Word: angleton
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...biblical sense, the truth shall make you free, then members of counterintelligence are serving life sentences. As the CIA's longtime chief of counterintelligence, James Angleton, sees it, agents wander through a "wilderness of mirrors," in which no revelation can be entirely trusted. Many have tried to chart that wilderness, and inevitably much of the landscape and many of the personalities are thoroughly familiar. But David C. Martin, a Washington reporter for Newsweek, has some fresh perspectives: he delves deeply into the daily life of counter-intelligence operatives; he recounts a sensational (and eminently disputable) surmise about Angleton...
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...
...attaché in the British embassy in Washington from 1948 to 1951 and is now a senior physicist at the National Bureau of Standards in Gaithersburg, Md. Boyle says the fifth man passed atomic-bomb secrets to the Soviet Union, but was trapped by then CIA Agent James Jesus Angleton and turned into a double agent. Angleton will not talk, and Mann told the London Daily Telegraph, "The whole thing is completely false...