Michael Ledeen has written one of the strangest and most ominous pieces I can remember seeing in print. It is ostensibly a present day conversation that Ledeen is having with James Jesus Angleton. But, Angleton died many years ago. To understand the significance of the article you have to know something about both Angleton and Ledeen.

Angleton was an original member of the CIA, and he was in charge of counterespionage. It was his job to root out KGB double agents. Angleton ran many illegal operations during his tenure, perhaps none more serious than his twenty-year long mail-opening program that was revealed during the Church Committee hearings.

Ledeen is one of the prime suspects in creating the forged Niger documents.

It’s hard to think of a more unsavory conversation than one between Ledeen and Angleton. And since Ledeen has Angleton provide an alternate history of Watergate, wherein Nixon is taken out by the CIA (using Woodstein as cut-outs), it makes for amazing conspiracy fodder.

I’ll excerpt a little of it below the fold.

I had finally gotten through via my broken-down ouija
board to my old friend, the late James Jesus Angleton, for many years
the head of CIA’s counterintelligence operations, and I had asked him
about the Mary McCarthy story. I had expected him to be furious at the
discovery that a CIA officer was meeting with Washington journalists,
contrary to agency policy.

ML: Huh? What’s that supposed to mean? You telling me you’re
responsible for setting up McCarthy’s conversations with Dana Priest?
You’ve been dead for a long time, how could you manage that from, uh,
where you’re at?

JJA: You might put it that way. It all goes back to Watergate, of
course, which hardly anybody understands. Haven’t I explained it to you?

ML: No, but it’s never too late, go for it.

JJA: Well you know how Nixon hated the CIA, he thought we were all a
bunch of effete Ivy League intellectuals who despised him, a simple
soul from a Quaker background, etc., and he didn’t trust CIA analyses.

ML: Okay, nothing new there. When I was in the Reagan administration there was general distrust of those analyses too.

JJA: Right, especially the stuff about the Soviets, which invariably
put the most benign possible interpretation on their actions. Part of
that came from the instincts of the analysts, but part of it came from
the actions of the KGB, both abroad and, to a frightening degree,
within the CIA. Our shop had identified many likely KGB and GRU moles
inside CIA, and some of our people wanted to start a very aggressive
mole hunt, but Nixon wouldn’t hear of it, despite his antipathy to the
place.

ML: Because of political fallout?

JJA: Yes, there was that — the ACLU and the 1st Amendment extremists
would have been all over it, arguing that it was just an excuse for the
politicization of intelligence, suppression of dissent, and so forth —
but there were also the practical considerations, which I shared: the
place was so riddled with penetrations that we’d never be able to feel
confident we’d solved the problem. Second, any investigation would risk
blowing the cover of the good operations we were running against the
Soviets, and third, the publicity would worry our allies, who would cut
back on their cooperation with us.

ML: Yeah, and meanwhile there were congressional investigations, endless leaks to the press…

JJA: Exactly. In essence, we were being deprived of the most
important thing for a secret intelligence service: the ability to
protect our sources and methods. Without that, you just can’t have good
intelligence.

ML: Haha, CIA had to reveal its most secret activities, but meanwhile the press was claiming an absolute right to protect their sources and methods…Hoho.

JJA: You figured it out, well done.

ML: Huh?

JJA: I mean, you couldn’t run a secret intelligence service at CIA,
but you could do it at a newspaper. Congress could pry all the secrets
out of Langley, but nobody could ask Jack Anderson for his sources.

ML: Well now they can, even though he’s in your neighborhood, heh. The FBI guys are trying to go through his documents.

JJA: Yes, I heard that from a source here. But anyway, back in the
Seventies the press had absolute protection of sources and methods, and
the government didn’t. We couldn’t do a serious internal investigation,
but we had to do something about the massive penetration of CIA. The
solution was obvious: Relocate our serious operations to the media.

ML: Reporters as agents?

JJA: You don’t actually need to recruit reporters, they act like
intelligence agents anyway. All you really need is editors, and Mrs.
Graham was happy to cooperate, which made it easy. Ben Bradlee fancied
himself a great patriot, and he worked closely with me. We just tasked
their reporters with collection requirements, and they filed their
stories, just like always. Bradlee made sure the really sensitive stuff
never made it into print.

ML: But the Post brought down Nixon…

JJA: Of course, in fact Bradlee chose the two agents personally when we decided Nixon had to go.

ML: What say??? I thought Nixon was with you.

JJA: Well, no. This sort of thing has to be done by the
professionals, you can’t bring in the short-termers, even the ones that
are going to be there maybe eight years. The problem was that Nixon was
just too smart for his own good. With all his contempt for CIA, he
still noticed the dropoff in reporting when we moved clandestine
collection from Langley to the Washington Post, and he started to snoop around with those annoying pseudo spooks of his, Hunt and Liddy.

ML: So Nixon was brought down to protect the real CIA, which was on 15th Street, not in northern Virginia?

JJA: Right. He was getting too close. And we had to get rid of some
others, too, you know, people who would have figured it out, like that
Sorenson guy who Carter wanted to make DCI. He never knew what hit him,
and we managed to get Stan Turner to Langley. What a dolt he was! But
there was no chance he’d notice that he wasn’t getting anything except
Soviet disinformation and rewritten newspaper stories from the
operations directorate.

Ledeen is too arrogant for his own good. While he is clearly having some tongue-in-cheek fun here, he is also telling some truth. Unfortunately, it is all gobbled up with misinformation. It is true that Katherine Graham and Ben Bradlee worked very closely with the CIA. It is very possible that the CIA (or elements within the CIA) had something to do with Woodward and Bernstein getting the story on Watergate. We now know that Mark Felt, who was the number two man at the FBI was Deep Throat. But it was E. Howard Hunt that organized the Watergate burglary, and he had been involved in every major CIA operation since the 1954 coup in Guatemala. Many have speculated that the Watergate burglary was intentionally botched.

Ledeen goes on to suggest that the CIA (or elements of the CIA working at the Washington Post) are replaying the Watergate coup to take down President Bush.

Strangley, he doesn’t seem to object. I don’t know for sure whether he is floating this theory in order to mock it, or he is serious. But, I do know that he just evil enough to be a part of this coup on either end: as a participant, or as a counterintelligence agent trying to expose it. If you don’t believe me, read this or this. Getting too close to Ledeen makes me shudder. As does this:

Rove is widely considered Bush’s most powerful aide because of his long history with Bush and his status as one of three (with Vice President Cheney and Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr.) who routinely command private audiences with Bush. Though he is Bush’s top political aide, Rove also has a seat at daily White House policy meetings, and his network of advisers includes those who talk to him about terrorism and foreign policy.

One is Michael Ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute, whose specialties include terrorism and the Middle East. His latest book, according to the official summary, asserts that “America must topple the regimes of the terror masters to eliminate the threat of terrorism.”

The two met after Bush’s election. “He said, ‘Anytime you have a good idea, tell me,’ ” Ledeen said. Every month or six weeks, Ledeen will offer Rove “something you should be thinking about.” More than once, Ledeen has seen his ideas, faxed to Rove, become official policy or rhetoric.