Final_Judgment

470 ”Deep Throat” [373]
that Angleton's operations involving the French Corsican Mafia (described
in Chapter 9 of Final Judgment) were at their height.
Davis describes the role that Bradlee and other journalists tied in to the
Angleton network played: "He and his colleagues are writing from the Cold
War point of view. Angleton and Ober are intelligence operatives who
travel between Washington and Paris, London, and Rome. In Washington,
at private places such as Philip and Katharine Graham's salon, these patriots
philosophize and make plans; in foreign cities, they do the work of keeping
European Communism under control by using whatever means necessary—
planting negative stories, infiltrating labor unions, supporting or discrediting
political leaders—to provoke anti-Communist sentiment." 963
Bradlee also managed to find himself in the thick of the Algerian
controversy that, back in the United States, young Sen. John F. Kennedy
had embroiled himself—much to the dismay of Israel's supporters who
objected to the concept of Arab Algeria (then still a French colony) of
becoming an independent republic.
According to Davis, Bradlee's "most notable feat as a foreign
correspondent was to obtain an interview with the FLN, the Algerian
guerrillas who were then in revolution against the French government. The
interview, which had all the earmarks of an intelligence operation . . .
caused the French to expel Bradlee from the country in 1957." 964
In any event, remarkably enough, here we find Bradlee—while
working with Angleton, some 17 years before Watergate—in the midst of
yet another project of special interest to Israel and which would ultimately
prove to be part of the so-called "French Connection" to the JFK
assassination conspiracy of which Angleton was a central player.
However, just shortly after the JFK assassination itself, we once again
find Angleton and Bradlee secretly working together behind the scenes. As
we pointed out in Chapter 16, after JFK's mistress, Mary Pinchot Meyer
(Bradlee's sister-in-law and the wife of high-level CIA official Cord Meyer)
was found shot to death (in what was said to be a robbery) on October 12,
1964 Angleton obtained Mrs. Meyer's diary (with Bradlee's help) and
destroyed it at CIA headquarters.
Some years later, after a Washington Post editor, James Truitt, became
engaged in a conflict with Bradlee, Truitt went public with the story of
Angleton and Bradlee's procurement of Mrs. Meyer's diary. Prior to this
time Angleton had managed to avoid the spotlight, but his connection to the
Mary Meyer intrigue brought him some unwanted public recognition
indeed. According to Deborah Davis, "Truitt' s feud with Bradlee
unnecessarily [exposed] Angleton, to his disgust and bitterness." 965
By 1967, with Israel safely assured the all-out support of the Johnson
administration, Angleton's office at the CIA was running the now-infamous
"Operation CHAOS" which was an "intelligence collection program with
definite domestic counterintelligence aspects" 966 —in short a spying
operation aimed at American citizens who dared dissent against CIA and