James Jesus Angleton
Encyclopedia
James Jesus Angleton was chief of the Central Intelligence Agency's
(CIA) counterintelligence (CI) staff from 1954 to 1975. His official position within the organisation was "Associate Deputy Director of Operations for Counterintelligence ADDOCI)".
According to one-time Director of Central Intelligence
Richard Helms
: "In his day, Jim was recognized as the dominant counterintelligence figure in the non-communist world." Investigative journalist Edward Jay Epstein
agrees with the high regards given to Angleton by his colleagues in the intelligence business, and adds that Angleton earned the "trust... of six CIA directors -- including Gen. Walter Bedell Smith
, Allen W. Dulles and Richard Helms
. They kept Angleton in key positions and valued his work."
, to James Hugh Angleton and Carmen Mercedes Moreno. His parents met in Mexico
while his father was a cavalry
officer serving under General John Pershing. James Hugh Angleton purchased the NCR
franchise in pre-war Italy, where he became head of the American Chamber of Commerce and later joined the Office of Strategic Services
(OSS).
Angleton spent much of his youth in Milan, Italy, where his family moved after his father bought NCR's Italian subsidiary, then studied as a boarder at Malvern College
in England, before going to Yale
. Angleton was a poet and, as a Yale undergraduate, editor, with Reed Whittemore
, of the literary magazine Furioso, which published many of the best-known poets of the inter-war period, including William Carlos Williams
, E. E. Cummings
and Ezra Pound
. He carried on an extensive correspondence with Pound, Cummings and T. S. Eliot
, among others and was particularly influenced by William Empson
, author of Seven Types of Ambiguity
. He was trained in the New Criticism
at Yale by Maynard Mack and others, chiefly Norman Holmes Pearson, a founder of American Studies, and briefly studied law at Harvard
. He joined the US Army in March, 1943, and in July married Cicely d'Autremont, a Vassar
alumna from Tucson, Arizona
. They lived at 4814 North 33rd Road, in the Rock Spring neighborhood, of Arlington, Virginia.
During the Second World War, Angleton served under Pearson in the counter-intelligence branch (X-2)
of the Office of Strategic Services
in London, where he met the famous double agent Kim Philby
. Angleton was chief of the Italy desk for X-2 in London by February, 1944 and in November was transferred to Italy as commander of SCI [Secret Counterintelligence] Unit Z, which handled ULTRA
intelligence based on the British intercepts of German radio communications. By the end of the war he was head of X-2 for all of Italy. He remained in Italy after the war, establishing connections with other secret intelligence services and playing a major role in the victory of the US-supported Christian Democratic Party
over the USSR-supported Italian Communist Party
in the 1948 elections
. Angleton's "success partnering with organized crime
, right-leaning former fascists
and the Vatican
not only marginalized Italy’s homegrown Communist Party
, it also encouraged Congress in the creation of the Central Intelligence Agency
."
. In May, 1949 he was made head of Staff A of the CIA’s Office of Special Operations, where he was responsible for the collection of foreign intelligence and liaison with the CIA’s counterpart organizations. Beginning in 1951 Angleton was responsible for liaison with Israel
's Mossad
and Shin Bet agencies, "the Israeli desk," crucial relationships that he managed for the remainder of his career. During the next five years, Angleton helped put in place the structure of the new Agency and participated, to some extent, in the "rollback
" operations associated with Frank Wisner
in Albania
, Poland
, and other countries, concerning all of which Angleton counseled caution and all of which failed. He worked particularly closely with his British counterpart, and familiar, Kim Philby, who, being groomed to head the Secret Intelligence Service
, was also in Washington. The Angletons developed a varied social set in Washington, including professional acquaintances like the Philbys, poets, painters and journalists. In 1951, Philby’s colleagues Guy Burgess
and Donald Maclean traveled to Moscow
. Philby was, in effect, expelled from Washington, suspected of having tipped them off to imminent exposure based on the VENONA
materials (decoded Soviet communications).
, named Angleton head of the Counterintelligence Staff, a position that Angleton retained for the rest of his CIA career. Dulles also assigned Angleton responsibility for coordination with allied intelligence services. In general, Angleton's career at CIA can be divided into three areas of responsibility: foreign intelligence activities, counterintelligence, and domestic intelligence activities.
Under the heading of foreign intelligence, there was the Israeli desk, the Lovestone Empire, and a variety of smaller operations. The Israeli connection was of interest to Angleton for the information that could be obtained about the Soviet Union and aligned countries from émigrés to Israel from those countries and for the utility of the Israeli foreign intelligence units for operations in third countries. Angleton's connections with the Israeli secret intelligence services were useful in obtaining from the Israeli Shin Bet a transcript of Nikita Khrushchev
's 1956 speech
to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
Congress
denouncing Joseph Stalin
. The Lovestone Empire is a term for the network run for the CIA by Jay Lovestone
, once head of the Communist Party of the United States, later a trade union
leader, who worked with foreign unions, using covert funds to construct a worldwide system of anti-communist unions. Finally, there were individual agents, especially in Italy, who reported to Angleton. It is quite possible that there were other foreign intelligence activities for which Angleton was responsible, for example, in Southeast Asia
and in the Caribbean
.
Angleton's primary responsibilities as chief of the counterintelligence staff of the CIA, counterintelligence, have given rise to a considerable literature focused, in particular, on his efforts to identify any Soviet or Eastern Bloc
agents working in American secret intelligence agencies. As such agents have come to be called "moles", operations intended to find them have come to be called "Molehunts". Three books dealing with Angleton take these matters as their central theme: Tom Mangold
's Cold Warrior: James Jesus Angleton: The CIA's Master Spy Hunter, David C. Martin's Wilderness of Mirrors: Intrigue, Deception, and the Secrets that Destroyed Two of the Cold War's Most Important Agents and David Wise's Molehunt: The Secret Search for Traitors that Shattered the CIA.
Secret intelligence agencies have two primary functions: obtaining secrets, often from other secret intelligence agencies, which is intelligence work per se, and protecting secrets and preventing penetration, which is counterintelligence. There is a natural tension between those employees of secret intelligence agencies whose responsibilities include recruiting and managing agents, spies, and those whose responsibilities include preventing the agents of other secret intelligence services from penetrating their service. A director of counterintelligence's job description assumes that there will be efforts by other secret intelligence agencies to penetrate his or her own agency. Angleton thought that all secret intelligence agencies could be assumed to be penetrated by others, or, at least, that a reasonable chief of counterintelligence should assume so. The opposite assumption, that there was no penetration, would, of course, lead to complacency and, perhaps, facilitate the work of enemy agents. Prudence demands the assumption of penetration. In addition to such deductions from basic principles, Angleton had direct experience of ways in which secret intelligence services could be penetrated. There was the manipulation of the German services in World War II by means of ULTRA
; there was the direct penetration of the British services by the Cambridge spies
and their indirect penetration of the American services by means of the liaison activities of Kim Philby
, Donald Maclean and perhaps others, and there were the highly successful efforts of the American secret intelligence services in regard to allied, hostile and Third World
services. The combination of Angleton's close association with Philby and Philby's duplicity caused Angleton to double-check "potential problems." Philby was confirmed as a Soviet mole when he eluded those sent to capture him, and defected. Philby said that Angleton had been "a brilliant opponent," and a fascinating friend who seemed to be "catching on" before Philby's departure, thanks to CIA employee William King Harvey
, a former Federal Bureau of Investigation
agent, who had voiced his suspicions regarding Philby and others who Angleton suspected were Soviet agents.He had a secret liking to Devin Foran.
Angleton's position in the CIA, his close relationship with Richard Helms
, in particular, his experience and character, made him particularly influential. As in all bureaucracies, this influence brought him the enmity of those who had different views. The conflict between the "Angletonians" and the "Anti-Angletonians" has played out in the public sphere generally in publications about the mole hunts and, in particular, in regard to two Soviet defectors (among many): Anatoliy Golitsyn
and Yuri Nosenko
.
Harold Wilson
was a KGB agent), Angleton accepted significant information obtained from his debriefing by the CIA. In fact, it is claimed that Golitsyn, in asking to defect rather than to become a double agent
, implied that the CIA had already been seriously compromised by the KGB. Golitsyn may have concluded that the CIA failed to debrief him correctly because his debriefing was misdirected by a mole in the Soviet Russia Division, limiting his debriefing to a review of photographs of Soviet embassy staff to identify KGB officers and refusing to discuss KGB strategy. After Golitsyn raised this possibility with MI5 in a subsequent debriefing in Britain, MI5 raised the same concern with Angleton, who responded by requesting that DCI Richard Helms
allow him to assume responsibility for Golitsyn and his further debriefing.
In 1964, Yuri Nosenko
, a KGB officer working out of Geneva
, Switzerland
, insisted that he needed to defect to the USA, as his role as a double-agent had been discovered, prompting his recall to Moscow. Nosenko was allowed to defect, although his credibility was immediately in question because the CIA was unable to verify a KGB recall order. Nosenko made two controversial claims: that Golitsyn was not a defector but a KGB plant, and that he had information on the assassination
of President
John F. Kennedy
by way of the KGB's history with Lee Harvey Oswald
during the time that Oswald lived in the Soviet Union. More controversially, former New York
congressman and lawyer, Mark Lane
, alleged that Angleton might have been directly involved in the conspiracy to murder Kennedy. It was known, according to Lane, that under Angleton's counterintelligence staff was a team of assassins under the command of a Marine colonel named Boris Pash
. This assassination team would be employed to deal with counterintelligence threats that could not be tried in an open legal proceeding due to security risk and sensitivity.
