"Confidential Agents"
Secret agents, mysterious deaths and the rest of the story...
by Bill Bonner
Baltimore, Maryland - "Nothing comes from nothing…no one comes from nobody…and there’s always more to the story; usually the important part of it. We were doing a little wondering about where we came from…or at least about the industry of which we’ve been a part for the last nearly 50 years. Its genesis – for our narrow little piece of it – began in the late 1930s.
Patrick Maitland was the 17th Earl of Lauderdale, by virtue of which he was also the clan chief of Clan Maitland. He went to Oxford in the early ‘30s…and then became a journalist, with a job with an obscure diplomatic newsletter, called The Fleet Street Letter. Thus did he join the hallowed company of hacks, has-beens, and occasional maverick geniuses in the newsletter trade. We acquired the Fleet Street Letter in 1993. Lord Rees-Mogg, our longtime business partner, became its chairman.
Back in the ‘30s…"The Heart of the Matter." Maitland saw the job of a newsletter then, as we do now, to get to the heart of the story…to reject the official propaganda and tell the truth in a way a mainstream rag cannot. And he did it by putting his own boots on the ground where there was most likely to be trouble.
In the mid-‘30s, Germany, Italy and Japan were ‘gunning up.’ Their leaders wore uniforms, held mass rallies, excited the masses and styled themselves as masters of war. But when Neville Chamberlain came back from Munich and reported that there would be ‘peace in our time,’ Mailtand had his doubts. He decided to find out for himself. He went to Italy. He watched. He listened. And when he returned to London, he reported that ‘peace’ was an illusion; Mussolini wanted war. Britain needed to get ready for it.
He was…of course…right. The mainstream press relies on advertising. And advertisers want the imprimatur of a mainstream publication. After all, if you see it advertised in The New York Times…it must be legit! Mainstream publications aim to keep both advertisers and readers happy by sticking with storylines that don’t challenge them or irritate them. Readers get what they want…what they expect…and what the paper wants them to have. Today’s New York Times, for example, passes along the elite, government line as news. ‘The Biden Administration did this…’ ‘Secretary of State Blinken said that…’ Etc.
Over on the editorial pages, columnists and cheerleaders explain why the elite view is correct and why opponents are silly, evil or stupid. Readers, with no alternative source of facts or opinions, fall in behind their thought leaders.
Newsletters, on the other hand, are written for the few, not for the many. They do not attempt to please advertisers; they have none. Instead, they present contrarian, alternative views…often views that make readers uncomfortable. They dig a little deeper…turn over rocks to see the slimy things beneath…and try to help readers understand what is really going on.
The Power and the Glory: Maitland scored another big coup…a ‘scoop’ as they say in journalism…after WWII. The US had demonstrated its devastating atomic bomb, kept under close guard. No other nation had it. But in 1950, Maitland was among the first to report that the Soviet Union had a working model. This was a big story. How did Maitland find out? We don’t know, but here’s a hint: he hired a very special journalist – this one from Cambridge – Kim Philby.
Here is where the story gets interesting. Philby was a Soviet spy, one of the “Cambridge Five” who infiltrated British intelligence and worked as moles for the Soviet secret police. He also wrote for the Fleet Street letter. Philby later worked at the British embassy in Washington. There, he got to know a young, gifted CIA agent named James Jesus Angleton. The two seemed to get along. What secrets they shared, we have no idea.
But Angleton was a hard-driving, divisive character. After a while he had divided the CIA into two factions…the pro-Angletons and the anti-Angletons. Angleton himself got to be a little weird and perhaps unreliable. He had been placed in charge of the CIA’s counterintelligence unit…where they sought to root out double agents. Soon, he was seeing them everywhere. He claimed that the Prime Minister of England, Harold Wilson, was a Soviet spy. Same thing for the Prime Minister of Canada, Lester Pearson. Rumor had it that in his zeal to identify potential enemies, he had ‘gone rogue.’ It was said that he worked with the mafia and with Cuban exiles.
At this time, the CIA was remarkably incompetent. It hatched more than 600 different plots to kill Fidel Castro. All of them were failures. Its Bay of Pigs operation was a disaster. John Kennedy, president at the time, was not even informed of the Bay of Pigs invasion until it was already underway. He was furious and vowed publicly to ‘smash (the CIA) into a thousand pieces.’ A few months later, he was assassinated. RFK, Jr. believes the CIA was involved in his uncle’s murder. Fingers pointed at Angleton.
Our Man in Maryland: By 1975, Sen. Frank Church had come to believe that it was time to bring the CIA under control. His ‘Church Committee’ held hearings and discovered that many of the rumors were true. One of the most important witnesses was, of course, the then director of the CIA, William Colby. Colby was granted a special privilege. As director of an on-going covert operation, his testimony was limited. But what he reported…and what he heard…was enough to make him want to clean house. He fired Angleton.
By this time, Kim Philby had defected to Moscow. And now Angleton was taking his retirement too – at least, so they announced. Privately, he was let back into the CIA in an off-the-record deal and presumably went back to doing whatever it was he was doing before.
A few years later, Bill Colby retired too. But he didn’t entirely stop working either. Instead, he joined us as a consultant. We were just trying to ‘connect the dots,’ as always. And we thought Colby may have some connections we lacked. But either he was too prudent to tell us very much…or he didn’t know very much.
When we met Colby it was usually at his house in Georgetown. But he also had a place in Maryland, down on the Chesapeake Bay. It was there, one day, that he fixed himself his usual breakfast. And then, for some inexplicable reason, he appears to have gone out in his canoe – leaving the breakfast untouched. A storm was blowing up. But that didn’t stop him. His body was found two days later…washed up on the beach."
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