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James Jesus Angleton

Secretive and suspicious, James Jesus Angleton had a compulsive approach to anything he took on — whether hunting spies, raising orchids, or catching trout. He believed the values of Western democracies left them vulnerable to intelligence attack — especially deception — and so he sat on some actionable information if he thought it was unverifiable or counterfeit. Angleton often was arrogant, tactless, dismissive, and even threatening toward professional colleagues who disagreed with him.

No Agency officer who knew Angleton or worked with others who did can recall anyone ever calling him "Mother". Angleton's other supposed monikers - including "Virginia Slim," "Skinny Jim," "the Gray Ghost," "the Black Knight," "the Orchid Man," "the Fisherman," and "Scarecrow" - were uttered (if at all) only in men's room and corridor chit-chats or were attached to him in later years by imaginative interviewees. The "wilderness of mirrors," an expression that Angleton borrowed from the poet T.S. Eliot, has become a cliche for counterintelligence generally and Angleton's idiosyncratic view of Soviet operations specifically. Some said he was a paranoid who effectively shut down Agency operations against the Soviet Union for years during his Ahab-like quest for the mole in CIA. Distracted by unsubstantiated theories of Soviet “strategic deception,” Angleton and his staff embarked on counterproductive and sometimes harmful efforts to find moles and prove Moscow’s malevolent designs.

James “Jim” Angleton was born in Boise, Idaho, on December 9, 1917. His parents — James Hugh Angleton and Carmen Mercedes Moreno — met when his father was serving as a cavalry officer during the Mexican Revolution. The younger Angleton grew up mostly in Italy, where his father owned the National Cash Register subsidiary. During his time at Yale, Angleton took an interest in literature and poetry and edited the school's literary magazine “Furioso,” which published poetry by the likes of E. E. Cummings and Ezra Pound. Angleton graduated from Yale in 1941 and enrolled at Harvard Law School. Angleton did not finish law school because he was drafted into the U.S. Army in March 1943. During training he was singled out for an interview and offered the chance to work with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) — the predecessor to today’s CIA.

Angleton accepted the opportunity and was assigned to the X-2 Branch, responsible for counterintelligence. By October 1945, when OSS was liquidated, its counterintelligence branch, X-2, had become a widespread net of overseas stations staffed by some 650 counterintelligence specialists. In 1954, Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) Allen Dulles asked Angleton to become head of the Counterintelligence Staff. Angleton remained in this position for the rest of his career at the Agency.

Angleton ardently supported Israel; his control of that country’s account at CIA, an administrative anomaly, was one of the foundations of his influence. He saw Israel as a bastion against the Soviet Union. Angleton’s relationship with the Israelis paid off when the Shin Bet provided him a transcript of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s confidential 1956 speech denouncing his predecessor, Joseph Stalin.

Angleton began to lose his sense of proportion and his ability to live with uncertainty right around the time, 1959–63, when it became startlingly evident — agents compromised, operations blown, spies uncovered — that something was seriously amiss with Western intelligence and more aggressive CI and security were needed.11 Given the Soviets’ record of success at penetration and deception operations going back to the 1920s, and with no current evidence to the contrary, Angleton was justified in presuming CIA also was victimized.

Angleton was involved with debriefing two famous KGB defectors: Anatoly Golitsyn and Yuri Nosenko. In 1961, KGB Maj. Anatoly Golitsyn defected to the United States and was interviewed by Angleton. Angleton found Golitsyn to be a source of accurate information. Golitsyn claimed that the CIA had been infiltrated by the KGB. He also said that another defector would be sent to discredit his information and support the mole’s credibility. Angleton believed Golitsyn and began a mole hunt inside the Agency.

KGB officer Yuri Nosenko made contact with the CIA in 1962, but was not heard from again until 1964 when he defected. During his debriefing, he provided information that contradicted intelligence gathered from Golitsyn’s interviews. Because Angleton declared Golitysn a genuine source, he concluded that Nosenko was a false defector who couldn't be believed. After President John F. Kennedy's assassination on November 22, 1963, the US government briefly suspected that the Soviet Union might have perpetrated the crime. During Nosenko’s debriefing, he made a startling disclosure: he had been assigned to watch assassin Lee Harvey Oswald when Oswald defected to the Soviet Union (1959-1962). Nosenko said the KGB declined to work with Oswald after determining he was unstable.