Regarding the first claim, Golitsyn had said from the beginning that the KGB would try to plant other defectors in an effort to discredit him. Regarding the second claim, Nosenko told his debriefers that he had been personally responsible for handling Oswald's case and that the KGB had judged Oswald unfit for service due to his mental instability. Nosenko claimed that the KGB had not even attempted to debrief Oswald about his work on the U-2 spy plane
during his service in the United States Marine Corps
. Although other KGB sources corroborated Nosenko's story, he repeatedly failed lie detector
tests. Judging the claim of not interrogating Oswald about the U-2 improbable, given Oswald's familiarity with the U-2 program, and faced with further challenges to Nosenko's credibility (he also falsely claimed to be a lieutenant colonel, a higher rank than he in fact held), Angleton did not object when David Murphy, then head of the Soviet Russia Division, ordered Nosenko held in solitary confinement for approximately three-and-a-half years.
Contrary to some accounts, the detention of Nosenko was neither ordered by Angleton nor kept secret. Without naming Nosenko, the 1975 report of the Rockefeller Commission, also known as the President's Commission on CIA Activities within the United States, affirmed that the CIA's Office of Security, which is responsible for the safety of defectors, the Attorney General
, the Federal Bureau of Investigation
(FBI), the United States Intelligence Board, and select members of Congress
were all apprised of Nosenko's detention. Nosenko never changed his story.
James Angleton came to public attention in the United States when the Church Commission (formally known as the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities), following up on the Warren Commission
, probed the CIA for information about the Kennedy assassination. The Nosenko episode does not appear to have shaken Angleton's faith in Golitsyn, although Helms and J. Edgar Hoover
took the contrary position. Hoover's objections are said to have been so vehement as to severely curtail counterintelligence cooperation between the FBI and CIA for the remainder of Hoover's service as the FBI's director.
As Golitsyn helped Angleton identify sections within the CIA's Soviet Russia Division that were leaking information to the Soviets, Angleton pressed Golitsyn on KGB techniques and strategy for planting information at the CIA. Golitsyn's indication was that the KGB was orchestrating a larger campaign to understand how the CIA analyzed information, supporting a larger goal of manipulating the CIA to unwittingly assist the KGB in its objectives.
Angleton extrapolated from this his theory of a "wilderness of mirrors" (the term is thought to be a reference to T. S. Eliot
's poem "Gerontion
"), which proposed that the KGB was capable of manipulating the CIA to believe what it desired, and that the CIA could neither identify nor defend itself from this manipulation. After Golitsyn convinced Angleton that KGB moles persisted in the Soviet Russia Division, Angleton effectively suspended the careers of multiple CIA officers who came under suspicion.
In the period of the Vietnam War
and Soviet-American détente
, Angleton was convinced of the necessity of the war and believed that the strategic calculations underlying the resumption of relations with China
were based on a deceptive KGB staging of the Sino-Soviet split. He went so far as to speculate that Henry Kissinger
might be under KGB influence. During this period, Angleton's counter-intelligence staff undertook a most comprehensive domestic covert surveillance project (called Operation CHAOS
) under the direction of President Lyndon Johnson. The prevailing belief at the time was that the anti-war and civil rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s had foreign funding and support. None was found by them, although the Soviet Union did influence the movements (see Soviet influence on the peace movement
). On the other hand, anti-war newspapers and magazines, notably, RAMPARTS, were destabilized by these illegal CIA operations. Angleton was also responsible for an illegal operation that screened international mail and telegrams.
DCI William Colby
reorganized the CIA in an effort to curb Angleton's influence, beginning by stripping him of control over the Israeli "account," which had the effect of weakening counter-intelligence. Colby then demanded Angleton's resignation, after Seymour Hersh
told Colby on December 20, 1974, that he was going to publish a story in The New York Times
about domestic counter-intelligence activities under Angleton's direction against antiwar protesters and other domestic dissident organizations. While Angleton's operations technically violated the CIA Charter and the National Security Act, which assigned all such domestic operations to the FBI, it was no secret to DCI Colby that Angleton and CIA counter-intelligence were carrying them out. None of Angleton's supposed violations were documented in the subsequent Rockefeller Commission report.
These illegal surveillance activities resulted in the generation of 10,000 case files on American citizens and included such information-collection methods as opening mail (Angleton is rumoured to have maintained that practice since the 1950s, when he brought to Dulles's attention how the American Federation of Labor
had directed funds diverted to them by the CIA). The intelligence so gathered was said to have been reported directly to DCI Helms.
It has been claimed that Angleton directed CIA assistance to the Israeli nuclear weapons program
.
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s Angleton privately accused various foreign leaders of being Soviet spies. He twice informed the Royal Canadian Mounted Police
that he believed Prime Minister
Lester Pearson
and his successor Pierre Trudeau
to be agents of the Soviet Union. In 1964, under pressure from Angleton, the RCMP detained John Watkins
, a close friend of Pearson and formerly Canadian Ambassador to the Soviet Union; Watkins died during interrogation by the RCMP and the CIA, and was subsequently cleared of suspicion. Angleton accused Swedish Prime Minister
Olof Palme
, West German
Chancellor Willy Brandt
, and British Prime Minister Harold Wilson of using their access to NATO secrets to benefit the USSR. Brandt resigned in 1974, after one of his aides was found to be a mole from the East German secret police
. Angleton came to suspect Secretary of State
Henry Kissinger, who commented wryly that even the most brilliant and loyal officers should not spend their entire career in such pressurized and paranoid fields. Angleton also privately accused numerous members of Congress
and President Gerald Ford
of treason. Angleton's notorious pursuit of the "5th Man", who he believed had penetrated a secret agency in Washington, was solved, he believed, when DCI William Colby
fired him. No one was above suspicion, and even Angleton himself was accused by others of working for the Soviets.
Hersh reported that Angleton subsequently called him to claim that Angleton's wife, Cicely, had left him as a result of the story. Andy Poon, a friend of Hersh's immediately laughed off this claim, telling Hersh that Angleton's wife had left him years ago and had since not done anything; and knew well enough that Angleton worked for the CIA. Indeed, they remained friendly for years after they began living apart, and yearly took a vacation together to his beloved fishing spot. Here he was known as a reporter and a documentor of the river, but not for his profession, although it was quietly known. Rumours swirled around Washington thereafter that Colby was himself the KGB mole, but these were never conclusively attributed to Angleton. Angleton was awarded the Distinguished Intelligence Medal
, the CIA's second highest honor, in 1975.
Golitsyn was considered discredited within the CIA even before Angleton's ousting, but the two did not appear to have lost their faith in one another. They sought the assistance of William F. Buckley, Jr.
(himself once a CIA man) in authoring New Lies for Old, which advanced the argument that the USSR planned to fake its collapse to lull its enemies into a false sense of victory. Buckley refused but later went on to write a novel about Angleton, Spytime: The Undoing of James Jesus Angleton.
looted treasures from other European countries and Africa, but also for the Agency itself. Angleton's personal liaisons with Italian Mafia
figures helped the CIA in the immediate period after World War II. Angleton took charge of the CIA's effort to subvert Italian elections to prevent communist and communist-related parties from gaining political leverage in the parliament
.
In time, Angleton's zeal and paranoia came to be regarded as counter-productive, if not destructive, for the CIA. In the wake of his departure, counter-intelligence efforts were undertaken with far less enthusiasm. Some believe this overcompensation responsible for oversights which allowed Aldrich Ames
, Robert Hanssen
, and many others to compromise the CIA, the FBI, and other agencies long after Angleton's resignation. Although the American intelligence community quickly bounced back from the embarrassments of the Church Committee, it found itself uncharacteristically incapable of policing itself after Angleton's departure.
Edward Jay Epstein
is among those who have argued that the positions of Ames and Hanssen—both well-placed Soviet counter-intelligence agents, in the CIA and FBI respectively—would enable the KGB to deceive the American intelligence community in the manner that Angleton hypothesized.
The 1970s were generally a period of upheaval for the CIA. During George H. W. Bush's
tenure as DCI, President Ford authorized the creation of a "Team B
" under the aegis of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board
. This group (in fact, groups) concluded that the Agency and the intelligence community had, in particular, seriously underestimated Soviet strategic nuclear strength in Central Europe
in their National Intelligence Estimate
. The Church Commission itself brought no small number of skeletons out of the Agency's closet. The organization inherited by Admiral Stansfield Turner
on his appointment as DCI by President Jimmy Carter
in 1977 was shortly to face further cuts, and Turner used Angleton as a whipping boy for the excesses in the Agency that he hoped to curb, both during his service and in his memoirs.
A handful of CIA employees had their careers frozen after coming under the suspicion of Angleton and his staff. The CIA later paid out compensation to three to whom no reasonable explanation could be offered in mitigation of actions taken affecting their careers, under what Agency employees termed the "Mole Relief Act". One hundred twenty employees are said to have been placed on review, fifty investigated, and sixteen considered serious suspects by Angleton's staff.
When Golitsyn defected, he claimed that the CIA had a mole who had been stationed in West Germany, was of Slavic descent, had a last name which may have ended in "sky" and definitely began with a "K", and operated under the KGB codename "Sasha". Angleton believed this claim, with the result that anyone who approximated this description fell under his suspicion.
