James Jesus Angleton

James Jesus Angleton (December 9, 1917–May 12, 1987), known to friends and colleagues as Jim and nicknamed "the Kingfisher", was a long-serving chief of the Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA) counter-intelligence (CI) staff (Associate Deputy Director of Operations for Counterintelligence/ADDOCI).

A poetry aficionado with known ties to the likes of Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, and an avid fly-fisherman and orchid-breeder, Angleton was an unofficial adviser to successive Directors of the CIA, most notably Allen Dulles and Richard Helms. His creative genius for scenario-building and thoroughly penetrating understanding of espionage, deception, and false flag operations remain uneclipsed to this very day. His excesses as a counter-intelligence czar, arising from extreme paranoia that may have been clinical, had adverse effects on the Agency, especially during the 1970s. Considered by many within the intelligence profession as the single most polarizing, most controversial, and admittedly most revered spymaster bar none, Angleton had lived spy tradecraft with mad passion. Even the KGB used much of his tradecraft as training tools for their case officers and assets.

Early life

James Angleton was born in Boise, Idaho, to a Catholic mother, Carmen Mercedes Moreno. His father, James Hugh Angleton, was a cavalry officer who owned the NCR franchise in pre-war Italy, and later joined the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). His parents met in Mexico while his father was serving under General John "Black Jack" Pershing. His mother was a Mexican citizen renowned in Mexico's high society for her beauty.

Angleton mostly grew up in Rome, Italy, where his family moved after his father bought NCR's Italian subsidiary, but he completed his pre-university education as a boarder at Malvern College in England. He completed his undergraduate education at Yale University in 1941, after launching a poetry review, Furioso, with his roommate. The review published works by the likes of T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, and E. E. Cummings.

By the time he was a student at Yale, he was clearly an insomniac. He went on to attend Harvard Law School before joining the United States Army in 1943 and was recruited into the OSS later that year. He was selected for counter-intelligence training in London, where he was brought under the tutelage of British intelligence agents such as Kim Philby (Philby was already a mole for the KGB). He is thought to have been one of the few to have access to the Ultra program, the decryption operation which successfully cracked iterations of the Enigma code, effectively neutralizing the German U-boat campaign in the Atlantic Ocean. He subsequently served as a counter-intelligence agent in Italy, where he remained in service after the transfer of OSS operational functions to the War Department's Strategic Services Unit, which became part of the Central Intelligence Agency under the National Security Act of 1947. While in Rome, he became the chief counter-intelligence officer for Italy but returned to the United States shortly before the establishment of the CIA, rising to the rank of major while still a military officer. Angleton's knowledge of intelligence learned through Ultra permitted him to guide American interrogators of Axis subjects. By directing questioning via transcript reviews, Angleton was able to place into the American intelligence record details that were previously known only to Ultra-cleared analysts. This method protected Ultra, benefitted the Allied war effort, and propelled Angleton upward.

CIA career

The CIA recruited him shortly after its formation, and he continued his counter-intelligence activities there, first returning to Rome and his previous counter-intelligence position, where the knowledge of cryptography he had obtained from Ultra is said to have served him well. He turned his attentions to the KGB and the Soviet nuclear weapons program with its probable reliance on technology leaked from the American Manhattan Project.

Angleton's internal CIA cryptonym (codename) was KU/MOTHER. His cover name was Hugh Ashmead.

Manhattan Project and Jack Dunlap

Some of this information and subsequent leaks which helped the Soviets develop the hydrogen bomb were made by way of Donald Duart Maclean, with whom Angleton would have been acquainted from his ties to MI5 and whom Philby, in his capacity as counter-intelligence lead for the British embassy in Washington, D.C., assisted in escaping capture by the Americans and British by facilitating Maclean's defection to the USSR. It is likely that Angleton came to suspect Philby's allegiances in this period, even as the two maintained a regular lunch date. Maclean's espionage and defection effectively ended Philby's regular career in MI6 just as he was thought to be in line to become its director.

The efforts of Angleton and his CI staff also led to the discovery of a Soviet mole in the National Security Agency (NSA) in the person of Jack Dunlap. Some alleged that Angleton orchestrated Dunlap's death.

