Word: angleton
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...week's witnesses still clung to the notion of unaccountability. James J. Angleton, 57, had been chief of the CIA's counter-intelligence until he was pressured to retire last year because of his unyielding cold war stance. From 1955 to 1973, Angleton was in charge of the mail program. He told the committee that the operation was especially useful because the Soviets did not realize it was going on. Angleton refused to retract a statement he had made earlier in closed session: "It is inconceivable that a secret-intelligence arm of the Government has to comply with...
...Angleton described how helpful the CIA had been in the case of the Weatherpeople who blew up a Manhattan town house, where they were making bombs in 1970. FBI files contained little information about one of the fugitives, Kathy Boudin. The CIA, on the other hand, was able to supply more than 50 intercepted letters dealing with Boudin's activities...
...excessive by even CIA standards, leading the commission to conclude that top CIA officials knew "that the operation, at least in part, was close to being a proscribed activity." For instance, CHAOS' chief reported directly to then CIA Director Richard Helms, rather than to Counterintelligence Chief James Angleton, who was not even informed of all of the operation's activities. Eventually, CHAOS had 52 full-time employees and about 30 part-time agents and accumulated some 13,000 files, including 7,200 on American citizens and organizations. Drawing from those files and related documents, officials developed an index...
...Angleton's CIA staff was small-no more than a few score, mostly senior men who had been with him since the agency's founding. They were chiefly specialists on the "adversary" services; a foreign intelligence officer says that the operation was "the best in the world." Three of Angleton's people, including Rocca, have left the agency, angry over its failure to stand by their boss...
Forced Out. His defenders regard Angleton as a casualty of the times. They believe that he was forced out because some important U.S. policymakers no longer hold counterintelligence an indispensable function and so strongly believe in the durability of detente that they are uncomfortable with a clandestine organization that persists in regarding the KGB as a serious threat. In this respect, Angleton's departure is reminiscent of the fate of a fictional counter-intelligence man, George Smiley, the sad hero of John le Carré's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Fired during a staff shake...