The Life and Accomplishments of James Jesus Angleton



The Life and Accomplishments of James Jesus Angleton

James Jesus Angleton was born in Boise, Idaho, on 9th December, 1917. His father, James Hugh Angleton, was a former cavalry officer who met his wife, Carmen Mercedes Moreno, while serving in Mexico. Angleton's father worked for NCR. In 1933 he was sent to represent the firm in Europe. The following year he took over the NCR franchise in Italy. According to a close friend, Max Corvo, Angleton was "ultra-conservative" and a fascist sympathizer. James Angleton was sent to be educated at Malvern College, a public school in Worcestershire. In 1937 Angleton enrolled at Yale University. He was a poor student but managed to graduate in the autumn of 1941 with a BA.

After marrying Cicely d'Autremont he joined the United States Army. During theSecond World War Angleton served with the Office of Strategic Services and in March 1943 was sent to London to be trained by MI5 officers such as Dick White and Kim Philby. He later served as a counter-intelligence agent in Italy. After the war Angleton worked for the War Department's Strategic Services Unit. He became the chief counter-intelligence officer for Italy but in 1947 he returned home to join the Central Intelligence Agency. In 1951 he was sent to Israel where he helped establish Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service.

In May 1951, two senior British officials, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, fled to the Soviet Union. Senior figures in the CIA were investigating Burgess and Maclean at the time and suspected that Kim Philby, a MI6 agent working in Washington had tipped off his two friends. The CIA director, Walter Bedell Smith, asked Angleton and William Harvey to write up separate reports detailing what they knew about Philby. Harvey came to the conclusion that Philby was a Soviet spy. However, Angleton claimed that Philby had been "honestly duped" and warned Smith against taking the matter further. Smith took the advice of Angleton and Philby was able to continue his work until escaping to the Soviet Union four years later.

In 1954 Allen Dulles appointed Angleton as chief of the CIA's counter-intelligence section. Two years later Angleton had his greatest success when he obtained a transcript of the speech Nikita Khrushchev made to the 1956 Soviet Party Congress denouncing Joseph Stalin. Angleton leaked doctored versions of the speech to numerous foreign governments in a disinformation campaign. In December 1961, Anatoli Golitsin, a KGB agent, working in Finland, defected to the CIA. He was immediately flown to the United States and lodged in a safe house called Ashford Farm near Washington. Interviewed by Angleton, Golitsin supplied information about a large number of Soviet agents working in the West.

In these interviews Golitsin argued that as the KGB would be so concerned about his defection, they would attempt to convince the CIA that the information he was giving them would be completely unreliable. He predicted that the KGB would send false defectors with information that contradicted what he was ...