Nosenko's surprise decision to defect to the United States and his news that Oswald was not a KGB asset seemed too convenient for Angleton and other Agency officials. If Nosenko was found to be a dispatched agent, it would suggest that Moscow had ordered the murder of an American president – probably a casus belli for the United States. Consequently, Nosenko was detained for several years when it appeared to CIA officials that he might be hiding a Soviet role in the assassination.

Moreover, Nosenko contradicted Golitsyn, Angleton's key source on the KGB. Golitsyn claimed that Nosenko was a disinformation agent sent both to discredit him and to hide Moscow's hand in President Kennedy's death.

A few years later, the CIA decided that Nosenko was telling the truth, but Angleton never changed his mind. Despite being detained for more than three years, Nosenko never changed his story. Nosenko was eventually released and compensated.

Angleton was among the first, and very few, CIA officers to be read into the highly compartmented VENONA material, the SIGINT operation against Soviet intelligence organizations in the United States. The "Years of the Spies" from 1959 to 1963 - one of the bleakest periods in Cold War counterintelligence history showed to Angleton that the Soviets had badly penetrated several Western services:

1. 1959 Pyotr Popov (CIA source in GRU) arrested
2. 1960 Martin and Mitchell (NSA officers) defect to USSR
3. 1961 George Blake (KGB mole in MI-6) arrested
4. 1961 Portland Ring in United Kingdom rolled up
5. 1962 Heinz Felfe (KGB mole in BND) arrested
6. 1962 Oleg Penkovsky (CIA source in GRU) arrested
7. 1963 Philby (MI-6) and Hamilton (;.JSA) defect to USSR
8. 1963 Jack Dunlap (GRU source in NSA) commits suicide before arrest
9. 1963 Stig Wennerstrom (GRU spy in Swedish military) arrested
10. 1963 Profumo Affair (involving GRU "honey trap") in UK disclosed

Angleton's detractors accused him of willfully ignoring reality, notably Yugoslav leader Josef Tito's break with Moscow and the Sino-Soviet split. Although early opinion inside the Agency and the U.S. Government was sharply divided over how to interpret signs of Russian-Chinese estrangement, by the mid-1960s only a few holdouts - Angleton among them - still denied or downplayed extensive evidence that the split was deep and would last.

Angleton's notorious "search for Sasha" combined methodological and psychological elements that proved incompatible and destructive. The molehunt gained momentum from mid-1963 to late 1964 for what in retrospect seem justifiable reasons. Acting on Golitsyn's vague leads, Angleton did find a mole. But because he was not as senior or as damaging as Angleton had thought, and was no longer working for CIA, Angleton continued to search for the "primary mole" supposedly still inside Langley. Along the way, 40 Agency officers were put on the suspect list and 14 were thoroughly investigated. Although innocent, all had their careers damaged by the "security stigma."

Angleton was compelled to find the mole inside the CIA, as asserted by Golitsyn. Along the way, this hunt damaged many Agency officers' careers and tarnished Angleton’s reputation. His CI Staff, which at one time had a few hundred employees, was surprisingly thin on Soviet field expertise. But the large Soviet Division - with around 900 staffers, including over 600 posted overseas l5 - continued to handle defectors and run new operations while its recruits were under greater CI scrutiny and some of its officers were under investigation. Other projects were terminated, but not necessarily because Angleton objected; throughout the 1960s, the Soviet espionage division dropped a number of unproductive activities as part of a change in emphases, particularly after a leadership shakeup in the late 1960s.

