Word: angleton
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Another top priority for the new director is improving counterintelligence. Reagan's CIA transition team solicited advice on the subject from the agency's longtime counterintelligence master, James Angleton, who was fired in 1974 by Director William Colby. It is generally agreed that U.S. counterintelligence efforts have fallen off sharply in the six years that followed, enabling Soviet agents to operate more freely...
Such weapons were needed to combat the sudden surge of Soviet expansion as World War II drew to a close. Angleton hardly seemed suited for the part: he aspired to be a poet, and his friend E.E. Cummings called him a "miracle of momentous complexity." But Angleton's poetic imagination proved useful indeed when he was put in charge of counterintelligence for the wartime OSS in Italy. Recruiting German and Italian agents, he performed spectacularly. He unearthed the secret correspondence between Hitler and Mussolini, the Soviet instructions to the Italian Communist Party for supporting the Red uprising in Greece...
Named chief of counterintelligence in 1954, Angleton had to pass judgment on defectors coming out of the Soviet bloc. Were they genuine or sent to mislead, the U.S. with "disinformation"? Very few defectors got through his fine net, frustrating other CIA agents anxious to collect all the information they could. Echoing their complaints, Martin charges that Angleton became so obsessed with uncovering a Soviet "mole" in the CIA that he immobilized its operations. Martin even dignifies in print some speculation of others that astonishes and angers Angleton's admirers in the intelligence community: that Angleton himself could have been...
...Unlike Angleton, Harvey was almost too accessible. Known as the "Pear" be cause of his shape, Harvey was, says Mar tin, "the secret war made flesh." The bluff, boisterous Harvey began his career at the FBI, where his macho style offended J. Edgar Hoover. Transferring to the CIA, he took with him an encyclopedic knowledge of Soviet agents operating in the U.S. Harvey, contemptuous of striped-pants types, was the first, declares Martin, to identify Philby as a Soviet spy. The fact that Phil by traveled in the best circles did not mislead Harvey as it did others...
...them for going too far, for being so mesmerized by their craft that they became as great a danger to the U.S. as to the Soviet Union. But in a world where the KGB has grown increasingly aggressive, it is at least worth considering how far is too far. Angleton and Harvey deserve to be judged by what did not hap pen, by what the Soviets were unable to achieve while they had the watch. Now that they are gone and American counter-intelligence is much reduced, one can only hope that the next book written on the subject...