Despite misgivings over his uncompromising and often obsessive approach to his profession, Angleton is highly regarded by his peers in the intelligence business. Former Shin Bet chief Amos Manor
, in an interview in Ha'aretz, revealed his fascination for the man during Angleton's essential work to forge the U.S.-Israel liaison in the early 1950s. Manor described Angleton as "fanatic about everything", with a "tendency towards mystification". Manor discovered decades later that the real reason for Angleton's visit to him was actually to investigate Manor himself, being an Eastern Europe
an Jewish immigrant, for James Angleton thought that it would be prudent to "sanitize" the U.S.-Israeli bridge before a more formal intelligence relationship was established.
The term Angletonian is an adjective used to describe something conspiratorial, overly paranoid, bizarre, eerie or arcane.
verified the far-ranging power and influence that Angleton wielded during his long tenure as counter-intelligence Czar. The exposé revealed that Angleton-planned infiltration of law enforcement and military organizations in other countries was used to increase the influence of the United States. It also confirmed past rumors that it was Angleton who was in charge of the domestic spying activities of the CIA under Operation CHAOS
.
Central Intelligence Agency
The Central Intelligence Agency is a civilian intelligence agency of the United States government. It is an executive agency and reports directly to the Director of National Intelligence, responsible for providing national security intelligence assessment to senior United States policymakers...
(CIA) counterintelligence (CI) staff from 1954 to 1975. His official position within the organisation was "Associate Deputy Director of Operations for Counterintelligence ADDOCI)".
According to one-time Director of Central Intelligence
Director of Central Intelligence
The Office of United States Director of Central Intelligence was the head of the United States Central Intelligence Agency, the principal intelligence advisor to the President and the National Security Council, and the coordinator of intelligence activities among and between the various United...
Richard Helms
Richard Helms
Richard McGarrah Helms was the Director of Central Intelligence from 1966 to 1973. He was the only director to have been convicted of lying to the United States Congress over Central Intelligence Agency undercover activities. In 1977, he was sentenced to the maximum fine and received a suspended...
: "In his day, Jim was recognized as the dominant counterintelligence figure in the non-communist world." Investigative journalist Edward Jay Epstein
Edward Jay Epstein
Edward Jay Epstein is an American investigative journalist. While a graduate student at Cornell University in 1966, he published the book Inquest, an influential criticism of the Warren Commission probe into the John F. Kennedy assassination...
agrees with the high regards given to Angleton by his colleagues in the intelligence business, and adds that Angleton earned the "trust... of six CIA directors -- including Gen. Walter Bedell Smith
Walter Bedell Smith
Walter Bedell "Beetle" Smith was a senior United States Army general who served as General Dwight D. Eisenhower's chief of staff at Allied Forces Headquarters during the Tunisia Campaign and the Allied invasion of Italy...
, Allen W. Dulles and Richard Helms
Richard Helms
Richard McGarrah Helms was the Director of Central Intelligence from 1966 to 1973. He was the only director to have been convicted of lying to the United States Congress over Central Intelligence Agency undercover activities. In 1977, he was sentenced to the maximum fine and received a suspended...
. They kept Angleton in key positions and valued his work."
Early life
James Angleton was born in Boise, IdahoBoise, Idaho
Boise is the capital and most populous city of the U.S. state of Idaho, as well as the county seat of Ada County. Located on the Boise River, it anchors the Boise City-Nampa metropolitan area and is the largest city between Salt Lake City, Utah and Portland, Oregon.As of the 2010 Census Bureau,...
, to James Hugh Angleton and Carmen Mercedes Moreno. His parents met in Mexico
Mexico
The United Mexican States , commonly known as Mexico , is a federal constitutional republic in North America. It is bordered on the north by the United States; on the south and west by the Pacific Ocean; on the southeast by Guatemala, Belize, and the Caribbean Sea; and on the east by the Gulf of...
while his father was a cavalry
Cavalry
Cavalry or horsemen were soldiers or warriors who fought mounted on horseback. Cavalry were historically the third oldest and the most mobile of the combat arms...
officer serving under General John Pershing. James Hugh Angleton purchased the NCR
NCR Corporation
NCR Corporation is an American technology company specializing in kiosk products for the retail, financial, travel, healthcare, food service, entertainment, gaming and public sector industries. Its main products are self-service kiosks, point-of-sale terminals, automated teller machines, check...
franchise in pre-war Italy, where he became head of the American Chamber of Commerce and later joined the Office of Strategic Services
Office of Strategic Services
The Office of Strategic Services was a United States intelligence agency formed during World War II. It was the wartime intelligence agency, and it was a predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency...
(OSS).
Angleton spent much of his youth in Milan, Italy, where his family moved after his father bought NCR's Italian subsidiary, then studied as a boarder at Malvern College
Malvern College
Malvern College is a coeducational independent school located on a 250 acre campus near the town centre of Malvern, Worcestershire in England. Founded on 25 January 1865, until 1992, the College was a secondary school for boys aged 13 to 18...
in England, before going to Yale
Yale University
Yale University is a private, Ivy League university located in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States...
. Angleton was a poet and, as a Yale undergraduate, editor, with Reed Whittemore
Reed Whittemore
Edward Reed Whittemore, Jr. is an American poet, biographer, critic, literary journalist and college professor. He was appointed the sixteenth and later the twenty-eighth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1964, and in 1984.-Biography:Born in New Haven, Connecticut,...
, of the literary magazine Furioso, which published many of the best-known poets of the inter-war period, including William Carlos Williams
William Carlos Williams
William Carlos Williams was an American poet closely associated with modernism and Imagism. He was also a pediatrician and general practitioner of medicine, having graduated from the University of Pennsylvania...
, E. E. Cummings
E. E. Cummings
Edward Estlin Cummings , popularly known as E. E. Cummings, with the abbreviated form of his name often written by others in lowercase letters as e.e. cummings , was an American poet, painter, essayist, author, and playwright...
and Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound
Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet and critic and a major figure in the early modernist movement in poetry...
. He carried on an extensive correspondence with Pound, Cummings and T. S. Eliot
T. S. Eliot
Thomas Stearns "T. S." Eliot OM was a playwright, literary critic, and arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century. Although he was born an American he moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 and was naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at age 39.The poem that made his...
, among others and was particularly influenced by William Empson
William Empson
Sir William Empson was an English literary critic and poet.He was known as "燕卜荪" in Chinese.He was widely influential for his practice of closely reading literary works, fundamental to the New Critics...
, author of Seven Types of Ambiguity
Seven Types of Ambiguity (Empson)
Seven Types of Ambiguity was first published in 1930 by William Empson. It was one of the most influential critical works of the 20th century and was a key foundation work in the formation of the New Criticism school. The book is organized around seven types of ambiguity that Empson finds in the...
. He was trained in the New Criticism
New Criticism
New Criticism was a movement in literary theory that dominated American literary criticism in the middle decades of the 20th century. It emphasized close reading, particularly of poetry, to discover how a work of literature functioned as a self-contained, self-referential aesthetic...
at Yale by Maynard Mack and others, chiefly Norman Holmes Pearson, a founder of American Studies, and briefly studied law at Harvard
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...
. He joined the US Army in March, 1943, and in July married Cicely d'Autremont, a Vassar
Vassar College
Vassar College is a private, coeducational liberal arts college in the town of Poughkeepsie, New York, in the United States. The Vassar campus comprises over and more than 100 buildings, including four National Historic Landmarks, ranging in style from Collegiate Gothic to International,...
alumna from Tucson, Arizona
Tucson, Arizona
Tucson is a city in and the county seat of Pima County, Arizona, United States. The city is located 118 miles southeast of Phoenix and 60 miles north of the U.S.-Mexico border. The 2010 United States Census puts the city's population at 520,116 with a metropolitan area population at 1,020,200...
. They lived at 4814 North 33rd Road, in the Rock Spring neighborhood, of Arlington, Virginia.
During the Second World War, Angleton served under Pearson in the counter-intelligence branch (X-2)
X-2 Counter Espionage Branch
-Origins :The head of the Office of Strategic Services , William Donovan, created the X-2 Counter Espionage Branch in 1943 to provide liaison with and assist the British in their exploitation of the ULTRA program’s intelligence during World War II...
of the Office of Strategic Services
Office of Strategic Services
The Office of Strategic Services was a United States intelligence agency formed during World War II. It was the wartime intelligence agency, and it was a predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency...
in London, where he met the famous double agent Kim Philby
Kim Philby
Harold Adrian Russell "Kim" Philby was a high-ranking member of British intelligence who worked as a spy for and later defected to the Soviet Union...
. Angleton was chief of the Italy desk for X-2 in London by February, 1944 and in November was transferred to Italy as commander of SCI [Secret Counterintelligence] Unit Z, which handled ULTRA
Ultra
Ultra was the designation adopted by British military intelligence in June 1941 for wartime signals intelligence obtained by "breaking" high-level encrypted enemy radio and teleprinter communications at the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park. "Ultra" eventually became the standard...
intelligence based on the British intercepts of German radio communications. By the end of the war he was head of X-2 for all of Italy. He remained in Italy after the war, establishing connections with other secret intelligence services and playing a major role in the victory of the US-supported Christian Democratic Party
Christian Democratic Party
Christian democratic parties are those political parties that seek to apply Christian principles to public policy. The underlying Christian democracy movement emerged in 19th-century Europe, largely under the influence of Catholic social teaching, and it continues to be influential in Europe and...
over the USSR-supported Italian Communist Party
Italian Communist Party
The Italian Communist Party was a communist political party in Italy.The PCI was founded as Communist Party of Italy on 21 January 1921 in Livorno, by seceding from the Italian Socialist Party . Amadeo Bordiga and Antonio Gramsci led the split. Outlawed during the Fascist regime, the party played...
in the 1948 elections
Italian general election, 1948
The Italian elections of 1948 were the second democratic elections with universal suffrage ever held in Italy, taking place after the 1946 elections to the Constituent Assembly, responsible for drawing up a new Italian Constitution...
