Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything - Too good to be true remix

Episode Date: August 15, 2023

Two very different tales about making stuff up about the CIA. Your host shares the story of Sylvia Press, who in the 1950s, wrote a revenge novel after she was fired during the McCarthy purges. And author Jefferson Morley tells us about the time CIA director Richard Helms tried to create an American James Bond with the help of future Watergate burglar E Howard Hunt.Get Jefferson Morley’s amazing new book: Scorpion's Dance. Sylvia Press’s novel The Care of Devils is harder to find.

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Episodes every other week at neverpo.st and wherever you find pods. The first published fictional account of the inner workings of the CIA was a revenge novel. In the mid-1950s, CIA analyst Sylvia Press was subjected to a Kafkaesque seven-week security interrogation and then fired. She then wrote a romanocle called The Care of Devils, which was published in 1958. As someone who has fictionalized many of my own trials and humiliations, I do believe this novel brought Sylvia Press, catharsis, and closure.

But unfortunately, she never got revenge. The Care of Devils is set in the early 1950s, when power-mad Senator Joseph McCarthy was on the attack, accusing government agencies like the CIA of harboring pinkos, traitors, communists and subversives. In The Care of Devils, Senator McCarthy becomes Senator Cochran, and Sylvia Press becomes Ellen Simon. Like Sylvia Press, Ellen Simon began her intelligence career during the war, working for the OSS in Europe. And in the early 1950s, when the novel begins,

she is a highly respected analyst stationed in D.C. Ellen Simon shrugs off Senator Cochran's threats because director Clarence Rommel has promised to defend his staff from the red-baiting and fear-mongering. Clarence Rommel is obviously a stand-in for CIA Director Alan Dulles, and in real life, Sylvia Press was actually in the CIA auditorium when Dulles pledged to protect his staff from McCarthy and his goons. But then, one day, Ellen Simon is called to security and told that she is under investigation. The accusations are vague, and she is tormented by both fears that she's guilty of something she can't recall,

and by an outraged conviction that she is guilty of absolutely nothing. Her tormentors insinuate that she's either a communist or harboring communist, or perhaps even one of Stalin's paid assassins. They spend weeks going over every detail of a trip she once took to Mexico with an unmarried man. They hook her up to a lie detector, and they bring in Herman the Vermin Kane, an odious colleague Ellen had recently shown up in the field to bully her. And then she's fired. The book ends with a face-to-face meeting with the director. Ellen reminds him of his promise to defend his staff. Rommel has no idea that she worked for him during the war, nor can he recall the name of her boss. But yet he assures her he

has made his decision after closely examining her file. She comes to believe that she was a sacrifice made by the CIA to appease the red-baiting senator. A mere statistic in an unpatriotic quota. On the final page, Ellen Simon decides to go public with her story. Which is exactly what Sylvia Press did. In March of 1958, The Care of Devils was published by Beacon Press. A highly readable story about the clear and ever-present danger of this kind of panic and persecution, Kirkus announced in its review.

But The Care of devils bombed. Eight years later, in 1966, Esquire magazine's editor Harold Hayes stumbled on the story of Sylvia Press and her novel, while putting together an issue on spies and sex. He asked writer Malcolm Muggeridge, an ex-MI5 intelligence agent himself, to investigate the rumors that the CIA had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to ensure that the book failed. My own consciousness of the ineptitude and incompetence of publishers is such that I But after reading Sylvia Press's book, he admitted he was surprised that it failed. It provides, he wrote, with a candor and authenticity I have not come across elsewhere. A blow-by-blow account of the interrogation of a suspected subversive in an American intelligence agency, clearly the CIA, during the ill-omened McCarthy era.

Apart from any other consideration, the care of devils would seem to me to be of major interest as documentation. But as much as the book has to offer students of McCarthyism, Mugger has recognized that the novel revealed something much more important and devastating about the CIA. The Care of Devils begins with Herman Cain, that odious agent who's brought in to bully Ellen Simon at the end of her interrogation,

championing a new Soviet defector. Ellen, who has a photographic memory, proves that this defector is in fact a phony. Ellen's discovery of the man's phoniness, Muggeridge explains in his article, is a point against her rather than for her, almost as though her superiors had a stake in his genuineness, resented his exposure, and took out their annoyance on Ellen. Such situations, he added, in any case are all too liable to arise in intelligence organizations the world over. I know of a case in the war of a very valuable source of information remaining unused because the man who turned it up happened to be personally disliked by a senior officer at headquarters.

