Delving into bureaucratic correspondence isn’t anyone’s idea of entertainment. Yet on a relatively ordinary afternoon at the British National Archives, I encountered a small, puzzling item: a 1972 diplomatic cable from the British embassy in Muscat, Oman, recounting a chat with the American chargé d’affaires. The topic was Robert B. Anderson, Eisenhower’s former secretary of the treasury, who had recently established himself in Oman.
What drew my attention wasn’t the American diplomat’s assessment of Anderson, but the silence surrounding his name. The diplomat refused to pronounce it, referring to him only as “the man we don’t mention in the cables.” For a moment I set that aside, though I dutifully jotted a note to “investigate Anderson” for a possible future paper.
I study history at the University of Oxford, focusing on intelligence networks across the Middle East and Africa rather than the United States. Nevertheless, Anderson kept appearing in my research, and each encounter felt like staring into an abyss. On paper, he presented as a respectable diplomat and a former secretary of the treasury who Eisenhower once regarded as presidential timber. Off the page, though, he seemed to embody something else entirely: a spy-master, a treasure hunter, a wheeler-dealer, and a conduit for the deep state. Then Anderson surfaced in a place I did not anticipate—the recently declassified files related to John F. Kennedy’s assassination.
Most reports surrounding the JFK materials zeroed in on locating a “smoking gun” that would prove conspiratorial murder. Even as that pursuit disappointed, the archives offer a wealth of riveting glimpses into Cold War dynamics. Anderson’s narrative illustrates how far the United States’ reach extended, shaping events far beyond its shores.
His official CV is itself intriguing. Born in 1910 in Burleson, Texas, to a family of cotton farmers, Anderson became a lawyer at 22 and promptly won a seat in the Texas House of Representatives. By the 1940s he had shifted into the oil industry, catching the eye of Eisenhower’s campaign during the 1950s.
Anderson’s influence extended well past the walls of Washington. After the Suez Crisis of 1956, Eisenhower dispatched him to the Middle East in what came to be known as the “Anderson Mission.” Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon would later appoint him to various official roles. In 1964 he was named a special ambassador to Panama to negotiate the canal’s future, a mission in which he ultimately failed after resisting a swift transfer of control to Panama, and he stepped away from public life in 1973.
In the wake of Watergate, it seemed to some British diplomats that Anderson had fallen from grace. Yet behind the scenes he had built a formidable global consulting operation headquartered at One Rockefeller Plaza in New York, aided by a network of contacts ranging from foreign heads of state to international financiers.
By the 1980s, the image of Anderson as a principled statesman began to crumble. He became a lobbyist and adviser for Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church—familiarly known as the Moonies—and ran a peculiar bank in Anguilla, the Commercial Exchange Bank and Trust. He drew substantial, discreet compensation for Moon-related services, with funds sheltered in a tax-free Caribbean setting.
In 1987, amid a federal probe led by Rudy Giuliani, Anderson pleaded guilty to tax evasion and operating an unregistered offshore bank. In addition to mishandling his own money, he had taken on clients, including at least one drug dealer. The only secretary of the treasury ever condemned by a felony, he received a sentence consisting of several months of house arrest and five years of probation. He died two years later, in 1989. Thus ended his explicit public career.
But rumors persisted that his shadowy activities began long before.
One of the most remarkable episodes, as recounted by historians Sterling and Peggy Seagrave, claims that shortly after World War II Gen. Douglas MacArthur and Army intelligence officer Maj. Edward Lansdale unearthed hidden caches of Japanese war loot—often referred to as “Yamashita’s Gold”—in caves north of Manila. Anderson, then serving on the secretary of war’s staff, purportedly accompanied them. Instead of returning the treasure to its rightful owners, the tale goes, he proposed sequestering the wealth in secret “black gold” accounts around the globe to support covert operations in the future.
Although unverified, the JFK files do indicate Anderson’s involvement in secret dealings funded by opaque money. In 1973, amid the Watergate fallout, CIA Director William Colby had his team compile a dossier on all other potentially compromising CIA activities—the collection known as the “family jewels.” A declassified memo in that bundle notes Anderson’s involvement during his Panama mission, when riots against the U.S. presence flared. It says Anderson approached the CIA with a proposal to inject roughly $300,000—purportedly from American business interests—to tilt Panama’s elections in a favorable direction. The CIA declined this offer, at least at that time.
Panama, however, was not his only arena. Through his international consulting network, Anderson allegedly ran a global web of informants and agents. Among his associates was Ghassan Shaker, a Saudi-born, Cambridge-educated son of an Ottoman officer, who played a role in embedding himself within various Middle Eastern governments, according to archival material I encountered. Shaker had been recruited in the 1960s in Beirut, where Anderson and the infamous CIA figure Miles Copeland operated Interser, widely believed to serve as a front for U.S. intelligence in the region. By 1970, both Anderson and Shaker had moved to a relatively obscure, newly independent former British protectorate.
