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William Stephenson’s medals on a clip, thank you Intrepid-Society.org
“There’s no doubt you [James Angleton] are easily the most interesting and fascinating figure the intelligence world has produced, and a living legend.”
— Clare Boothe Luce, courtesy of the CIA’s Angleton guru, David Robarge.
There’s a problem with the official history of the CIA: counterintelligence. Counterintelligence, or ‘routing out’ enemy spies, is never properly accounted for in any narrative that I’ve come across. Let me explain that a little bit further.
You’ll remember that the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner to the CIA, was set up through a collaboration between William S. Stephenson, head of the “British” Security Coordinate (BSC) and J. Edgar Hoover, with the blessing of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Stephenson had a secret mission that he wasn’t supposed to tell the Americans. According to his autobiography, A Man Called Intrepid, he was to covertly influence US opinion in favor of fighting WWII with Britain by any means necessary. This meant lying, smear campaigns, as well as using intimidation tactics against FDR’s political opponents, such as isolationists and pacifists.
FDR used Stephenson’s right-hand man, William ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan, to set up the OSS as an American partner to the BSC. That means readers, that the premiere US intelligence service (which also worked intimately with Hoover’s FBI) was staffed with an enemy agent at its highest level and, by necessity to Stephenson’s mission, many more lower down.
How does an organization set up and run by double agents conduct counterespionage? Trick question! It doesn’t.
Let’s do a little thought experiment: say that you are a British double agent posing as an American ‘Overseer of National Intelligence’. You’re tasked with finding enemy spies in America. You don’t really want to do this, obviously, because a good counterintelligence team may ‘out’ you as an agent of the British. What to do?
Solution: You hire a ‘Chief of Counterintelligence’ who a) typifies an American (like a poetry-writing Eagle Scout!!); b) is bad at the job; and c) has some horrible secret that could be used to discredit him should he somehow sniff you out.
Did Donovan/Stephenson hire such a patsy? Only if you think James Jesus Angleton had emotional issues and was out of his depth as Head of Counterintelligence at the CIA.
If you’ve never heard of James ‘Jimmy’ Jesus Angleton, here’s his bio: Angleton worked for the OSS in Italy and was the CIA’s first head of counterintelligence. (His dad was a high-ranking executive at National Cash Register, parent organization to IBM. The root of our problems, freedom-loving techies!)
Jimmy Jesus is the least ‘cool’ CIA agent you’ll ever hear about. The official story goes like this: after years of faithful service, Jimmy went crazy and started telling his peers in friendly intel agencies ‘stuff’ that just couldn’t be true.
What type of stuff you ask? It’s hard to say, because after the CIA kicked Jimmy out they burned his trove of files. However, according to Tom Mangold in Cold Warrior, much of this burned ‘stuff’ had to do with untrustworthy agents in the CIA’s Soviet Division.
Angleton’s closest working buddies are said to have been loyal to him to the end (details are obscure), but every spook with a career knows that Jimmy was just plan crazy. The CIA still keeps their own public reading list on Angleton (complete with notes on what you’re supposed to think about each book!) and for even shorter attention spans, there’s the Wikipedia summary: James Angleton became obsessed with the idea that the CIA was thoroughly infiltrated with KGB agents. Jesus, Jimmy!
Red-blooded CIA historians all know Angleton was crazy; they know this because Jimmy has become a case study in (CIA quote) “how not to conduct counterintelligence”. Jimmy’s methods are unfashionable, but did they at least catch enemy spooks? Well, the safe answer is a quiet ‘no’, because a) Angleton didn’t see through Kim Philby, the famous Soviet double agent and son of Saudi-powerbroker St. John Philby; and b) Angleton listened to an informant named Anatoliy Golitsyn, who was ‘just telling Angleton what he wanted to hear’ by claiming that the CIA was heavily infiltrated with Soviet ‘moles’ (spies).
Here we come to the screaming contradiction in the official history of counterespionage at the CIA: a crazy, incompetent man ran counterespionage for over twenty years and nobody noticed.
Hmmm. This is where Stephenson’s apologists invoke “government incompetence” while asking us to keep funding organizations like the CIA. That’s horse-talk: men like Stephenson are unethical, not stupid. This screaming contradiction doesn’t lead anywhere good for Agency leadership.
1) If you buy the ‘Crazy Angleton’ story, the next logical question is “Why didn’t CIA leadership care about counterespionage?”
2) If you don’t buy that story, the next logical question is “What was Angleton saying that scared the higher-ups at the CIA enough to shut him down?”
How the public perceives Angleton matters a great deal to the agency, as shown by their continued investment into shepherding public thought on him. (How often are movies and televisions shows recommended as valuable historical sources by real historians?!)
I’ve had the opportunity to ask a small number of Angleton ‘experts’ the two preceding questions. Their replies have run the gambit from “Shut up, you’re not qualified!” to a sly smile and suave change-of-subject. My personal conclusion is that talking Jimmy-Jesus don’t get ya promoted.
Fortunately, I don’t have to worry about getting promoted. I’m not crushed under a mountain of classified newspaper clippings nor bound by life-long gag orders. Therefore, I’m going to talk about things that you don’t need security clearance to read, things that are easily verifiable and are on the public record.