Muggeridge is dead on. Yes, the book provides a first-hand account of the farce that was McCarthyism. And yes, it is a scathing attack on the cluelessness and cowardice of CIA director Alan Dulles. But Sylvia Press's primary target is this small, petty, verminous, cigar-chomping man. And while I don't know the guy's real name, I'm sure every CIA agent who read The Care of Devils knew exactly who she was talking about. A few months after the Esquire article came out, Bantam Books decided to reissue The Care of Devils. But once again, the novel bombed and copies disappeared. In her 2009 memoir, The Cloak and Dagger Cookbook, former CIA agent K. Sean Nelson revealed that Sylvia Press' former colleagues

were indeed instructed to gather up and turn over copies of The Care of Devils to CIA security. Sylvia Press was fired, she relates, because she was a woman without important connections for whom nobody was willing to stand up. The story only gets worse. In the late 1960s, Sylvia Press became eligible for her CIA pension. She had, after all, devoted 13 years to the agency. But she didn't get it. And in his biography of CIA director Richard Helms,

the man who kept the secrets, journalist Thomas Powers tells us that Richard Helms sent one of his top men to meet with Sylvia Press in New York to let her know that she would never get her pension because of that book. The New York Public Library doesn't even own a copy of The Care of Devils. In fact, there's only one copy of the book in a library on the East Coast. It's housed in Princeton University's off-site stacks.

I ordered it using interlibrary loan. You can find copies of The Care of Devils for sale online, but they're not cheap. The copy I got from Princeton has a book plate on the inside front cover. It reads, From the Library of Alan W. Dulles, Class of 1914. Alan Dulles also got fired. After the disaster that was the Bay of Pigs, President John F. Kennedy publicly fired him. And I like to imagine Sylvia Press finding comfort reading about Dulles' humiliation in the papers. Dulles' successors had very different ideas

about the CIA and fiction. In fact, in the mid-1960s, Richard Helms launched a secret operation to create an American James Bond franchise. Helms has the idea, well, look at the British Secret Service. Look at Ian Fleming and James Bond. Ian Fleming is the former British intelligence officer and author of the James Bond stories. The Bond movies are turned into these hugely popular movies. And all of a sudden, British intelligence looks like the coolest thing on earth, you know, and like people love it, you know, and spying is glamorous. And so Helms wants to do that same thing for the CIA.

This is Jefferson Morley. He's the author of Scorpion's Dance, a new book about CIA director Richard Helms and his relationship with President Richard Nixon. It's a Watergate book, and one of the supporting characters is Watergate burglar E. Howard Hunt, the very agent Richard Helms tapped to create the CIA's James Bond.

Ian Fleming dies in August 1964, and Helms says, my buddy Howard Hunt can step right in, and he can be the Ian Fleming of the CIA. Hunt, a graduate of Brown, not a bad writer at all. In fact, writing was his first passion. He tried to be a writer before he tried to be a spy. And so Helms commissions Hunt to start cranking out these, you know, kind of James Bond type novels starring a CIA officer named Peter Ward, who's based, not surprisingly, on Howard Hunt. And Peter Ward has a very high powered, impressive boss named Avery Thorne. And Avery Thorne, in every respect, biographical details, physical appearance, style, is a dead ringer for Dick Helms. Hunt wrote 10 Peter Ward books. None of them are very good. You can still find copies of some of them, like Festival for Spies and The Towers of Silence, online.

Because after Watergate, a publisher got the idea that Hunt's notoriety might lead to book sales. My copy of The Venus Probe has written by convicted Watergate conspirator in large print on the cover. Howard Hunt sent his Peter Ward books to agents and publishers using a pseudonym, David St. John. He also used a pseudonym when he attempted to publish an unauthorized book, A History of the Bay of Pigs. A reporter was able to figure out who the real author was, and alarm bells went off at the agency. Hunt is so irrepressible and careless, like he doesn't obey basic CIA tradecraft.

So on these books that are written under a pseudonym, when he sends to the copyright office, he puts his home address in there. So it's easily traceable. Anybody who wanted to know who was behind the pseudonym, all they had to do was look up who was the resident at that address, and they would know that the pseudonymous author was, in fact, Howard Hunt, CIA man. Remarkably, Howard Hunt was not fired for this offense. Proof, Jefferson Morley argues, that Helms and Hunt shared a very strong bond. Once Helms had contained the problem, right, they found the manuscript, they retrieved all

the copies of it, they slapped Hunt on the wrist and said, bad boy, don't do that again. And then, you know, Helms arranges his retirement from the CIA and writes him a letter of recommendation. And Hunt lands on his feet at the Mullen Company a couple of months later. So, you know, he did protect him throughout that ordeal. And then after that, Helms continues to press his friends in Hollywood with Hunt's books, seeking to get them made into movies. And he shows them to his friend Jack Valenti, who's the head of the Motion Picture Association of America, Hollywood's lobbyist in Washington. And Valenti passes them to Paramount, who reads them and rejects them, thinks that they're no good. And Helms isn't discouraged.

