Photo:
Henry Burroughs/AP
January 1 2018, 2:15 p.m.
VETERAN
CIA OFFICER Cleveland Cram was nearing the end of his
career in 1978, when his superiors in the agency’s directorate of operations
handed him a sensitive assignment: Write a history of the agency’s
Counterintelligence Staff. Cram, then 61, was well qualified for the task. He
had a master’s and Ph.D. in European History from Harvard. He had served two
decades in the clandestine service, including nine years as deputy chief of the
CIA’s station in London. He knew the senior officialdom of MI-5 and MI-6, the
British equivalents of the FBI and CIA, the agency’s closest partners in
countering the KGB, the Soviet Union’s effective and ruthless intelligence
service.
Cram
was assigned to investigate a debacle. The Counterintelligence Staff, created
in 1954, had been headed for 20 years by James Jesus Angleton, a legendary spy
who deployed the techniques of literary criticism learned at Yale to find deep
patterns and hidden meanings in the records of KGB operations against the West.
But Angleton was also a dogmatic and conspiratorial operator whose
idiosyncratic theories paralyzed the agency’s operations against the Soviet
Union at the height of the Cold War, and whose domestic surveillance operations
targeting American dissidents had discredited the CIA in the court of public opinion.
In
December 1974, CIA Director William Colby fired Angleton after the New
York Times revealed the then-unknown counterintelligence chief had
overseen a massive program to spy on Americans involved in anti-war and black
nationalist movements, a violation of the CIA’s charter. Coming four months
after the resignation of Richard Nixon, Angleton’s fall was the denouement of
the Watergate scandal, propelling Congress to probe the CIA for the first time.
A Senate investigation, headed by Sen. Frank Church, exposed a series of other
abuses: assassination conspiracies, unauthorized mail opening, collaboration
with human rights abusers, infiltration of news organizations, and the MKULTRA
mind-control experiments to develop drugs for use in espionage.
The
exposure of Angleton’s operations set off a political avalanche that engulfed
the agency in 1975 and after. The post-Watergate Congress established the House
and Senate intelligence committees to oversee covert operations. The passage of
the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act required the CIA to obtain warrants
to spy on Americans. And for the first time since 1947, the agency’s annual
appropriation was slashed.
Cram’s
mission — and he chose to accept it — was to soberly answer the questions that
senior CIA officials were asking in their private moments: What in the name of
God and national security had Jim Angleton been doing when he ran the
Counterintelligence Staff from 1954 to 1974? Did his operations serve the
agency’s mission? Did they serve the country?
With
his porkpie hat and trenchcoat, the portly Cram bore a passing resemblance to
George Smiley, the fictional British spymaster as played by Alec Guinness in
the BBC’s production of John le Carré’s classic “Smiley’s People.” There
was some professional similarity as well. In le Carré’s novels, Smiley is
introduced as a veteran counterintelligence officer called on by his superiors
to assess a covert operation gone disastrously wrong. He is drawn into a hunt
for a mole in the British intelligence service.
Cram’s
task in 1978 was to investigate a covert career that culminated in a disastrous
mole hunt. Like Smiley, Cram was a connoisseur of files, their connections and
implications, their deceptions and omissions. Like Smiley, he embarked on a
Cold War espionage odyssey that would fill more than a few volumes.
When
Cram took the assignment, he thought his history of the Counterintelligence
Staff would take a year to write. It took six. By 1984, Cram had produced 12
legal-sized volumes about Angleton’s reign as a spymaster, each running 300 to
400 pages — a veritable encyclopedia of U.S. counterintelligence that has never
before been made public. With professional thoroughness, Cram plumbed the
depths of a deep state archive and returned with a story of madness that the
CIA prefers to keep hidden, even 40 years later.
LAST
JUNE, I received a phone call from a Los Angeles area code.
Half expecting a robocall, I tapped the green icon.
“I’ve
heard you are interested in a man named Cleve Cram,” the caller said in a
British accent. “Is that so?”
