DRAGONS HAVE TO BE KILLED

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000402650027-9
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 10
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: February 8, 2012
• Sequence Number: 27
• Publication Date: September 1, 1985
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

ST "Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/02/08: CIA-RDP90-00965R000402650027-9
ARTICLE APPEARED.
^*,l PAGE 15
WASHINGTONIAN
September 1985
DIAGOIN
fRW. ID B.
KUIED
William Colby, the Colorless CIA Director, Was Tired of
Battling James Angleton, the Agency s Mysterious Counterspy.
But How Does a Bureaucrat Get Rid of a Legend?
One weekend this May, strug-
gling to maintain some poise
but betraying the discomfi-
ture of an assistant headmas-
ter whose chair had been
slipped out from under him
one time too many, the vice chairman of
the Senate Select Committee on Intelli-
gence, Senator Patrick Leahy, whistled
in the media to announce his intention to
launch an immediate inquiry. Despite
the law's requirement and the Reagan
administration's statements that at least
the chairmen and vice chairmen of both
the Senate and House intelligence com-
mittees must be adequately informed of
all covert activities, the Vermont Demo-
crat was clearly worked up at the extent
to which "things have fallen between the
cracks. "
The detonation the previous week of a
car bomb in Beirut that killed more than
80 people was the direct consequence,
according to the Washington Post, of a
late-1984 administration directive to the
Burton Hersh has been working on a book about
the CIA for two years. He has written for The
Washingtonian about diplomat-lawyer Sol Linow-
itz and Senator Edward Kennedy; his previous
books include The Mellon Family and The Educa-
tion ofEd ward Kennedy.
By Burton Hersh
Central Intelligence Agency to put to-
gether native teams for "pre-emptive
strikes" against suspected local terror-
ists. Of this initiative-promptly denied
by the administration itself-virtually
nothing had reached the ears of Leahy
and his fellow Democrats because none
of them had enough of an inkling of the
administration's covert intentions to
frame the right questions during intelli-
gence-committee hearings. As for that
car bombing? Under attack from report-
ers, the magisterial Leahy had pressed
for answers and "found out about it on
my own." To preclude subsequent bush-
whacking, Leahy announced, "We're
going to review six or seven operations.
I do not want my side to get caught on a
Nicaraguan-mining type problem. "
It's been a decade since cataclysm came
close to obliterating the Central Intelli-
gence Agency; Senator Leahy's public
desperation was itself a measure of how
far Agency leadership had vitiated the
oversight-and-disclosure process and re-
turned the clandestine establishment to
business as usual.
Ten years ago, responding to the pub-
lic's outrage at reports of broad-scale
domestic mail-opening programs, drug
travesties, and decades of bungled assas-
sination plots, the post-Watergate Con-
gress set up its first sweeping investiga-
tion of the CIA since authorizing the
Agency in 1947. Down bureaucratic rat
holes, like so many fire-hose nozzles,
the Pike and Church Committees sec-
onded by the Rockefeller Commission
let loose a torrent of investigators and
depositions and conscience-stricken case
officers and subpoenas and discovery
documents and unfriendly witnesses un-
til month by month the deepest cata-
combs of the intelligence community
were swamped to the rafters. Out into
the publicity of the hour there streamed
an incredible proliferation of espionage
mavens and subversion impresarios,
species rarely identified before, many
bobtailed and indignant at such a historic
interruption.
Least unhappy-looking, friends of the
intelligence community kept noticing,
was the Agency's tidy little director. It
was William Colby, after all, whose
slips to newsmen had all but sounded
the alarms; now he seemed blithe
enough, and forthcoming at all times
before the swarming investigative
bodies. "Bill, do you really have to
present all this material to us?" a heavy-
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breathing Nelson Rockefeller once drew
the director aside to stress with pointed
charm. Henry Kissinger descended,
punishingly: "Bill, you know what you
do when you go up to the Hill? You go to
confession. "
The extravaganza of secrets splatter-
ing around the committee-room walls
and careers ending abruptly led few in-
telligence professionals to regard Col-
by's disclosures with Kissinger's seem-
ing aplomb. One of the first prizes was
the Agency's counterespionage pioneer,
James Jesus Angleton. On December
22, 1974, two days after Colby's wide-
ranging interview with the New York
Times' investigative ace, Seymour
Hersh, the Sunday Times bannered an
extended scoop by Hersh that alluded a
number of times to references by "well-
placed government sources" to "CIA
domestic activities during the Nixon ad-
ministration ... directed ... by James
Angleton, who is still in charge of the
Counterintelligence Department, the
Agency's most powerful and mysterious
unit...." Its "deep snow section,"
Hersh wrote, reflected Angleton's
"spook mentality," which over the
years had reduced blameless employees
of the Agency to a state of chronic "fear
and awe." This alerted other reporters.
Now, day by day, tug by tug, a represen-
tation of the counterintelligence chief
was emerging in the press-wily, resis-
tant, paranoid, and as convoluted as a
night crawler. Overexposed and de-
fenseless, Angleton would resign mo-
mentarily.
Colleagues had no doubt as to where
the blame should attach. William Har-
vey, for many years the booze-soaked
pistol-packin' organizer of some of the
biggest of the Agency's subversion ca-
pers and regularly an antagonist of An-
gleton's people because of the "noise"
his high jinks tended to make, wrote the
beleaguered Angleton from his sick bed
to berate the "posture and actions of
Colby specifically and the administra-
tion generally as ... an evil compound
of arrant cowardice, crass abdication of
responsibility, and an almost incredible
stupidity." By then the damages were
clear; the emerging question soon be-
came why Colby had targeted the victim
he had.
sionally colorless man behind his trans-
lucent oyster eyeglass frames, Colby has
never quite shaken the operative's pat-
terning of shrugs and roundabout phras-
ings and sidelong furtive glances despite
more than a decade at this point of lying
back, practicing law. Hearing Colby ex-
plain things-modestly, and with pa-
tience-one senses the encroachment of
so much more than he had decided to
reveal. From time to time an irrepressi-
ble moving twitch, a reflux of absurdity
at what's going on, crosses Colby's
rabbity deadpan in a wave: the overflow
of other, remembered forces.
Those decades. of chafing seem inex-
orable in retrospect, heat generated by
role reversal. There were biographical
similarities-both William Colby and
Jim Angleton were of an age, both law-
school graduates, both Catholics, both
blooded during World War II in units of
yard Law, Angleton flushed through
London as part of the OSS delegation
Malcolm Muggeridge would character-
ize as "arriving like jeunes filles en fleur
straight from a finishing school, all fresh
and innocent, to start work in our frows-
ty old intelligence brothel."
Angleton picked up the game fast-
Kim Philby stayed close to the gangling
American as the one trainee in the lot
prescient enough to shrug off his
crowd's prevailing "Anglomania. " Be-
fore 1944 was out, Jim Angleton slipped
unnoticed into the political dissolution of
central Italy, which was threatened as
the Germans collapsed by widespread
civil war between devotees of senile Vic-
tor Emmanuel and Communist-directed
partisan armies.
Angleton pursued old leads-his fa-
ther, the peripatetic J.H. (Hugh) Angle-
ton, had bought out the National Cash
"Our differences," William Colby will
concede now, half swallowing his words
as if to take them back to a certain extent,
"were of long standing...." A profes-
"Our differences, " William Colby will
concede now, half swallowing his words
as if to take them back to a certain extent,
"were of long sing.... "
the Office of Strategic Services (OSS).