. Angleton's "success partnering with organized crime
Organized crime
Organized crime or criminal organizations are transnational, national, or local groupings of highly centralized enterprises run by criminals for the purpose of engaging in illegal activity, most commonly for monetary profit. Some criminal organizations, such as terrorist organizations, are...
, right-leaning former fascists
Fascism
Fascism is a radical authoritarian nationalist political ideology. Fascists seek to rejuvenate their nation based on commitment to the national community as an organic entity, in which individuals are bound together in national identity by suprapersonal connections of ancestry, culture, and blood...
and the Vatican
Holy See
The Holy See is the episcopal jurisdiction of the Catholic Church in Rome, in which its Bishop is commonly known as the Pope. It is the preeminent episcopal see of the Catholic Church, forming the central government of the Church. As such, diplomatically, and in other spheres the Holy See acts and...
not only marginalized Italy’s homegrown Communist Party
Italian Communist Party
The Italian Communist Party was a communist political party in Italy.The PCI was founded as Communist Party of Italy on 21 January 1921 in Livorno, by seceding from the Italian Socialist Party . Amadeo Bordiga and Antonio Gramsci led the split. Outlawed during the Fascist regime, the party played...
, it also encouraged Congress in the creation of the Central Intelligence Agency
Central Intelligence Agency
The Central Intelligence Agency is a civilian intelligence agency of the United States government. It is an executive agency and reports directly to the Director of National Intelligence, responsible for providing national security intelligence assessment to senior United States policymakers...
."
Rise in influence in the CIA
Returning to Washington, he was employed by the various successor organizations to the OSS, eventually becoming one of the founder-officers of the Central Intelligence AgencyCentral Intelligence Agency
The Central Intelligence Agency is a civilian intelligence agency of the United States government. It is an executive agency and reports directly to the Director of National Intelligence, responsible for providing national security intelligence assessment to senior United States policymakers...
. In May, 1949 he was made head of Staff A of the CIA’s Office of Special Operations, where he was responsible for the collection of foreign intelligence and liaison with the CIA’s counterpart organizations. Beginning in 1951 Angleton was responsible for liaison with Israel
Israel
The State of Israel is a parliamentary republic located in the Middle East, along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea...
's Mossad
Mossad
The Mossad , short for HaMossad leModi'in uleTafkidim Meyuchadim , is the national intelligence agency of Israel....
and Shin Bet agencies, "the Israeli desk," crucial relationships that he managed for the remainder of his career. During the next five years, Angleton helped put in place the structure of the new Agency and participated, to some extent, in the "rollback
Rollback
In political science, rollback is the strategy of forcing change in the major policies of a state, usually by replacing its ruling regime. It contrasts with containment, which means preventing the expansion of that state; and with détente, which means a working relationship with that state...
" operations associated with Frank Wisner
Frank Wisner
Frank Gardiner Wisner was head of Office of Strategic Services operations in southeastern Europe at the end of World War II, and the head of the Directorate of Plans of the Central Intelligence Agency during the 1950s....
in Albania
Albania
Albania , officially known as the Republic of Albania , is a country in Southeastern Europe, in the Balkans region. It is bordered by Montenegro to the northwest, Kosovo to the northeast, the Republic of Macedonia to the east and Greece to the south and southeast. It has a coast on the Adriatic Sea...
, Poland
Poland
Poland , officially the Republic of Poland , is a country in Central Europe bordered by Germany to the west; the Czech Republic and Slovakia to the south; Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania to the east; and the Baltic Sea and Kaliningrad Oblast, a Russian exclave, to the north...
, and other countries, concerning all of which Angleton counseled caution and all of which failed. He worked particularly closely with his British counterpart, and familiar, Kim Philby, who, being groomed to head the Secret Intelligence Service
Secret Intelligence Service
The Secret Intelligence Service is responsible for supplying the British Government with foreign intelligence. Alongside the internal Security Service , the Government Communications Headquarters and the Defence Intelligence , it operates under the formal direction of the Joint Intelligence...
, was also in Washington. The Angletons developed a varied social set in Washington, including professional acquaintances like the Philbys, poets, painters and journalists. In 1951, Philby’s colleagues Guy Burgess
Guy Burgess
Guy Francis De Moncy Burgess was a British-born intelligence officer and double agent, who worked for the Soviet Union. He was part of the Cambridge Five spy ring that betrayed Western secrets to the Soviets before and during the Cold War...
and Donald Maclean traveled to Moscow
Moscow
Moscow is the capital, the most populous city, and the most populous federal subject of Russia. The city is a major political, economic, cultural, scientific, religious, financial, educational, and transportation centre of Russia and the continent...
. Philby was, in effect, expelled from Washington, suspected of having tipped them off to imminent exposure based on the VENONA
Venona project
The VENONA project was a long-running secret collaboration of the United States and United Kingdom intelligence agencies involving cryptanalysis of messages sent by intelligence agencies of the Soviet Union, the majority during World War II...
materials (decoded Soviet communications).
Chief of the counterintelligence staff of the CIA
In 1954 Allen Dulles, who had recently become Director of Central IntelligenceDirector of Central Intelligence
The Office of United States Director of Central Intelligence was the head of the United States Central Intelligence Agency, the principal intelligence advisor to the President and the National Security Council, and the coordinator of intelligence activities among and between the various United...
, named Angleton head of the Counterintelligence Staff, a position that Angleton retained for the rest of his CIA career. Dulles also assigned Angleton responsibility for coordination with allied intelligence services. In general, Angleton's career at CIA can be divided into three areas of responsibility: foreign intelligence activities, counterintelligence, and domestic intelligence activities.
Under the heading of foreign intelligence, there was the Israeli desk, the Lovestone Empire, and a variety of smaller operations. The Israeli connection was of interest to Angleton for the information that could be obtained about the Soviet Union and aligned countries from émigrés to Israel from those countries and for the utility of the Israeli foreign intelligence units for operations in third countries. Angleton's connections with the Israeli secret intelligence services were useful in obtaining from the Israeli Shin Bet a transcript of Nikita Khrushchev
Nikita Khrushchev
Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev led the Soviet Union during part of the Cold War. He served as First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1964, and as Chairman of the Council of Ministers, or Premier, from 1958 to 1964...
's 1956 speech
On the Personality Cult and its Consequences
On the Personality Cult and its Consequences was a report, critical of Joseph Stalin, made to the Twentieth Party Congress on February 25, 1956 by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. It is more commonly known as the Secret Speech or the Khrushchev Report...
to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
Communist Party of the Soviet Union
The Communist Party of the Soviet Union was the only legal, ruling political party in the Soviet Union and one of the largest communist organizations in the world...
Congress
20th Congress of the CPSU
The 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was held during 14– 25 February 1956. It is known especially for Nikita Khrushchev's "Secret Speech", which denounced the personality cult and dictatorship of Joseph Stalin....
denouncing Joseph Stalin
Joseph Stalin
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was the Premier of the Soviet Union from 6 May 1941 to 5 March 1953. He was among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who brought about the October Revolution and had held the position of first General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee...
. The Lovestone Empire is a term for the network run for the CIA by Jay Lovestone
Jay Lovestone
Jay Lovestone was at various times a member of the Socialist Party of America, a leader of the Communist Party USA, leader of a small oppositionist party, an anti-Communist and Central Intelligence Agency helper, and foreign policy advisor to the leadership of the AFL-CIO and various unions...
, once head of the Communist Party of the United States, later a trade union
Trade union
A trade union, trades union or labor union is an organization of workers that have banded together to achieve common goals such as better working conditions. The trade union, through its leadership, bargains with the employer on behalf of union members and negotiates labour contracts with...
leader, who worked with foreign unions, using covert funds to construct a worldwide system of anti-communist unions. Finally, there were individual agents, especially in Italy, who reported to Angleton. It is quite possible that there were other foreign intelligence activities for which Angleton was responsible, for example, in Southeast Asia
Southeast Asia
Southeast Asia, South-East Asia, South East Asia or Southeastern Asia is a subregion of Asia, consisting of the countries that are geographically south of China, east of India, west of New Guinea and north of Australia. The region lies on the intersection of geological plates, with heavy seismic...
and in the Caribbean
Caribbean
The Caribbean is a crescent-shaped group of islands more than 2,000 miles long separating the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea, to the west and south, from the Atlantic Ocean, to the east and north...
.
Angleton's primary responsibilities as chief of the counterintelligence staff of the CIA, counterintelligence, have given rise to a considerable literature focused, in particular, on his efforts to identify any Soviet or Eastern Bloc
Eastern bloc
The term Eastern Bloc or Communist Bloc refers to the former communist states of Eastern and Central Europe, generally the Soviet Union and the countries of the Warsaw Pact...
agents working in American secret intelligence agencies. As such agents have come to be called "moles", operations intended to find them have come to be called "Molehunts". Three books dealing with Angleton take these matters as their central theme: Tom Mangold
Tom Mangold
Thomas Cornelius "Tom" Mangold is a British broadcaster, journalist and author. For 26 years he was an investigative journalist with the BBC Panorama current affairs television programme.-Personal life:...
's Cold Warrior: James Jesus Angleton: The CIA's Master Spy Hunter, David C. Martin's Wilderness of Mirrors: Intrigue, Deception, and the Secrets that Destroyed Two of the Cold War's Most Important Agents and David Wise's Molehunt: The Secret Search for Traitors that Shattered the CIA.