Was
I ever. I had just sent in final changes to the manuscript of “The Ghost,” my
biography of Angleton. I thought of Cleve Cram the way a fisherman thinks of
the Big One that got away. I had focused on Cram in 2015, as soon as I started
to research “The Ghost.” He had written an
article, published in an open-source CIA journal, about the literature of
counterintelligence, which gave some insight into his classified conclusions
about Angleton. To learn more, I sought out his personal papers, more than a
dozen cartons of correspondence and other documents that his family had donated
to Georgetown University Library after his death in 1999. The library’s finding
aid indicated that the bequest contained a wealth of material on Angleton.
But
I was too late. The CIA had quietly re-possessed Cram’s papers in 2014. I was
told that representatives of the agency had informed the library that the CIA
needed to review the material for classified information. All that had been
publicly available vanished into the CIA’s archives. By withdrawing the Cram
papers from view, the agency effectively shaped my narrative of Angleton’s
career. Without Cram’s well-informed perspective, my account of Angleton would
necessarily be less precise and probably less critical. I wrote
about the experience for The Intercept in April 2016.
The
caller said his name was William Tyrer. He had read my article. He told me he
had visited the Georgetown library a few years earlier, while developing a
screenplay about a mole in Britain’s MI-5. He had gone through the Cram papers,
photographed several hundred pages of material, and become fascinated by the
man. “He’s like an American George Smiley, no?” Tyrer said.
I
agreed and said I would be most interested to see what he had found. He
questioned me closely about my views on Angleton, Cram, and the CIA, and said
he would be in touch. A quick web search revealed that Tyrer is a
British-American movie producer, the man behind “Memento,” a brilliant and
unforgettable backward-running thriller, the cult favorite “Donnie Darko,” and
scores of other movies. He was a serious man and a credible source. A few days
later, Tyrer started emailing me 50 pages of material about Angleton that he
had found in Cram’s personal papers.
The
Cleveland Cram File, portions of which are published here for the first time,
contains a sample of the primary source materials that the veteran CIA official
used to write his Angleton study. The documents were photographed in Georgetown
University’s Booth Family Center for Special Collections. A Georgetown
archivist did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment; the CIA also
declined to comment.
The
Cram file illuminates a pregnant moment in the history of America’s secret
government, when the CIA began to reckon with the legacy of James Angleton, a
founding father of the deep state, a master of mass surveillance, a conspiracy
theorist with state power.
Chief
Soviet delegate Semyon Tsarapkin, center, and colleague Yuri Nosenko, right, at
the Geneva Disarmament Conference in February 1964. A few days later, Nosenko,
a lieutenant colonel in the KGB, disappeared and later defected to the U.S.
Photo:
Central Press/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
PERHAPS
THE MOST complex and contested Angleton story that Cram had to
untangle concerned two KGB officers who defected to the United States and
offered their services to the CIA in the early 1960s. Angleton insisted the men’s
conflicting stories had enormous implications for U.S. presidents and
policymakers, and indeed for U.S. policy toward the Soviet Union. For the CIA,
the question was, which defector was the more reliable source?
Anatoly
Golitsyn, the chief of the KGB station in Finland, bolted to the West in
December 1961. He was a heavyset man with hazel eyes and a methodical and
manipulative mind. Yuri Nosenko, a career KGB officer embedded in the Soviet
delegation to a U.N. disarmament conference in Geneva, started selling
information to the Americans in June 1962 to pay back official funds blown in
the company of dubious women. Eighteen months later, he approached the CIA and
struck a deal to defect in return for a $50,000 cash payment. Among other
things, Nosenko had firsthand knowledge that the KGB had not recruited accused
presidential assassin Lee Harvey Oswald when he lived in the Soviet Union from
1959 to 1962.
Golitsyn,
resettled in upstate New York by the CIA, convinced Angleton that Nosenko was a
false defector sent by the KGB. Under Golitsyn’s influence, Angleton came to
believe that in 1959, the KGB had launched a massive deception operation
designed to lull the U.S. government into believing Soviet propaganda about
“peaceful coexistence” between capitalism and communism, with the goal of
prevailing over the complacent West.
