30 January 2018

New Data on Angleton and Cold War Counter-Intelligence

I don't have much to add to this article but I did want to post the link. Angleton's name is well known to those familiar with the unrestrained years of the CIA, the period extending from its founding in 1947 to the congressional investigations of the mid-1970's. Prompted by Watergate and the growing unease surrounding rumours of dark deeds and assassinations, many hoped the investigations would turn a new leaf and begin a new era of legality and transparency. The recent death of J Edgar Hoover in 1972 also prompted such hopes from those within and critical of the FBI.


The few remaining members of the old guard fell away during this period, men like Richard Helms, William Colby and James Angleton. And yet for both the FBI and the CIA, the 1970s proved to be little more than an interlude. While no one has assumed control of the FBI along the lines of Hoover and it's doubtful whether modern CIA directors wield the power of a Dulles or a Helms, the organisations have continued to pursue the 'old paths' they forged during the heyday of the Cold War.
They had to step lightly during the 1980's and 1990's but the evidence suggests they never reformed nor ever intended to. And then of course 9/11 happened and as many have put it, 'the gloves came off'.
More than once Angleton has been described as someone straight from the movies. A weird ghoulish figure, paranoid and always tending his orchids, his name comes up repeatedly when it comes to all of the great CIA and espionage controversies of the era. As head of counter-intelligence he was spying on the spies and weaving patterns of deception trying to confuse his opponents. He wanted them to lose their way in the wilderness of mirrors and yet there's much to suggest Angleton lost his own way. Deceived by men like Kim Philby, Angleton has been accused by some of almost ripping the CIA apart in his endless quest for the moles (real and imagined) that infiltrated Western intelligence agencies.
Some have come to believe that Angleton himself may have been corrupted. Who can say? His behaviour was always strange and even if he wasn't a Soviet spy, he certainly had no regard for US law, let alone any kind of morality. Apart from the tremendous amounts of ink that have been spilled discussing his dealings with characters like Philby and the famous episode of duelling Russian defectors, in more recent years more attention has been given to his connections to both JFK surveillance and the events surrounding the life and death of Kennedy mistress Mary Pinchot Meyer.
Matt Damon's character in The Good Shepherd (2006) is essentially a composite of James Angleton and Richard Bissell. A movie both frustrating and captivating, it attempts to catch the zeitgeist of intelligence agency life during the Cold War. From its Wasp-ish Ivy League and OSS inception to the labyrinth of counter-intelligence and defectors, the movie captures something of the period and its dark confusion. The movie effectively ends with the Bay of Pigs failure and its aftermath... leaving a host of unanswered questions.

2 comments:

  1. There's a comment on the article from a "Karl" that draws a loose connection between German fascism and the OSS (and subsequently the CIA). I think the commenter over states the case, but there may at least have been some ideological compatibility.

    I'm currently reading "Agent M," a biography of Maxwell Knight, a British "spymaster" during WW2, by Henry Hemming. His early career (interwar) was spent infiltrating British "fascist" paramilitary organizations on behalf of a private British intelligence organization, not so much to spy on these organizations as to manipulate them into more effective confrontation with British communist organizations. The interesting thing is that the fascists mostly considered themselves loyal British subjects, and thought they were being patriotic. Knight is thought to have been sympathetic to their ideology, all thought it could have been a ruse. Either way, in many ways the fascist organizations ended up functioning as unwitting extensions of the British intelligence system.

    I doubt that there was ever an infiltration of the American intelligence system by a "German Fascist braintrust". However, it would be accurate to say that there's a certain similarity between American clandestine organizations and fascist ideology. Fascism was always seen as a buffer against communism, or even an ally. While the US is certainly not fascist, the NSA, CIA, and others do tend to act from a totalitarian attitude that's amenable to fascism.

    I'm not sure if this really explains Angleton's strange behavior, except to say that perhaps he was a man both drunk with power and lost within the labyrinthian system that gave him that power. Men like Angleton, who know how the sausage is made, must always be paranoid that someone is lying to them as they lie to others.

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  2. There were definitely some figures within the OSS like Allen Dulles that got on famously well with the Nazis and a case could be made that ideologically they were not 'that far' removed from them.
    Others viewed their utilisation in purely pragmatic consequentialist terms.

    Additionally people have forgotten how popular fascism was in the 1930's... Fascism not be equated with the Third Reich, the latter being an extreme manifestation of an already extreme ideology. That said, the fear and perceived threat of communism was so great and there was such a horror regarding what had happened just a little over a decade before in Russia and in places like Hungary in the wake of WWI... that many looked to the fascist model as a means of preserving the West. Many were quite keen on Franco and Mussolini and not a few on Hitler... at least early on. They certainly grew uneasy with him and yet many in Germany felt the same. They went along with it all because dissent was dangerous and in other cases because they appreciated what he was doing in part... even if they didn't like a lot of things he stood for. Once the war was on, a lot of Germans felt like they were committed and of course many fascists outside Germany remained committed to the ideology but even within that ideology they had to put nation first and that meant war against Hitler.

    Yeah, as far as the Nazis taking over American intelligence... I don't know about that. Some people certainly believe it. Clearly they used many of them both in the US and in Europe and some became rather chummy when it came to Deep State projects. But the whole narrative that the Nazis secretly won and took over America...that's a little too simplistic. That said, the discussion of Fascism within the American system remains valid.

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