Secret intelligence agencies have two primary functions: obtaining secrets, often from other secret intelligence agencies, which is intelligence work per se, and protecting secrets and preventing penetration, which is counterintelligence. There is a natural tension between those employees of secret intelligence agencies whose responsibilities include recruiting and managing agents, spies, and those whose responsibilities include preventing the agents of other secret intelligence services from penetrating their service. A director of counterintelligence's job description assumes that there will be efforts by other secret intelligence agencies to penetrate his or her own agency. Angleton thought that all secret intelligence agencies could be assumed to be penetrated by others, or, at least, that a reasonable chief of counterintelligence should assume so. The opposite assumption, that there was no penetration, would, of course, lead to complacency and, perhaps, facilitate the work of enemy agents. Prudence demands the assumption of penetration. In addition to such deductions from basic principles, Angleton had direct experience of ways in which secret intelligence services could be penetrated. There was the manipulation of the German services in World War II by means of ULTRA
Ultra
Ultra was the designation adopted by British military intelligence in June 1941 for wartime signals intelligence obtained by "breaking" high-level encrypted enemy radio and teleprinter communications at the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park. "Ultra" eventually became the standard...
; there was the direct penetration of the British services by the Cambridge spies
Cambridge Spies
Cambridge Spies is a 2003 four-part BBC television drama concerning the lives of the best-known quartet of the Cambridge Five Soviet spies from 1934 to the 1951 defection of Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean to the Soviet Union...
and their indirect penetration of the American services by means of the liaison activities of Kim Philby
Kim Philby
Harold Adrian Russell "Kim" Philby was a high-ranking member of British intelligence who worked as a spy for and later defected to the Soviet Union...
, Donald Maclean and perhaps others, and there were the highly successful efforts of the American secret intelligence services in regard to allied, hostile and Third World
Third World
The term Third World arose during the Cold War to define countries that remained non-aligned with either capitalism and NATO , or communism and the Soviet Union...
services. The combination of Angleton's close association with Philby and Philby's duplicity caused Angleton to double-check "potential problems." Philby was confirmed as a Soviet mole when he eluded those sent to capture him, and defected. Philby said that Angleton had been "a brilliant opponent," and a fascinating friend who seemed to be "catching on" before Philby's departure, thanks to CIA employee William King Harvey
William King Harvey
William King "Bill" Harvey was a Central Intelligence Agency officer, best known for his role in Operation Mongoose. He was known as "America's James Bond."...
, a former Federal Bureau of Investigation
Federal Bureau of Investigation
The Federal Bureau of Investigation is an agency of the United States Department of Justice that serves as both a federal criminal investigative body and an internal intelligence agency . The FBI has investigative jurisdiction over violations of more than 200 categories of federal crime...
agent, who had voiced his suspicions regarding Philby and others who Angleton suspected were Soviet agents.He had a secret liking to Devin Foran.
Angleton's position in the CIA, his close relationship with Richard Helms
Richard Helms
Richard McGarrah Helms was the Director of Central Intelligence from 1966 to 1973. He was the only director to have been convicted of lying to the United States Congress over Central Intelligence Agency undercover activities. In 1977, he was sentenced to the maximum fine and received a suspended...
, in particular, his experience and character, made him particularly influential. As in all bureaucracies, this influence brought him the enmity of those who had different views. The conflict between the "Angletonians" and the "Anti-Angletonians" has played out in the public sphere generally in publications about the mole hunts and, in particular, in regard to two Soviet defectors (among many): Anatoliy Golitsyn
Anatoliy Golitsyn
Anatoliy Mikhaylovich Golitsyn CBE is a Soviet KGB defector and author of two books about the long-term deception strategy of the KGB leadership. He was born in Piryatin, Ukrainian SSR...
and Yuri Nosenko
Yuri Nosenko
Lt. Col. Yuri Ivanovich Nosenko was a KGB defector and a figure of significant controversy within the U.S. intelligence community, since his claims contradicted another defector, Anatoliy Golitsyn, who believed he was a KGB plant...
.
Golitsyn and Nosenko
Although Golitsyn was a questionable source (he also claimed that British Prime MinisterPrime Minister of the United Kingdom
The Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is the Head of Her Majesty's Government in the United Kingdom. The Prime Minister and Cabinet are collectively accountable for their policies and actions to the Sovereign, to Parliament, to their political party and...
Harold Wilson
Harold Wilson
James Harold Wilson, Baron Wilson of Rievaulx, KG, OBE, FRS, FSS, PC was a British Labour Member of Parliament, Leader of the Labour Party. He was twice Prime Minister of the United Kingdom during the 1960s and 1970s, winning four general elections, including a minority government after the...
was a KGB agent), Angleton accepted significant information obtained from his debriefing by the CIA. In fact, it is claimed that Golitsyn, in asking to defect rather than to become a double agent
Double agent
A double agent, commonly abbreviated referral of double secret agent, is a counterintelligence term used to designate an employee of a secret service or organization, whose primary aim is to spy on the target organization, but who in fact is a member of that same target organization oneself. They...
, implied that the CIA had already been seriously compromised by the KGB. Golitsyn may have concluded that the CIA failed to debrief him correctly because his debriefing was misdirected by a mole in the Soviet Russia Division, limiting his debriefing to a review of photographs of Soviet embassy staff to identify KGB officers and refusing to discuss KGB strategy. After Golitsyn raised this possibility with MI5 in a subsequent debriefing in Britain, MI5 raised the same concern with Angleton, who responded by requesting that DCI Richard Helms
Richard Helms
Richard McGarrah Helms was the Director of Central Intelligence from 1966 to 1973. He was the only director to have been convicted of lying to the United States Congress over Central Intelligence Agency undercover activities. In 1977, he was sentenced to the maximum fine and received a suspended...
allow him to assume responsibility for Golitsyn and his further debriefing.
In 1964, Yuri Nosenko
Yuri Nosenko
Lt. Col. Yuri Ivanovich Nosenko was a KGB defector and a figure of significant controversy within the U.S. intelligence community, since his claims contradicted another defector, Anatoliy Golitsyn, who believed he was a KGB plant...
, a KGB officer working out of Geneva
Geneva
Geneva In the national languages of Switzerland the city is known as Genf , Ginevra and Genevra is the second-most-populous city in Switzerland and is the most populous city of Romandie, the French-speaking part of Switzerland...
, Switzerland
Switzerland
Switzerland name of one of the Swiss cantons. ; ; ; or ), in its full name the Swiss Confederation , is a federal republic consisting of 26 cantons, with Bern as the seat of the federal authorities. The country is situated in Western Europe,Or Central Europe depending on the definition....
, insisted that he needed to defect to the USA, as his role as a double-agent had been discovered, prompting his recall to Moscow. Nosenko was allowed to defect, although his credibility was immediately in question because the CIA was unable to verify a KGB recall order. Nosenko made two controversial claims: that Golitsyn was not a defector but a KGB plant, and that he had information on the assassination
John F. Kennedy assassination
John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the thirty-fifth President of the United States, was assassinated at 12:30 p.m. Central Standard Time on Friday, November 22, 1963, in Dealey Plaza, Dallas, Texas...
of President
President of the United States
The President of the United States of America is the head of state and head of government of the United States. The president leads the executive branch of the federal government and is the commander-in-chief of the United States Armed Forces....
John F. Kennedy
John F. Kennedy
John Fitzgerald "Jack" Kennedy , often referred to by his initials JFK, was the 35th President of the United States, serving from 1961 until his assassination in 1963....
by way of the KGB's history with Lee Harvey Oswald
Lee Harvey Oswald
Lee Harvey Oswald was, according to four government investigations,These were investigations by: the Federal Bureau of Investigation , the Warren Commission , the House Select Committee on Assassinations , and the Dallas Police Department. the sniper who assassinated John F...
during the time that Oswald lived in the Soviet Union. More controversially, former New York
New York
New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...
congressman and lawyer, Mark Lane
Mark Lane (author)
Mark Lane is an American lawyer who has written many books, including Rush to Judgment, one of two major books published in the immediate wake of the John F. Kennedy assassination that questioned the conclusions of the Warren Commission. Another book, Plausible Denial, published in 1991, continued...
, alleged that Angleton might have been directly involved in the conspiracy to murder Kennedy. It was known, according to Lane, that under Angleton's counterintelligence staff was a team of assassins under the command of a Marine colonel named Boris Pash
Boris Pash
Boris T. Pash was a United States Army officer.-Biography:He was born in San Francisco, California, on June 20, 1900. His father was Rev. Theodore Pashkovsky , a Russian Orthodox priest who had been sent to California by the Church in 1894...
. This assassination team would be employed to deal with counterintelligence threats that could not be tried in an open legal proceeding due to security risk and sensitivity.
Regarding the first claim, Golitsyn had said from the beginning that the KGB would try to plant other defectors in an effort to discredit him. Regarding the second claim, Nosenko told his debriefers that he had been personally responsible for handling Oswald's case and that the KGB had judged Oswald unfit for service due to his mental instability. Nosenko claimed that the KGB had not even attempted to debrief Oswald about his work on the U-2 spy plane
Lockheed U-2
The Lockheed U-2, nicknamed "Dragon Lady", is a single-engine, very high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft operated by the United States Air Force and previously flown by the Central Intelligence Agency . It provides day and night, very high-altitude , all-weather intelligence gathering...
during his service in the United States Marine Corps
United States Marine Corps
The United States Marine Corps is a branch of the United States Armed Forces responsible for providing power projection from the sea, using the mobility of the United States Navy to deliver combined-arms task forces rapidly. It is one of seven uniformed services of the United States...