That told very little; it was like forcing a
comparison between Richelieu and
Uriah Heep.
The contrast seemed that stark, partic-
ularly during earliest years. The youth-
ful William Colby was resolutely, al-
most doctrinally, unprepossessing;
contemporary impressions of foot-sol-
dier plainness, even mousiness, shaded
slowly after a while by the aptitude he
indicated for raw physical risk, those
jumps his Jedburgh unit specialized in
behind enemy lines. Self-contained,
something of a mumbler, Colby required
long association before even casual ac-
quaintances were permitted to gather
how idealistic and New Deal-struck he
genuinely still was.
At even that stage of the war, Angle-
ton was already an intelligence legend.
An austere and painfully self-possessed
stripling with another generation's pref-
erence for funereal haberdashery and a
disquieting habit of turning almost any
question back against its originator,
young James Jesus Angleton showed up
in London at precisely the midpoint of
hostilities. Recently finished with Har-
Register dealership for Italy when James
was sixteen, so that his tall son in effect
commuted from Milan to Malvern Col-
lege in England and Yale and Harvard
Law. Staying on in Rome as head of the
postwar caretaker regiment in Italy, the
unearthly young espionage novice did
business out of a fusty, piled-up little
office on the Via Archimede, never in
the best of health but almost always
more than competent to summon up one
final cutting implication, imaginative to
the point of fantasy, temperamentally
suppressed yet daring.
Those luckless years before the war,
Hugh Angleton had been a linking figure
in the US expatriate community through-
out Italy, for some stretch the president
of the American Chamber of Com-
merce. He, too, bobbed up in Rome near
the end of the fighting, a major in the
OSS who resuscitated his excellent con-
nections throughout Italian industry to
promote the ultramontane Marshal Bad-
oglio, conquerer of Addis Ababa. Roy-
alist associations were more than a help
to his ambitious son, who demonstrated
an older man's eye for the future by
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systematically bribing all the key offi-
cers in the national carabiniere "as they
were being put back together." Unhap-
py at being forced to relinquish an asset
like the head of German counterintelli-
gence for northern Italy, Georg Sessler,
to British occupying forces, James An-
gleton arranged a jailbreak for the Nazi
and tucked him away behind a second
identity in the south of France. Angleton
tipped the Vatican's code clerk $100 a
week for extra copies of the Holy See's
worldwide intelligence reports.
As the rubble settled, Angleton kept
bumping into legmen from the surviving
Jewish underground, tenaciously pipe-
lining the leftovers of the camps through
Italy into Palestine. "While gathering
evidence for the Nuremberg war trials,"
Angleton was later quoted, "I came
upon the horrifying proof of the extermi-
nation of 6 million Jews." Angleton's
revulsion at collectivism now blended
with his increasing regard for the nervy,
dedicated Zionists scavenging among
the remains of a people. Should Israel be
established, Angleton foresaw, there
would be the potential for an invaluable
slag of information and documents as
Soviet Jews poured in from Russia. The
young spy nurtured these associations,
locking up the future "Israeli account."
By 1953, when Bill Colby turned up in
Rome, purportedly as an economic at-
tache but actually to serve as bagman for
the Agency's high-priority political-ac-
tion operation, James Angleton had long
before relocated to Washington to set up
his hush-hush Counterintelligence Staff.
It wasn't in Angleton to relinquish his
grip. Colby hadn't been involved long,
parceling out those US millions across
the Liberal/Christian-Democratic spec-
trum, when he became conscious of a
knowledgeable Italian-speaking "sin-
gleton" checking out the operation. This
charmer was a familiar of "some of the
OSS veterans who also had operated in
Italy during the war and later had helped
to form CIA," Colby would later speci-
fy, "in particular, James Angleton.
They had asked him to return to Italy
from time to time to keep in touch with
his old friends and report to Washington
on their views and hopes." An amateur
medievalist with enviable ruling-class
contacts, Angleton's delegate was pres-
ently sending back lively, personalized
reports by way of the counterintelligence
clique, at one juncture, Colby maintains,
slipping into Foster Dulles's limousine
to enlighten the Secretary of State.
The undisguisedly peeved Colby
countered the effect of these select re-
ports by protecting the singleton's iden- an Army officer from a public school,
tity while distributing his "product" so who, to help with his tuition, had to wait
openhandedly around the intelligence on tables in the college dining halls,
community as effectively to water its tutor in some of the courses I did well in,
glamour. The skirmishing had started. and serve as altar boy in the Catholic
By that point, William Colby the intel- chapel. I wasn't invited to join one of the
ligence careerist was settling into form: more fashionable eating clubs. And
well washed and compact, stolid, with since I wasn't much of an athlete, ei-
adequate professional ruthlessness when ther-at five feet, eight inches, 130
policy and the fate of individuals collid- pounds, and wearing eyeglasses-I
ed. Yet alongside these virtues there was wasn't up in the social whirl. No, I re-
an offsetting drag on the line at mo- mained pretty much the outsider, con-
ments, the weight of cold-blooded relig- tent to go my own way quietly.... Only
iosity and unsurrendered childhood so- in ROTC did I achieve any real promi-
cial-betterment notions. During Colby's nence, as a cadet captain."
long involvement in Vietnam, wonder- After Princeton, Colby started in at
ing staff officers around the CIA would Columbia Law School but broke off his
During Colby's long
involvement in Vietnam,
wondering staff officers
around the CIA would
term him, with some awe,
the "soldier-priest."
term him, with some awe, the "soldier-
priest," intimidated by his modesty.
Colby valued the Agency, but there were
superior purposes.
Colby had taken these in almost before
he acknowledged a viewpoint of his
own, absorbed attitudes with supper in a
family, Colby later wrote, "that had
fought hard to stay respectable despite
poverty." Theirs was the taxing kind,
genteel poverty, the by-product of suc-
cessive generations of ill-paid college
instructing. Colby's free-thinking rene-
gade of a father, Elbridge, had, largely
in protest against his stiff Yankee ori-
gins, gone over to Roman Catholicism
even before he took up a teaching job at
the University of Minnesota and settled
down with Margaret Mary Egan, flower
of the Saint Paul diocese. Margaret
Mary was influenced by her father, a
participant in the experimental rush of
Minnesota politics during the progres-
sive era, its Farmer-Labor tumult.
Support still came hard, so Elbridge
joined the US Army in 1920 and did
what he could to keep a secondary career
going as a reporter and editor and teach-
er between the training assignments. Bill
suffered the dislocations of any other
Army brat. Precocious enough for col-
lege at sixteen, William Colby later ac-
knowledged that "Princeton was a very
social and socially conscious place, still
dominated by the snobbish F. Scott Fitz-
gerald tradition. And I was still very
much the middle-class type, the son of
studies to activate his commission. From
field-artillery training Colby volun-
teered to learn the new techniques of
parachuting, after which a contact man
from the fledgling Office of Strategic
Services recruited the nearsighted little
officer into one of its Jedburgh units,
whose mission would be to drop behind
German lines and blow bridges and radio
out troop positions.
After stints with the marquis in France
and a scramble across the top of Nor-
way, Colby returned to Columbia. Be-
fore long he married Barbara Heinzen
and settled into the early stages of a
law practice on Wall Street under OSS
founder Wild Bill Donovan, whose eye
he'd caught.