Nosenko’s
purpose, Golitsyn said, was to protect a Soviet “mole” already working inside
CIA headquarters. “He is a provocateur, who is on a mission for the KGB,”
Golitsyn told Angleton, according to a memo found in the agency’s
declassified online
database known as CREST, or the CIA Records Search Tool. “He was introduced
to your agency as a double agent in Geneva in 1962. During all the time until
now he has been fulfilling a KGB mission against your country.”
Angleton
reneged on the payment and ordered that Nosenko be held in what would now be
known as a “black site,” a secret CIA detention facility in southern Maryland.
Nosenko was not tortured, but he was fed a minimal diet, denied all
possessions, and, he said later, dosed with LSD. He was held in solitary
confinement for the next four years, all the while protesting his innocence.
In
1968, Angleton lost out to the institutional consensus within the agency that
Nosenko was in fact a bona fide defector. Nosenko was released from solitary
confinement and the CIA resettled him in suburban Washington, D.C. Nothing he
did in his retirement supported the idea that the KGB had sent him or that he
knew of a mole inside the CIA.
A
few years later, Cram was faced with a simple but important question: Had
Angleton been right to incarcerate Nosenko?
To
answer it, Cram relied in part on a secret CIA history titled “The Monster
Plot,” written by John Hart, a career officer in the Soviet
Russia division who had previously studied the Nosenko case on behalf of
CIA Director Richard Helms. “The
Monster Plot,” which runs to more than 180 pages, was declassified with a
batch of JFK assassination files in November; Cram kept a copy in his personal
papers.
The
introduction and conclusion of “The Monster Plot,” photographed by Tyrer in the
Georgetown collection, detail how legitimate concerns about Soviet penetration
of the CIA blossomed into Angleton’s certainty that a giant KGB deception
operation was undermining the West. The history’s title referred to the massive
size of the suspected Soviet “plot” that Angleton and others feared was
unfolding within the CIA.
Harold
“Kim” Philby, former first secretary of the British Embassy in Washington, at a
press conference in response to his involvement with defected diplomats Burgess
and McLean, at his brother’s home in Drayton Gardens, London, on Nov. 8, 1955.
Photo:
J. Wilds/Keystone/Getty Images
Angleton
was well acquainted with Soviet treachery. His best friend in British
intelligence was Kim Philby, with whom he shared many a secret over liquid lunches
in Washington. In 1951, Philby was expelled from the United States on the
wholly justified suspicion that he was a Soviet spy. He later turned up in
Moscow and became a general in the KGB.
After
Philby’s betrayal, Angleton and other CIA officials worried that another
communist mole might still be working the agency, a theory that seemed to be
borne out nearly a decade later, when the CIA began losing a string of spies
inside the Soviet Union. In October 1959, Petr Popov, a Soviet military
intelligence officer who had been passing secrets to the Americans for seven
years, vanished. A few months later, it emerged that he had been arrested,
which “added a specific problem to the general concerns about the possibility
the CIA was penetrated,” wrote Hart.
Soviet
Military Intelligence Colonel Oleg Penkovsky, center, was sentenced to death
during his public trial on May 11, 1963, in Moscow.
Photo:
AFP/Getty Images
In
1961, the CIA began receiving anonymous letters warning that Western
intelligence agencies — but not the agency itself — had been penetrated. The
information in the letters was considered genuine because it led to the arrest
of Soviet spies in the upper ranks of the British and German intelligence
services. A year later, Oleg Penkovsky, a British spy in Soviet military
intelligence who had given the U.S. information of “great strategic
importance,” was arrested.
Angleton
suspected the worst, and he found Golitsyn’s explanation persuasive. All the
Soviet defectors who came after Golitsyn’s arrival in late 1961, including
Nosenko, were phonies, Golitsyn said. They had been dispatched with false
information to discredit Golitsyn, to protect KGB moles already in place, and
to confuse U.S. policymakers about Moscow’s intentions. Hart noted that when
Golitsyn “stressed themes of KGB ‘disinformation’ (dezinformatsiya) and
extensive (but initially unspecified) staff penetration of the Western
services, he found a willing and eager audience” in Angleton.
