A CIA Chief's Terrifying Dying Words and the JFK Assassination

“The better you lied and the more you betrayed, the more likely you would be promoted,” a dying James Angleton said.

One of the reasons I for years rejected the theory of a conspiracy to kill JFK was that it’s too hard to keep small secrets, let alone an enormous one.

“Somebody would have talked by now,” I once told a relative who had read a lot of books on the JFK assassination. “A deathbed confession. Something.”

What I didn’t realize at the time was that there had been confessions and near confession from people inside the US government. The most famous of these was E. Howard Hunt (1918-2007), a legendary CIA spook and one of the the “three tramps” who was photographed near the Texas School Book Depository on the day of the Kennedy assassination.

Shortly before his death, a dying Hunt spilled the beans in a 2007 interview published by Rolling Stone, alleging that the CIA and mafia killed Kennedy in a plot that included Lydon Johnson and CIA officer Bill Harvey (dubbed “America’s James Bond”).

I vaguely remember reading about Hunt’s deathbed confession, which offered details not included in his memoir American Spy: My Secret History in the CIA, Watergate, and Beyond.

I’ll explore Hunt’s allegations in the future, but first I wanted to explore a confession I had never heard before.

James Jesus Angleton (1917 – 1987) was chief of counterintelligence for the CIA and the righthand man of longtime CIA director Allen Dulles. Though Angleton guarded Dulles’s secrets for years, as the Catholic inched near his meeting with death he began to unburden himself of the secrets he’d harbored for years, confessing to unspecified evils. The most chilling part of Angleton’s confession is the culture he described at the CIA.

“The better you lied and the more you betrayed, the more likely you would be promoted,” Angleton said, per Joseph Trento’s The Secret History of the CIA. “Outside of their duplicity, the only thing they had in common was desire for absolute power. I did things in looking back on my life, I regret. But I was part of it and loved being in it.”

What precisely the “things” are that Angleton was referring to is unclear, but author David Talbot points out in the CIA history The Devil’s Chessboard that among the strange items they found Angleton’s safe after his death were “files relating to both Kennedy assassinations and stomach-turning photos taken of Robert Kennedy’s autopsy, which were promptly burned.”

Were these items “mementoes,” as some have alleged? Perhaps. We don’t know. But we do know that certain men in the CIA hated Kennedy, who famously described his desire to "splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it into the winds.”

Whether some of these men led an effort to dispense with the president in the name of “the greater good” remains a mystery. (And the CIA refuses to release all documents related to his assassination.) But a dying Jim Angleton gave us a clue as to the types of men who rise in the US intelligence apparatus.

“If you were in a room with them, you were in a room full of people that you had to believe would deservedly end up in hell,” Angleton said. “I guess I will see them there soon.”