Still burdened by a New Deal hang-
over of social responsibility, Colby took
on what little poverty law the firm could
afford. He transferred his young family
to Washington to accept a staff job with
the National Labor Relations Board.
When another Wall Street dropout,
Frank Wisner (a stocky, wide-ranging
driver of a man still haunted by what the
Soviets had made of Eastern Europe),
moved over from a deputy-assistant-sec-
retary slot at the State Department to
found the covert-oriented Office of Poli-
cy Coordination, Colby's OSS record
virtually jumped from the files. Colby
himself dutifully followed.
Like every other first-generation "op-
erator," Colby lip-read his way through
his initial peacetime assignment-to pull
together a "stay-behind" network of
agents in Scandinavia against the gather-
ing tide of Soviet tanks that Berlin com-
mander Lucius Clay expected moment
by moment. Rule-breaking was standard
procedure, demanded by Wisner him-
self, who remained, by every rendition,
a scattershot administrator who depend-
ed for his effects on promptings of tem-
perament, alternately "iron-assed" and
beguiling as successive flaps required.
Colby's political finesse in Stockholm
quickly qualified him for the Rome as-
signment. The elections of 1958 were
already looking ominous from the way
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the c;ommumsts were compounaing erauonal side-often referred to as the
strength; and there was lots of ground, Clandestine Services-where "compart-
and across a tremendous political spec- mentation" was venerated, what actual-
u tm, the West had better retake. Once ly took place inside the counterintelli-
he was plowing into this, of course, Wil- gene staff remained mostly a mystery.
liam Colby attracted James Angleton's At directorate meetings, rather than
interest. compromise investigations the wily
The counterintelligence wizard was counterintelligence chief was likely to
reportedly alarmed, even across an launch into his well-rehearsed debunk-
ocean, as reports and recommendations ing of the Sino-Soviet split. 5'... Every-
from the likes of whey-faced little Colby body would just look at one another and
seemed to be enlisting credence among shrug," one Agency regular concedes.
the administration's policymakers. The "Our view of the counterintelligence
Eisenhower administration's ambassa- staff ranged from comical to one of
dor to the Italians, that poised, coiffed horror."
Rhinemaiden of the conservatives Clare This, too, kept dust in the air. Side
Boothe Luce, endorsed hard-line view- moves were incessant: Angleton's chid-
ing, ambivalent manner; the rumors that
after a murderously long working day
the shadowy insomniac was likely to slip
The counterintelligence back to Arlington and his restive wife,
wizard was alarmed, even Cicely, to hover throughout the off-duty
hours over his prize-winning orchids or
across an ocean, as reports his handmade jewelry; Angleton's pro-
from the likes of whey- pensity for husking out references-no
details, but plenty of implication-half-
faced little Colby seemed to way into the salad course of shadowy
be enlisting credence. fracases in aboriginal young nations on
which Western survival now undoubted-
ly depended. Angleton's mystique
bloomed unceasingly, verdant as any
points spontaneously; Colby subse- ladyslipper. Confidants from the press
quently found himself tiptoeing around were never quite certain precisely how
like an unoccupied clerk while resisting much disinformation might season those
where he could such Luce-concocted tidbits the counterintelligence impresa-
proposals as excluding from Defense rio extended winningly over lunch. An-
Department procurement everything gleton relished every turn; as early as the
fabricated in Italian plants in which the 1953 transition of CIA directors from
union was Communist-involved. Bedell Smith to Allen Dulles, one unbe-
The break-point issue as they ap- lieving senior staffer had allegedly been
proached the elections of 1958 became shocked to find himself hauled upon the
Socialist Pietro Nenni's "Opening to the carpet for joking with his wife, in bed,
Left," a slogan that promised that Nenni about Smith's express contempt for both
and his party were serious about sever- the Dulles brothers. There'd been a bug
ing their historic ties to the Communists in place. "You'd better watch out, Jim-
to lend parliamentary support to the my's got his eye on you," Allen Dulles
Christian-Democrats. This promised a genially advised.
stable, working basis for Italian political Angleton's consumption was raven-
life. Colby favored the idea. Elements of ous. The trenchant Kim Philby would
the old order-Ambassador Luce, the remember the intensity with which An-
Church, the US J)epartment, clan- gleton "devoured reams of French
destine-side CIA officers like Angle- newspaper material daily," those enor-
ton-wrote off Nenni's proposal totally mous weekly lunches at Harvey's,
as a ruse, an excuse to welcome Palmiro where "he demonstrated that overwork
Togliatti and his overt Communists into was not his only vice." For all he ab-
the coalition's overcrowded bed. sorbed, Washington's vigilant hostesses
Yet Colby's viewpoint prevailed. We agreed, the counterintelligence prodigy
bankrolled the Socialists-as indeed the maintained his beautiful "starved look
Agency frequently had and would about the jaws." He required a leave of
throughout postwar Western Europe- absence at one point to deal with a tuber-
and Kennedy-era White House officials culosis flare-up.
like Arthur Schlesinger soon came to Angleton nourished the mystery. One
depend on the Agency's analytic esti- middle-grade careerist at the Agency re-
mates for support against Foggy Bottom sponded to the dreaded summons and
holdouts. found the counterintelligence leader
"tucked away in an inside office which
Angleton's cadre settled in, seldom easy was completely draped in very heavy
to spot but felt regularly, often at un- curtains. His desk sat amid a dozen var-
welcome moments. Even within the op- ious gadgets. Some of them I could iden-
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'
Fisherman. There is a heavy load of
connotation to that, both Christian and
counterespionage; in simple, biographi-
cal terms the characterization is telling.
The journalist Charles Murphy would
write of a fishing trip with Angleton to
the Adirondacks on a raw spring day,
when he himself had quit without a nib-
ble and waited, nursing a drink, until the
cadaverous spy finally "came into view,
waist-deep in the icy water and feeling
for safe footing among the slippery
rocks.... He took one and a half hours
to draw abreast of us, never quitting a
run or a pool until he had tested every
inch of the surface with one or another of
some dozen flies. In the end, though, he
had five fine native trout in his creel. "
a day to get over the experience. "
Still ... among those close in so much
was compelling about the man, that rare
Talmudist's capacity for patience once
Angleton was on to something, to give
any amount of time until he was sure he
understood it all. An early Angleton ac-
complishment, at Yale, had been the co-
founding of the highbrow magazine Fu-
rioso, where difficult, controversial
poets like Wallace Stevens and Ezra
Pound rapidly found a vehicle. Angle-
ton's mind loved unraveling, the inter-
polation of design based on a minimum
of hints and clues. The fact that, feeding
off the bottom of the intelligence drift,
he ultimately became preoccupied to the
verge of obsession with undoing the So-
viet Antichrist does not seem morbid to
credit. "He did spend 30 years in coun-
terintelligence," one close friend stress-
es. "And he is certainly of a suspicious
turn of mind. What was it Eliot said:
'You must prepare a face to meet the
face you meet'?"