Golitsyn
couldn’t have known how ready Angleton was to believe him when it came to
Soviet disinformation, for Angleton had learned firsthand how strategic
deception operations could influence the course of history. As a young
intelligence officer in World War II, he was cleared for the ULTRA operation,
in which British intelligence fed false information to the German High Command.
Winston Churchill and Dwight Eisenhower both believed the ULTRA operation gave
the Allies a decisive advantage over the Germans, and so did Angleton.
The
Soviets’ goal, Golitsyn said, was to dupe the West into believing that a schism
was developing between the Soviet Union and its longtime ally China in the late
1950s. On the surface, at least, there were ample indications of a split. When
Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalin’s tyranny in 1956, the
Chinese communists turned hostile to Moscow, issuing bitter demarches about the
correct course of communism and launching border skirmishes over obscure
territorial disputes. But Golitsyn didn’t buy it. According to Hart, the
defector “was certain” the purported distance between the two powers “was the
clever product of KGB disinformation.”
Angleton
was persuaded, viewing the public Sino-Soviet conflict as part of a KGB
deception operation designed to persuade the West that the communist world was
divided, Hart wrote. If the deception succeeded — that is, if the CIA believed
it — it would undermine the U.S.’s commitment to a firm policy of containing
Soviet power, Angleton thought. Hart concluded that Angleton had set out to
break Nosenko before ascertaining the facts.
“There
was never an honest effort at the time to establish NOSENKO’s bona fides,” Hart
wrote. “There was only a determined effort to prove NOSENKO was mala fide, and
part of a KGB deception operation meant to mislead the CIA into believing it
was not penetrated.”
In
his report, Hart affirmed the agency’s 1968 finding, reached over Angleton’s
bitter objections, that Nosenko was a genuine defector. Not for the first or
last time, a self-serving informant had used the agency’s ideological
preconceptions to manipulate it to his own ends. Angleton’s handling of Nosenko
“did not conform to any generally accepted sense of the term ‘methodology,’”
Hart wrote. In his recommendations, he called for more rigorous psychological
assessment of defectors and “improvement of intellectual standards” in the clandestine
service.
Cram
agreed. In a summary of his assessment of the Nosenko case, published in a 1993
monograph for the CIA’s Center for the Study of Intelligence titled “Of
Moles and Molehunters,” he concluded Angleton was wrong about Nosenko. The
excerpts from Cram’s papers reveal the classified information on which he based
his conclusion.
AS
CRAM DELVED into Angleton’s records, he received a
signed memo, included in the Georgetown collection, from a branch chief in the
Soviet Russia division named “Miles.” Miles explained that in the mid-1960s, he
had served on a CIA team code-named AESAWDUST that sought to vindicate
Angleton’s theory of false defectors and strategic disinformation. (All CIA operations
involving the Soviet Union were identified by the diagraph AE, followed by a
randomly selected code name.)
With
the benefit of hindsight, Miles admitted that groupthink had distorted his
work. “The AESAWDUSTERS were convinced people (I ought to know, I was one of
them), and they were very impatient with anyone who disagreed with them or were
critical [sic], often snapping back that the critic did not have all the
information they had, so didn’t know what he was talking about,” he wrote.
“Convinced participating AESAWDUST members were terribly concerned and
motivated by fear that until this vast deception complex was exposed and
countered, we would be in bad trouble which could get worse at any moment.”
The
sheer enormity of Angleton’s “Monster Plot” theory convinced its advocates that
it must be true, Miles wrote. But a counterintelligence theory that explained
everything was suspect. The mass of cases “tossed into the boiling pot grew and
grew, until outsiders simply could no longer swallow the idea that all [Soviet
defectors] were bad,” Miles wrote. “Sooner or later those not bound up in the
mission said ‘Hold it, Wait a minute! Maybe NOSENKO [was a fake defector],
maybe some [double agent] cases, maybe even a few more, but almost all?
Too much.’”
