James Jesus Angleton
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James Jesus Angleton (December 9, 1917 - May 12, 1987), known to friends and colleagues as Jim and nicknamed "the Kingfisher," was the long-serving director of the CIA's counter-intelligence division, an occasional poetry aficionado, and an avid fly-fisherman and orchid-grower.
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Life and career
Angleton was born in Boise, Idaho. His father, James Hugh Angleton, was a cavalry officer who worked for NCR and later joined the OSS. His parents met in Mexico (his mother, Carmen Mercedes Moreno, was a Mexican citizen; his middle name comes from his maternal grandfather and accordingly follows the Spanish pronunication) while his father was serving under General John "Black Jack" Pershing. He 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, E. Reed Whittemore, Jr., that 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 MI5 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. 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 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.
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 the Soviet nuclear weapons program with its probable reliance on technology leaked from the American Manhattan Project. 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, DC, assisted in escaping capture by the Americans and British with his 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.
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 Kruschev's 1956 speech to the Soviet Party Congress denouncing Josef Stalin, which the agency made public for its immense propaganda value. Angleton is further said to have then leaked doctored versions of the speech to numerous foreign government in a disinformation campaign, although Angleton is said to have admitted that this claim was itself disinformation he kept in circulation and that this effort was refused by others in the CIA leadership.
It is thought that the combination of Angleton's close association with Philby and Philby's effective duplicity caused Angleton to develop a profound paranoia that may have been clinical and advanced. It was only with the defection of Anatoliy Golitsyn in 1961 that Philby was confirmed as a Soviet model, although this was not adequately corroborated until 1963 (Philby eluded those sent to capture him and defected). 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 this 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, 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 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's 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 U2 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 Oswald claim improbable given his familiarity with the U2 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 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 FBI, the United States Intelligence Board and select members of Congress were all appraised of the detention.) Nosenko never changed his story. He 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 curtal severely counterintelligence cooperation between the FBI and CIA for the remainder of his service as the FBI's director.
As Golitsyn helped Angleton identify sections within the Soviet Russian Division that were leaking 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 unwittingly to 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 unabled 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. 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 marshall 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 not able to directly draw upon Golitsyn.
In the period of the Vietnam War and then detente, Angleton was convinced of the necessity of the war and believed that the strategic calculations underlying the resumption of relations with China was based on a KGB staging of the Sino-Soviet. He went so far as to speculate that Henry Kissinger might be under KGB influence. DCI William Colby, who was reorganizing the CIA in an effort to curb Angleton's influence (beginning with stripping him of control over the Israeli "account"), with the concommitant effect of weakening counter-intelligence, demanded his resignation, after Seymout 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 against antiwar protesters and other domestic dissidents organizations under Angleton's direction, in violation of the CIA Charter and the National Security Act, which assigned all such domestic functions to the FBI (none of these violations were included in the subsequent Rockefeller Commission report). These activities resulted in the generation of 10,000 case files on American citizens and included such information collection activities 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 was directed funds diverted to them by the CIA). The intelligence so gathered was said to have been reported directly to DCI Helms.
Angleton's resignation was announced on Christmas Eve, just as the President demanded Colby report on the allegations and various Congressional committees announced they would launch their own inquiries. Angleton was never prosecuted for his involvement in these activities. Three of Angleton's senior aides in counter-intelligence, Raymond Rocca, Angleton's deputy, William J. Hood, the executive officer of the counter-intelligence division, and Newton S. Miller, his chief of operations, were coaxed into retirement within a week of his resignation after it was made cleared 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 his wife, Cicely, had left him as a result of the story (a friend of Hersh's immediately laughed off this claim, telling Hersch 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 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. The two 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.
Angleton died of lung cancer in Washington's Sibley Hospital on May 12, 1987. He was survived by a son, James Charles Angleton, and two daughters, Guru Sangat Kaur and Lucy d'Autremont Angleton.