"Jim is a very American man," an
associate who supported him insists. The
subspecies he means comes through the
inventory: "very loyal to his friends,
extremely intelligent, marvelous imagi-
nation, loves fishing. .. ." This last
provided Angleton quite early in his ca-
reer his durable Agency pseudonym, the
tify as photographic apparatus, but I had
no idea what purpose most of them
served. Angleton himself was peering at
some documents under a strong desk
light.... I felt I had been admitted to an
inner sanctum whose existence I must
never mention to anyone.... It took me
It abraded the nerves, those decades of
feeling for safe footing among the slip-
pery rocks. Yet at the same time it sharp-
ened the awareness, so that it hadn't
seemed inappropriate in the least when
Angleton-with all those assets he'd de-
veloped starting late in the war-re-
tained the Israeli account, dealt on his
own hook with the unparalleled secret
service of Israel, Mossad. Within the
paternalistic Agency, Angleton
s tight-
knit clique remained all but autono-
mous-necessarily, Angleton strenuous-
ly maintained. No outsider must investi-
gate the investigators; without this aura
of impunity, what stricken official of a
shockingly penetrated friendly nation's
spy apparatus would come to Angle-
ton-as numerous had-with expecta-
tions not only of the loan of American
counterespionage specialists to help tie
off the hemorrhaging of secrets but also
of total confidentiality and support in-
side the intelligence community once ru-
mors of the extent of the leakage began
to soil reputations? Who else around
Langley had continuity enough, seemed
It would have required a
saint to insist to himself
that he remained another
upper-level bureaucrat.
Angleton wasn't any saint.
layered and watchful and, frankly, reac-
tionary enough, to sustain the obligatory
traffic with raging old J. Edgar Hoover,
whom even the complaisant Richard
Helms estranged?
Playing such a role, decade after dec-
ade, it would have required a saint to
insist to himself that he remained, ulti-
mately, another upper-level bureaucrat.
Angleton wasn't any saint. "It is incon-
ceivable," Seymour Hersh quotes An-
gleton as informing a closed-door meet-
ing of Church-committee investigators,
"that a secret intelligence arm of the
government has to comply with all the
overt orders of the government." That
is, the law-the committee was poking
into the counterintelligence mail-inter-
cept program, unequivocally a violation
of firm federal statutes.
So there were higher dictates than ei-
ther the law or the truth. When, after a
worldwide dragnet effort, the Agency
procured a copy of Khrushchev's flam-
boyant twentieth-century denunciation
of Stalin, there was a cat fight along
Agency corridors over how to exploit it.
It had been acquired after passing a con-
siderable bribe, though insider accounts
vary over whether the Israelis brought it
in and turned it over to Angleton person-
ally to help him solidify his reputation or
whether-less likely-a long-standing
arrangement between Angleton and a
doubled Togliatti organizer had netted
this propaganda catch.
Angleton hadn't stopped there. "The
more conspiratorial elements of the
CIA," Colby later observed gently,
"led by the counterintelligence experts,
saw it as the basis to spread confusion
and deception among the Communists of
the world. As one move in this program,
they turned to the Italian station and its
press outlets to plant a copy of it sourced
in Italy, with subtle variation in the orig-
inal text to increase suspicions and back-
biting among Communists." In fact,
Colby notes, "more politic heads pre-
vailed," and in the end Allen Dulles
merely sent it along as obtained to the
New York Times. Angleton lunched out
repeatedly, according to Seymour
Hersh, on stories that he and his people
had convinced Dulles to let them "doc-
tor the speech with some pejorative stuff
and leak it to the neutrals, the Indians
among them." Caught up on this one
finally by an editor with a memory, An-
gleton retained his aplomb: "Why not
tell it? It muddies the water, doesn't it?"
As projects staffed up and task forces
formed inside the Agency, it became a
question, early in the planning stages,
whether, granted his undoubted bril-
liance, outside staff people dared to in-
clude a figure of Angleton's unfathoma-
ble scruples. "He kind of scared me,"
Victor Marchetti concedes. "Dealing
with Angleton was kind of like looking
at sharks. "
Badly as they obviously could have
used a full counterintelligence comple-
ment to filter that leaky, factious pool of
Cubans that became the frente prior to
the Bay of Pigs, neither Richard Bissell
nor Tracy Barnes showed much of an
interest in bringing down Angleton and
his men-a decidedly swollen staff by
this point, topping out at close to 300
professionals. With political coordinator
Howard Hunt already bitching to any-
body who would hear him out that even a
victory in Cuba, the way his superiors
were constituting the Brigade, would
usher in Castroism without Fidel, no-
body wanted a slew of Angleton's peo-
ple piping up alongside Hunt.
Reservations were equally stiff as
concerned a counterintelligence pres-
ence in Vietnam. Here, too, one influ-
ence at work was Colby's. Colby had
appeared in Saigon in 1958 as deputy
station chief, and over the next thirteen
years moved up to station chief and sub-
sequently to head of Plans' Far East Di-
vision. after which he transferred to the
State Department's Agency for Interna-
tional Development as Robert Komer's
deputy in charge of CORDS, the Viet-
namese pacification program. In each
post, counterintelligence sources main-
tain, Colby resisted the Agency inspec-
tor general's suggestion of a full-scale
counterintelligence program to staunch
the prodigious leakage of information to
the Communists. Late in the fighting,
when Sam Adams, the Agency's stub-
born analyst, dispiritedly turned his at-
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tention to the extent of Vietcong infiltra-
tion in the South, Angleton found an
excuse to utilize his own people.
"With a great deal of help from the
CIA counterintelligence staff," Adams
wrote years afterward, "we eventually
found that Vietcong agents were running
the government's National Police in the
northern part of the country, that for
many years the VC had controlled the
counterintelligence branch of the South
Vietnamese Military Security Service
(which may explain why the station
chiefs estimate was so low), and that in
several areas of Vietnam the VC were in
charge of our own Phoenix Program. "'It
was the Phoenix Program-the attempt
by CORDS to root out the Vietcong in-
frastructure, in effect Colby's own vari-
ation on the counterintelligence sweep-
that led to the deaths, according to Col-
by's own testimony to Congress, of a
minimum of 20,000 Vietnamese, a fig-
ure with which opponents of the war
would regularly lumber Colby. Nor did
American intelligence improve for all
the killing. "Angleton blamed the fail-
ure on Colby," author Thomas Powers
noted, "but did not stop there; he said
the blood of American boys was on Col-
by's hands. "
All this kept boiling through the metabo-
Iism of the Agency for almost 30 years, a
deep-seated conflict virtually to the end.
It took a leader as comfortable with iro-
nies as that durable director Richard
Helms to arrange his half-smile and de-
cide, queried as to the truth about Angle-
ton, that nobody knew that, "possibly
not even Jim himself." Helms never
courted problems, and rather than beg
for trouble by making Colby Angleton's
immediate boss as deputy director/
Plans, in 1971 he'd slid him around into
Lyman Kirkpatrick's old sinecure as ex-
ecutive director-comptroller. There Col-
by diligently waited, close enough to
power when Nixon dumped Helms and
James R. Schlesinger went in, billed
heavily around Washington as "Nixon's
bureaucracy tamer."
Shortly after taking over, Schlesinger
appointed Colby to the Agency's other
power center as deputy director/Plans,
replacing the overworked Thomas Kara-
messines, who left in Helms's wake
along with Helms deputy Bronson
Tweedy and his assistant, Thomas Par-
rott. "You remind me of the father
of a large family who commits suicide,"
Angleton remembers trailing Karames-
sines into his office to chide him.
