10 Intriguing Mysteries Involving The CIA’s Dark Deeds Alex Hanton from Listverse
10 Intriguing Mysteries Involving The CIA’s Dark Deeds
Alex Hanton October 29, 2015
The CIA was established in 1947 and tasked with carrying out intelligence work outside the United States. But the agency soon strayed from its original purpose, carrying out coups, assassinations, and other murky activities around the globe. And while much of the CIA’s sordid history was exposed by the Church Committee in the 1970s, there are still plenty of unanswered questions about the darker side of “the Company.”
Featured photo credit: CIA
10Who Killed Nick Deak?
Even as a simple financier, Nicholas Deak was quite a
character. An exiled Transylvanian aristocrat, he joined the US military during
World War II and soon joined the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the
forerunner of the CIA. In that capacity, he planned attacks on Romanian oil
fields and trained guerrillas in Burma, where he accepted the Japanese commander’s samurai sword
at the end of the war.
In 1947, he started a flower business in Hawaii, which soon grew into a
powerhouse in the world of finance. Deak and Co. was soon the largest precious
metals and foreign exchange trader in the world. (The precious metal branch is
now known as Goldline, while the rest of the business became the foreign
exchange branch of Thomas Cook.) A staunch libertarian, Deak regularly appeared
alongside speakers like Ron Paul and Alan Greenspan. As president of the OSS
veterans organization, he was a close friend of James Jesus Angleton and future
CIA director Bill Casey.
But in reality, Deak had never quite retired from espionage. His company’s remarkable growth was actually funded by the CIA, which needed an untraceable way to move cash around the world. A foreign exchange company was perfect, and Deak didn’t disappoint, funneling untraceable foreign currency to secret operations around the world. In 1953, he smuggled $1 million into Iran to fund the overthrow of Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, and later carried out similar operations in Guatemala and the Congo. It’s said he even warned the CIA that the Chinese were planning their 1962 invasion of India when they ordered huge sums of Indian currency through his Hong Kong office.
One example of how Deak’s firm operated came during the Lockheed bribery scandal, in which the defense contractor bribed Japanese politicians to favor their planes for the state-run airline and other government contracts. Lockheed enlisted Deak to smuggle millions of dollars to a Yakuza don (and war criminal) named Yoshio Kodama, who distributed it within Japan. Deak had the money smuggled into the country in orange crates by a defrocked priest. When the scandal broke, the Japanese prime minister was arrested and a deranged male porn star flew a plane into Kodama’s house as revenge for staining Japan’s honor. Deak survived unscathed.
But his bulletproof reputation disintegrated in the 1980s, when the Justice Department accused him of laundering millions of dollars for the Colombian cartels, at which point the CIA unceremoniously dumped him. A run on his banking operations wiped out most of Deak’s cash reserves—and infuriated everyone from the cartels to the Macau triads, who felt he had lost their money. Shortly after declaring bankruptcy, Deak was shot dead in his plush Wall Street office by a homeless woman named Lois Lang.
Officially, Lang was said to have acted alone, prompted by a deranged belief that Deak owed her money. Yet many have had trouble accepting that explanation, with the Canadian economist R.T. Naylor acidly observing that Deak was “gunned down by one of those lone nuts that do for US politics what heart attacks do in Italian jails.” More seriously, Arkadi Kuhlmann, who followed Deak as CEO of Deak and Co., says his investigators found evidence that Lang met with two Argentinean mobsters in Miami, shortly before she bought a gun and a bus ticket to New York. When Kuhlmann went to Macau after Deak’s death, he found the offices empty and strewn with papers. In a desk drawer, he found a picture of Deak bleeding to death on his office floor. The picture, apparently taken by Lang, had never been released by the authorities.
9Why Did James Angleton Want Mary Meyer’s Diary?
Photo via Wikipedia
In October
1964, two men were changing a flat tire near the C&O Canal in Washington,
DC, when they heard a cry for help and two gunshots. When the
police arrived, they found the body of Mary Pinchot Meyer lying on a towpath,
shot twice at close range. Mary Meyer was an artist and the ex-wife of Cord
Meyer, a senior CIA official who had overseen Operation Mockingbird, which
sought to influence the American media
in favor of the CIA. A prominent figure on the Washington social scene, Mary
Meyer had also carried on a lengthy affair with John F. Kennedy before his
death.