Angleton knew that the Soviets had badly tricked Western services twice in sophisticated, very similar "false flag" operations run thirty years apart: the Trust and WiN. The Soviets used the Trust from 1921 to 1927 against White Russian emigre groups abroad. The program used a bogus anti-Bolshevik organization (the Monarchist Association of Central Russia) to penetrate. control. and disrupt the intelligence and political activities of more than one million expatriate dissidents. In the early 19505. the Soviets used a formerly authentic dissident group in Poland Wolnosc I Nepodleglosc ("Freedom and Independence" and known by its acronym WiN), to convince the CIA and MI-6 to airdrop money, ordnance, and radios to supposed WiN elements all over Poland.

When he was appointed to head the Soviet Division in the late 1960s, William Colby received Angleton's famous "brietlng" about KGB operations. After listening to Angleton's theories and looking at his charts and diagrams, Colby left not only unpersuaded of the immediate threat but also doubting the effectiveness of the CI Staff.

David Wise, the doyen of intelligence journalists, focused "Molehunt" on the search for “Sasha” — the alleged Soviet mole inside the CIA. Wise revealed details about the penetration agent, who did not damage CIA nearly as much as Angleton feared or as the molehunt itself did. William F. Buckley, Jr., resuscitated the unoriginal idea that William Colby, who fired Angleton, was the long-sought Soviet mole in CIA (and, more imaginatively, the “Fifth Man” in the Cambridge spy ring). Colby later wrote: "we seemed to be putting more emphasis on the KGB as CIA's adversary than on the Soviet Union as the United States' adversary".

One of Angleton's officers using the same logic that had discredited several victims of the molehunt concluded that Angleton himself was a Soviet agent.

Angleton's thirty-year intelligence career came to an sudden end because of public disclosures of two dubious domestic operations that his CI Staff had been conducting: intercepting mail sent between the United States and the Soviet Union (codenamed HTLINGUAL) and spying on American antiwar protestors (MHCHAOS). A sensational New York Times front-page story by Seymour Hersh in December 1974 about CIA domestic operations prompted Angleton’s dismissal. Angleton was fired in December 1974 amidst the "Family Jewels" scandal, and as details of the Nosenko case and the molehunt became widely known inside and outside the Agency, his theories and methods fell into disrepute.

He used the Security and Intelligence Fund as a forum for publicizing his views about Soviet "active measures." Until 1982 he worked at the American Security Council, a conservative defense lobby group that, like him, opposed rapprochement with the Soviet Union. Edward Jay Epstein, author of Legend and Deception [Legend: The Secret World of Lee Harvey Oswald (New York: McGraw Hill, 1978); Deception: The Invisible War Between the KGB and the CIA (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989)] became Angleton's most prolific ally in his post-dismissal, behind-the-scenes campaign for vindication. In Legend, Epstein first publicized the clashes inside the CIA over the bona fides of KGB defector Yuri Nosenko and drew attention to the "strategic deception" theories of Angleton and his prize source, KGB defector Anatoli Golitsyn.

Angleton died of lung cancer 12 years later on May 12, 1987.

Five current or former CIA employees began spying against the United States in the decade after Angleton's departure and the change in counterintelligence philosophy. Congressional investigations reached damning conclusions about the state of post-Angleton counterintelligence: "despite verbal acknowledgment that some espionage losses have been truly devastating and have negated enormous defense investments, top managers remain unwilling to budget relatively modest sums for improved counterintelligence and security measures that would help protect much larger investments;" the U.S. Government's counterintelligence had "basic flaws" and was "poorly organized, staffed, trained, and equipped to deal with continuing counterintelligence challenges."67 In response to the "Year of the Spy," the CLI\. created the Counterintelligence Center (CiC) to draw together and give prominence to CI operations and analysis. To some Agency veterans, the move sounded familiar.

In the late 1980s, the CIA's slowness to accept the fact that one of its own - Aldrich Ames - had gone bad was attributable in part to its leaders' reluctance to be cast as Angletonian inquisitors. The Agency's first response to Ames's arrest was heavy-handed overreliance on polygraphs that left many Agency officers languishing in a security limbo, and the FBI's horrendous handling of the Robert Hanssen case ­ especially the vehemence with which it pursued an innocent CIA officer based on the flimsiest of coincidences - was reminiscent of Angleton at his worst.