Best-selling author, famed political pundit, and the recipi- ent of over 35 honorary degrees, William Frank Buckley, Jr., is best known for founding the conservative opinion magazine National Review and hosting Firing Line, the longest-running television debate program in the United States. But Buckley (not to be confused with CIA CHIEF OF STATION WILLIAM BUCKLEY, who was captured and murdered by Lebanese Shiites in the mid-1980s) was also a CIA officer who served in Mexico during the early 1950s.
Buckley was born in New York City on November 24, 1925, the sixth of 10 children to Catholic oil baron William Frank Buckley, Sr., and Aloise Steiner Buckley. Soon thereafter, the Buckley family moved to Sharon, Connecticut, where, raised by Mexican housekeepers, young Buckley spoke his first words in Spanish. At six years old he attended his first school—in Paris, where he learned French. At age seven, he learned English at a day school in London. In 1943, he attended the University of Mexico, and in 1944, he joined the U.S. Army as a second lieutenant.
At the end of World War II, Buckley enrolled in Yale University. Like many of his future CIA compatriots, including future U.S. president GEORGE HERBERT WALKER BUSH and JAMES JESUS ANGLETON, RICHARD BISSELL, WILLIAM PUTNAM BUNDY, and WILLIAM SLOAN COFFIN, JR., Buckley became a member of Yale’s secret SKULL & BONES SOCIETY. He also distinguished himself as a skilled debater and became chairman of the Yale Daily News. Buckley graduated from Yale with honors in 1950. The following year, he penned God and Man at Yale, a scathing accusation that the institution had turned away from its founding premise that God exists. According to Buckley, Yale had evolved into a secular bastion of atheism. Many of Buckley’s former professors were unsettled, as much of Buckley’s work stemmed from their lectures. However, the book effectively launched his career.
In May 1951, he was recruited into the CIA. Buckley would later recall, “I did training in Washington as a secret agent and was sent to Mexico City.” In Mexico City, he served as a field officer of the Agency’s recently estab- lished OFFICE OF POLICY COORDINATION (OPC) under the direct supervision of E. HOWARD HUNT, a station chief destined to become one of the key players in the infa- mous WATERGATE SCANDAL. The OPC, the CIA’s covert- action wing, was responsible for everything from propaganda to economic warfare and from sabotage to assisting underground resistance forces. Buckley, however,
36 bug
spent the majority of his time at OPC editing and trans- lating The Road from Yenan, an anticommunist book by Eudocio Ravines, a former Marxist from Chile.
In 1952, Buckley left the Agency for a career in jour- nalism. Two years later, he met and became close friends with Whitaker Chambers, a journalist and former mem- ber of the American Communist Party who had worked as an agent for Soviet intelligence during World War II. Chambers, who had made an ideological about-face in the late 1930s and had become an outspoken anticommunist, was best known for his 1948 revelation that Alger Hiss, a respected U.S. State Department official, had also been a spy for the Soviets. In the last years of Chamber’s life, he wrote Buckley a voluminous series of letters, which the latter published in book form as Odyssey of a Friend 1954–1961.
In 1955, Buckley founded National Review, one of the most widely circulated political opinion journals in the United States and required reading for every staff member in President Ronald Reagan’s administration. For 10 years, he served as the magazine’s editor in chief. His
friend Chambers became a senior editor with the maga- zine, serving in that capacity until his death in 1961. Buckley also began a syndicated column, “On the Right,” in 1962. Today, it appears three times a week in over 300 newspapers worldwide.
In 1965, Buckley ran unsuccessfully for mayor of New York. The following year, he launched Firing Line—a tele- vision interview program featuring world political and intellectual leaders, with Buckley as host. By 1971, the show was carried nationally on the Public Broadcasting System. Buckley’s interviewees have included U.S. presi- dents Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, and Bush; British prime ministers Harold Wilson, Margaret Thatcher, and Edward Heath; and comedian Groucho Marx and best- selling author James Michener.
In the late 1970s, Buckley produced a series of suc- cessful spy novels featuring a fictionalized CIA agent, Blackford Oakes. In addition to God and Man at Yale, Odyssey of a Friend, and the Blackford Oakes series, Buck- ley authored a number of books on communicating, his- tory, and political thought. In 2000, Buckley published Let Us Talk of Many Things, a collection of his speeches, as well as a CIA-based novel entitled Spytime: The Undoing of James Jesus Angleton.
In November 1991, Buckley was awarded the Presi- dential Medal of Freedom. He has received many other awards.
In a 1999 interview for Salon magazine, Buckley said, “For 50 years, I never talked about what I did in the CIA because I had pledged not to. But I just picked up a book (Who Paid the Piper by France Stonor Saunders) in England that describes what I did do.” That book convinced Buck- ley that he no longer needed to keep the knowledge of his CIA tenure a secret. But, despite his unwavering patrio- tism, he also revealed many of the inner workings of the unseen world of espionage in his Blackford Oakes novels.
bug
A bug is a small, hidden audio device used by CIA officers and other intelligence operatives to eavesdrop on and record closed door conversations. Bugs, often referred to as “wires” or “listening devices,” are often placed in hotel rooms, telephone receivers, vehicles, and other places where the intended target might talk more freely with friends, lovers, or close associates, thus unwittingly dis- closing vital information.
Some of the more clever methods of employing bugs or listening devices have been concealing them in book spines and ballpoint pens. During the 1950s, a Soviet- planted bug was discovered behind a wooden carving of the U.S. seal at the American embassy in Moscow. The seal was on the wall directly behind the desk of U.S. ambassador GEORGE FROST KENNAN, the man considered
Bunche, Ralph Johnson 37
to be the architect of the CIA’s covert-action arm. In 1964, some 40 eavesdropping devices were discovered and pried out of the walls of the same American embassy in Moscow. In 1985, construction was halted on a new American embassy in Moscow after it was determined that bugs had been planted throughout the building.
CIA operatives in foreign countries are also wary of being bugged themselves. Consequently, they often employ Agency counterintelligence specialists known as EXTERMINATORSto locate and remove the devices.