James Jesus Angleton

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James Jesus Angleton

James Jesus Angleton (born December 9, 1917 in Boise , Idaho , † May 12, 1987 in Washington ) was an American agent and long-time head of the counterintelligence department of the CIA .

Life

Angleton was born the son of cavalry officer James Hugh Angleton and his Mexican wife Carmen Mercedes Moreno. In the 1930s, the family moved to Milan, where Angleton's father ran the Italian branch of NCR Corporation . After studying at Malvern College , Yale University and Harvard , Angleton was enlisted by the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), of which his father was a member, and served in the X2 London office from 1941-42. In 1943 he was transferred to Italy and at the end of the war became head of the counter-espionage unit in Rome. After a stay in Washington, D. C. Angleton became chief OSS and X2 for Italy in the late 1940s. Back in Washington he was employed in various successor organizations of the OSS and one of the founding officers of the Central Intelligence Agency. In 1949, Angleton became Chief Staff A of the Office of Special Operations, a department responsible for acquiring intelligence from abroad and linked to the counter-espionage departments. Angleton maintained good relations with Israel's Mossad and the Shin Bet until the end of his career .

Because of his experiences with Donald Maclean , Kim Philby (whom Angleton knew personally but was unable to uncover) and Jack Dunlap, he developed an almost obsessive tendency to look for traitors in his own ranks. The jump of the KGB officers Anatoly Mikhailovich Golitsyn and Yuri Ivanovich Nossenko and their - sometimes questionable - information reinforced Angleton's concern about moles in their own organization.

In 1963 Angleton headed " Operation CHAOS ", in which civil rights activists and opponents of the war were unconstitutionally monitored (and bypassing the FBI actually responsible ).

resignation

Angleton's resignation was announced at Christmas 1974. Three of Angleton's senior counterintelligence officers, his deputy Raymond Rocca, William J. Hood, and Angleton's chief of operations, Newton S. Miller, have been pushed into retirement. Counterintelligence was reduced from 300 to 80 employees.

Angleton was fond of poetry, especially Ezra Pound , with whom he corresponded, and Thomas Stearns Eliot . He dealt with gems and with orchid cultivation .

Assessment and artistic reception

Former Central Intelligence Agency director Richard Helms said of Angleton: "At the time, Jim was seen as the dominant counter-espionage figure in the non-communist world." Journalist Edward Jay Epstein says Angleton had the trust of six CIA directors, including Walter Bedell Smith , Allen W. Dulles and Richard Helms, who would have filled key positions with him and who would have appreciated his work.

John le Carré goes into his 1991 foreword to the novel Dame, König, As, Spion (which is about the hunt for a mole in the British secret service) and says about Angleton's paranoia that the Soviet Union has a high-ranking agent in the CIA, which would have enabled her to actually lead it, that this assumption was wrong, but the effects of this paranoia were no less catastrophic than he was right. According to Le Carré, this paranoia paralyzed the CIA as much as Philby's betrayal paralyzed British intelligence.

His myth-shrouded personality served as a model for numerous works of literature.

Norman Mailer was inspired by Angleton for his character Hugh Montague in Harlot's Ghost . The super spy Eliot in David Morrell's novel The Brotherhood of the Rose is also based on Angleton, as is the character “Mother” in Orchids for Mother by Aaron Latham . The film The Good Shepherd 2006 (dt. The Good Shepherd ) is a free variation of Angleton's life story. Angleton is also a central figure in the novel The Company by Robert Littell , which was filmed in 2007 under the name The Company - Commissioned by the CIA . In Forgiveness (Swedish Luftslottet som sprängdes , 2007) by Stieg Larsson , Angleton is also prominently mentioned.

literature

  • Jefferson Morley: The Ghost: The Secret Life of CIA Spymaster James Jesus Angleton , Melbourne / London (Scribe Publications) 2017. ISBN 978-1911344735
  • Tom Mangold: Cold Warrior: James Jesus Angleton. The CIA's Master Spy Hunter . New York: Simon & Schuster 1991
  • David C. Martin, Wilderness of Mirrors: Intrigue, Deception, and the Secrets that Destroyed Two of the Cold War's Most Important Agents . Guilford: The Lyons Press 2003
  • David Wise: Molehunt: The Secret Search for Traitors that Shattered the CIA . New York: Random House 1992
  • Richard Helms : A Look Over my Shoulder: A Life in the Central Intelligence Agency . New York: Random House 2003
  • Terence Hawkes: William Empson's influence on the CIA . Times Literary Supplement, Jun 12, 2009, pp. 3-5.
  • Michael Holzman: James Jesus Angleton, the CIA and the Craft of Counterintelligence . University of Massachusetts Press 2008

Movie

  • Ready for action - Nazis and fascists on behalf of the CIA, direction and script: Dirk Pohlman

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Richard Helms, A Look over My Shoulder: A Life in the Central Intelligence Agency (New York: Random House, 2003), p. 275. In the original: “In his day, Jim was recognized as the dominant counterintelligence figure in the non -communist world. "
  2. ^ Edward Jay Epstein: Opening Up the CIA. Espionage, covers action and the trouble with 'dangles' (English) . In: Wall Street Journal online , Wall Street Journal. Archived from the original on December 21, 2008. 
  3. ↑ Dame, König, As, Spion, p. 9, Berlin 2012, List, ISBN 978-3-548-61077-1 .
personal data
SURNAME Angleton, James Jesus
ALTERNATIVE NAMES The Kingfisher (nickname)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American intelligence officer, long-time chief of the counterintelligence department of the CIA
DATE OF BIRTH December 9, 1917
PLACE OF BIRTH Boise , Idaho
DATE OF DEATH May 12, 1987
Place of death Washington