From the National Counterintelligence Center Counterintelligence Reader, Volume 3
The Angleton Era in CIA
Yale professor, Norman Holmes Pearson, recruited his former student into the Office of Strategic Service’s (OSS) X-2 (counterintelligence). In 1943, OSS sent Angleton to London where he learned counterintelligence from the British. He lived at the Rose Garden Hotel on Ryder Street, which was headquarters for the combined counterintelligence operations of OSS and MI6. During his tour in London, the British gave Angleton access to their intercepts of the broken German Abwehr code (ICE).
In 1944, X-2 ordered Angleton to Italy to assume control of its counterintelligence operations as the Allied forces drove northward up the peninsula against the retreating German army (for additional information on Angleton’s operations in Italy, see the article “ARTIFICE” in Volume II). Shortly after the Germans surrendered in May 1945, President Truman disbanded the OSS. Angleton remained in Rome as commanding officer of a small caretaker organization called the 2677th Regiment of the Strategic Services Unit (SSU).
In 1947, Angleton returned to the United States and joined CIA’s Office of Special Operations. In December 1949 he became chief of Staff A (Operations), responsible for clearances for all agent operations, double agent operations, provocation, and operational interrogation. With his background in counterintelligence, it was surprising that Angleton was not assigned to Staff D, which was created at the same time. Staff D was responsible for CI, and William Harvey was named chief. Later, Staff D became Staff C. It operated primarily in the field of records exploitation, analysis of information, control of CI information, and name checks. Both Staffs in effect performed counterintelligence functions.
Staff C also acquired several responsibilities from the Office of Special Operations (OSO), which was eliminated. It acquired the physical security of all the Agency’s foreign installations, the operational security of agents, and protective and counterespionage chores. From the Soviet branch it acquired the external USSR section (International Communism) and the Russian Intelligence Section.
In 1952, Angleton, with the support of the Office of Security, started operation HTLINGUAL. It conducted international mail openings from the main postal facility in Jamaica, New York. In proposing the operation, Angleton argued that the mail opening operation was a necessary alternate to the CIA’s foreign operations. In 1958 the FBI was informed of the mail openings after it requested permission from the postmaster general to mount a similar operation. The postmaster general informed the Bureau that the CIA had been opening mail for five years.
CIA’s Office of Security actually opened the letters, and the Counterintelligence Staff processed the information. The operation ran smoothly until Deputy Director of Operations, William Colby, recommended to DCI William Schlesinger that HTLINGUAL be terminated. Angleton made a strong appeal for its continuation, saying the mail information was valuable. To legalize the operation, he urged Schlesinger to obtain the President’s personal approval. Not wanting to take sides, Schlesinger suspended the operation, and it eventually died from neglect.
The Philby Connection
Before CIA established its Counterintelligence Staff, Angleton worked with Harvey’s Staff C to track down Soviet spies in the United States. Afterwords, Kim Philby, from British intelligence, arrived in Washington in September 1949 to become liaison officer to the FBI and CIA. Angleton and Harvey also collaborated closely with him. Philby and Angleton became friends and often lunched together. An unidentified CIA officer stated that “Philby was Angleton’s prime tutor in counterintelligence.”
In 1950, the British Foreign Office assigned Guy Burgess to the British Embassy in Washington as a second secretary. He previously worked for MI6 but his indiscretions caused MI6 to fire him. After his firing, the British Broadcasting Corporation hired him but he soon left to join the Foreign Office where he was appointed as the confidential secretary to the minister of state.
Upon his arrival in the United States, Burgess moved into Philby’s home. Although Philby attempted to be a stabilizing influence for Burgess, the task was impossible because Burgess was a flagrant drunkard and unabashed homosexual. In the Spring of 1951, the British Foreign Office considered recalling Burgess to London for abusing his diplomatic privileges but changed its mind. The issue resurfaced one afternoon when the Virginia State Police stopped him for speeding three times. Each time he berated the state troopers to such an extent that the Governor of Virginia reported the incident to the State Department. The Foreign Office had no choice but to recall Burgess to London to face a disciplinary board for his indiscretions in the United States.
After his return to London, British security noted Burgess having several lunches with Donald Maclean. Maclean, head of the British Foreign Office’s American Department, was suspected of being a Soviet agent. Suspicion of Maclean surfaced after intercepted KGB coded cables were decrypted by American intelligence pointing to a spy in the British Foreign Office. Of particular interest was an intercept that indicated that “Homer” (codenamed for Maclean) met his Soviet handler twice a week in New York using the cover story of visiting his wife. This pattern matched that of Maclean’s movements of twice-a-week visits to his pregnant wife, Melinda, who was residing with her American mother in New York City.