The police arrested an African-American man named Ray Crump, who was found
nearby, soaked and with a bleeding hand. Crump acted suspiciously and changed
his story a few times. He eventually said he had been fishing, but his fishing
rod was still in his house. But no hard evidence could be found and a jury
acquitted him. The mysterious killing has subsequently become a favorite topic
among conspiracy theorists.
Meanwhile, Mary Meyer’s brother-in-law, future Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, got a strange call from one of
her friends, the sculptor Anne Truitt. According to Truitt, Meyer had asked her
to destroy her diary in the event of her sudden death. Since Truitt was in
Tokyo, she asked Bradlee to look for it. But when he arrived at Mary’s locked
house, he found James Jesus Angleton, the legendary CIA counterintelligence
head, searching the living room for the diary, which was nowhere to be found.
Bradlee next decided to try Mary’s studio, only to find Angleton had beaten him
there and was in the process of picking the lock. Embarrassed,
Angleton left and Bradlee found the diary, which revealed Mary’s affair with
JFK. Bradlee subsequently agreed to hand the diary over to Angleton on the
condition that he destroy it. But he didn’t—Bradlee’s wife discovered it was
still in his possession over a decade later. On her insistence, the diary was
burned.
8Did The CIA Have Ties To Klaus Barbie?
Photo via Wikipedia
As “the
Butcher of Lyon,” Klaus Barbie was one of the most notorious members of the
Gestapo and a committed Nazi. Yet after the war, US military intelligence
recruited him as an agent, sheltered him from the French authorities, and
eventually helped him escape to South America. That’s not a conspiracy
theory—the US government publicly confirmed as much
in 1983, following an investigation by the Justice Department.
The real mystery is what happened next. In South America, Barbie became an
influential figure in right-wing circles, a drug trafficker, and a key player
in the brutal “Cocaine Coup” that briefly
overthrew the government of Bolivia in 1980. He was extradited to France in
1983. Did US intelligence services, including the CIA, maintain a connection
with Barbie during his time in Bolivia?
They certainly considered it. In its 1983 report, the Justice Department cited
CIA documents which discussed hiring Barbie to help hunt down Che Guevara, who
was leading a communist insurgency in Bolivia at the time. Officially, the CIA
decided not to follow through with the plan, wary of French plans to have
Barbie extradited to stand trial. However, there are some indications that the
agency might have sought Barbie’s help off the record. Kevin MacDonald’s
acclaimed 2007 documentary My Enemy’s
Enemy explored the idea, with a close friend of Barbie’s insisting he had
met with the senior American officer planning counter-guerrilla operations
in Bolivia.
The evidence is inconclusive, although it’s worth noting that the CIA was in
strong support of Bolivian president Rene Barrientos, who did have ties to
Barbie. At the moment, Barbie’s only certain ties to Western intelligence after
1951 came in 1966, when he was briefly employed by West
Germany’s BND spy agency.
7Was Yuri Nosenko A Real Defector?
Photo via Wikipedia
In 1962, a
KGB officer named Yuri Nosenko contacted CIA
agents in Geneva and informed them that a prostitute had stolen $200 from him.
Because the KGB strictly monitored his expenses, he was desperate to get the
money back, offering to sell the CIA a KGB manual in return for the cash. The
agency accepted and asked Nosenko to keep in touch, promising him $25,000 if he
could expose any Russian spies. Nosenko agreed, but a few weeks after the
Kennedy assassination, he told his American contacts that the KGB was onto him
and asked to defect. He was flown to Washington in 1964.
But CIA operatives soon grew suspicious of Nosenko. He had insisted on being
extracted from Switzerland right away, since a cable from Moscow had arrived
ordering his return. But the US was secretly monitoring the embassy and said no cable had arrived. In
1962, Nosenko had said he didn’t want to defect because of his wife and child. In 1964, he
never mentioned them. He first said he was a colonel, then changed his mind and
said he was a captain.
Before he shot Kennedy, Lee Harvey Oswald had briefly defected to the Soviet
Union, living there for just over two years. Nosenko said that he had overseen
the Soviet file on Oswald, explaining that the KGB considered Oswald deranged
and had never attempted to recruit him. Many in the CIA found that suspicious.
Oswald’s time in Russia had prompted speculation that he was a Russian agent.
How convenient for his KGB case worker to defect just weeks later and reassure
the Americans that the Soviets had nothing to do with the assassination.