“Simple
passage of time has proven that AESAWDUST was wrong,” Miles continued. “The
idea was that NOSENKO would not have been sent unless the goals of the KGB were
truly major. These were postulated as negating GOLITSYN’s information (which
NOSENKO never did, nor do I believe he could have); then to protect sources the
KGB had in place in the USG and CIA (none discovered despite marathon effort);
and finally to destroying CIA itself.”
The
CIA had indeed “gone downhill” in the 1970s, Miles noted, but he attributed
that decline to sensational revelations of CIA abuses in the press and the
cultural changes wrought by the 1960s, not KGB deception operations. “Nothing
has turned out as AESAWDUST predicted,” Miles concluded.
Even
Angleton’s original supporters eventually became disenchanted with the rigidity
of his thinking. Such testimony fortified Cram’s findings about Angleton and
clarified the fate of another one of his victims, James Leslie Bennett, chief
of counterintelligence for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
IN
THE COURSE of his inquiry, Cram heard from a counterintelligence
officer with the initials “PTD” who seems to have known about the origins of
Angleton’s investigation of Bennett.
PTD
sent Cram a one-page memo on “The Bennett Case,” which was included in the
Georgetown collection and photographed by Tyrer. It was a damning account of
Angleton’s methods and his misguided reliance on Anatoly Golitsyn.
The
Bennett Case began in 1970, when senior Canadian intelligence officers became
convinced, correctly, that there was a communist spy working inside their
headquarters. Because the CIA worked closely with the Royal Canadian Mounted
Police, known as the RCMP, Angleton was concerned, too. He consulted with
Bennett, his Canadian counterpart, an intellectual whose headstrong opinions
were not always appreciated by his more provincial colleagues. But Angleton
liked Bennett, according to PTD. Angleton “never thought of Bennett as a spy
and in fact was very high on him as a pro among cowboys,” PTD wrote. Angleton
even gave a “tongue-lashing” to a colleague who suggested Bennett might be
working for the Soviets.
One
of the Canadian officials who clashed with Bennett came to Washington in the
summer of 1970 for “long discussions of penetration of RCMP by [Russian
Intelligence Service] and probable Bennett role,” PTD recalled.
After
defending Bennett, Angleton asked Golitsyn to analyze the case. “In early 1972
Golitsyn was given RCMP files to peruse about the supposed RIS penetration,”
PTD recalled. In his report, Golitsyn wrote down three names of Canadian
officials, one of whom was Bennett. “After pondering some he decided Bennett
was the penetration.”
Angleton
was suddenly persuaded. “JJA forced Golitsyn on the RCMP for this purpose of
supposedly aiding them in the investigation,” PTD wrote, using Angleton’s
initials. “And all through the case, JJA kept up an unrelenting pressure on the
RCMP … to push Bennett out.”
Bennett
protested his innocence and took a polygraph test to prove it. The exam “showed
him to be a strong reactor on certain subjects not related to the
investigation,” PTD reported. “But when queried whether he was working for an
adversary service (and they tried them all), there was no response.”
When
a CIA polygraph security officer looked at the results, PTD wrote, “he
concluded Bennett had passed the test.” By then Bennett had already been forced
to retire.
As
first reported in “Cold Warrior,” Tom Mangold’s 1993 book about
Angleton’s mole hunt, Bennett left intelligence work under a cloud of
undeserved suspicion. He got divorced and moved to Australia. The Canadians
eventually caught a Russian spy in their midst who had nothing to do with
Bennett. In 1993, the Canadian government cleared Bennett of any wrongdoing and
gave him $150,000 Canadian in compensation, according
to journalist David Wise.
To
Cram, PTD’s account showed that Angleton had acted on Golitsyn’s whim,
misinterpreted the polygraph results, and ruined a man’s career on the
slenderest of suppositions.
Edward
Petty was a CIA officer whose career ended after he accused his boss,
longtime chief spycatcher James J. Angleton, of snooping for the Soviets during
the height of the Cold War. Petty died in 2011 at 90. Here he is pictured
in 1973 with his grandson.
