James Jesus Angleton

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James Jesus Angleton
"The Kingfisher"
James Jesus Angleton
Allegiance	United States
Service	CIA United States Army
Rank	Counter Intelligence (CI) Chief
Operation(s)	Enigma Code Manhattan Project Israeli nuclear weapon program Operation CHAOS CHAOS Program
Award(s)	Distinguished Intelligence Medal
Codename(s)	"Hugh Ashmead"
	KU/MOTHER
Born	December 9, 1917(1917-12-09)
Died	May 12, 1987 (aged 69)
Nationality	American
Alma mater	Yale University, Harvard Law School

James Jesus Angleton (December 9, 1917 – May 12, 1987), known to 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 Counter-Intelligence/ADDOCI). Angleton's internal CIA cryptonym (codename) was KU/MOTHER. His cover name was Hugh Ashmead.

Angleton is notable for his long tenure as the CIA's foremost "spy catcher" (as chief of counter-intelligence), but also for being deceived by the Soviet spy, Kim Philby. When Philby's associates in Britain's Secret Services, MacLean and Burgess, defected, it eventually became apparent that Philby had engaged in long-term espionage in both the US and the U.K, directly under the noses of counter-intelligence authorities, including Angleton. Angleton's faith in his abilities was deeply shaken by Philby's success. From that point onward, Angleton was increasingly convinced that CIA was penetrated by other Soviet moles.

A poetry aficionado with known ties to Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, and an avid fly-fisherman, gemologist and orchid-breeder, Angleton functioned as principal adviser to successive Directors of the CIA, most notably Allen Dulles and Richard Helms. 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.

According to former CIA officer Robert Baer: "Angleton was truly a bit of a lunatic. He fancied himself as a serious poet. He was half-Mexican [via his mother], very tall and gangly, a raconteur who could stay up all night talking. In fact, he fairly well destroyed the CIA single-handedly because of his paranoia. He put a security system into place that ensures even today that CIA people work in a bubble, isolated from the way the world works."^[1] Former Director of Central Intelligence Richard Helms had this to say about Angleton in his autobiography: "In his day, Jim was recognized as the dominant counterintelligence figure in the non-communist world."^[2] 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."^[3]

Contents 1 Early life 2 CIA career 2.1 Manhattan Project and Jack Dunlap 2.2 Rise in influence in the CIA 2.3 Golitsyn and Nosenko 2.4 Increasing paranoia 2.5 Resignation 3 Legacy 4 CIA Family Jewels 5 In popular culture 6 References 7 See also 8 External links

[edit] Early life

James Angleton was born in Boise, Idaho to 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 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.^[4]

Angleton 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 came under the tutelage of British intelligence agents such as Kim Philby (Philby was already a mole for the Soviet Union). Angleton is believed to have had access to Ultra, the decryption operation which successfully cracked iterations of the Enigma code, significantly affecting the German U-boat campaign in the Atlantic Ocean.

Angleton 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 later became part of the Central Intelligence Agency under the National Security Act of 1947.

While in Rome, Angleton 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 grasp of classified material acquired through Ultra enabled him to guide American interrogations 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, benefited the Allied war effort, and propelled Angleton upward.

[edit] CIA career

CIA recruited him shortly before 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.

[edit] Manhattan Project and Jack Dunlap

Much of the intelligence which helped the Soviets develop the hydrogen bomb was routed through the Soviet agent and MI5 officer Donald Duart Maclean, with whom Angleton was acquainted from his ties to MI5. Philby, in his capacity as head of counter-intelligence for the British embassy in Washington, D.C., assisted Maclean in escaping capture by the Americans and British by facilitating Maclean's defection to the USSR. It is possible 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 allege 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 pertaining to deciphering and interception operations. For a variety of legal reasons and for reasons pertaining to intelligence, it would have been difficult to arrest and to prosecute Dunlap.[1] His suicide, contrived or not, resolved a contentious and damaging penetration of US intelligence.

[edit] Rise in influence in the CIA

Beginning in 1951 Angleton was responsible for liaison with Israel's Mossad and Shin Bet agencies, crucial relationships that he managed for the remainder of his career. It has been claimed that, in this capacity, Angleton directed CIA assistance to the Israeli nuclear weapons program (See Samuel Katz, Soldier Spies, 1992)

In 1954 Allen Dulles, who had recently become Director of Central Intelligence, 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.

During 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 Joseph Stalin, which the CIA made public for reasons of propaganda. Angleton, who obtained a copy of the speech from the Israeli Shin Bet,^[5] is said to have then leaked doctored versions of the speech to certain foreign governments in a disinformation campaign. Angleton later admitted that this claim was itself disinformation, and that his effort to circulate a doctored version of the speech was thwarted by others in the CIA leadership.

[edit] Golitsyn and Nosenko

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 after the defection of Anatoliy Golitsyn in 1961, although it was not proven beyond all doubt 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." Philby also 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 FBI agent, who had voiced his suspicions regarding Philby and others that 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 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.

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 their services 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 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 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.

[edit] Increasing paranoia

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 that 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 directly draw upon Golitsyn.

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 the 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. These types of activities were the very same that the CIA was fomenting in other countries, so it was not outlandish to presume the existence of foreign support and influence.

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^{[citation needed]} 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. Colby's demand for Angleton's resignation was therefore opportunist. None of Angleton's supposed violations were included in the subsequent Rockefeller Commission report.^{[citation needed]}

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 that Prime Minister Lester Pearson and his successor Pierre Trudeau were 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. Interestingly, Brandt later had to resign because one of his aides was found to be a mole from the East German secret police, the Stasi. Angleton came to suspect Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who wryly 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 treason. Angleton's 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 others of working for the Soviets.

[edit] 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. A friend of Hersh's immediately laughed off this claim, telling Hersh that Angleton's wife had left him years ago and had since returned—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 fisherman 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.

[edit] 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 Nazi 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.

“	Deception is a state of mind and the mind of the State.	”
— James Angleton[6][7]

In time, Angleton's zeal and paranoia were 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 that this overcompensation was responsible for the oversights that 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 bounced back fast from the embarrassments of the Church Committee, 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, for example, 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.[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. 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 European 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.

[edit] CIA Family Jewels

The recently released internal CIA investigation prompted by the 1970s Church Committee 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.[3]

[edit] 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. Angleton appears in Chris Petit's novel The Passenger (novel).

• The 2006 film The Good Shepherd 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 proceeding the 1988 terrorist attack on a Pan-American airplane that exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland.

• The three part 2007 TNT Network television miniseries The Company features Angleton (portrayed by actor Michael Keaton) and his failure to recognize Kim Philby as a Soviet spy and his subsequent over-compensating mole-hunting paranoia.

• 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 West.

• The 2003 BBC TV production of Cambridge Spies includes several scenes with a young James Jesus Angleton depicted as being assigned to Kim Philby during the war.

• The Bob Howard-Laundry Series of Charles Stross 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 Rush. Lyricist/Drummer Neil Peart used the phrase in the song "Double Agent," and cites both Angleton and T. S. Eliot 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 Wilson.

[edit] References

[edit] See also

• Jim Skardon

[edit] 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).