Nosenko’s case soon caught the attention of James Jesus Angleton, the notorious
CIA counterintelligence chief. Angleton had been very taken by a previous KGB
defector named Anatoly Golitsyn, who
claimed that the Soviets had infiltrated moles at the very highest levels of
Western intelligence agencies. He also said that the KGB would send false
defectors to discredit him. When Nosenko contradicted Golitsyn, Angleton was
convinced. On his orders, Nosenko was imprisoned for three years and subjected
to increasingly harsh interrogation techniques. Angleton also began tearing the
CIA apart in search of Golitsyn’s moles.
The situation was intolerable and Angleton was forced out of the CIA in 1975.
Wracked by paranoia, some of Angleton’s supporters began spreading rumors that CIA director William Colby
had been the mole all along. Meanwhile, Golitsyn continued to push increasingly
bizarre conspiracy theories, including the idea that the fall of the Soviet
Union was an elaborate communist deception. Nosenko, who repeatedly passed
polygraph tests, was released and vindicated. But while nobody believes
Golitsyn anymore, the question of whether Nosenko was a real defector or not
persists, with some, including the CIA agent who arranged his defection,
insisting that the details just don’t add up.
6Did The Agency Target John Watkins?
In 1964, Canada’s former ambassador to the Soviet Union, John Watkins, died in
a Montreal hotel room where he was being interrogated by the Royal Canadian
Mounted Police (RCMP). It had long been rumored that the Soviets had
photographed a senior Canadian diplomat during a homosexual encounter in
Moscow. When Yuri Nosenko defected, he confirmed that the diplomat was Watkins.
The CIA alerted the RCMP, who hauled Watkins in for questioning. After Watkins
died, the RCMP covered it up. It was
reported that Watkins had suffered a heart attack during a dinner.
The truth emerged in 1981, when the British journalist Chapman Pincher reported
on it. Then, Canadian novelist Ian Adams unearthed files proving the RCMP had
kept the circumstances of the death from the coroner. The cover-up rightly
caused an uproar in Canada.
But the case wasn’t quite as bad as it’s often made out to be. A senior
diplomat dying during an interrogation sounds very dark, but Watkins actually
had a heart condition and could have passed away at any time. He cooperated
fully with the investigation, which was friendly and polite, and the RCMP was
inclined to believe that the ambassador did not give in to Soviet blackmail.
Watkins and the RCMP officers watched Canadian football together and regularly
dined with each other in the hotel. The investigation even took a 10-day break,
during which Watkins visited his cousins. Eager to clear his name, he ignored a
doctor’s advice to check into the hospital immediately.
But questions have been raised about the CIA’s role in the affair. Watkins was
a good friend of Canadian prime minister Lester Pearson, who an official CIA report called
“disturbing from a US point of view,” and it has been suggested that the CIA
pushed the RCMP to interrogate him in the hopes of discrediting Pearson.
According to Ian Adams, who helped expose the affair, James Jesus Angleton
suspected that Watkins was a Soviet mole and wanted to extract a confession
from him in order to stage “a de facto coup” that would
bring down the Pearson government. Certainly, the CIA alerted the RCMP to
Nosenko’s claims, but what other pressure they brought to bear remains unclear.
5Did The US Rat Out Nelson Mandela?
Photo credit: White House
In 1962,
South African police arrested a revolutionary named Nelson Mandela, who was one
of the most prominent figures in the anti-apartheid African National Congress
(ANC). He would famously remain in jail for most of the next three decades,
embracing nonviolence and becoming an international icon in the process. Which
might be awkward for the CIA, since it’s long been rumored that they tipped off
the South Africans about where to find Mandela, who was in disguise as a chauffeur
when he was arrested.
At the time, the US government halfheartedly supported the apartheid regime as
a bulwark against communism in the region. (The ANC’s links to the South
African Communist Party didn’t help matters.) In 1990, it was reported that the
CIA’s Pretoria station chief, Paul Eckel, had told a friend that the agency “turned Mandela over to the
South African Security Branch. We gave them every detail, what he would be
wearing, the time of day, just where he would be. They picked him up. It was
one of our greatest coups.” Retired South African intelligence officer Gerard
Ludi claims that the tip was delivered by Millard Shirley, a CIA officer with a
long career in Africa, “because it was in America’s interest to have Mr. Mandela out of
the way.” Shirley later helped disrupt the anti-Apartheid movement in the late
‘80s, although it’s not clear that he was formally working for the CIA at the
time.