On Friday, May 25, 1951, the British Foreign Office authorized MI5 to interrogate MacLean the following Monday. Burgess simultaneously knew of this decision. He reportedly told a companion that they would have to postpone plans for a weekend in France because “a friend of mine in the Foreign Office is in trouble. I am the only one who can help him.” Burgess and MacLean defected to Russia. On June 7th, the press reported the disappearance of the two men. On June 26, 1951, the Bureau informed the code breakers at Arlington Hall that “Homer” was possibly identical to Maclean.
By early 1951 the British apparently focused on Philby as a Soviet spy. Their suspicions grew after the defection of Burgess and Maclean and because of further decrypted KGB messages being read by American intelligence. Before anything could be done, however, Bill Harvey and Angleton, aroused by their own suspicions of Philby, began an independent investigation. This unilateral action on the part of the CIA forced the British to recall Philby and show their hand.
When Burgess and MacLean defected on May 25, 1951, the DCI, Gen. Bedell Smith, directed Harvey, Angleton, and everyone else in CIA to prepare a memo on what they knew about them. Harvey’s five-page memo, dated June 13, 1951, stated categorically that Philby was a Soviet agent. Angleton’s memo of June 18, 1951, did not suggest any suspicions of Philby, according to a CIA officer who studied the memo closely. “It related two or three incidents, the bottom line of which was that you couldn’t blame Philby for what this nut Burgess had done.” In his memo, Angleton wrote, “Philby has consistently sold (Burgess) as a most gifted individual. In this respect, he has served as subject’s apologist on several occasions when subject’s behavior has been a source of extreme embarrassment in the Philby household. Philby has explained away these idiosyncrasies caused by a brain concussion in an accident.…” Another source said that Angleton’s memo did conclude that Philby was a Soviet agent.
After Philby had been unmasked, Angleton would claim to have had his doubts about Philby all along. Two of Angleton’s closest friends would support that contention, but three CIA officers who reviewed the Philby file in depth insisted that Harvey was the first to point the accusing finger. Angleton explained the absence of documentary evidence to support his claim that he had his doubts about Philby all along by saying one did not put in writing something so sensitive as suspicions about the loyalty of a trusted member of a friendly intelligence service. Angleton had not unmasked Philby. Never again would he permit himself to be so badly duped. He would trust no one. Philby was the greatest blow Angleton ever suffered.
Smith forwarded Angleton’s and Harvey’s memos to MI6 in London with a cover letter stating that Philby was no longer welcome as the British liaison officer in Washington.
Angleton Named Chief of CI Staff
In September 1954, the new DCI Allen Dulles selected Angleton to be chief of an expanded Counterintelligence Staff “to prevent or detect and eliminate penetration of CIA.” He previously served as the DCI’s personal advisor on CI problems, sometimes to the exclusion of the more official Staff C, and played a leading part in negotiating this restructuring. Angleton’s aim was to prevent the CI mission of the Clandestine Services from becoming subordinate to other divisions.
Dulles decided that the Israeli account was too important to be entrusted to the pro-Arab specialists in the Near East Division. His solution was to give it to the Counterintelligence Staff. One rationale for this move was that Angleton had a wide range of contacts with Israeli leaders, many of whom he had met in Italy after the war.
Another responsibility Dulles gave Angleton was handling all liaison with allied intelligence services. This allowed Angleton to boost his personal authority within the CIA because it delegated to him ready access to the Director. He became the central figure through whom the director would learn of important secrets volunteered by allied intelligence services and also allowed him to control what information CIA passed to these services.
British MI5 officer, Peter Wright, in 1957, stated: “I was struck by (Angleton’s) intensity. He had a razor sharp mind and a determination to win the Cold War, not just to enjoy the fighting of it. Every nuance and complexity of his profession fascinated him, and he had a prodigious appetite for intrigue. I liked him, and he gave enough hints to encourage me into thinking we could do business together.”
The CI Staff’s charter, published in March 1955 as Chapter V of the revised CSI No. 70-1 established four subunits:
- Special Investigations (mainly operational approvals and support).
- Liaison ( with the FBI regarding US internal security).
- Research and Analysis.
- Special Projects (especially touchy matters and liaison with the Israeli Service).
