Word: angleton
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James Jesus Angleton was an enigma. With his horn-rimmed glasses, homburg hats and foppish manners, he looked more like a Cambridge don than an American , spy hunter. Yet the Idaho-born Yale graduate, who joined the Central Intelligence Agency after a wartime stint in the Office of Strategic Services, had a flair for global intrigue and office politics that propelled him into the CIA's upper echelons. During his 20-year tenure as head of counterintelligence at the height of the cold war, Angleton hamstrung the agency with a paranoiac mole hunt that led him to ignore crucial leads...
...corroborate many of the details in interviews with former CIA officials who were so distressed over events of that era that they were willing to break their vow of silence. After three years of research, Mangold concludes that counterintelligence and the recruitment of Soviets -- both of which came under Angleton's scrutiny -- "were virtually paralyzed by Angleton's operations." TIME's survey of many senior CIA veterans indicates there is considerable truth to this judgment...
...Angleton's fixation on Soviet penetration probably began with allegations that his best friend in Britain's MI6 intelligence service, Kim Philby, was a KGB mole. Philby removed all doubt when he defected to the Soviets in 1963. "After the Philby case," says an Angleton friend, "Jim was never the same." But the full scope of Angleton's obsessive mole hunt was not apparent until his dismissal. Agents sent to clear out his secret vault at the CIA's Langley, Va., headquarters discovered hundreds of files from his Ahab-like search for Soviet counteragents within the ranks...
DIED. James Jesus Angleton, 69, relentless, enigmatic director of counterintelligence at the Central Intelligence Agency from 1954 to 1974; of lung cancer; in Washington. Angleton was an early member of the Office of Strategic Services, the World War II precursor to the CIA. His trust-nobody style while working in what he called espionage's "wilderness of mirrors," and his pursuit of Soviet agents in the U.S. and moles within the CIA, won him respect from insiders but little public notice. He has been credited with helping to expose Kim Philby, the British journalist who worked for the Soviet Union...
...million or more who are directly engaged in deception and analysis throughout the world, and the potential for chaos is enormous. As the author's survey of modern snooping illustrates with unrestrained relish, free- lancers, self-serving desk jockeys, double and triple agents turn espionage into what James J. Angleton, former chief of the CIA's counterintelligence division, called a "wilderness of mirrors...