These public-record things fall into two camps. The first deals with conflicts of interest inherent in having a foreign spy set up one’s intelligence apparatus. The second deals with the apparently self-defeating way CIA leadership responded to Angleton’s ‘going crazy’.
1) The OSS was set up by Bill Donovan, who came at the recommendation of a British spy whose mission was to spin information presented to US representatives and the public. The CIA drew heavily from the OSS ‘talent pool’. British agents had incentive to join the OSS and easy access to the fledgeling organization. There’s no good reason why the CIA shouldn’t have been infiltrated left, right and center by the British; and we all know now that the British were infiltrated left, right and center by the Soviets. Oops! (Interested? Search ‘Cambridge Five’.)
2) OSS leadership opened their doors wide to KGB talent: Donovan oversaw this cooperation personally. (He nurtured the partnership secretly, on the advice of J. Edgar Hoover who knew such a partnership would be toxic if the public ever found out.) The Soviets had nothing but contempt for Donovan’s lack of professionalism and found it easy to abuse their partnership and infiltrate Wild Bill’s organization far beyond his original intention. (Interested? See The Haunted Wood by Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev.)
3) Has history shown us that the OSS at least was riddled with Ruskie plants? Yes, it has; that’s part of what made the Venona decrypts a big deal. Since the CIA picked up so much talent from it’s parent organization, I suspect a good portion of CIA hires were also rotten.
Points 1), 2) and 3) should make us ask: Why are Angleton’s suspicions about widespread Soviet infiltration still looked on with disdain?
Now, onto what the CIA did to stop an ‘Angleton’ happening again:
4) Angleton was in office for twenty years; that’s long enough to see patterns even if one isn’t very bright. In response to Angleton’s disgrace, the CIA put limits on how long anyone may head the counterintelligence department– four years only [correction, five years]. This policy keeps institutional memory short: Soviet agents spend a lifetime working cover, spy-hunters have only 60 months to sniff the enemy out before the dept is shook up again. That’s a good environment for enemy spies.
5) Burning Angleton’s archives was a funny choice to make. If his records were in fact incinerated, the agency won’t be able to check what Angleton was telling their international partners. However, burning his archives makes perfect sense if CIA leadership was scared of what was contained therein.
6) The CIA nurtured a cult of ‘Angleton Is Not Sexy’ amongst generations of subsequent counterintelligence professionals/aficionados. In his youth, Angleton had shown allegiance to ideas that ran contrary to Churchill’s globalist patrons: populism, small-government, anti-war, anti-international banking. Jimmy had kept up correspondence with folks like Ezra Pound, E. E. Cummings and T.S. Eliot. (Even after Pound was imprisoned in Italy!) It’s possible that Angleton’s bird’s-eye view of the Agency dredged up old ‘America-First’ ideas about international banking and democracy that altered Jimmy’s view of Stephenson’s hires, leading Angleton to ask uncomfortable questions. Those questions aren’t sexy, boys.
The tricky thing about talking spook history is that spook historians can always fall back on “I’ve got classified information that I can’t show you but supports my point perfectly.” We’re all just supposed to believe them because, well, they’re paid professionals and therefore trustworthy.
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I have yet to meet a professional intelligence historian whose judgement I trust. In the meantime, all I have to go on is common sense and the powerful question: Cui bono?
Cui bono from hiring, then humiliating, Angleton?
Churchill set up his spying apparatus through Stephenson before he became prime minister, while he was an obscure back-bencher. Winston set up a private network of informers in the global business community because British Intelligence deemed him not important enough (or too untrustworthy?) to receive their debriefings. Why would the chief of MI6 Admiral Sinclair exclude the famous half-American ‘British Bulldog’?
Churchill’s family was skint; his career was paid for by Vanderbilt (robber baron) heiress Consuelo, a deal brokered by her mother, Alva Belmont, and the son of Lord Rothschild’s American agent August Belmont, of horse-race fame. Read all about that arrangement in Consuelo and Alva Vanderbilt by t. (Alva ultimately married August’s son, and used their money to patronize Mrs. Pankhurst and Clare Boothe Luce). Perhaps men like Admiral Sinclair weren’t entirely sure Alva’s interests were the same as British interests.
From the British point of view, there’s nothing British about new-money American buccaneers buying their way into Empire politics. I used ” ” (quotation marks) around the “British” in BSC earlier because the BSC wasn’t very British at all. You could say that the British were its first victims.
Churchill was paid for by international business interests. Winston got his info from international business interests. Churchill represented international business interests. The established British intelligence services had to work with Churchill’s international-business-spook-network once he became PM. According to historian Ron Cynewulf Robbins:
It cannot be overlooked that there was mutual antipathy between Sir Stewart Menzies, head of British intelligence, and Stephenson. Churchill gave Stephenson the New York appointment over the objections of Menzies.
Given Churchill’s backers, it’s not hard to see why counterespionage was a low priority at the OSS and newly-fledged CIA. Americans may hope that counterintelligence is no longer a dumping-ground for the ‘artistic’ sons of the Security-Cleared, but considering the CIA’s current adventures would make a Robber Baron proud, such hope is probably misplaced.
Image may be NSFW.
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