Dunlap, an employee of the NSA, was found dead of carbon monoxide poisoning in an apparent suicide. He also was a Soviet penetration agent, who had concealed in the attic of his house sealed packets of classified NSA documents bearing on its deciphering and interception operation. There were several reasons why it would have been difficult to arrest and try Dunlap.[1]

Rise in influence in the CIA

Beginning in 1951 Angleton was responsible for cooperation with Israel's Mossad and Shin Bet agencies, a relationship he managed closely for virtually the remainder of his career. It has been claimed that, in this capacity, Angleton directed CIA assistance to the Israeli nuclear weapons program.

In 1954 Allen Dulles, who had recently become Director of Central Intelligence, named Angleton head of the Counterintelligence Staff, a position he retained for the rest of his CIA career. Dulles also assigned him responsibility for coordination with allied intelligence services.

From this period Angleton was characterized by colleagues as a chain smoking workaholic who had no reservations about checking cocktail party boastings against official service records — or placing colleagues under surveillance for minor violations of protocol, written or otherwise, including personal indiscretions.

One of Angleton's biggest coups under Dulles was obtaining a transcript of Nikita Khrushchev's 1956 speech to the Soviet Party Congress denouncing Josef Stalin, which the agency made public for its immense propaganda value. Angleton, who obtained a copy of the speech from Israeli agent Tommy Lapid, is further said to have then leaked doctored versions of the speech to numerous foreign governments in a disinformation campaign, although Angleton is said to have admitted that this claim was itself disinformation he kept in circulation and that his effort to circulate a doctored version was refused by others in the CIA leadership.

Golitsyn and Nosenko

It is thought that the combination of Angleton's close association with Philby and Philby's effective duplicity caused Angleton to double check "potential problems." It was only with the defection of Anatoliy Golitsyn in 1961 that Philby was confirmed as a Soviet mole, although this was not adequately corroborated until 1963, when Philby eluded those sent to capture him, and defected. Living a lonely life in Moscow, Philby was occasionally interviewed. He reminisced that his escape was a "close shave" and that Angleton had been "a brilliant opponent" and fascinating friend who seemed to be "catching on" before Philby's departure, thanks to CIA employee Bill Harvey, a former FBI agent, who had voiced his suspicions regarding Philby and others Angleton suspected were Soviet agents.

Although Golitsyn was a questionable source (he also claimed that British Prime Minister 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 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 of misdirection of his debriefing by a mole in the Soviet Russia Division, limiting his debriefing to reviewing photographs of Soviet embassy staff to identify KGB staff 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 extremely controversial claims: that Golitsyn was not a double-agent 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 in the time Oswald lived in the Soviet Union.

Regarding the first claim, Golitsyn had said from the beginning that the KGB would try to plant 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 their services due to mental instability and had not even attempted to debrief Oswald about his work on the U-2 spy planes 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 held in fact), Angleton did not object when David Murphy, then head of the Soviet Russia Division, ordered him held in solitary confinement for approximately three-and-a-half years.

Contrary to some accounts, the detention of Nosenko was not ordered by Angleton or 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, affirms 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 curtail severely 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 Soviet Russian Division that were leaking information to the Soviets, Angleton pressed Golitsyn on the KGB technique 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 a capability to manipulate the CIA to unwittingly assist the KGB in their 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 "Gerontion"), which entailed that the KGB was capable of manipulating the CIA to believe what they wanted through channels that the CIA was unable to identify and defend against. In the wake of Golitsyn's establishing to Angleton's satisfaction the existence of KGB moles in the Soviet Russia Division, Angleton effectively suspended the careers of those in the teams alleged to be compromised.

Increasing paranoia

Angleton became increasingly convinced that the CIA was thoroughly compromised by the KGB, and Golitsyn convinced him that the KGB had been reorganized in 1958 and 1959 to consist mostly of a shell of pawns, who were the people the CIA and FBI were recruiting at the time, directed by a small cabal of agents who managed those pawns to manipulate their Western counterparts. Hoover eventually curbed cooperation with the CIA because Angleton refused to relent on this hypothesis, and Angleton came into increasing conflict with the rest of the CIA, particularly the Directorate of Operations, over the efficacy of their intelligence-gathering efforts, which he questioned without having to elaborate his larger 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 directly draw upon Golitsyn.

