The CIA was established in 1947 and tasked with carrying out intelligence work outside the United States. But the agency soon strayed from its original purpose, carrying out coups, assassinations, and other murky activities around the globe. And while much of the CIA’s sordid history was exposed by the Church Committee in the 1970s, there are still plenty of unanswered questions about the darker side of “the Company.”

Featured photo credit: CIA

10 Who Killed Nick Deak?

Even as a simple financier, Nicholas Deak was quite a character. An exiled Transylvanian aristocrat, he joined the US military during World War II and soon joined the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the CIA. In that capacity, he planned attacks on Romanian oil fields and trained guerrillas in Burma, where he accepted the Japanese commander’s samurai sword at the end of the war. The Devil’s Ches... Talbot, David Best Price: $3.67 Buy New $41.00 (as of 10:40 UTC - Details)

In 1947, he started a flower business in Hawaii, which soon grew into a powerhouse in the world of finance. Deak and Co. was soon the largest precious metals and foreign exchange trader in the world. (The precious metal branch is now known as Goldline, while the rest of the business became the foreign exchange branch of Thomas Cook.) A staunch libertarian, Deak regularly appeared alongside speakers like Ron Paul and Alan Greenspan. As president of the OSS veterans organization, he was a close friend of James Jesus Angleton and future CIA director Bill Casey.

But in reality, Deak had never quite retired from espionage. His company’s remarkable growth was actually funded by the CIA, which needed an untraceable way to move cash around the world. A foreign exchange company was perfect, and Deak didn’t disappoint, funneling untraceable foreign currency to secret operations around the world. In 1953, he smuggled $1 million into Iran to fund the overthrow of Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, and later carried out similar operations in Guatemala and the Congo. It’s said he even warned the CIA that the Chinese were planning their 1962 invasion of India when they ordered huge sums of Indian currency through his Hong Kong office.

One example of how Deak’s firm operated came during the Lockheed bribery scandal, in which the defense contractor bribed Japanese politicians to favor their planes for the state-run airline and other government contracts. Lockheed enlisted Deak to smuggle millions of dollars to a Yakuza don (and war criminal) named Yoshio Kodama, who distributed it within Japan. Deak had the money smuggled into the country in orange crates by a defrocked priest. When the scandal broke, the Japanese prime minister was arrested and a deranged male porn star flew a plane into Kodama’s house as revenge for staining Japan’s honor. Deak survived unscathed. Maryu2019s Mosaic: The... Peter Janney Best Price: $3.39 Buy New $15.89 (as of 06:55 UTC - Details)

But his bulletproof reputation disintegrated in the 1980s, when the Justice Department accused him of laundering millions of dollars for the Colombian cartels, at which point the CIA unceremoniously dumped him. A run on his banking operations wiped out most of Deak’s cash reserves—and infuriated everyone from the cartels to the Macau triads, who felt he had lost their money. Shortly after declaring bankruptcy, Deak was shot dead in his plush Wall Street office by a homeless woman named Lois Lang.

Officially, Lang was said to have acted alone, prompted by a deranged belief that Deak owed her money. Yet many have had trouble accepting that explanation, with the Canadian economist R.T. Naylor acidly observing that Deak was “gunned down by one of those lone nuts that do for US politics what heart attacks do in Italian jails.” More seriously, Arkadi Kuhlmann, who followed Deak as CEO of Deak and Co., says his investigators found evidence that Lang met with two Argentinean mobsters in Miami, shortly before she bought a gun and a bus ticket to New York. When Kuhlmann went to Macau after Deak’s death, he found the offices empty and strewn with papers. In a desk drawer, he found a picture of Deak bleeding to death on his office floor. The picture, apparently taken by Lang, had never been released by the authorities.

9 Why Did James Angleton Want Mary Meyer’s Diary?

Photo via Wikipedia

In October 1964, two men were changing a flat tire near the C&O Canal in Washington, DC, when they heard a cry for help and two gunshots. When the police arrived, they found the body of Mary Pinchot Meyer lying on a towpath, shot twice at close range. Mary Meyer was an artist and the ex-wife of Cord Meyer, a senior CIA official who had overseen Operation Mockingbird, which sought to influence the American media in favor of the CIA. A prominent figure on the Washington social scene, Mary Meyer had also carried on a lengthy affair with John F. Kennedy before his death. Shadow Government: Sur... Engelhardt, Tom Buy New $9.99 (as of 05:40 UTC - Details)

The police arrested an African-American man named Ray Crump, who was found nearby, soaked and with a bleeding hand. Crump acted suspiciously and changed his story a few times. He eventually said he had been fishing, but his fishing rod was still in his house. But no hard evidence could be found and a jury acquitted him. The mysterious killing has subsequently become a favorite topic among conspiracy theorists.

Meanwhile, Mary Meyer’s brother-in-law, future Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, got a strange call from one of her friends, the sculptor Anne Truitt. According to Truitt, Meyer had asked her to destroy her diary in the event of her sudden death. Since Truitt was in Tokyo, she asked Bradlee to look for it. But when he arrived at Mary’s locked house, he found James Jesus Angleton, the legendary CIA counterintelligence head, searching the living room for the diary, which was nowhere to be found. Bradlee next decided to try Mary’s studio, only to find Angleton had beaten him there and was in the process of picking the lock. Embarrassed, Angleton left and Bradlee found the diary, which revealed Mary’s affair with JFK. Bradlee subsequently agreed to hand the diary over to Angleton on the condition that he destroy it. But he didn’t—Bradlee’s wife discovered it was still in his possession over a decade later. On her insistence, the diary was burned.

8 Did The CIA Have Ties To Klaus Barbie?

Photo via Wikipedia

As “the Butcher of Lyon,” Klaus Barbie was one of the most notorious members of the Gestapo and a committed Nazi. Yet after the war, US military intelligence recruited him as an agent, sheltered him from the French authorities, and eventually helped him escape to South America. That’s not a conspiracy theory—the US government publicly confirmed as much in 1983, following an investigation by the Justice Department. The Secret Team: The C... L. Fletcher Prouty Best Price: $11.58 Buy New $11.87 (as of 06:10 UTC - Details)

The real mystery is what happened next. In South America, Barbie became an influential figure in right-wing circles, a drug trafficker, and a key player in the brutal “Cocaine Coup” that briefly overthrew the government of Bolivia in 1980. He was extradited to France in 1983. Did US intelligence services, including the CIA, maintain a connection with Barbie during his time in Bolivia?

They certainly considered it. In its 1983 report, the Justice Department cited CIA documents which discussed hiring Barbie to help hunt down Che Guevara, who was leading a communist insurgency in Bolivia at the time. Officially, the CIA decided not to follow through with the plan, wary of French plans to have Barbie extradited to stand trial. However, there are some indications that the agency might have sought Barbie’s help off the record. Kevin MacDonald’s acclaimed 2007 documentary My Enemy’s Enemy explored the idea, with a close friend of Barbie’s insisting he had met with the senior American officer planning counter-guerrilla operations in Bolivia.

The evidence is inconclusive, although it’s worth noting that the CIA was in strong support of Bolivian president Rene Barrientos, who did have ties to Barbie. At the moment, Barbie’s only certain ties to Western intelligence after 1951 came in 1966, when he was briefly employed by West Germany’s BND spy agency.

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