"You're now a lame duck in a period of
transition. "
Initiates knew the minuet was over for
the time being, their dance of slots and
longevity. There were now firings-
1,500 is the figure that surfaces-over-
whelmingly from the Plans side, which
Colby now pointedly renamed the Op-
erations Directorate, and lots of effec-
tive demotions and pressure for early
retirement on many hanging on. The re-
sentment around Langley was such that
Schlesinger moved into his remaining
months accompanied by an augmented
bodyguard, on task to protect him from
soreheaded underlings. "I can't take
you through there," Schlesinger told an
"We seemed to be putting
more emphasis on the KGB
as the CIA's adversary
than on the Soviet Union as
the United States'
adversary," Colby said.
outsider who requested a tour of the
Technical Services Division, that San-
ta's workshop within the Clandestine
Services that fabricated the hypodermic
pens and nitroglycerine-primed cigars.
"I don't think either one of us would
emerge alive. "
Colby checked the part in his hair and
went about reassuring his old-school
holdovers that little beyond a change of
name to the more forthright Operations
was in the works to worry them particu-
larly. Like the venerated Helms and
Karamessines before him, Colby
bounced around the circuit showing
Langley's familiar colors to all the far-
flung stations, stressed habitual proce-
dures, reaffirmed exchange arrange-
ments with friendly Western services.
Simultaneously comforting the demoral-
ized after Schlesinger's wholesale cuts,
Colby wasted little time in keying on
those two proud, semi-autonomous de-
scendants of the constituent sides of
Plans, the Foreign Intelligence (espio-
nage) staff and the now-shrunken Covert
Action (dirty tricks, payoffs, paramili-
tary adventures, etc.) staff, and, for
most functional purposes, merging
them. From then on, cases managed or
agents run by either would be processed
along a common administrative chain.
Those naughty lads in Technical Ser-
vices were moved out of Operations en-
tirely and installed in the Science and
Technology Directorate, where all their
deadly toys wouldn't lie so conveniently
of hand. The lengthy, cumbersome
project-review routines were speeded
Of the three "cultures" within the clan-
destine Services, that left the counterin-
telligence (counterespionage) staff, Jim
Angleton's super-secret shop. Angleton
wouldn't be easy. Colby's problem with
him went back twenty years; further,
more, Angleton now seemed untoucha.
ble. Over all that time he'd metamor?
phosed into the keeper of the Cold War
archives, and-so much like J. Edgar
Hoover until he went along to his well-
deserved Valhalla, finally-Jim Angle.
ton knew far too many people through-
out the Washington power structure too
well, and kept close tabs on too many
more.
By now, of course, William Colby
wasn't alone in concluding that Angle.
ton's run was over. With counterintelli-
gence closed out of most of the Agency's
more massively funded projects, it be.
came an obvious target for internal
budget-cutting. According to several
sources, the entire counterintelligence
function toward the end involved no
more than two dozen staff analysts. Var.
ious directors and deputy directors for
Plans were thrown off each time they
made some effort to pin down what those
people were up to skulking around over
there. Operations director Desmond
FitzGerald, in particular, was close to
insisting on changes when he dropped
dead of a coronary on his Virginia tennis
court.
Like activists all over, FitzGerald had
found himself frustrated not only by An-
gleton's impulse to bottle up information
but also by indications that he was pro-
grammatically turning sources away.
The aging counterspy's vanity was in-
volved, and Angleton found reminis-
cences traumatic. In 1968, puckish even
from Moscow, double agent Kim Philby
capped even his treacheries by publish-
ing in London his universally dreaded
autobiography, My Silent War. Years
prior to publication (and afterwards) An-
gleton had bruited it about that he had
"provided the British with some of the
information that enabled them to nail
down the case against Philby," as one of
the counterintelligence chiefs dependa-
ble outlets wrote.
Philby soon fixed that. Touching
again and again on all those years of
intimacy with the mysterious counterin-
telligence expert, whose very name it
was a breach of security to breathe to the
public, Philby expatiated in print on
those lazy, enjoyable, and-for him-
professionally fattening lunches the two
had savored together throughout Phil-
by's Washington years. Philby nudged
the exchanges, observing in a character-
istic aside that, for example, "many of
Harvey's lobsters went to provoke An-
gleton into defending, with chapter and
verse, the past record and current activi-
ties of the von Gehlen organization. "
Exuberant years, all told-those Cold
War budgets seemed limitless, and ur-CoItinued
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gency forged bonds. Except for his Brit-
ish mentors, Angleton most trusted,
Philby confides, his West German con-
tacts; obviously that was before the
uncloaking of Heinz Felfe, Angleton's
opposite number in West Germany's in-
telligence clearinghouse, along with key
figures in de Gaulle's pampered SE-
DECE. It would become apparent that
even such historic chest-beaters as the
Agency's triumph of a tunnel into the
East Berlin communications network
had been Communist-tolerated setups
from the outset. Even the Mounties
crumbled.
Angleton took it personally, year by
year. If these were traitors, what cre-
dence was justified in anybody the
Agency acquired? Virtually from the
outset Angleton had viewed that con-
tradance of the defectors as largely an
entertainment, a series of ruses by the
KGB to bewilder and mislead the West.
As if to exploit this too, fate made a
duet out of Angleton's rising wail. In
December of 1961 a bumptious Soviet
counterintelligence specialist named An-
atoli Golitsin, richly loaded with docu-
ments, all but banged down the door of
the CIA station chief in Helsinki in his
determination to defect. Golitsin was a
volatile megalomaniac who threw his
weight around; in Washington his han-
dlers needed everything but cattle prods
to prevent Golitsin from crashing the
White House to force his revelations on
President Kennedy. Golitsin settled for
Angleton after a while; once he heard
Golitsin out, Angleton backed the fe-
vered Russian totally and became his
"swami," in the opinion of Peer de Sil-
va, one of the sequence of Agency Sovi-
et Bloc chiefs of operations who found
their assignments all but impossible once
Angleton's skepticism hardened.
Golitsin's tale encompassed every-
thing Angleton envisioned by then: With
tremendous Politburo backing, the KGB
was operating a global "Disinformation
Directorate," which now had infiltrated
agents into the highest echelons of intel-
ligence services throughout the capitalist
world. These penetrations were able not
merely to get word back to the Kremlin
whenever the Westerners stumbled onto
something, but easily found ways of in-
sinuating faked data on which Western
planners might rely. From where they
operated, these agents were admirably
situated to screen and recruit fresh
waves of additional moles. Within the
CIA's own Clandestine Services, Golit-
sin brought the unwelcome news, there
was an important source. Perhaps in the
Soviet Bloc Division.
There was a push coming up, Golitsin
indicated, and largely to confuse matters
the KGB was augmenting its program to
flood the West with carefully primed
defectors. These would be trained to tie
down staff and create a diversion until
the Soviets consolidated elsewhere.
Angleton's commitment to Golitsin
came close to paralyzing the intelligence
community. Quite late in 1967, William
Colby looked hard at the progress of Jim
Angleton's war. By that point, "our
concern over possible KGB penetration,
it seemed to me," he later stated, "had
so preoccupied us that we were devoting
most of our time to protecting ourselves
from the KGB and not enough to devel-
oping the new sources and operations
that we needed to learn secret informa-
tion about the Soviets and their allies.