In the period of the Vietnam War and Soviet-American detente, 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 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 the most comprehensive domestic covert surveillance project (called the CHAOS Program) under the direction of President Lyndon Johnson. The prevailing belief at the time was that the anti-war and civil rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s had foreign funding and support. These types of activities were the very ones that the CIA was fomenting in other countries, so it was not outlandish to privately question the presence of foreign support and influence.

DCI William Colby reorganized the CIA in an effort to curb Angleton's influence, beginning with stripping him of control over the Israeli "account," which had the effect of weakening counter-intelligence. Colby 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, in violation of the CIA Charter and the National Security Act, which assigned all such domestic functions to the FBI rather than the CIA. (None of these violations were included 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. Opening mail has since been made obsolete by x-ray technology.

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 were agents of the Soviet Union. He accused Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme of using his NATO access to benefit the USSR, and West German Chancellor Willy Brandt and British Prime Minister Harold Wilson of the same. Interestingly, Brandt later had to resign because one of his aides was found to be a mole from the East German secret police, Stasi. He came to suspect Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who wrily commented that even the most brilliant and loyal officers should not spend their entire careers in such pressurized and paranoid fields. Angleton also privately accused numerous members of Congress and President Gerald Ford of such influence. His notorious pursuit of the "5th Man," whom 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 other of working for the Soviets.

Resignation

Angleton's resignation was announced on Christmas Eve, just as the President demanded that Colby report on the allegations and as various Congressional committees announced 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 his 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.

Hersh reported that Angleton subsequently called him to claim that Angleton's wife, Cicely, had left him as a result of the story. A friend of Hersh's immediately laughed off this claim, telling Hersh that Angleton's wife had left him years ago and since returned—and knew well enough that Angleton worked for the CIA. 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 ouster, 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.

Legacy

Angleton's tour of duty in Italy as an intelligence officer is long regarded as a critical turn not only in his professional life, wherein he helped recover Mussolini's and the Nazis' looted treasures from other European countries and Africa, but also for the Agency itself. His personal liaisons with known Italian warlord figures and the Mafia, who were against the strong rule of Il Duce, were credited to have enriched the tradecraft of operatives, especially in handling highly specialized operations such as assassination and cover-ups. The relationship Angleton had forged had helped the CIA to employ many of these tactics for its overseas operations against the enemies of the U.S. Government. 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.

Angleton's zeal and paranoia were regarded as counter-productive, if not destructive, for the CIA. In the wake of his departure, counterintelligence efforts were undertaken with far less enthusiasm. Some believe that this overcompensation is responsible for the oversights that allowed Aldrich Ames, Robert Hanssen, and many others to compromise the CIA, the FBI, and American intelligence community generally long after his departure. However, America's ability to conduct covert operations abroad in the wake of the Church Committee somehow rebounded despite the negative publicity. In fact, when Aldrich Ames was beginning his treasonous activities in 1984, the United States through the CIA was preparing the Iran-Contra deals. The American intelligence community bounced back fast from the embarrassments of the Church Committee, and yet it was incongruously unable to police 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 counterintelligence agents, in the CIA and FBI respectively, would collectively allow the KGB to deceive the American intelligence community in a manner Angleton clearly hypothesized.[2]

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 — the group (in fact, groups) so assembled concluded that the Agency and intelligence community generally had, in particular, seriously underestimated strategic nuclear strength in Central Europe in their National Intelligence Estimate. The Church Commission 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 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 suspicions of Angleton and his staff, and the CIA has since had to pay out large awards to three to whom no reasonable explanation could be offered in mitigation of actions taken affecting their careers, under what Agency employees have called the Mole Relief Act. One hundred twenty employees are said to have been placed on review, fifty investigated, and sixteen considered serious suspects.

