Theodore Shackley

Theodore George "Ted" Shackley, Jr. (July 16, 1927 – December 9, 2002) was an American CIA officer involved in many important and controversial CIA operations during the 1960s and 1970s.

He is one of the most decorated CIA officers.

Due to his "light hair and mysterious ways", Shackley was known to his colleagues as "the Blond Ghost".

Shackley was born on July 16, 1927, and raised in West Palm Beach, Florida.

He enlisted in the U.S. Army on October 23, 1945, at Springfield, Massachusetts as a private, eventually becoming part of the Allied Occupation Force in Germany on completion of basic training.

Due to his knowledge of the Polish language (his mother was a Polish immigrant), he became a recruit of U.S. Army Counterintelligence (ACI).

As an army recruit he studied at the University of Maryland, and returned to Germany as a 2nd Lieutenant in 1951.

Again he served as a member of Army Counterintelligence, where his linguistic skills were used in the recruitment of Polish agents.

It was at this time that he was recruited by the CIA, and in 1953 he was assigned to work under William King Harvey at the CIA's Berlin Base.

In the early 1960s, Shackley's work included being station chief in Miami, during the period of the Cuban Missile Crisis, as well as the Cuban Project (also known as Operation Mongoose), which he directed.

In 1961, Shackley married Hazel Tindol Shackley of Bethesda.

While heading the CIA office (known as "JMWAVE") shortly after the 1961 Bay of Pigs Invasion, Shackley dealt with operations in Cuba (alongside Edward Lansdale).

JMWAVE employed more than 200 CIA officers, who handled approximately 2,000 Cuban agents.

These included the famous "Operation Mongoose" (aka "The Cuban Project").

The aim of this was to "help Cubans (exiles) overthrow the Communist regime" (of Fidel Castro Ruz).

During the period (1962–1965), Shackley was station chief in Miami, Florida.

During this period as Miami Station Chief, Shackley was in charge of about 400 agents and general operatives (as well as a huge flotilla of boats), and his tenure there encompassed the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962.

He was also said to be the director of the "Phoenix Program" during the Vietnam War, as well as the CIA station chief in Laos between 1966 and 1968, and Saigon station chief from 1968 through February 1972.

In 1966, Shackley moved on to the Vietnam War, becoming the CIA station chief in Laos between 1966 and 1968, where he directed the CIA's secret war against the North Vietnamese forces in Laos.

He also helped coordinate local army efforts against the Pathet Lao and North Vietnamese Army in the northern regions of Laos.

In late 1968, he then moved to Saigon to become station chief for Vietnam.

Shackley was responsible for running the Phoenix Program and the Provincial Reconnaissance Units (PRUs), a secret assassination and capture campaign aimed at members of the Vietcong infrastructure.

However, in his memoirs Shackley claimed that he had not been the mastermind of the Phoenix Program (which had already started before his arrival in Saigon) and did not even approve of it, given its disappointing effectivity at producing intelligence material and "its poor press image" of being an assassination program rather than one for information procurement.

In November 1969, he decided a six-months "phase-out" of CIA's involvement in the program before transferring it under South Vietnamese control, CIA agents being replaced by CORDS personnel.

Shackley served in South Vietnam through February 1972 when he returned to Langley, Virginia.

From May 1972, Shackley ran the CIA's "Western Hemisphere Division".

When Shackley took over the division, one mission for him was "regime change" in Chile (United States intervention in Chile / Project FUBELT).

During this time, Shackley also dealt with the case of ex-CIA officer Philip Agee, who was suspected of having defected to Cuban intelligence.

Agee had told acquaintances that he was going to write an exposé of the CIA (published in 1975 as Inside The Company: CIA Diary).

Shackley managed to get a copy of Agee's book before it was published, and according to journalist David Corn, even arranged for Agee to receive a bugged typewriter.

In 1976, he was appointed Associate Deputy Director for Operations, second in charge of CIA covert operations.

In May 1976, Shackley was made Associate Deputy Director for Operations, serving under CIA director George H. W. Bush.

At that time, Shackley claimed that he would have become CIA director if President Gerald Ford had been reelected in 1976 and that only this investigation kept him from becoming CIA director or deputy director under new president Ronald Reagan.

After Jimmy Carter had succeeded Gerald Ford as President and replaced Bush with Stansfield Turner, Shackley was relieved of his post in December 1977, before officially retiring from the organization in 1979 – when the Carter administration announced wide cuts in the CIA's network of officers and informants.

Reportedly, he was forced out of the CIA by Turner who disapproved of Shackley's involvement with former officer Edwin P. Wilson, who was under federal investigation for smuggling explosives to Libya.

Shackley was suspected by federal prosecutor Lawrence Barcella to be part of Wilson's Egyptian-American Transport and Services Corporation (EATSCO), a front for his arms smuggling which was also accused of fraudulently billing the Department of Defense.

In 1982, Wilson was convicted for selling 22 tons of C4 plastic explosive to Muammar al-Gaddafi's Libya, and also on the charge of exporting guns.

Shackley reported that he met with General Manucher Hashemi, the former head of SAVAK's counterintelligence division, in Hamburg, West Germany in November 1984.

On February 5, 1986, Shackley was interviewed by the Tower Commission investigating the Iran–Contra affair.

On October 29, 2003, the conviction on the explosives charge was reversed.