Photo:
Family photo/Washington Post/Getty Images
AS
CRAM DUG into the debacle of the mole hunt, he came across its
absurd culmination: Angleton, the mole hunter, became the prime suspect.
Cram
heard the story in May 1978 from Clare Edward Petty, a veteran U.S.
counterintelligence officer. After years of unsuccessful mole hunting, Petty
became convinced that the mole must be working on Angleton’s staff. First,
Petty wrongly suspected Angleton’s longtime deputy, Newton “Scottie” Miler, and
later Pete Bagley, chief of counterintelligence for the Soviet Division, who
didn’t actually work for Angleton but was, in Cram’s estimation, “wholly under
Angleton’s domination.”
Petty
had also spoken to two reporters, David Martin, a defense correspondent for
Newsweek, and David Ignatius, then a reporter for the Wall Street Journal. Both
had written glancingly about the astonishing-if-true allegation that Angleton
was suspected of being the mole, and were trying to confirm it with sources
inside the agency.
In
a four-hour interview with Cram, Petty gave a more detailed version of the
story he had told Martin and Ignatius. He said that he had written up his
suspicions of Bagley in a memo and sent it to Angleton at some point in the
late 1960s. Several months later, during a long conversation about something
else, Angleton suddenly said, “Bagley is not a spy.”
That
blanket denial, Petty said, set him wondering what made Angleton so sure. Could
it be that Angleton was himself the mole? Cram thought it unlikely that Petty
was alone in his suspicions, “for there were many who regarded Angleton as
sinister,” he observed in his memo about the interview, which was included in
the Georgetown collection.
Petty
said he recorded 30 hours of commentary in which he outlined the various
“litmus tests” he had run on Angleton to see if he was a KGB spy. His reasoning
might have been called “Angletonian.” Assuming the CIA had been penetrated at a
high level, Petty considered the possibility that both Anatoly Golitsyn and
Yuri Nosenko had been sent by the KGB under the guidance of the real mole,
Angleton himself. Through this analytical lens, Petty saw new meaning in the
anomalies of Angleton’s career: his friendship with Kim Philby; his faith in
Golitsyn; his insistence that the Sino-Soviet split was a ruse. Every decision
he made seemed to impede U.S. intelligence operations, Petty noted. Perhaps it
was intentional.
Cram’s
account of the interview makes clear that Petty had no solid evidence to
support his musings. Petty specialized in “airy theorizing,” Cram wrote later,
favoring “extreme speculation unsupported by facts.”
There
was — and is — no evidence that Angleton was a spy for the KGB. Given
Angleton’s staunch anti-communism, the notion is close to absurd. Petty’s
accusation is most significant as evidence for Cram and the CIA leadership that
Angleton’s theory and practice of counterintelligence were deeply flawed.
IF
ANGLETON wasn’t working for the Soviets, what could account for
his folly?
Among
the papers Cram reviewed was a “very secret” report prepared in January 1973
for Angelo Vicari, chief of the Italian National Police, and included in the
Georgetown collection. It conveyed the views of an Italian intelligence officer
serving in Washington to his superiors in Rome, including his impressions of
the CIA.
“He
regards the offensive sector of the CIA as better than the defensive sector and
says that noteworthy conflicts exist between the two of them,” the report said.
“The man who ruined the defensive sector there is Angleton, known to you
personally — who though fortunately set aside for some time — is still in a
position to do harm.”
“According
to this opinion, not his (because he does not know him personally) but of his
service, Angleton is clinically mad and his madness has only gotten worse in
these later years. This is a madness that is all the more dangerous because it
is sustained by an intelligence that has about it elements of the monstrous and
that rests on a hallucinatory logical construction. The whole is unified by a
pride that imposes a refusal to recognize his own errors.”
That
was hearsay evidence of a widely held belief that buttressed what even
Angleton’s onetime supporters admitted: The man’s thinking bordered on
delusional, even as he was too proud to admit he might be wrong about anything.
James
Angleton, former chief of counterintelligence at the CIA, answers questions
concerning the CIA’s cover-up of reading the mail of many prominent Americans,
including Richard M. Nixon, before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Sept.