Although the rumors have been persistent, there is currently no hard evidence
that the CIA informed on Mandela. Typically, Mandela preferred to let the
matter go, later saying “let’s forget about that, whether it is true or not.”
One way or another, the mystery should hopefully be resolved soon, since
activist Ryan Shapiro is currently suing the CIA under the Freedom of
Information Act, demanding that they release their records on
Mandela.
4The Chesapeake Bay Deaths
Photo credit: Nora lives
A CIA agent
since 1953, John A. Paisley held a number of senior positions in the agency
during the 1970s. Among other things, he was CIA liaison to the White House
Special Investigations Unit, which was set up to investigate the Pentagon
Papers leak and gradually grew into a key player in the Watergate scandal. As a
liberal close to Director William Colby, Paisley came under suspicion from
hardliners who believed the Soviets had moles in the CIA. The evidence wasn’t
exactly compelling, with CIA officer David Sullivan explaining “I never liked
him. There was something that wasn’t right. He seemed like some kind of
burned-out old fart who had a beard and looked like a queer. I am convinced he was the mole.”
In September 1978, Paisley’s boat was found moored in Chesapeake Bay. His body
was pulled from the water a short distance away, weighed down with two diving
belts. He had been shot above the left ear. The death was ruled a suicide,
although some have questioned why the right-handed Paisley would shoot himself
in the left side of his head. There was no sign of blood on the boat, and the
weapon was never found. Oddly, Paisley’s estranged wife had reservations about
whether the body was really his, prompting widespread and faintly ludicrous
speculation that the real Paisley was a Soviet agent who had been whisked to
safety aboard a Russian submarine.
The case was largely forgotten until 18 years later, when Paisley’s old mentor,
CIA director William Colby, also vanished while alone in a boat on Chesapeake
Bay. His body was missing for days, before a policeman spotted something
floating near the shore. He was ruled to have died from a combination of
drowning and hypothermia caused by exposure. Since Colby was an experienced
sailor, his disappearance prompted a revival of the Paisley conspiracy theories
and the rumors of moles being spirited away on Russian subs. For his part,
Colby was always dismissive of the rumors. In 1978, he told a journalist “the
latest story about me is that I’m the mole. You know, on the side of the
Russians. [ . . . ] I’ve had lots of bum raps. I shake them
off.”
3Where Is Mike Hand?
As a Green Beret, Mike Hand won a Purple Heart and served extensively in
Vietnam, including with the CIA’s Phoenix program, which
carried out targeted killings. (The CIA adamantly denies they were
“assassinations.”) He also worked extensively training mercenaries from the Meo
people, who were also large-scale opium growers.
After the war, Hand moved to Australia and teamed up with local businessman
Frank Nugan to found the Nugan Hand Bank. Despite
having seed capital of just $1,000, Nugan Hand soon grew into one of the
largest banks in Australia, with more than $1 billion to invest each year. The
bank was notable for its close links to the US military and intelligence
communities. Retired admiral Earl Yates served as president, while at least
three former generals held senior posts. Former CIA director William Colby
served as legal counsel, while the head of the Thailand branch was the former
CIA station chief in the country. But in reality, Nugan Hand was a giant
criminal enterprise, set up to launder profits from the Asian heroin trade.
The bank dabbled in other areas—selling guns to African rebels and Iran, moving
stolen money for Filipino dictator Ferdinand Marcos—but the bulk of its
operations involved drugs. Oddly, the bank never ran afoul of the US
authorities, even though its activities should have been obvious. The
aforementioned Thailand branch even maintained an office in Chiang Mai, in the
heart of the “Golden Triangle” heroin trade, which shared a building with the local DEA office. The DEA
never investigated Nugan Hand.
Along with the large number of military personnel working for it, the lack of
US interest in the bank has led to reasonably well-substantiated speculation
that Nugan Hand was a front for the CIA. The agency officially denies this, but
as an Australian official told writer Jonathan Kwitny:
“What you’re left with is saying, here are all these patriots who have served
their country faithfully for years, suddenly saying, ‘Let’s all become
criminals. Let’s forget our war service, our heroism, and go out and commit
crimes against the very country we’ve been working for.’ ”
Things came crumbling down after Frank Nugan apparently shot himself with a
high-powered rifle while in his car. Police called to the scene found a list of
Australian politicians with large sums of money listed next to each name. In
the aftermath, Admiral Yates flew out to Australia to oversee a “team of former
US military operatives” who were seen “ransacking” Nugan’s house
and office. Hand ordered his employees to shred incriminating files, threatening anyone who protested
that “terrible things would happen; your wives would be cut up and returned to
you in bits and pieces.” The bank collapsed shortly afterward, costing many
depositors their life savings. Earl Yates and the bank’s other American
officers refused to return to Australia to testify.