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 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 inclination to his profession, Angleton is highly regarded by his peers in the intelligence business. Former Shin Bet chief Amos Manor, in a recent interview in Ha'aretz, revealed his fascination for the man during Angleton's essential work to forge U.S.-Israel liaison in the early 1950s whom Manor described as "fanatic about everything," with a "tendency towards mystification." Manor discovered decades after that the real reason for Angleton's visit to him was actually to investigate Manor himself, being a Eastern European Jewish immigrant, for James Angleton thought that it would be prudent to "sanitize" the U.S.-Israel bridge first before a more formal liaison was established.

The term Angletonian is an adjective used to describe something conspiratorial, overly paranoid, bizarre, eerie or arcane; & yet, he is, on this very issue, a classic victim.

In popular culture

• Norman Mailer loosely based the character of Hugh Montague (or Harlot) in Harlot's Ghost on Angleton. Likewise, the mysterious spymaster Eliot, in David Morrell's novel The Brotherhood of the Rose, is clearly based on Angleton, as is the character "Mother" in Orchids for Mother by Aaron Latham.

• The 2006 film The Good Shepherd is a fictionalized account of Angleton's life and his role in the formation of the CIA.

References

• Buckley, William F., Jr. Spytime: the Undoing of James Jesus Angleton: A Novel. New York: Harcourt, 2000. ISBN 0-15-100513-3.
• Engelberg, Stephen."James Angleton, Counterintelligence Figure, Dies". The New York Times, May 12, 1987, Late City Final Edition, Section D, Page 31, Column 1.
• Epstein, Edward Jay. Deception: The Invisible War between the CIA and the KGB. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989. ISBN 0-671-41543-3.
• Hersh, Seymour. "Huge C.I.A. Operation Reported in US against Antiwar Forces, Other Dissidents During Nixon Years". The New York Times, December 22, 1974, p. 1.
• Hersh, Seymour. "President Tells Colby to Speed Report on CIA". The New York Times, December 24, 1974, p. 43.
• Hersh, Seymour. "3 More Aides Quit in CIA Shake-Up". The New York Times, December 30, 1974, p. 51.
• Hersh, Seymour. "The Angleton Story". The New York Times Magazine, June 25, 1978, p. SM4.
• Latham, Aaron. Orchids for Mother: A Novel. New York: Bantam Books, 1985. ISBN 0-553-25407-3. Fictional account of Angleton.
• Littell, Robert. The Company: A Novel of the CIA. New York: Penguin Books, 2003. ISBN 0-14-200262-3. Fictional history of the CIA during the Cold War in which Angleton is a major supporting character.
• Mangold, Tom. Cold Warrior: James Jesus Angleton: The CIA's Master Spy Hunter. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991. ISBN 0-671-66273-2.
• Martin David C. Wilderness of Mirrors: Intrigue, Deception, and the Secrets that Destroyed Two of the Cold War's Most Important Agents. New York: Harper & Row, 1980; Boston: The Lyons Press, 2003 (reprinted). ISBN 0-06-013037-7; ISBN 1-58574-824-2.
• Petit, Chris. The Passenger. London: Simon & Schuster, 2006. ISBN 0-7432-0946-X. A thriller/spy-novel which involves Angleton as a central character.
• Wise, David. Molehunt: The Secret Search for Traitors that Shattered the CIA. New York: Random House, 1992. ISBN 0-394-58514-3.

External links

• James Angleton—A general overview of Angleton's career with citations
• "Through the Looking Glass" by Edward Jay Epstein—Article on Angleton and Golitsyn from Edward Jay Epstein's Web site
• "Disinformation" COMMENTARY July 1982 by Edward Jay Epstein—Article on Stansfield Turner from Edward Jay Epstein's Web site, including references to Angleton
• Frontline—"The Spy Hunter" May 14, 1991 by Tom Mangold for the PBS program
• "James Jesus Angleton and the Kennedy Assassination", Part I by Lisa Pease, Probe Magazine, July-August 2000 issue (Vol. 7 No. 5).
• "James Jesus Angleton and the Kennedy Assassination, Part II" by Lisa Pease, Probe Magazine, September-October 2000 issue (Vol. 7 No. 6).
• "James Jesus Angleton - Deputy Director of Counter Intelligence & Guardian of The CIA's Greatest Secret" By Timothy S. Cooper Background information mixed in with conspiracy theories