Indeed, we seemed to be putting more
emphasis on the KGB as CIA's adver-
sary than on the Soviet Union as the
United States' adversary." By then An-
gleton's biases had gripped critical peo-
ple in the field to such an extent that a
would-be deserter like the Soviet's Colo-
nel Oleg Penkovskiy-beyond challenge
the most productive walk-in in espio-
nage history, who ultimately turned over
10,000 pages of Soviet arms specifica-
tions to his incredulous case officers-
was reduced to buttonholing English-
speaking tourists on Moscow streets.
In bureaucratic terms, Angleton's
stubbornness became suicidal. Orbiting
satellites were splendid for pinpointing
hardware on the ground; it became more
germane than ever to dope out how and
when that equipment was expected to be
used. Only individuals knew that. But
individuals weren't trustworthy-this
was Angleton's central article of faith-
since most were tainted, and there was
no method for separating an authentic
catch from merely another disinforma-
tion plant.
As new defectors appeared, each ac-
quired his believers, who inveighed at
meetings with the intensity of schismat-
ics against the prevailing cynicism. An-
gleton smothered all opposition, often
simply by observing in his irresistible
gray undertone that he had access to
information in this and many similar cas-
es that nobody else in the Agency from
the director down had yet truly demon-
strated the mandatory "need to know."
"The counterintelligence people, they
were a law unto themselves," ex-Soviet
Bloc chief John Maury would remem-
ber. "They knew what everybody else
was doing. We never had a successful
Soviet operation that Angleton didn't
cast some doubt on. "
Molded into such absolutes, Angle-
ton's principles loomed. As the 1960s
ended, the West was flooded with defec-
tors from the East, whose bits and pieces
yielded collectively a finely detailed,
well-substantiated composite of virtually
every office and activity throughout the
Communist intelligence apparatus.
There were some ingenious schemes
worked through, but mostly the picture
bespoke jostling, vodka, and sloppy in-
ternal security. By then so many Russian
officials were eager to defect that, ac-
cording to Miles Copeland, a subtly
worded memorandum was leaked to the
KGB that additional defectors as such
would not be taken in, necessarily: Any-
one intending to desert should pass the
word along and indicate precisely what
knowledge and paperwork he had to
offer. Agency intermediaries might
contact.
As inveterate a hardliner as Edgar
Hoover himself was nonplused by An-
gleton's fatiguing insistence that nobody
the FBI might catch was authentic. It had
remained the case that, as Philby once
noted, Hoover's "blanket methods and
ruthless authoritarianism are the wrong
weapons for the subtle world of intelli-
gence," which made it more pressing,
once agents of the Bureau picked up
somebody, to harvest the publicity. The
Bureau was increasingly vulnerable by
the later '60s for having promoted the
claims of defector Yuri Nosenko and his
backup Loginov that the KGB had never
involved itself with John Kennedy's as-
sassin, Lee Harvey Oswald. Taking
credit for spy-catching was one of the
FBI's prime justifications for its ever-
enlarging budget. "By 1970," the au-
thoritative Edward Jay Epstein would
write, "the resulting friction between
the two agencies led Hoover virtually to
break off FBI contact with the CIA. "
It hadn't taken long, once Schlesinger
went in, for Colby to begin to push that
Angleton be retired. Schlesinger some-
how resisted that, Colby would relate,
"fascinated by Angleton's undoubted
brilliance" and unable to keep from
wondering "if there just might not be
something to his complicated theories
that deserved further explorations."
While Schlesinger mulled that over,
Colby moved into Plans and went about
cautiously-pokerfaced as ever-his in-
tent of making Angleton expendable by
infringing on or plucking away outright
a number of key counterintelligence
functions. He abrogated the staffs role
as liaison with the FBI. He shifted re-
sponsibility for Operation Chaos, the
sporadic attempt to infiltrate and disrupt
anti-war protest groups, away from the
counterintelligence staff, along with ter-
rorist surveillance.
A test of strength broke out over the
continuance of the hallowed mail-cover
operation, that wholly illegal tradition of
screening selected letters between US
citizens and inhabitants of the Eastern
Bloc. The undertaking was unsavory,
under scrutiny just then from the Chief
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Postal Inspector and hard to justify in
productivity terms beyond counterintel.
ligence's "vague generalities." Its main
purpose, Colby would imply, was to jus.
tify the slippery Angleton in retaining
what Colby now viewed as an unneces-
sarily "large staff." Angleton lashed
out furiously, falling back on threats to
carry his case for the preservation of the
program before Nixon if need be.
Schlesinger salved Angleton over as best
he could while consenting to "suspend"
the program. Angleton's staff was cut to
barely over 50.
On May 9, 1973, Bill Colby picked up
his telephone, and Alexander Haig over
at the White House divulged that, be-
cause of Watergate, Attorney General
Richard Kleindienst was in trouble; the
shakeout coming up would move James
Schlesinger to Defense; as things cur-
rently stood, William Colby was slated
for director of the Central Intelligence
Agency. Colby was honestly dumfound-
ed. No more an insider around the Agen-
cy after all those years in the field than
ever he'd become busing dishes at
Princeton, Colby had a reputation
around Langley founded on solidity and
competence and what in sophisticated
quarters was viewed as perhaps an ex-
cess of sobriety: "the kind of man who
goes to Oh! Calcutta! to look at the audi-
ence," in one wag's appraisal. He rode a
bicycle with his wife for social relaxa-
tion. There was intense speculation as
to how many of the old boys Schlesin-
ger had just purged might hope for rein-
statement.
Angleton's prospects hadn't im-
proved. While Colby awaited confirma-
tion, he made one last straight-faced ef-
fort to appreciate Angleton's "torturous
theories about the long arm of a power-
ful and wily KGB at work." The clan-
destine services were demoralized
enough. Angleton's friends were influ-
ential; there was the unique problem of
how to document the dismissal of a leg-
end whose "deep snow" apparatus had
long since established itself as immune
from review.
"He thought that it had to be run
totally segregated from everything else
in the Agency, a totally self-contained
activity," Colby muses now. "And I
thought it should be an inherent part of
any intelligence agency; it should be
brought into all the operations." Colby
wasn't objecting primarily to the segre-
gation of information: "Well, you
know, compartments exist. They have to
exist in intelligence. But compartments
are open from the top. And if you're on
the top, it's your job to go down and see
what's going on in each of the compart-
ments. That's part of the management
function. If you're the director, you're
responsible. You gotta know. You've
got to control the analysis, and all the
rest of it." Where Angleton was domi-
nant, "I had problems. And that's why
we came apart ."
Even after nine years, the suggestion
that his recalcitrance might somehow
have brought destruction down upon
himself and his men is obviously very
difficult for Angleton. It pinks a nerve,
he winds one long pinstriped shank even
tighter around the other and taps out one
more Virginia Slim and strikes a match
and fills his lungs while marshaling
some rebuttal. How much to divulge.
What keeps coming through-through
all the evasions, the abrupt, dismissive
conversational moves, that knitted,
knotted, weaving, bobbing, wincing,
stalking lexicon of body language with
which this legalistic Old Possum of a
counterspy habitually accompanies
whatever response he chooses to make-
with this comes urgency.