25, 1975.
Photo:
AP
ANGLETON’S BEHAVIOR may have sometimes been foolish, but he was no fool, not when it came to amassing power and wielding it. Angleton’s expansive view of the CIA’s scope of operations was discredited in the mid-1970s, but it returned in the 1980s with President Ronald Reagan, who countenanced the extra-legal activities that culminated in the Iran-Contra scandal. After the September 11 attacks, the George W. Bush administration revived Angleton’s warrantless mass surveillance program for the digital age. To oversimplify only slightly, Dick Cheney picked up where Jim Angleton left off.
Angleton
acted zealously on a theory of history whose validity is hard to accept and
harder to dispute: that secret intelligence agencies can control the destiny of
mankind. He had a keen understanding of how intelligence agencies covertly
manipulate societies, and he believed that such operations could turn the tide
of history. He would not have been surprised by Russia’s meddling in the U.S.
presidential election of 2016. The CIA had used such tactics in scores of votes
around the world, starting with the 1948 Italian elections, which prevented the
communist party from coming to power, and in which Angleton himself played a
key role.
Angleton
lived and thrived in what he called “the wilderness of mirrors,” his favorite
phrase for Soviet deception operations. When David Martin published a book
about Angleton called “Wilderness of Mirrors,” Angleton indignantly claimed he
had coined the phrase, according to a three-page memo included in the
Georgetown collection. He hadn’t. He had first read it in T.S. Eliot’s poem, “Gerontion.” But his
explication of the metaphor was apt. The phrase, he wrote in the memo,
perfectly captured the “myriad of stratagems, deceptions, artifices, and all
the other devices of disinformation which the Soviet bloc and its coordinated
intelligence services use to confuse and split the West … an ever fluid
landscape where fact and illusion merge.”
The
most powerful intelligence agencies traffic in facts and illusions to
manipulate societies on a massive scale. Substitute “CIA” for “Soviet bloc” and
“America’s perceived enemies” for “the West” and you have a solid description
of U.S. covert action around the globe for the last 70 years. Substitute
“Putin’s Russia” for “Soviet bloc” and you’ve captured the FSB-sponsored social
media operations in recent U.S., French, and German elections.
The
Cram papers suggest that if Angleton were in government today, he would approve
of the National Security Agency’s mass surveillance capabilities, which were
reportedly used to listen in on Russians calling their contacts in Trump Tower.
He probably would have overestimated the FSB’s capacity to pull off deception
operations, such as social media-driven “fake news,” and their impact on
American government, just as he overestimated the KGB’s capabilities and
influence in the 1960s. He would have searched long and hard for “moles,” the
agent or agents inside the U.S. intelligence community who helped the Russians
advance their schemes. Counterintelligence was Angleton’s religion, and he
would have insisted on its relevance.
Cram
continued to study Angleton and share the lessons of his extraordinary career
for the rest of his life, even as his epic study remained a state secret. In
his 1993 monograph, declassified a decade later, Cram concluded that Angleton
was “self-centered, ambitious and paranoid with little regard for his agency
colleagues or simple common sense.” He was a visionary and a crank, a prophet
and a law breaker, a national security menace just slightly ahead of his time.
Jefferson
Morley is the author of “The
Ghost: The Secret Life of CIA Spymaster James Jesus Angleton.”
Top
photo: Former CIA counterintelligence chief James J. Angleton as he
departed from a meeting of the Rockefeller commission on the CIA in Washington,
D.C., on Feb. 11, 1975. Angleton, who resigned from the agency that December,
testified for nearly two hours in closed session as the panel probed
alleged domestic spying.
We
depend on the support of readers like you to help keep our nonprofit newsroom
strong and independent. Join Us
RELATED
CONTACT
THE AUTHOR:
/https://www.niagarafallsreview.ca/content/dam/thestar/news/canada/2021/09/25/huawei-executive-meng-wanzhou-receives-warm-welcome-upon-return-to-china/_1_meng_wanzhou_2.jpg)
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.