. Although other KGB sources corroborated Nosenko's story, he repeatedly failed lie detector
Polygraph
A polygraph measures and records several physiological indices such as blood pressure, pulse, respiration, and skin conductivity while the subject is asked and answers a series of questions...
tests. Judging the claim of not interrogating Oswald about the U-2 improbable, given Oswald's familiarity with the U-2 program, and faced with further challenges to Nosenko's credibility (he also falsely claimed to be a lieutenant colonel, a higher rank than he in fact held), Angleton did not object when David Murphy, then head of the Soviet Russia Division, ordered Nosenko held in solitary confinement for approximately three-and-a-half years.
Contrary to some accounts, the detention of Nosenko was neither ordered by Angleton nor kept secret. Without naming Nosenko, the 1975 report of the Rockefeller Commission, also known as the President's Commission on CIA Activities within the United States, affirmed that the CIA's Office of Security, which is responsible for the safety of defectors, the Attorney General
United States Attorney General
The United States Attorney General is the head of the United States Department of Justice concerned with legal affairs and is the chief law enforcement officer of the United States government. The attorney general is considered to be the chief lawyer of the U.S. government...
, the Federal Bureau of Investigation
Federal Bureau of Investigation
The Federal Bureau of Investigation is an agency of the United States Department of Justice that serves as both a federal criminal investigative body and an internal intelligence agency . The FBI has investigative jurisdiction over violations of more than 200 categories of federal crime...
(FBI), the United States Intelligence Board, and select members of Congress
United States Congress
The United States Congress is the bicameral legislature of the federal government of the United States, consisting of the Senate and the House of Representatives. The Congress meets in the United States Capitol in Washington, D.C....
were all apprised of Nosenko's detention. Nosenko never changed his story.
James Angleton came to public attention in the United States when the Church Commission (formally known as the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities), following up on the Warren Commission
Warren Commission
The President's Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy, known unofficially as the Warren Commission, was established on November 27, 1963, by Lyndon B. Johnson to investigate the assassination of United States President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963...
, probed the CIA for information about the Kennedy assassination. The Nosenko episode does not appear to have shaken Angleton's faith in Golitsyn, although Helms and J. Edgar Hoover
J. Edgar Hoover
John Edgar Hoover was the first Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation of the United States. Appointed director of the Bureau of Investigation—predecessor to the FBI—in 1924, he was instrumental in founding the FBI in 1935, where he remained director until his death in 1972...
took the contrary position. Hoover's objections are said to have been so vehement as to severely curtail counterintelligence cooperation between the FBI and CIA for the remainder of Hoover's service as the FBI's director.
As Golitsyn helped Angleton identify sections within the CIA's Soviet Russia Division that were leaking information to the Soviets, Angleton pressed Golitsyn on KGB techniques and strategy for planting information at the CIA. Golitsyn's indication was that the KGB was orchestrating a larger campaign to understand how the CIA analyzed information, supporting a larger goal of manipulating the CIA to unwittingly assist the KGB in its objectives.
Angleton extrapolated from this his theory of a "wilderness of mirrors" (the term is thought to be a reference to T. S. Eliot
T. S. Eliot
Thomas Stearns "T. S." Eliot OM was a playwright, literary critic, and arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century. Although he was born an American he moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 and was naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at age 39.The poem that made his...
's poem "Gerontion
Gerontion
"Gerontion" is a poem by T. S. Eliot that was first published in 1920. The work relates the opinions and impressions of a gerontic, or elderly man, through a dramatic monologue which describes Europe after World War I through the eyes of a man who has lived the majority of his life in the 19th...
"), which proposed that the KGB was capable of manipulating the CIA to believe what it desired, and that the CIA could neither identify nor defend itself from this manipulation. After Golitsyn convinced Angleton that KGB moles persisted in the Soviet Russia Division, Angleton effectively suspended the careers of multiple CIA officers who came under suspicion.
The Molehunt
Angleton became increasingly convinced that the CIA was compromised by the KGB. Golitsyn convinced him that the KGB had reorganized in 1958 and 1959 to consist mostly of a shell, incorporating only those agents whom the CIA and the FBI were recruiting, directed by a small cabal of puppet masters who doubled those agents to manipulate their Western counterparts. Hoover eventually curbed cooperation with the CIA because Angleton refused to relent on this hypothesis. Angleton also came into increasing conflict with the rest of the CIA, particularly with the Directorate of Operations, over the efficacy of their intelligence-gathering efforts, which he questioned without explaining his broader views on KGB strategy and organization. DCI Helms was not willing to tolerate the resulting paralysis. Golitsyn, who was after all a major in the KGB and had defected years before, was able to marshal few facts to provide concrete support for his far-reaching theoretical views of the KGB. The senior leadership of the CIA came to this conclusion after a hearing in 1968, and Angleton was thereafter unable to draw directly upon Golitsyn.In the period of the Vietnam War
Vietnam War
The Vietnam War was a Cold War-era military conflict that occurred in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1 November 1955 to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. This war followed the First Indochina War and was fought between North Vietnam, supported by its communist allies, and the government of...
and Soviet-American détente
Détente
Détente is the easing of strained relations, especially in a political situation. The term is often used in reference to the general easing of relations between the Soviet Union and the United States in the 1970s, a thawing at a period roughly in the middle of the Cold War...
, Angleton was convinced of the necessity of the war and believed that the strategic calculations underlying the resumption of relations with China
People's Republic of China
China , officially the People's Republic of China , is the most populous country in the world, with over 1.3 billion citizens. Located in East Asia, the country covers approximately 9.6 million square kilometres...
were based on a deceptive KGB staging of the Sino-Soviet split. He went so far as to speculate that Henry Kissinger
Henry Kissinger
Heinz Alfred "Henry" Kissinger is a German-born American academic, political scientist, diplomat, and businessman. He is a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. He served as National Security Advisor and later concurrently as Secretary of State in the administrations of Presidents Richard Nixon and...
might be under KGB influence. During this period, Angleton's counter-intelligence staff undertook a most comprehensive domestic covert surveillance project (called Operation CHAOS
Operation CHAOS
]Operation CHAOS or Operation MHCHAOS was the code name for a domestic espionage project conducted by the Central Intelligence Agency. A department within the CIA was established in 1967 on orders from President of the United States Lyndon B. Johnson and later expanded under President Richard Nixon...
) under the direction of President Lyndon Johnson. The prevailing belief at the time was that the anti-war and civil rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s had foreign funding and support. None was found by them, although the Soviet Union did influence the movements (see Soviet influence on the peace movement
Soviet influence on the peace movement
During the Cold War , when the Soviet Union and the USA were engaged in an arms race, the Soviet Union promoted its foreign policy through the World Peace Council and other front organizations...
). On the other hand, anti-war newspapers and magazines, notably, RAMPARTS, were destabilized by these illegal CIA operations. Angleton was also responsible for an illegal operation that screened international mail and telegrams.
DCI William Colby
William Colby
William Egan Colby spent a career in intelligence for the United States, culminating in holding the post of Director of Central Intelligence from September 1973, to January 1976....
reorganized the CIA in an effort to curb Angleton's influence, beginning by stripping him of control over the Israeli "account," which had the effect of weakening counter-intelligence. Colby then demanded Angleton's resignation, after Seymour Hersh
Seymour Hersh
Seymour Myron Hersh is an American Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist and author based in Washington, D.C. He is a regular contributor to The New Yorker magazine on military and security matters...
told Colby on December 20, 1974, that he was going to publish a story in The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
about domestic counter-intelligence activities under Angleton's direction against antiwar protesters and other domestic dissident organizations. While Angleton's operations technically violated the CIA Charter and the National Security Act, which assigned all such domestic operations to the FBI, it was no secret to DCI Colby that Angleton and CIA counter-intelligence were carrying them out. None of Angleton's supposed violations were documented in the subsequent Rockefeller Commission report.
These illegal surveillance activities resulted in the generation of 10,000 case files on American citizens and included such information-collection methods as opening mail (Angleton is rumoured to have maintained that practice since the 1950s, when he brought to Dulles's attention how the American Federation of Labor
American Federation of Labor
The American Federation of Labor was one of the first federations of labor unions in the United States. It was founded in 1886 by an alliance of craft unions disaffected from the Knights of Labor, a national labor association. Samuel Gompers was elected president of the Federation at its...
had directed funds diverted to them by the CIA). The intelligence so gathered was said to have been reported directly to DCI Helms.
It has been claimed that Angleton directed CIA assistance to the Israeli nuclear weapons program
Israel and weapons of mass destruction
Israel is widely believed to possess weapons of mass destruction, and to be one of four nuclear-armed countries not recognized as a Nuclear Weapons State by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty...
.
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s Angleton privately accused various foreign leaders of being Soviet spies. He twice informed the Royal Canadian Mounted Police
Royal Canadian Mounted Police
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police , literally ‘Royal Gendarmerie of Canada’; colloquially known as The Mounties, and internally as ‘The Force’) is the national police force of Canada, and one of the most recognized of its kind in the world. It is unique in the world as a national, federal,...
that he believed Prime Minister
Prime Minister of Canada
The Prime Minister of Canada is the primary minister of the Crown, chairman of the Cabinet, and thus head of government for Canada, charged with advising the Canadian monarch or viceroy on the exercise of the executive powers vested in them by the constitution...