Anatoliy Golitsyn, Angleton’s Rasputin
Anatoliy Mikhaylovich Golitsyn, born 25 August 1926, Piryatin, Ukraine, was a KGB staff officer who defected to the United States while stationed in Helsinki on 15 December 1961. Golitsyn was the first KGB staff officer defector since 1954. The first nine months after his arrival in the United States were very productive. He provided insights into the operations and personnel of the KGB but only compromised one significant spy–– Georges Paques, a French national, working in the NATO press office. Many of his leads were vague; a factor compounded by his refusal to be debriefed in Russian. CIA accepted Golitsyn’s bona fides in March 1962. Some of his information was deemed important enough by CIA that DCI McCone and later Richard Helms briefed President Kennedy and the British and French Governments as well, about it.
Golitsyn elaborated on the espionage work of previously identified agents as Heinz Felfe and George Blake. He espoused the theory that the Soviets had penetrated all the Western intelligence services. Peter Wright, an MI5 officer, became one of the most devoted followers of the Golitsyn theories and played a major role in the MI5 investigations of the supposed penetrations of the British services.
In November 1964, Golitsyn identified Ingeborg Lygren as a Soviet agent. She had recently returned to Oslo from Moscow and was serving as secretary to the head of military intelligence, Col. Wilhelm Evang, Norway’s chief liaison with CIA. Angleton flew to Oslo but, instead of contacting Evang about Golitsyn’s allegation, he told the chief of Norway’s internal security service, Asbjorn Bryhn. Bryhn and Evang were bitter enemies and their noncooperation with each other was legendary in Norway. To Bryhn, the arrest of the secretary to his archenemy would be a plum in his cap.
The result of the investigation was insufficient evidence to bring the case to trial. Despite the lack of hard facts, Bryhn had Lygren arrested on 14 September 1965. Evang was informed three days later that his secretary had been arrested and was being held in solitary confinement. During her confinement, Lygren did admit indiscretions in Moscow with persons she presumed were under KGB control but claimed that she was never recruited.
On 10 December 1965, Lygren was formally charged as a Soviet spy. Four days later, Norway’s state prosecutor promptly threw out the case because of the lack of hard evidence. Lygren was freed but the case did not disappear. The Norwegian press began a hue and cry and an impartial Norwegian investigation followed. This investigation cleared Lygren and criticized severely Evang and Bryhn for their distrust of each other. Both men were reassigned.
The whole affair caused an enormous flap that damaged CIA’s liaison with Norway for many years. Two years later, Oleg Gordievskiy, a senior KGB officer who was recruited by the British and worked inplace for them, advised the British that a KGB agent worked in the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. After an investigation, the Norwegian intelligence service arrested Gunvor Haavik, who served as secretary to the Norwegian ambassador in Moscow before Lygren arrived in Moscow in 1956.
Golitsyn arrived at a time when CIA officers were in a state of alarm about the KGB. He convinced many of them of the existence of a successful Soviet conspiracy to push “misinformation.” Golitsyn was treated in an unusual manner. For instance, when his original handler died, he was turned over exclusively to the CI Staff, which allowed him access to CI files to look for material to support his theories about the Soviet conspiracy. Golitsyn then went on to encourage suspicions that there were high-ranking spies planted in the West.
The Nosenko-Golitsyn Debate
It was Golitsyn who provided the first information about the KGB’s “disinformation” department. When CIA picked up on this, it began to assume that many KGB operations had “disinformation” as their purpose and that most Soviet defectors were in fact “dispatched” agents. Golitsyn also predicted that Moscow would send out another defector with the specific mission of undermining him and his information.
Yuriy Ivanovich Nosenko, a Lieutenant Colonel in the KGB’s Second Chief Directorate with considerable experience in operating against Americans, first approached US Intelligence in Geneva, Switzerland in June 1962. He provided information dealing with KGB operations against Americans and other foreigners inside the USSR. In early February 1964, Nosenko defected while accompanying the Soviet delegation to the Geneva disarmament talks.
The first CIA interviewers who met with Nosenko favored cooperation with him. He was accepted as a defector in February 1964 and began to undergo intensive debriefing. One key item in this was Nosenko’s report on the story in the USSR of Oswald and his flat denial that Oswald had been under KGB direction.
Angleton soon converted Nosenko’s designated handler Chief, Soviet Russia/Counterintelligence (C/SR/CI) Tennant Bagley, to the Golitsyn point of view. The original attempt to establish Nosenko’s bona fides turned into a prolonged effort to break him and to learn from him the details of his mission and its relation to possible penetration of US Intelligence and security agencies.
For the remainder of DCI McCone’s tenure, CIA held Nosenko in close confinement and periodically subjected him to hostile interrogation. For 10 years, starting in 1964, James Angleton devoted a substantial part of the resources of the Counterintelligence Staff to investigating the charges and countercharges surrounding Yuri Nosenko, suspecting that the CIA harbored a Soviet double agent.