And what about Michael Hand? He was last seen boarding a flight to Fiji, wearing a false beard and
using a fake passport. That was 1980. In 1991, an Australian newspaper reported
that he was living in Washington, but the Australian government declined to take further action. He has not been
seen since.
2Did The CIA Help Bring Down The Australian Government?
Photo credit: Oliver Atkins
In 1975,
Australia was in crisis, with opposition Liberal senators refusing to approve
the budget of Labor prime minister Gough Whitlam (pictured above with Richard
Nixon), which would effectively shut down the government. In response,
Australian governor-general John Kerr dismissed Whitlam from office and
appointed a Liberal prime minister, who won the following election.
The governor-general is the Queen’s representative in Australia and traditionally
does not interfere in politics. So Kerr’s decision to remove an elected prime
minister caused huge controversy, to the point that Kerr eventually had to leave the country.
Ever since Whitlam’s dismissal, questions have been asked over the role of the
CIA in the downfall of his government. Whitlam had pulled Australian troops out
of Vietnam and condemned the American bombing campaigns
there. Shocked to learn that Australian intelligence had helped to undermine
the left-wing government of Salvador Allende in Chile, Whitlam refused to allow
his staff to be “vetted or harassed” by the Australian Security and
Intelligence Organization (ASIO). In 1974, he instructed ASIO to cut all ties
with the CIA, an order that ASIO secretly ignored.
In 1974, Whitlam said that he was opposed to foreign military installations in
Australia, including the huge CIA facility at Pine Gap. According to CIA agent
Victor Marchetti, the “threat to close Pine Gap caused apoplexy in the
White House.” CIA cables called Whitlam a “security threat.” One of Whitlam’s
ministers claimed MI6 was bugging Australian cabinet meetings and his deputy
prime minister had to resign in a scandal that may have been partially
engineered by US intelligence.
Meanwhile, John Kerr was known to be a member of the Australian Association for
Cultural Freedom, which a congressional investigation later revealed to be a
CIA front group. CIA contractor Christopher Boyce, who became a Soviet spy in
the mid-1970s, said he turned against the CIA after seeing cables indicating
the agency was acting against the Australian government. According to Boyce,
the cables referred to the governor-general as “our man Kerr.”
It’s certainly unlikely that the CIA alone was responsible for Whitlam’s
downfall, but serious questions remain over whether the agency agitated against
the elected leader of an American ally. Regardless, the Whitlam case and Nugan
Hand damaged the agency’s reputation in Australia to the point that it had to issue
a public statement: “The CIA has not engaged in operations against the
Australian government, has no ties to Nugan Hand, and does not engage in drug
trafficking.”
1What’s In The Missing Family Jewel?
Photo via Wikipedia
In 1973,
director James Schlessinger ordered deputy director William Colby to compile a
record of any CIA activities since 1959 that might have violated the law or the
agency’s charter. Colby put together a loose-leaf package of around 700 papers,
which came to be known as “the Family Jewels.” Examples of the Jewels include
Yuri Nosenko’s three-year detention, domestic surveillance operations carried
out by CIA agents, and the agency’s famous attempts to kill Castro and other
foreign leaders. Many of these secrets trickled out over the years or were
exposed by congressional investigations like the Church Committee. But the full
document was only released in 2007, providing a fascinating insight into the
CIA’s most scandalous operations.
Almost all of them anyway. Even in 2007, one prominent Jewel was redacted. A
memo from Howard Osborn, CIA director of security, lists the Jewels involving
his department. The second Jewel on the list describes how the CIA recruited
the Mafia to help assassinate Fidel Castro. But the first item on the list is
blacked out. So is a later section describing the redacted operation in more
detail. So what’s the missing Jewel? It remains unclear, but it must be good.
As National Security Archive director Thomas Blanton told The Nation: “The No. 1 jewel of the CIA’s Office of
Security is probably a pretty good one—especially since the second jewel in
this list is the Roselli/Castro assassination pr
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