Lester Pearson
Lester B. Pearson
Lester Bowles "Mike" Pearson, PC, OM, CC, OBE was a Canadian professor, historian, civil servant, statesman, diplomat, and politician, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1957 for organizing the United Nations Emergency Force to resolve the Suez Canal Crisis...
and his successor Pierre Trudeau
Pierre Trudeau
Joseph Philippe Pierre Yves Elliott Trudeau, , usually known as Pierre Trudeau or Pierre Elliott Trudeau, was the 15th Prime Minister of Canada from April 20, 1968 to June 4, 1979, and again from March 3, 1980 to June 30, 1984.Trudeau began his political career campaigning for socialist ideals,...
to be agents of the Soviet Union. In 1964, under pressure from Angleton, the RCMP detained John Watkins
John Watkins (Canadian diplomat)
John Watkins was an educator and Canadian Ambassador to the USSR . Born at Norval Station, Ontario, Watkins was a Scandinavian specialist at the University of Manitoba before joining the Department of External Affairs in 1946.First posted to the USSR in 1948, Watkins learned Russian and developed...
, a close friend of Pearson and formerly Canadian Ambassador to the Soviet Union; Watkins died during interrogation by the RCMP and the CIA, and was subsequently cleared of suspicion. Angleton accused Swedish Prime Minister
Prime Minister of Sweden
The Prime Minister is the head of government in the Kingdom of Sweden. Before the creation of the office of a Prime Minister in 1876, Sweden did not have a head of government separate from its head of state, namely the King, in whom the executive authority was vested...
Olof Palme
Olof Palme
Sven Olof Joachim Palme was a Swedish politician. A long-time protegé of Prime Minister Tage Erlander, Palme led the Swedish Social Democratic Party from 1969 to his assassination, and was a two-term Prime Minister of Sweden, heading a Privy Council Government from 1969 to 1976 and a cabinet...
, West German
West Germany
West Germany is the common English, but not official, name for the Federal Republic of Germany or FRG in the period between its creation in May 1949 to German reunification on 3 October 1990....
Chancellor Willy Brandt
Willy Brandt
Willy Brandt, born Herbert Ernst Karl Frahm , was a German politician, Mayor of West Berlin 1957–1966, Chancellor of West Germany 1969–1974, and leader of the Social Democratic Party of Germany 1964–1987....
, and British Prime Minister Harold Wilson of using their access to NATO secrets to benefit the USSR. Brandt resigned in 1974, after one of his aides was found to be a mole from the East German secret police
Stasi
The Ministry for State Security The Ministry for State Security The Ministry for State Security (German: Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (MfS), commonly known as the Stasi (abbreviation , literally State Security), was the official state security service of East Germany. The MfS was headquartered...
. Angleton came to suspect Secretary of State
United States Secretary of State
The United States Secretary of State is the head of the United States Department of State, concerned with foreign affairs. The Secretary is a member of the Cabinet and the highest-ranking cabinet secretary both in line of succession and order of precedence...
Henry Kissinger, who commented wryly that even the most brilliant and loyal officers should not spend their entire career in such pressurized and paranoid fields. Angleton also privately accused numerous members of Congress
United States Congress
The United States Congress is the bicameral legislature of the federal government of the United States, consisting of the Senate and the House of Representatives. The Congress meets in the United States Capitol in Washington, D.C....
and President Gerald Ford
Gerald Ford
Gerald Rudolph "Jerry" Ford, Jr. was the 38th President of the United States, serving from 1974 to 1977, and the 40th Vice President of the United States serving from 1973 to 1974...
of treason. Angleton's notorious pursuit of the "5th Man", who he believed had penetrated a secret agency in Washington, was solved, he believed, when DCI William Colby
William Colby
William Egan Colby spent a career in intelligence for the United States, culminating in holding the post of Director of Central Intelligence from September 1973, to January 1976....
fired him. No one was above suspicion, and even Angleton himself was accused by others of working for the Soviets.
Resignation
Angleton's resignation was announced on Christmas Eve of 1975, just as President Ford demanded that Colby report on the allegations and as various Congressional committees announced that they would launch their own inquiries. Angleton was never prosecuted for his involvement in the surveillance of antiwar protesters and domestic dissidents. Three of Angleton's senior aides in counter-intelligence, his deputy Raymond Rocca, executive officer of the counter-intelligence division William J. Hood, and Angleton's chief of operations Newton S. Miller, were coaxed into retirement within a week of Angleton's resignation after it was made clear that they would be transferred elsewhere in the agency rather than promoted, and the counter-intelligence staff was reduced from 300 people to 80 people.Hersh reported that Angleton subsequently called him to claim that Angleton's wife, Cicely, had left him as a result of the story. Andy Poon, a friend of Hersh's immediately laughed off this claim, telling Hersh that Angleton's wife had left him years ago and had since not done anything; and knew well enough that Angleton worked for the CIA. Indeed, they remained friendly for years after they began living apart, and yearly took a vacation together to his beloved fishing spot. Here he was known as a reporter and a documentor of the river, but not for his profession, although it was quietly known. Rumours swirled around Washington thereafter that Colby was himself the KGB mole, but these were never conclusively attributed to Angleton. Angleton was awarded the Distinguished Intelligence Medal
Distinguished Intelligence Medal
The Distinguished Intelligence Medal is awarded by the Central Intelligence Agency for performance of outstanding services or for achievement of a distinctly exceptional nature in a duty or responsibility.-Notable Recipients:Robert G. Brewster...
, the CIA's second highest honor, in 1975.
Golitsyn was considered discredited within the CIA even before Angleton's ousting, but the two did not appear to have lost their faith in one another. They sought the assistance of William F. Buckley, Jr.
William F. Buckley, Jr.
William Frank Buckley, Jr. was an American conservative author and commentator. He founded the political magazine National Review in 1955, hosted 1,429 episodes of the television show Firing Line from 1966 until 1999, and was a nationally syndicated newspaper columnist. His writing was noted for...
(himself once a CIA man) in authoring New Lies for Old, which advanced the argument that the USSR planned to fake its collapse to lull its enemies into a false sense of victory. Buckley refused but later went on to write a novel about Angleton, Spytime: The Undoing of James Jesus Angleton.
Legacy
Angleton's tour of duty in Italy as an intelligence officer is regarded as a critical turn not only in his professional life, wherein he helped recover NaziNazism
Nazism, the common short form name of National Socialism was the ideology and practice of the Nazi Party and of Nazi Germany...
looted treasures from other European countries and Africa, but also for the Agency itself. Angleton's personal liaisons with Italian Mafia
Mafia
The Mafia is a criminal syndicate that emerged in the mid-nineteenth century in Sicily, Italy. It is a loose association of criminal groups that share a common organizational structure and code of conduct, and whose common enterprise is protection racketeering...
figures helped the CIA in the immediate period after World War II. Angleton took charge of the CIA's effort to subvert Italian elections to prevent communist and communist-related parties from gaining political leverage in the parliament
Parliament of Italy
The Parliament of Italy is the national parliament of Italy. It is a bicameral legislature with 945 elected members . The Chamber of Deputies, with 630 members is the lower house. The Senate of the Republic is the upper house and has 315 members .Since 2005, a party list electoral law is being...
.
In time, Angleton's zeal and paranoia came to be regarded as counter-productive, if not destructive, for the CIA. In the wake of his departure, counter-intelligence efforts were undertaken with far less enthusiasm. Some believe this overcompensation responsible for oversights which allowed Aldrich Ames
Aldrich Ames
Aldrich Hazen Ames is a former Central Intelligence Agency counter-intelligence officer and analyst, who, in 1994, was convicted of spying for the Soviet Union and Russia...
, Robert Hanssen
Robert Hanssen
Robert Philip Hanssen is a former American FBI agent who spied for Soviet and Russian intelligence services against the United States for 22 years from 1979 to 2001...
, and many others to compromise the CIA, the FBI, and other agencies long after Angleton's resignation. Although the American intelligence community quickly bounced back from the embarrassments of the Church Committee, it found itself uncharacteristically incapable of policing itself after Angleton's departure.
Edward Jay Epstein
Edward Jay Epstein
Edward Jay Epstein is an American investigative journalist. While a graduate student at Cornell University in 1966, he published the book Inquest, an influential criticism of the Warren Commission probe into the John F. Kennedy assassination...
is among those who have argued that the positions of Ames and Hanssen—both well-placed Soviet counter-intelligence agents, in the CIA and FBI respectively—would enable the KGB to deceive the American intelligence community in the manner that Angleton hypothesized.
The 1970s were generally a period of upheaval for the CIA. During George H. W. Bush's
George H. W. Bush
George Herbert Walker Bush is an American politician who served as the 41st President of the United States . He had previously served as the 43rd Vice President of the United States , a congressman, an ambassador, and Director of Central Intelligence.Bush was born in Milton, Massachusetts, to...
tenure as DCI, President Ford authorized the creation of a "Team B
Team B
Team B was a competitive analysis exercise commissioned by the Central Intelligence Agency in the 1970s to analyze threats the Soviet Union posed to the security of the United States. Team B, approved by then Director of Central Intelligence George H. W. Bush, was composed of "outside experts" who...
" under the aegis of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board
President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board
The President's Intelligence Advisory Board is an advisor to the Executive Office of the President of the United States. According to its self-description, it "...provides advice to the President concerning the quality and adequacy of intelligence collection, of analysis and estimates, of...