Pressure from the Clandestine Services led to a reopening of the Nosenko case. Near the end of DCI’s Raborn’s tenure, a Soviet Division officer laid out his reasons for believing that Nosenko was a bona fide defector and his recommendations for an impartial review in a paper that he sent to the Chief, SB Division. When no action was taken, he sent it to the DDCI. Toward the end of 1966, interrogation of Nosenko resumed under more humane conditions.
Still dissatisfied at the lack of a solution, the officer finally took his case to the DCI in December 1966. In March 1967, Helms turned the Nosenko case over to DDCI Rufus Taylor. Taylor assigned responsibility for the case to the Office of Security, thus getting it off to a fresh start. Bruce Solie took over Nosenko’s handling and interrogation, and in due course turned around the Agency’s official position. Nosenko was released from detention in October 1968. In May 1977, CIA finally accepted Nosenko’s bona fides as valid.
Paradoxically, while SB’s efforts against the Soviet target were handicapped by charges of plots, moles, and disinformation campaigns, the Soviets themselves were evolving in the other direction. By the late 1960s, a new generation—less bound by the idealism of the revolutionary period and the suspicions of the Stalinist era—were emerging as the group most often in contact with Westerners. They proved somewhat more susceptible than their elders to recruitment offers and more willing to supply intelligence information.
The Angleton Legacy and Deception
From 1963 to 1965, the Soviet Division collided with Angleton and his theories that any reports and information acquired from Soviet sources was likely to be planted for the purposes of deceiving US intelligence. Such views negated any accomplishments of the Division, and the Division itself was split over the issue of whether the Division was a victim of Soviet provocation and penetrations.
The Trust Operation and Its Impact on the CI Staff’s View of Deception
The Trust was an organization especially created by the GPU (forerunner of the KGB) for the purpose of demoralization of the émigrés, specifically its monarchist faction. In four years after its creation, the “Trust” not only became a powerful organization, which attracted to itself all the orthodox monarchist and anti-Bolshevik elements, but also obtained control over most of the Russian émigrés.
It not only achieved penetration into the principal anti-Soviet intelligence services and acquired influence over the information about Soviet Russia going to a number of European capitals, but it became capable of conducting deep reconnaissance in Europe and of committing sabotage in the realm of international relations. One could pose the obvious question: were there no suspicions aroused during this period lasting several years. Did it not seem suspicious that this organization, so much talked about in all the European capitals and all the émigré caberets, had not been uncovered by the Bolsheviks?
When the Trust ended, it had inflicted great damage on the Russian emigre movements. Their political and military capabilities were undercut to such an extent that, from 1927 on, its role became insignificant. The damage to the European intelligence services was just as devastating, since for several years they were severed from their own potential real sources, were fed notional and deception material, and were demoralized as a result of the apparent easiness of the work.
The Trust was the cause of numerous misunderstandings between the various services, which destroyed that mutual confidence which, at first, united them in their work against the Soviets.
The Monster Plan vs. The Master Plan
The CI Staff took up the doctrine of Soviet use of disinformation techniques and automatically suspected all defectors of being KGB provocateurs. By the time of Nosenko’s arrival, it had become virtually impossible for any defector from the Soviet intelligence service to establish his bona fides to the satisfaction of the CI Staff or the Soviet Division.
The feud escalated into competing “plot” scenarios, with CI Staff seeing a Moscow-directed conspiracy to subvert CIA by controlling key officials within it and with certain Soviet Division officers seeing a CI plot to undermine confidence in Agency leaders and CIA’s Soviet experts. Productive activities were inhibited for long periods of time while accusations and counteraccusations about a possible Soviet-controlled “mole” in the top echelons of CIA were checked out. The damage to morale lasted longer.
CI Staff’s “Monster Plot” theories—developed and elaborated from 1962 to 1970—were based on closely reasoned arguments. They began with the assumption that the KGB would run a Nosenko-style provocation only if it had a deep penetration of the organization against which the provocation was directed. This was reinforced by a dictum CI Staff applied to its own operations—that a deception or disinformation case cannot be run without controlled channels of communications. CI also had a deep conviction that CIA could not have escaped the sort of penetrations that had been proved in other Western services.
One extreme aspect of the plot theory was a special, rigidly compartmented project that included CI Staff, the Office of Security, and the FBI but excluded the Soviet Division. Much of the work under the special project was done by junior officers, who sought to document given hypotheses they assumed to be valid. CI Staff did not reveal its suspicions to the rest of the Clandestine Service, which remained unaware that some quarters considered all their Soviet Bloc operations contaminated.
