HONETOL
Angleton pushed for a joint CIA-FBI operation to expose Soviet spies within the American intelligence community and named it HONETOL, an odd combination of J. Edgar Hoover's last name and Anatoliy Golitsyn's first name. Golitsyn singled out forty CIA officers as possible moles. Of these, fourteen were closely investigated.
The year 1980 was not entirely one of wine and roses for the Angletonians because Wilderness of Mirrors, written by David Martin, also appeared. Now considered a classic of intelligence literature, the book was the product of more than two years of interviewing CIA retirees, including Angleton. The latter at first favored the author with many secrets but then cut him off when he learned Martin was also in touch with Angleton's CIA critics.
One of these was Clare E. Petty, who had worked on Angleton's staff and accepted his conspiracy theories but by this time had concluded his boss was either a giant fraud or a KGB agent. Martin originally intended to publish Petty's view in Newsweek but abandoned that plan when Angieton threatened legal action. Wilderness of Mirrors exposed Golitsyn as an unimportant defector who caused more trouble than he was worth, suggested Nosenko was genuine, and punched many holes in the Angieton myth. Publication provoked a lengthy and denunciatory review by Epstein in The New York Times and a long public statement by Angieton claiming Martin had robbed him of his phrase "wilderness of mirrors." In fact, Angleton had himself lifted it from "Gerontion," a poem by T.S. Eliot.
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