Paul Simpson - A Brief History of the Spy

James Jesus Angleton, chief of counter-intelligence for the CIA from 1954 to 1975, has been seen by some as a scapegoat for the Agency’s problems; to others, the way in which he was allowed to operate epitomizes what was wrong with the Agency during this period. Even the CIA themselves describe him as ‘one of the most influential and divisive intelligence officers in US history’.

Angleton was recruited into the OSS in 1943, and served with the counter-intelligence branches in London and Rome, finishing the Second World War as chief of counter-intelligence operations in Italy. He remained there until 1947 and then became the liaison between the new CIA and other western counter-intelligence organizations, notably Shin Bet and Mossad, the agencies for the new country of Israel. In 1954 he was appointed to the role at CIA headquarters that he held until his departure. Although charming in a social context, in business he was described as ‘arrogant, tactless, dismissive, and even threatening’ to those who disagreed with him.

It was Angleton who managed to get hold of a copy of Nikita Khruschev’s denunciation of Stalin in 1956, via his Israeli contacts, when no one else had been able to obtain it. Angleton was utterly convinced that the Soviet Union was implacably hostile towards the West and, on top of that, as far as he was concerned, international Communism was monolithic. He didn’t believe that the Sino-Soviet split of 1960 was genuine, but was simply part of an elaborate disinformation campaign, and it was a firm tenet that the KGB had penetrated all of the Western agencies.

Angleton’s interactions with two KGB spies informed this opinion. He had been friendly with Kim Philby during the forties: the two met regularly when Philby was stationed in Washington from 1949 onwards, to the extent that their weekly dinner meetings were known as ‘The Kim and Jim Show’. When Philby’s treachery became obvious after the defection of Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean in 1951, Angleton spent the next few years deconstructing his former friend’s career, and realized that his various promotions had been part of a Soviet plan. If Philby could reach a situation where he was being seriously talked of as a future head of MI6, there could well be other agents. As a result, DCI Allen Dulles agreed to the establishment of the counter-intelligence section.

The other agent was Anatoli Golitsyn. While many regarded him as — to put it politely — a fantastist, his tales of KGB infiltration of the entire Western intelligence operation (which he didn’t start to mention until sometime after his defection) fit in precisely with Angleton’s way of thinking. Golitsyn claimed that British prime minister Harold Wilson was a KGB agent; by the end of his time at the Agency, Angleton would add Swedish prime minster Olaf Palme and West German chancellor Willy Brandt to that list (Brandt of course wasn’t the source of any leaks — it was his assistant Günter Guillaume).

In 1962, shortly after Golitsyn’s defection, Angleton moved to the new CIA building at Langley and set up the Special Investigation Group (the SIG), searching for KGB influence within the Agency. To the surprise of many, Angleton accepted Golitsyn’s claims at face value. It reached a point where the SIG would pass Golitsyn its case files for evaluation, and the Russian would ‘finger’ specific individuals as likely agents, a practice that later CIA officers found hard to credit.

This meant that when Yuri Nosenko defected, and his claims often contradicted Golitsyn (notably about the presence of a KGB spy within the CIA itself), the newcomer was ignored. The drastic treatment that Nosenko received at the CIA’s hands was because Angleton and like-minded colleagues refused to believe he wasn’t a KGB plant. Only when new DCI Richard Helms intervened and ordered a review of the evidence was Nosenko exonerated.

Angleton’s methods antagonized his colleagues, and many believed that he was speculating about likely Soviet agents, rather than bringing actual proof. The case that Angleton made regarding one particular agent, interrogated in 1968, was described as ‘the last piece of reasoning you would bring into a case where you already had evidence. But it’s certainly not the kind of thing that you would start off a case with.’ The paranoia that Angleton fostered even resulted in one of the counter-intelligence chief’s analysts accusing Angleton himself of being a Soviet spy.

Golitsyn maintained that there was one specific spy at the heart of the CIA, code-named Sasha, prompting what became known as the Great Molehunt. (The connection to John le Carré’s character George Smiley’s most famous mission in the novel Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy becomes more apt when one considers the description given of Angleton in 1980: ‘If John le Carré and Graham Greene had collaborated on a superspy, the result might have been James Jesus Angleton.’) Among the forty or so CIA officers who Angleton focused his suspicions upon was Richard Kovich (born Dushan Kovacevich) whose career was ruined by Angleton’s actions — despite placing bugs in Kovich’s home and finding nothing, Angleton still sought to prevent his promotion. After Angleton’s enforced retirement, CIA analysts spent three years going through the papers he had compiled — he refused to allow his material to be computerised, or otherwise indexed — and found not one shred of hard evidence to back up his notion that there was a mole.

Angleton’s suspicions extended to personnel in other countries’ intelligence agencies as well. Welsh-born agent Leslie James (‘Jim’) Bennett had served in British intelligence in Istanbul alongside Kim Philby, as well as Melbourne, Australia, before heading to Canada, eventually becoming deputy chief of the counter-espionage branch of the RCMP. Although Bennett’s service record wasn’t particularly outstanding — he suffered various setbacks that he ascribed in part to the KGB having a spy within the RCMP — he was invited to be part of the team debriefing Golitsyn. However, when he started to disagree with Angleton, the CIA chief opened a file on him, with allegations mounting to such a level that Bennett had to resign in July 1972. After Angleton’s departure from the CIA, no evidence was found against Bennett. Vitaly Yurchenko, a later defector, confirmed that the KGB spy had been Giles G. Brunet, not Bennett.

Much as Angleton’s behaviour upset those he worked with — although his counter-intelligence section continued to provide the goods, which meant that successive DCIs backed him — the public revelation of two operations that his department carried out brought his career to an end, and contributed to the bad odour with which the Agency became surrounded in the mid-seventies.

An operation had begun in 1952 in an effort to see if Soviet agents were communicating with the USSR via the US mail, and whether there might be any Soviets writing to American citizens who could become potential assets for the CIA. Originally only copying addresses from envelopes, in 1955 the operation was renamed HTLINGUAL and the letters within the envelopes were opened — in contravention of American law, although some of the Postmasters General over the two decades were informed of the operation by the CIA. The FBI had been a party to HTLINGUAL initially, although they stopped taking an active role in 1966. A similar operation, code-named CHAOS, began in 1967 in response to President Johnson’s desire to know if the anti-Vietnam War movement was being used by the Communists.

While Angleton and his counter-intelligence team regarded this work as ‘foreign surveillance’, the cold reality was that the post opened was travelling to and from American citizens. The CIA did not have a remit to operate domestically within the United States — its participation in ‘internal security functions’ was specifically prohibited by the National Security Act. Incoming DCI James Schlesinger shut CHAOS down when he learned in 1973 that it had yielded very few results; HTLINGUAL was stopped by Schlesinger’s successor William Colby later that year. When New York Times journalist Seymour Hersh warned that he was investigating the projects in 1974, Angleton’s time at the Agency was drawing to a close, and he finally retired, very reluctantly, in 1975.