Cold Warrior: James Jesus Angleton - CIA's Master Spy Hunter

This was one take on JJA that offered some insights not highlighted elsewhere. I found it to be an easy read.

This book focuses on "Master-Counterspy" James Jesus Angleton's obsession with a CIA penetration, or with the infamous internal mole hunt instigated by Angleton's own paranoia. Angleton's paranoia, and the way it left the agency's counterintelligence directorate tied in knots, seems to have been his most important, if not his only, legacy. British journalist Tom Mangold, tries, without much success, to rehabilitate the Angleton legacy by pulling back the veil formed around the Angleton mystique. The book gives short shrift to Angleton's background and life, going right to his controversial exploits as head of the CIA's counter-espionage directorate. But I believe that Mangold over analyzes and over sensationalizes some of Angleton's most famous cases. The foremost exception to this rule however was Angleton's relationship with the Soviet defector Anatoli Golitsyn, who Angleton apparently trusted so much that he gave Golitsyn the keys to the U.S. intelligence kingdom. In my view, David Wise's account of this episode is much richer and interesting, giving it a "realpolitic flavor" and getting into the respective psychologies of both Angleton and Golitsin. This version, comparatively speaking, is bland, sketchy and very much incomplete. Angleton seems as much an enigma after reading this book, as was his work. He controlled the Israeli account as if it were his own private fiefdom, not sharing his cases even with his staff including his deputy, and giving paranoid but undecipherable reports to his superiors, including GWH Bush, why? More than a few authors have even implicated him as being the CIA's moving hand behind the scene in the JFK assassination; that he looked the other way as Israel developed nuclear weapons, etc. But there is no hint of any of this here? This author leaves the consequences of Angleton's two decades of machinations and "tying the CIA up in knots," very much hanging in the air. I would argue that this "retrospective" is much too "Angleton friendly." Bill Colby eventually fired Angleton, and it seems that he was sent to the agency to do just that. Upon arrival, Colby and others claim that there was no evidence based on actual cases that Angleton had caught any Russian spies during his entire career? If so, what purpose did he serve over all those years? Is it not an elementary axiom in spy craft, that if one is not catching any moles, but is preventing his agency from doing so, then he must be the mole himself? Even the retrospectives friendlier than this one, suggest that Angleton may have done more harm than good to the nation's counterintelligence operations: His claim of a deep CIA penetration was never discovered, or if discovered, never revealed -- at least not until a CIA's own "in-house" investigative unit revealed that "the most likely" deep undercover CIA mole was Angleton himself. Even though their evidence against him was all circumstantial, it was nevertheless persuasive: An important part of their case

I read this book several years ago, and found it to be very interesting and worthwhile. James Jesus Angleton was one of the early members of the CIA - a graduate of Yale which, at one time, was one of the primary recruiting grounds for the CIA. Angleton, according to the author, cut a very shadowy figure in an already shadowy world. Some of Mangold's text seems biased against Angleton, such as references to "The Trust" - an early counter intelligence operation created by Feliks Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the Cheka. Angleton placed great emphasis on understanding this old operation. Mangold seems to deride this practice of Angelton's, which I felt was unfairly judgemental. Mangold, however, also describes an operation headed up my Angleton which caused the ruin of some productive CIA officers. All in all, though, the book is very interesting, and manages to submerge the reader into the world of counter intelligence during the cold war era. Counter Intelligence has been described by those who have practiced it as a "Wilderness of mirrors". After reading this book the reader will gain an appreciation, even if only superficial, of how nerve-racking the job could be - not knowing whom you can trust.