In July 1970, a palace coup in Oman toppled Sultan Said bin Taimur in favor of his 29-year-old son, Qaboos. The new ruler inherited a country with little development, a budding oil boom, and a civil war against communist insurgents. He had few trusted advisers. One ally was Tim Landon, a 27-year-old British officer who would gain near-legendary status within Middle Eastern intelligence circles. Landon and Qaboos had trained together at Sandhurst, and they grew close when Landon joined the sultan’s army in 1966. The two bonded over opera and theatre; Landon later helped plan the palace coup, in which the only casualty was the sultan’s father, Said, wounded by a self-inflicted gunshot.
Anderson soon moved in. Claiming to represent the U.S. government and suggesting proximity to the CIA, he organized an advisory group for the young sultan that included Shaker, Landon, and a Libyan CIA asset named Yehia Omar. After Muammar Gaddafi overthrew the Libyan monarchy in 1969, the CIA reportedly smuggled Omar out of Libya, placing him on a plane bound for the United States.
Locals in Oman dubbed Anderson’s inner circle the “Muscat Mafia.” Its members benefited greatly—and, according to Oman’s historian John Peterson, illicitly—from the oil boom and the lucrative government contracts that followed.
Anderson himself profited substantially from the arrangement. Sultan Qaboos granted him an oil concession and gave him authority to award additional oil and mineral concessions on the sultan’s behalf.
The British diplomats were astonished, yet their suspicions grew. They believed Anderson aimed to supplant British influence in Oman with American sway. They recalled confrontations with him in the early 1960s in Kuwait and treated his actions with unease. One report even records a moment when he was asked, “Who is the ruler of Oman, anyway?” and he replied, “I am.” His motives, as he later told the press, included freeing Oman from British dominance, and he acknowledged occasionally sharing intelligence with the CIA.
However, his Oman stay was brief. Anderson told Qaboos that his departure was required by his wife’s deteriorating health. British officials doubted that explanation, suspecting Watergate’s fallout and dwindling White House influence as underlying causes. In 1973, Anderson left Oman in a rush, leaving the Muscat Mafia to carry on without him.
That did not spell the end of Anderson as a global fixer. He retained his New York office and his connections with world leaders and business magnates. (Anderson even attended Qaboos’ White House reception in 1983.) His associate Frank Rosenfelt, who led MGM Studios in the 1970s and early 1980s, told journalist Tom O’Neill that Anderson was invited by Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in 1981 to witness the Yom Kippur War parade, an event at which Anderson appeared with his bodyguard, Reeve Whitson. From their vantage point among the VIPs, the two men witnessed Sadat’s assassination up close.
Sadat’s murder wasn’t the only episode connecting Anderson and Whitson. O’Neill spent two decades researching the Manson murders for his 2019 bestseller Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties. His work hints that Whitson may have infiltrated the Manson group as part of a covert CIA operation to undermine the antiwar movement.
According to O’Neill’s account, prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi sent Whitson to intimidate a key witness, Shahrokh Hatami, a photographer and friend of Sharon Tate, with threats of deportation. O’Neill also proposes that Whitson had advance knowledge of the killings—reportedly telling Hatami about the murders ninety minutes before authorities arrived. It is possible he even kept Tate’s house under surveillance. Lt. Col. Paul Tate, Sharon’s father, pursued his own inquiry into his daughter’s murder and repeatedly encountered Whitson, who always seemed a step ahead.
O’Neill, who possessed Tate’s unpublished manuscript and spoke with Whitson’s various associates, amassed so much material about Whitson that nothing relevant could fit into his book. There simply wasn’t room for Anderson, even in the extensive endnotes. Yet O’Neill was kind enough to share portions of his research with me, including an interview with Rosenfelt. That material circles back to Anderson.
Anderson’s papers at the Eisenhower Library reveal transfers of funds to Whitson during the 1960s. Whitson, meanwhile, engaged in a range of money-movement schemes, including a Brigadoon-themed amusement park in Scotland and a maglev railway project from Pasadena to Las Vegas—projects that scarcely concealed money-laundering activities.
Then there is Panama again. Kenneth Rijock, a former cartel banker and author of The Laundry Man, claims to have encountered Whitson there in the 1980s. According to Rijock, Whitson oversaw the Iran-Contra affair’s Panama leg from a CIA base nicknamed “the Quarry.”
A few years back I sat down with a former senior State Department official who had joined the foreign service in the 1960s and served in Beirut. I asked him one last question before ending the interview: “And what was Robert Anderson up to?”
He smiled, drew a zipper over his lips, and replied, “I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.”