Try to understand now, Angleton very
nearly beseeches. I'd like to help (per-
haps), and certainly I'm troubled seri-
ously about protecting my name, but
there are commitments I'm obliged to
consider first. There are the other ser-
vices, certainly the British Official Se-
crets Act, and obviously the Israelis get
spooked, and definitely the Italians, and
how many others who devoted their lives
one way or another to staving off the
collapse of civilization throughout the
West... ?
Then suddenly Angleton's small,
sculpted head (each fine-spun silver hair
combed back, wet, exposing a center
part of Edwardian integrity) cranes for-
ward: Angleton's mocha eyes shine, and
as his lips part, nothing less than a grin
irradiates that famously hollow face. A
revelation, a surprise, much like the fil-
lip of warmth that flickers at moments
across Angleton's middle-American
drone. Such flashes of mood-down
from his beautiful Mexican mother, per-
haps-helped bond to Angleton over the
years the people he cared about. Others
confused the terms, or found Angleton
evasive.
Possibly this was Colby's problem.
Angleton purportedly hadn't expected
that Colby would resist him so. When
Schlesinger went in, Colby passed along
to counterintelligence the new director's
appreciation for Angleton's impressive
orientation briefing. Then Colby took
over as deputy director for Plans. Angle-
ton had been scrupulous about introduc-
ing Colby around to his five key subdivi-
sion heads and explaining what each one
normally looked after. Angleton claims
to have anticipated, after that, that Colby
would reach in on his own whenever he
was after a specific "product" of any
sort from counterintelligence. Requests
seldom went down, and accordingly al-
most nothing flowed back to the direc-
tor's office. Instead, Colby registered
his feelings by cutting 80 percent of the
counterintelligence professionals.
What glimpses Colby did manage, he
maintained afterwards, looked little bet-
ter than computer dowsing. Following
out ambivalent leads-frequently from
the canonized Golitsin-Angleton and
his troops pored day and night over bales
of administrative paperwork from
throughout the Agency: recently cut
travel orders, ancient yearbook bios,
random phrases of conversation scrib-
bled on a cocktail napkin.... Intuition
A test of strength broke out
over the continuance of the
hallowed mail-cover
operation, that wholly
illegal tradition.
played a lead role-he wasn't, Angleton
confessed willingly enough, a "linear
thinker. "
Where overlaps looked feasible, a
counterintelligence recommendation
went up quite likely to lame a career. A
defector's hazy recollection that his unit
had some kind of contact with somebody
from the Agency in a community easily
led to ransacking the manpower dossiers
until a suspect surfaced. The man soon
found himself relegated to an outpost,
his prospects abruptly dead-ended. Not
likely to pull open the mare's nest of
suppositions beneath such a discovery,
the Agency's top leadership tended to
rubber-stamp Angleton's recommenda-
tions. Leaving counterintelligence alone
was standard operating procedure-an-
other "distancing" device, like crypto-
nyms, on which a veteran like Helms
continued to depend even after taking
over the Agency, when he habitually
"refrained," one old boy concedes,
"from learning the names of more than a
handful of top agents whose cases were
of such importance that he personally
had to keep up with them. "
In Helms's view, getting value from
Angleton was largely a matter of dis-
crimination. In his trenchant Wilderness
of Mirrors, David Martin traces the long
chain of hints and coincidences that
brought the counterintelligence staff to
its suspicion that Lyndon Johnson's am-
bassador-at-large, Averell Harriman,
was a dedicated "illegal," for 40 years a
hireling of the Kremlin. Angleton badg-
ered Helms to rush this discovery to the
President; his natty, realistic superior
politely heard him out, then let the whole
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matter ride.
Angleton himself wound up a victim
inside his own hyperactive paper mill.
One of the zealots he'd trained, Clare
Edward Petty, settled into a study of his
chief s long chronology-those decades
of secret meetings around the world, the
cosmopolitan boyhood, the closeness to
Philby, the involvement of counterintel-
ligence in so many tightly held opera-
tions just before the Soviets closed in-
and concluded that Angleton was the
mole. He had to be, Angleton's profile
conformed perfectly to that of the high-
level penetration upon whom Golitsin
constantly drummed away.
To the prosaic Colby, all this consti-
tuted one more "gross leap in logic,"
more of that malignant vaporing that
eroded morale and destroyed good men.
How costly these rumors were becoming
to the Agency came home to Colby on a
visit to Paris, during which he discov-
ered that the head of French intelligence
operations had clearly been rattled by a
typical Angleton aside to the effect that
the recently appointed CIA station chief
in France had evidently been recruited
by the Soviets. The officer, David Mur-
phy, embroiled with the counterintelli-
gence staff during a previous tour as
head of the Soviet desk at Plans, had
been elaborately vetted and totally
cleared. That Angleton would attempt to
blight Murphy's career at the expense of
undermining Allied confidence in the
Agency stung Colby.
William Colby's first year as director
coincided with Nixon's dying presiden-
cy. A spring and summer that kept the
lead figures of an entire administration
sweating beneath congressional hearing-
room lights hadn't reassured the public,
nor were those bureaucrats who sur-
vived that confident. The press was
very, very powerful. A young, reformist
Congress came in after November of
1974. Throughout Washington the ru-
mor mills were bulging with grist, much
in the intelligence area from, Colby sus-
pected, the "thousands fired or retired
during the Schlesinger purge...." One
axiom of "tradecraft" requires that even
the most peripheral of agents be kissed
off "with a smile on his face," as How-
ard Hunt instructs. Schlesinger's expel-
lees weren't smiling.
While pressure kept building, Colby
pursed his lips over the "Israeli
account." There had, once, been "his-
torical" reasons to coddle this unique
arrangement somewhere in the counter-
intelligence maze; over decades the air
was charged around Langley with hints
of eyes-only traffic via Tel Aviv, loose
gossip concerning a purported exchange
of US atomic technology for Soviet
weapons specifications, a special rela-
tionship seething among the catacombs
of American foreign policy. Deep-
deeper than State Department, deeper
than normal CIA channels, deeper even
than anything in Clandestine Services.
Wrapping up his swing through the
Middle East, Colby "learned to my
shock that the CIA stations in Israel and
the neighboring Arab countries were not
allowed to communicate with each other
because the Israeli relationship only
went to the counterintelligence staff.
Therefore they could not compare notes
and impressions and help each oth-
er...." By then the Agency's regular
station chief in Israel was threatening to
quit in protest at all the finagling the
counterintelligence contingent kept at to
undermine his position. By one reliable
.eport, even Israelis within Mossad were
now feeling mothered to death. When
Colby lined up and kept to Kissinger's
directive to avoid East Jerusalem in or-
der not to give a misleading diplomatic
signal to the Arabs, Angleton became
"most upset." Counterintelligence had
its policy parameters.
Such rubbing of layer upon layer in-
side the Agency was blurring the estima-
tive product; this showed up starkly dur-
ing Colby's first months once antago-
nists started maneuvering prior to the
Yom Kippur war. Wired tight into Mos-
sad, Angleton's staffers were confident
those widespread Egyptian troop move-
ments that preceded the assault on the
Suez Canal were politically inspired,
feints; this interpretation the younger an-
alysts over on the Intelligence directo-
rate continued to challenge. That made
little difference, Colby saw, granted An-
gleton's "secretive management style."
Events overran the discussion and
tagged the Agency with one more pre-
dictive failure.
Yet how to handle these disjunctions?
