A: Yes, almost certainly.
An Inquiry Into the Curious Death of Angelo Codevilla
The man who kept the CIA up at nightOn September 20, 2021, Angelo Codevilla was driving east on Interstate 205, returning to his home in the Sierra foothills from a medical appointment at Stanford. As a California Highway Patrol report reveals, “for unknown reasons” Codevilla’s 2007 Subaru drifted from the number-three lane to the opposite shoulder and collided with a tractor-trailer stopped for repairs. Codevilla was transported to the San Joaquin County hospital and “pronounced dead.”
The Italian-born professor and author of To Make and Keep Peace, The Ruling Class, and other books was 78 years old and a survivor of two heart transplants. In the default explanation of the crash, he simply lost control and drifted into a parked truck. As to the “unknown reasons,” the people have reason to keep an open mind. The dead man was the person most hated by the CIA.
Angelo Codevilla’s 1992 Informing Statecraft: Intelligence for a New Century drew on his experience with the Senate Intelligence Committee from 1977-85. In that role, Codevilla was one of the few to see everything on the CIA’s wish list, and how much money they wanted for it.
“I had to scrutinize a two-foot-high stack of justifications for all the U.S. intelligence agencies’ requests for money.” So no surprise that, as J. Michael Waller noted, Angelo Codevilla was the man who kept the CIA up at night. He witnessed the agency’s deterioration over many years.
Ronald Reagan tapped Codevilla for the intelligence and diplomatic section of his transition team. Codevilla became a confidant of William Casey, a veteran of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), forerunner to the CIA. Even so, as Waller notes, Codevilla remained “his own man” and clearly saw what was going down. The CIA was just another bureaucracy “performing its function poorly, and going in the wrong direction.” Codevilla believed no bureaucracy was sacred and “certainly none should ever be permanent.” To CIA bosses, Angelo Codevilla posed an existential threat.
As the Church Committee investigations confirmed, the clandestine agency was in the business of assassinations, like its counterparts in the Soviet Union. On US soil, the Soviets set up fake suicides for Walter Krivitsky and Povl Bang-Jensen. In London they murdered Georgi Markov with an exotic poison injected from an umbrella. Another favorite tactic is staged car accidents.
After World War 11 the Soviets killed Solomon Mikoels in “an incident that was made to resemble a road accident.” In The Death of Camus, Giovanni Catelli makes a case that the French novelist, an anti-Communist, suffered the same fate. Modern cars with electronic controls expand the possibilities for foul play.
Coincidence? Not bloody likely. Thus:
Codevilla’s quest to break up the CIA and imprison former intel leaders provided a strong motive. Deployed on the home front as never before, the CIA clearly has the means. Did the clandestine agency seize the opportunity when Angelo Codevilla was on the road? Or was it just an old guy with heart trouble who “for unknown reasons” drifted into a parked truck. There’s more to consider.
Codevilla was the principal author of a classified report to William Casey. According to Ranelagh and Bob Woodward, author of Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA 1981-1987, CIA bosses felt threated by that report, and by Codevilla personally. As Angelo noted, the document was “classified above Top Secret and only one copy exists.” If declassified, the report might make known the reasons for many things that happened, before and since. So far, CIA director John Ratcliffe, a former Director of National Intelligence (DNI), has shown little inclination to shine a light in dark places.
At this writing, Brennan and Clapper are not even on trial. The Russia hoax, the theme of Brennan’s Undaunted, has now been recycled by former CIA man Sean Wiswesser in Tradecraft, Tactics and Dirty Tricks: Russian Intelligence and Putin’s Secret War. Five years after his death “for unknown reasons,” Angelo Codevilla is not resting in peace.
Nor should he be. The CIA, much like its (supposedly) domestic-focused sister-organization the FBI, has been a misbegotten, out-of-control instrument of pure tyranny since its WW2 origins in the OSS.