The Loginov Affair
Yuriy Loginov was a KGB illegal dispatched to Finland in 1961. Rather than establishing a fictitious, non-Soviet identity there as his KGB superiors had directed, he informed the American Embassy in Helsinki that he wished to defect. Agency officers persuaded him to return to the USSR instead, to serve as a CIA agent. He maintained contact with CIA as he traveled abroad on KGB missions over the next six years, although his production was minimal.
After Nosenko’s 1964 detention by CIA, the poisons of that case contaminated the Soviet Division’s handling of Loginov as well. In part because Loginov’s information substantiated Nosenko’s and in part because of Golitsyn’s hold over Angleton and the Soviet Division, prevailing CIA opinion when Loginov appeared in South Africa in February 1967 was that he was a witting KGB deception agent. Told that the Agency did not trust him, he asked permission to defect, only to be refused. Tipped by CIA that Loginov was a KGB-controlled agent, South African police arrested him in July, after promising to keep CIA’s past association with him a secret. Two years of imprisonment and interrogation followed.
In July 1969, South African officials, working through the West Germans, exchanged Loginov with the KGB for 11 Westerners jailed in the East. According to several reports, Loginov resisted his forced return to the end. He died before a firing squad.
The Cold Warrior
Angleton was one of a few CIA officers who was granted special authority to report directly to the DCI, outside the normal chain of command. This special reporting authority had arisen both from the need for tight security for sensitive activities and from each DCI’s interest in keeping close control of certain matters.
To the new DCI William Colby, this special access posed a problem because he wanted to eliminate any possibility that previous loyalties did not transcend current ones. He solved this by firing one of the officers previously given this special access. Angleton presented a much bigger problem.
Colby had first tried to get rid of Angleton in early 1973, when as Director of the Directorate of Operations he urged DCI James Schlesinger to fire the counterintelligence chief on the ground that Angleton’s ultraconspiratorial mind was more of a liability than an asset to CIA. Schlesinger refused.
In September 1973, with Schlesinger appointed as Secretary of the Department of Defense, Colby was named DCI. As Colby noted in his book, however, by the time the decision was his to make, he thought the Clandestine Service had had about all the personnel turbulence it could take and that it would see a move against Angleton as an omen of much more to come.
Reprieved from dismissal, Angleton faced a reduction of his virtual autonomy. In June 1973, Colby saw to it that the mission statement of the Counterintelligence Staff was revised and that Angleton was firmly told the CI Operations component would in the future report to and be directed by the Directorate of Operations. The private communications channels between the Chief of CI Staff and its representatives abroad were put on a case-by-case basis, and Angleton’s control of counterterrorism liaison with the FBI was also taken away.
Colby has explained that he did not suspect that Angleton and his staff were engaging in improper activities, but that he just could not figure out what they were doing at all. He said he could not follow Angleton’s tortuous arguments and could not find any tangible results from his activities.
Colby’s concern grew when he discovered that CI Staff’s theories about Soviet deception and manipulation were distracting from CIA’s efforts to gather positive intelligence information, damaging the careers of good CIA clandestine operations officers by casting doubt on their reputations, and, in the case of France, threatening the Station’s relations with the host country by spreading accusations about the loyalty of the COS.
In another move, Colby stripped the Israeli account from Angleton. Colby hoped that Angleton would take the hint and retire. Angleton fought back but the publicity about illegal domestic surveillance, beginning with a long article by Seymour Hersh on December 22, 1974, tipped the scales.
Colby called Angleton to his office on Friday, December 20, 1974, and demanded his resignation. Colby offered Angleton another assignment, to spend the rest of his career writing an extensive study of the doctrine of counterintelligence complete with case studies.
Colby later explained that he had assumed that Angleton would be outraged and quit. Three of Angleton’s closest associates resigned at the time he was dismissed. All four were given short-term contracts or granted consultant status in order to provide for an orderly transfer of counterintelligence responsibilities.
The CI Staff was rebuilt with new people, with many of the positions filled on a rotational basis to ensure a continuing infusion of fresh personnel. Angleton’s immediate successor was George Kalaris, who was brought in to become Acting Chief, CI.
Seymour Hersh in a New York Times article, dated June 25, 1978, stated, “The political struggles that, to one degree or another, were provoked by the Soviet Union after WWII left the West with a legacy of fear of Soviet expansionism. As in any political conflict, there were extremists on both sides, and over the years Angleton came to symbolize one end of the spectrum, his apprehension of the Communist threat affecting all things Russian.”