a scientist but the CIA’s point man on anthrax.
Project MKULTRA
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."That reminds me – on the Discovery Channel program where I was featured, about CIA Mind Control, they showed a document related to Frank Olson, released from the Ford library a while back, where Rumsfeld and Cheney were advising keeping quiet about Olson’s death.
Plus ça change, plus c’est la meme chose…
More:
From this interesting article: “Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, and the Manchurian Candidate“