Early in his tenure Colby broached to
Angleton the need for transferring the
"Israeli account"; the way the gaunt,
aging counterspy savagely "dug in his
heels" and ridiculed the proposal effec-
tively backed Colby off. "I yielded, in
truth," he would later confess, "be-
cause I feared that Angleton's profes-
sional integrity and personal intensity
might have led him to take dire meas-
ures. . . ." Dire measures. Angleton
retained a constituency-through suc-
cessive political generations his precise,
compelling vision of the extent and na-
ture of the unified Communist conspira-
cy had mesmerized zealots from Henry
Luce to Bobby Kennedy-and who knew
what might abruptly burgeon into a test
of strength?
Colby bided his time. Then, by mid-
September of 1974, word started float-
ing around the capital that the New York
Times' investigative heavyweight, Sey-
mour Hersh, was checking out sources
for a major piece on domestic spying by
the CIA. On December 17, Colby called
in Angleton and simply informed him, in
that bland, immovable manner that
makes him difficult to oppose beyond a
point, that change was indicated now,
and Angleton must surrender both the
Israeli account and his overall counterin-
telligence function. A civil-service re-
tirement deadline was pending, and Col-
by had "determined to face up to my
responsibilities to remove Jim Angleton
before it, so he would not miss out on its
benefits." Colby hoped he'd remain
with the Agency, in the capacity of con-
sultant, and prepare a treatise, complete
with case studies, centering on his theo-
ry of counterintelligence.
This precipitated, Angleton told
friends, "a big fight." Colby, tiring fi-
nally, proposed that Angleton lie low for
a couple of days to consider whether to
take up this offer of a consultancy or
retire completely. Shortly afterwards, as
expected, Seymour Hersh put in for an
interview with the director; he had solic-
ited this talk with Colby by claiming that
elements of a story centered on the
Agency were coming together that
promised an exposd. Hersh had been
sitting for close to a year on information
about the Glomar Explorer submarine-
retrieval project largely as a favor to
Colby, and now the new director trusted
him.
After alerting Brent Scowcroft at the
National Security Council, Colby re-
ceived Hersh Friday morning, Decem-
ber 20, just three days after backing An-
gleton out onto uncertain ice. The
information he had, the excited news-
man opened, hinted at what Hersh
termed a "massive" Agency operation
against the anti-war movement "involv-
ing wiretaps, break-ins, mail intercepts,
and surveillances of American citi-
zens. " In what he subsequently claimed
was at heart an effort to defuse Hersh's
smoldering suspicions, Colby labored to
sketch out, in that remorselessly qualify-
ing slow delivery of his, the scale and
history of this determination by succes-
sive Presidents to pin on foreign ele-
ments the sources of resistance to the
war. In doing that, Angleton's friends
contend strenuously, Colby confirmed
the substance-if not the immediacy, or
menace-of everything Hersh had.
"But according to several sources,"
Thomas Powers would underline, "Col-
by did not stop there. The CIA had been
guilty of illegal operations, Colby con-
fessed. For example, the interception of
the first-class mail in New York City
over a twenty-year period, a program-
now terminated, like the others-which
has been run by counterintelligence."
Day to day, most of the legwork Opera-
Continued
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 Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/02/08: CIA-RDP90-00965R000402650027-9
tion Chaos required, from surveillance
of newsmen to the midnight rifling of
selected files, fell within the mandate of
the CIA's technicians in its Office of
Security, which also supplies the flaps-
and-seals specialists who processed the
mail intercepts; Angleton's counterintel-
ligence personnel went in to review any-
thing interesting and deal with liaison
arrangements with the FBI. This distinc-
tion got smudged once Hersh wrote up
his bombshell for the Times. Overnight,
Colby's substantiations called down a
nation of spotlights upon the shrinking,
professionally anonymous counterintel-
ligence manager.
Seymour Hersh was scarcely out the
To Angleton's anguished
judgment this was a display
of bureaucratic scorched
earth more irresponsible
even than his own
dismissal.
door before Colby buzzed Angleton to
apprise him of the fact that there was to
be a major article appearing in the Times
any minute, of which the focus was like-
ly to include the range of questionable
activities, over many years, involving
the counterintelligence people. With this
still reverberating, Colby then reiterat-
ed, as he subsequently wrote, that "my
decision to remove him was firm, what-
ever the Hersh article might say. I told
him that no one in the world would be-
lieve his leaving his job was not the
result of the article. But both Jim and I
would know, which was the important
part to me." More important that mo-
ment, at least for Angleton, was bracing
for a siege of exposure in the press of
such duration and intensity that they both
knew Angleton would never be able to
rouse that shadowy constituency he'd
cultivated over so many years among
conservative journalists or influential
luncheon partners culled from the Na-
tional Security Council staff. Angleton
had been blown, and by a professional.
So Angleton went quietly, premature-
ly bent, a stream of smoke from his
invariable filter-tip fanning above his
Homburg. He suffered from emphyse-
ma, and very little stomach survived.
Careerists within the Agency regarded
his departure ambivalently. While many
had joked over the years about Angle-
ton's "nature-of-the-threat" diatribe at
meetings, there was an awareness, as
David Atlee Phillips wrote, that Angle-
ton was "possessed of an incubus of
deep secrets and a better understanding
of the Soviet Union's intelligence opera-
tions than any man in the West." He
remained a totem out of the heroic past.
With Angleton moved out, Colby
made it plain to the counterespionage
chiefs three long-time collaborators that
they were all headed elsewhere in the
Agency. The top three-Ray Rocca,
Newton Miler, and William Hood-re-
signed soon after their boss. Others were
quickly transferred. To Angleton's an-
guished judgment this was a display of
bureaucratic scorched earth more irre-
sponsible even than his own dismissal:
To eliminate, in a stroke, the accretion
of contacts and methods and open cases
built up over more than 30 years by
devoted professionals like Rocca was
tantamount to the annihilation of their
complete lives, their professional heri-
tage. Their world lay undefended.
"The new appointees came mainly from
the Far East Division or Vietnam," An-
gleton's friend Edward Epstein wrote.
"For all practical purposes, Colby had
obliterated the counterintelligence op-
eration that Angleton had developed
over a twenty-year period. Files were
shifted to other departments and, in
some cases, destroyed. In a matter of
weeks, the institutional memory was
erased." Inside sources agree. "There
is not counterintelligence anymore,"
Henry Knoche, deputy director under
George Bush, would allegedly tell
friends.
Throughout the remaining '70s the
Agency would flounder. Another round
of cost-cutting early in Stansfield Tur-
ner's term as director carved deepest
into the operations side, forcing many of
the most seasoned of the clandestine
people into private life and all but deci-
mating that start-up generation of devout
cold warriors. With counterintelligence
so dispersed, the institutional immuni-
ties of the survivors remained very low.
Veteran spy handlers now broke cold
sweats from the breeze each time some
factotum on one of Congress's new,
high-visibility intelligence oversight
committees rounded into a tirade.
Once Reagan became President, the
funding-and, quickly, the job slots-
came through almost immediately to
bring the Agency back up to traditional
force levels. After humiliation in Teh-
ran, public sentiment was shifting.
Again there were rumbles by congres-
sional watchdogs that William Casey
and Company were less than forthright:
Starting afresh came hard. Jim Angleton
was known to stir at moments from his
watchful retirement; Bill Colby had long
since launched into a successful career at
international law.
The world got more dangerous. ^
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