. This group (in fact, groups) concluded that the Agency and the intelligence community had, in particular, seriously underestimated Soviet strategic nuclear strength in Central Europe
Central Europe
Central Europe or alternatively Middle Europe is a region of the European continent lying between the variously defined areas of Eastern and Western Europe...
in their National Intelligence Estimate
National Intelligence Estimate
National Intelligence Estimates are United States federal government documents that are the authoritative assessment of the Director of National Intelligence on intelligence related to a particular national security issue...
. The Church Commission itself brought no small number of skeletons out of the Agency's closet. The organization inherited by Admiral Stansfield Turner
Stansfield Turner
Stansfield M. Turner is a retired Admiral and former Director of Central Intelligence. He is currently a senior research scholar at the University of Maryland, College Park School of Public Policy....
on his appointment as DCI by President Jimmy Carter
Jimmy Carter
James Earl "Jimmy" Carter, Jr. is an American politician who served as the 39th President of the United States and was the recipient of the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize, the only U.S. President to have received the Prize after leaving office...
in 1977 was shortly to face further cuts, and Turner used Angleton as a whipping boy for the excesses in the Agency that he hoped to curb, both during his service and in his memoirs.
A handful of CIA employees had their careers frozen after coming under the suspicion of Angleton and his staff. The CIA later paid out compensation to three to whom no reasonable explanation could be offered in mitigation of actions taken affecting their careers, under what Agency employees termed the "Mole Relief Act". One hundred twenty employees are said to have been placed on review, fifty investigated, and sixteen considered serious suspects by Angleton's staff.
When Golitsyn defected, he claimed that the CIA had a mole who had been stationed in West Germany, was of Slavic descent, had a last name which may have ended in "sky" and definitely began with a "K", and operated under the KGB codename "Sasha". Angleton believed this claim, with the result that anyone who approximated this description fell under his suspicion.
Despite misgivings over his uncompromising and often obsessive approach to his profession, Angleton is highly regarded by his peers in the intelligence business. Former Shin Bet chief Amos Manor
Amos Manor
Amos Manor , born Arthur Mendelowitz, was a former Director of the Shin Bet, Israel's internal intelligence and security service, from 1953 until 1963....
, in an interview in Ha'aretz, revealed his fascination for the man during Angleton's essential work to forge the U.S.-Israel liaison in the early 1950s. Manor described Angleton as "fanatic about everything", with a "tendency towards mystification". Manor discovered decades later that the real reason for Angleton's visit to him was actually to investigate Manor himself, being an Eastern Europe
Eastern Europe
Eastern Europe is the eastern part of Europe. The term has widely disparate geopolitical, geographical, cultural and socioeconomic readings, which makes it highly context-dependent and even volatile, and there are "almost as many definitions of Eastern Europe as there are scholars of the region"...
an Jewish immigrant, for James Angleton thought that it would be prudent to "sanitize" the U.S.-Israeli bridge before a more formal intelligence relationship was established.
The term Angletonian is an adjective used to describe something conspiratorial, overly paranoid, bizarre, eerie or arcane.
CIA Family Jewels
The recently released internal CIA investigation prompted by the 1970s Church CommitteeChurch Committee
The Church Committee is the common term referring to the United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, a U.S. Senate committee chaired by Senator Frank Church in 1975. A precursor to the U.S...
verified the far-ranging power and influence that Angleton wielded during his long tenure as counter-intelligence Czar. The exposé revealed that Angleton-planned infiltration of law enforcement and military organizations in other countries was used to increase the influence of the United States. It also confirmed past rumors that it was Angleton who was in charge of the domestic spying activities of the CIA under Operation CHAOS
Operation CHAOS
]Operation CHAOS or Operation MHCHAOS was the code name for a domestic espionage project conducted by the Central Intelligence Agency. A department within the CIA was established in 1967 on orders from President of the United States Lyndon B. Johnson and later expanded under President Richard Nixon...
.
In popular culture
- Norman MailerNorman MailerNorman Kingsley Mailer was an American novelist, journalist, essayist, poet, playwright, screenwriter, and film director.Along with Truman Capote, Joan Didion, Hunter S...
loosely based the character of Hugh Montague (or Harlot) in Harlot's GhostHarlot's GhostHarlot's Ghost , a fictional chronicle of the Central Intelligence Agency by Norman Mailer. The characters are a mixture of real people and fictional figures.-Summary:...
on Angleton. Likewise, the mysterious spymaster Eliot, in David MorrellDavid MorrellDavid Morrell is a Canadian-American novelist, best known for his debut 1972 novel First Blood, which would later become the successful Rambo film franchise starring Sylvester Stallone. He has written 28 novels, and his work has been translated into 26 languages...
's novel The Brotherhood of the Rose, is clearly based on Angleton, as is the character "Mother" in Orchids for Mother by Aaron LathamAaron LathamAaron Latham is a journalist who wrote the article that inspired the movie Urban Cowboy and co-wrote its script with director James Bridges. He also co-wrote the book for the short-lived 2003 Broadway musical version....
. Angleton appears in Chris Petit's novel, The Passenger.
- The 2006 film The Good ShepherdThe Good Shepherd (film)The Good Shepherd is a 2006 spy film directed by Robert De Niro and starring Matt Damon and Angelina Jolie, with an extensive supporting cast. Although it is a fictional film loosely based on real events, it is advertised as telling the untold story of the birth of counter-intelligence in the...
is loosely based on Angleton's life and his role in the formation of the CIA.
- Angleton features heavily in the 2006 fictional espionage thriller The Passenger by Chris Petit which focuses on the events preceding the 1988 terrorist attack on a Pan-American airplane that exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland.
- The three part 2007 TNT Network television miniseries The CompanyThe Company (TV miniseries)The Company is a miniseries about the activities of the CIA during the Cold War. It was based on the best selling novel by Robert Littell. The teleplay adaptation was written by Ken Nolan.-Plot:...
features Angleton (portrayed by actor Michael KeatonMichael KeatonMichael John Douglas , better known by the stage name Michael Keaton, is an American actor known for his early comedic roles, most notably his performance as the title character of Tim Burton's Beetlejuice . Keaton is also famous for his dramatic portrayal of Bruce Wayne/Batman in Tim Burton's...
) and his failure to recognize Kim PhilbyKim PhilbyHarold Adrian Russell "Kim" Philby was a high-ranking member of British intelligence who worked as a spy for and later defected to the Soviet Union...
as a Soviet spy, then his subsequent discovery of another mole.
- James Jesus Angleton is the name of the main character in The Fatima Mansions' "Brunceling's Song" on their 1995 album Lost in the Former WestLost in the Former WestLost in the Former West was the final album released by The Fatima Mansions, continuing the focus on hard-rock anthems that had begun on Valhalla Avenue...
.
- The 2003 BBC TV production of Cambridge SpiesCambridge SpiesCambridge Spies is a 2003 four-part BBC television drama concerning the lives of the best-known quartet of the Cambridge Five Soviet spies from 1934 to the 1951 defection of Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean to the Soviet Union...
includes several scenes with a young James Jesus Angleton depicted as being assigned to Kim PhilbyKim PhilbyHarold Adrian Russell "Kim" Philby was a high-ranking member of British intelligence who worked as a spy for and later defected to the Soviet Union...
during the war.
- The Bob Howard-Laundry Series of Charles StrossCharles StrossCharles David George "Charlie" Stross is a British writer of science fiction, Lovecraftian horror and fantasy. He was born in Leeds.Stross specialises in hard science fiction and space opera...
features a senior Laundry agent whose nom de guerre is James Angleton after the CIA chief.
- The phrase "wilderness of mirrors" appears in a 1994 song by the Canadian rock trio RushRush (band)Rush is a Canadian rock band formed in August 1968, in the Willowdale neighbourhood of Toronto, Ontario. The band is composed of bassist, keyboardist, and lead vocalist Geddy Lee, guitarist Alex Lifeson, and drummer and lyricist Neil Peart...
. Lyricist/Drummer Neil PeartNeil PeartNeil Ellwood Peart , OC, is a Canadian musician and author. He is the drummer for the rock band Rush.Peart grew up in Port Dalhousie, Ontario . During adolescence, he floated from regional band to regional band in pursuit of a career as a full-time drummer...
used the phrase in the song "Double Agent", and cites both Angleton and T. S. EliotT. S. EliotThomas Stearns "T. S." Eliot OM was a playwright, literary critic, and arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century. Although he was born an American he moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 and was naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at age 39.The poem that made his...
in the liner notes as sources of the phrase.
- James Jesus Angleton pops up often, as an entry and elsewhere, in Conspiracies, Cults and Cover-ups by Robert Anton WilsonRobert Anton WilsonRobert Anton Wilson , known to friends as "Bob", was an American author and polymath who became at various times a novelist, philosopher, psychologist, essayist, editor, playwright, poet, futurist, civil libertarian and self-described agnostic mystic...
.
- Eric FlintEric FlintEric Flint is an American author, editor, and e-publisher. The majority of his main works are alternate history science fiction, but he also writes humorous fantasy adventures.- Career :...
's fantasy novel The Philosophical Strangler features an intelligence officer named "The Angel Jimmy Jesus".
- Angleton is mentioned several times in Stieg LarssonStieg LarssonKarl Stig-Erland Larsson , who wrote professionally as Stieg Larsson, was a Swedish journalist and writer, born in Skelleftehamn outside Skellefteå. He is best known for writing the "Millennium series" of crime novels, which were published posthumously...
's "Millennium series" as a model for Swedish counter-espionage.
External links
- Frontline—"The Spy Hunter" May 14, 1991 by Tom Mangold for the PBS program
- The phrase "wilderness of mirrors" appears in a 1994 song by the Canadian rock trio Rush