In 1972, he passes the book again to Charles Bluthorn, the head of Gulf and Western, which then owned Paramount, and to his deputy, Martin Davis. These are a couple of the most powerful men in Hollywood, you know, and Helms is at a premiere of The Godfather, a kind of classic Hollywood event, you know, and he's giving them the book saying, you know, make this into a movie or a TV show. So that's six years after Hunt has written the Peter Ward books and Helms is still pushing them, you know, so he really believed in them. He really wanted this to happen. You know, he never gave up on the idea. It's kind of incredible to compare the story

about what happened to Howard Hunt with the story about what happened to Sylvia Press after she wrote her book. I mean, this guy gets caught in the act trying to publish an unauthorized book about the CIA's greatest embarrassment, the Bay of Pigs. And yet, unlike Sylvia Press, he suffers no consequences. How do you explain that? I mean, you know, I just come back to Helms wanted use of Hunt's services, right? Alan Dulles and the CIA had no use for this woman's services. So they cut her off and crushed her. They had a use for Hunt. I mean, Helms wanted Hunt to carry out national security missions for the White House. It was just an off-the-shelf operation where Hunt would do his work for the CIA under cover of the Mullen

Company, or his work for Helms and the White House under the cover of the Mullen Company, because that's what Helms wanted because it improved his relationship with Nixon. When it comes to dirty tricks, Dick Nixon and Dick Helms shared a long history, going all the way back to the Cuban Revolution, back when Helms was in charge of some of the CIA's black operations and Nixon was Eisenhower's vice president.

Nixon, in 1959, assigns himself to be the point man, the administration's point man on Cuba, where Fidel Castro has come to power, and Nixon is determined to get rid of him. And so right from the start, Nixon and Helms, although not personal friends, were involved in the same set of policy issues around Cuba. And let's be real, you know, around the dirty tricks aspect of the work, and specifically, the idea that was very current in the CIA and the White House at that time of

assassinating Fidel Castro. So this business of the assassination business that Nixon and Helms have in common from the late 1950s and early 1960s becomes one of the secrets that they share when they both arrive at positions of supreme power later in the decade. In 1966, President Johnson promotes Helms from deputy director of the CIA to director. And in 1968, of course, Nixon wins the presidency. And on Johnson's advice, decides to keep Helms on as CIA director. In many ways, this shared background in dirty tricks made them the ideal power couple. But Watergate proved that a CIA director

can get away with a lot more than a president. This is one of the ironies of their struggle for power. I mean, Nixon couldn't suborn witnesses or lie to law enforcement. That wasn't part of his job description. Helms could. I mean, he might't suborn witnesses or lie to law enforcement. That wasn't part of his job description. Helms could. I mean, he might have been unethical. It might have been immoral. But he did have legal authority under our system to do that stuff, you know.

And as Mort Halperin, who worked for Kissinger on the NSC, said, you know, it was Helms' job to lie, and nobody told him was Helms' job to lie, and nobody told him it wasn't his job to lie to Congress. One of the biggest lies Dick Helms told during the Watergate investigation was about his relationship with one of the ex-CIA burglars, E. Howard Hunt. When Helms testifies to the Senate Watergate Committee and is asked about Hunt, he feigns that he barely knows this man. And Hunt is in jail when Helms says this. He's in the prison in Danbury, watching on TV, scared out of his mind by the other inmates in the prison. You know,

Howard Hunt was a tough guy on the outside. When he was on the inside with some real tough guys, he was scared shitless. And he sees this. He sees this on TV. And at that point, even then, even then, Hunt still believed in his friends. And he thought that what Helms was saying was that, you know, the company would take care of its men. And then nothing happened. And Hunt realized that his friends just didn't care. And so, you know, like the CIA often does, Hunt was cut loose. And so, you know, he wound up very bitter and would never, you know, speak to the man again. This installment is called Too Good to Be True. It was written and produced by me, Benjamin Walker, and it featured Jefferson Morley,

whose new book, Scorpion's Dance, is one of the best Watergate books I've ever read. You can find it wherever you get your books. Sylvia Press's novel, The Care of Devils, is, like I said, harder to find. The Theory of Everything is a proud founding member of Radiotopia from PRX, home to some of the world's best podcasts. Find them all at radiotopia.fm. Radiotopia. From PRX.