Legacy
Angleton's zeal and paranoia was regarded as counter-productive, if not destructive, for the CIA. In the wake of his departure, counterintelligence efforts were undertaken with far less zeal. It is thought that this overcompensation is responsible for the oversights which allowed Aldrich Ames, Robert Hanssen, and others to compromise the CIA and American intelligence community generally long after his departure. Edward Jay Epstein is among those who have argued (http://www.edwardjayepstein.com/question_angleton.htm) that the positions of Ames and Hanssen (well-placed Soviet counterintelligence agents in both the CIA and FBI) would collectively allow the KGB to deceive in the American intelligence community in the manner he 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 — 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 Team B analysis was shown to be the more accurate of the two, but only after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union); the Church Commission brought no small number of skeletons out the Agency's closet. The organization inherited by Admiral Stansfield Turner on his appointment as DCI by President Carter in 1977 was shortly to face further cuts, and Turner used Angleton as a totem for the excesses in the Agency he hoped to curb, both during his service and in his memoirs.
A handful 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, under what Agency employees have called the "Mole Relief Act". 120 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.
Angleton and conspiracy theory
Angleton is a recurring figure in swaths of conspiracy theory. His awareness of if not involvement CIA efforts to rehabilitate various agents of the Third Reich (the Nazis had no shortage of deeply convinced anti-Communists who did in fact work for the CIA and other Western governments after the war, with some thereby avoiding or at least deferring prosecution for war crimes and crimes against humanity) contributes to projected roles in assisting ODESSA and the rat line. His involvement with the Mossad contributes to projected roles in assisting ZOG or other would-be elements of Zionist or other Jewish world domination schemes and regimes produced by antisemites. His involvement in the defection of Nosenko and awareness of Nosenko's claims about Soviet control of Oswald, as well as later published remarks about the Mafia and the Church Commission, as well as accounts of his involvement in covering up CIA involvement in the Kennedy assassination (he was the primary CIA contact for inquiries into the Kennedy assassination after the CIA completed an initial investigation in December 1963), contribute to theories about awareness of, if not involvement in that assassination on his and the CIA's part. Angleton was said to have been personally convinced of some KGB role in the Dallas assassination. Golitsyn's claims about Soviet duplicity in faking their own collapse have been taken by some to be prophetic. Angleton has also been identified in various UFO literature, including material about Project Blue Book. There are also claims, themselves possibly conspiracy theory, that Angleton accused William Colby and/or Gerald Ford of being KGB agents, which would almost certainly be conspiracy theory on his part. It has also been said that Angleton was either homo- or bisexual and was in fact under the control of the KGB, who were blackmailing him.
Norman Mailer loosely based his character Hugh Montague (or Harlot) in [[Harlot's Ghost]] (1991) on Angleton.
Code and cover names
Angleton's internal CIA code was KU/MOTHER. His cover name was Hugh Ashmead.
Secondary Sources
- "Huge CIA Operation Reported in US against Antiwar Forces, Other Dissidents During Nixon Years," Seymour Hersh, New York Times, December 22, 1974
- "President Tells Colby to Speed Report on CIA," Seymour Hersh, New York Times, December 24, 1974
- "3 More Aides Quit in CIA Shake-Up," Seymour Hersh, New York Times, December 30, 1974
- "The Angleton Story," Seymour Hersh, New York Times, June 25, 1978
- Wilderness of Mirrors, (ISBN 1585748242) David C. Martin, 1980
- "James Angleton, Counterintelligence Figure, Dies," New York Times, May 12, 1987
- Deception: the Invisible War between the CIA and the KGB, (ISBN 0671415433) Edward Jay Epstein, 1989
- Cold Warrior: James Jesus Angleton and the CIA's Master Spy Hunter, (ISBN 0671662732) Tom Mangold, 1991
- Molehunt: the Secret Search for Traitor that Shattered the CIA, David Wise, 1992
- Orchids for Mother (ISBN 0553254073): Fictional account of Angleton by Aaron Latham
- The Company (ISBN 0142002623): Fictional history of the CIA during the Cold War
External links
- a general overview of Angleton's career with some useful citations (http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/SSangleton.htm)
- article on Angleton and Golitsyn from Edward Jay Epstein's web site (http://www.edwardjayepstein.com/archived/looking.htm)
- article on Stansfield Turner from Edward Jay Epstein's web site, including references to Angleton (http://www.edwardjayepstein.com/archived/whokilled.htm)
- Tom Mangold did a story on Angleton for the PBS program Frontline (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/programs/info/919.html)
- useful background information mixed in with UFO tinfoil hat material (http://www.rense.com/politics6/secret.htm)