James Jesus Angleton, the CIA, and the Craft of Counterintelligence [Paperback]

Michael Holzman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 31, 2008

As chief of counterintelligence for the Central Intelligence Agency from the early 1950s to the early 1970s, James Jesus Angleton built a formidable reputation. Although perhaps best known for leading the agency s notorious Molehunt the search for a Soviet spy believed to have infiltrated the upper levels of the American government Angleton also played a key role in the U.S. intervention in the Italian election of 1948, in Israel s development of nuclear weapons, and in the management of the CIA s investigation of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. He later led CIA efforts to contain the Vietnam-era antiwar movement, including the campaign to destroy the liberal Catholic magazine Ramparts.
In this deeply researched biography, Michael Holzman uses Angleton s story to illuminate the history of the CIA from its founding in the late 1940s to the mid-1970s. Like many of his colleagues in the CIA, James Angleton learned the craft of espionage during World War II as an officer in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), where he became a friend and protege of the British double agent Kim Philby. Yet Angleton's approach to counterintelligence was also influenced by his unusual Mexican American family background and his years at Yale as a student of the New Critics and publisher of modernist poets. His marriage to Cicely d Autremont and the couple s friendship with E. E. and Marion Cummings became part of a network of cultural connections that linked the U.S. secret intelligence services and American writers and artists during the postwar period.
Drawing on a broad range of sources, including previously unexamined archival documents, personal letters, and interviews, Holzman looks beneath the surface of Angleton s career to reveal the sensibility that governed not only his personal aims and ambitions but those of the organization he served and helped shape.

Editorial Reviews

Review

A smart and engaging discussion of James Jesus Angleton and his role as a central figure in the CIA from its origin until the mid-1970s. Doing research on someone who has dedicated his personal and professional life to concealment is not easy, yet Michael Holzman has done an admirable job of reconstructing Angleton s story. Perhaps its most valuable contribution is its elucidation of Angleton's involvement in illegal programs of domestic surveillance, an issue of obvious importance made more significant by the actions of the current presidential administration. --Robert D. Dean, author of Imperial Brotherhood: Gender and the Making of Cold War Foreign Policy (University of Massachusetts Press, 2001)

Holzman's book is a major history of chilling impact, and a long, rewarding odyssey through the labyrinth of counterintelligence. . . . His cast is huge and his explorations far reaching. --ForeWord, January-February 2009

Even those Americans who actually lived during the years when the FBI and the CIA were secretly and recklessly tracking 'subversives,' did not know the depth and range of that assault on the Bill of Rights.
Finally, in an unprecedentedly penetrating and fully documented expose of that dark era of our history, Michael Holzman in 'James Jesus Angleton, the CIA, and the Craft of Counterintelligence' (University of Massachusetts Press), has sounded an acutely contemporary warning of how the further plans by J. Edgar Hoover and others high in the government for mass roundups of persons of interest can actually happen through the far more advanced surveillance and interconnected databases of the present and future. The end of the Bush-Cheney regime of secret laws; corrosion of the separation of powers; and a steadily expanding surveillance society will not prevent the real-time probability in another 9/11 or its equivalent of a much more pervasive invasion of our Fourth and First Amendment rights than J. Edgar Hoover and the CIA s James Jesus Angleton even envisioned. To know what the United States government was capable of doing to disable the Constitution while also setting up the machinery of mass confinement of Americans suspected of endangering national security is to be forewarned of what George Orwell modestly prophesied before advancing surveillance technology eclipsed his imagination. In this book, Michael Holzman is a Paul Revere of this time that is also time past and time future. --Nat Hentoff, author of 'The War on the Bill of Rights and the Gathering of Resistance.

Review

Holzman's book is a major history of chilling impact, and a long, rewarding odyssey through the labyrinth of counterintelligence. . . . His cast is huge and his explorations far reaching.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 408 pages
• Publisher: Univ. of Massachusetts Press (July 31, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1558496505
• ISBN-13: 978-1558496507
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.1 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #800,704 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Michael Holzman is a writer and independent consultant. He is the author of a number of books, articles and reviews in the fields of education, literature, literacy and history. His most recent book, James Jesus Angleton, The CIA and the Craft of Counterintelligence, was published in 2008, by the University of Massachusetts Press. He is completing a novel, at the moment called Transgressions, set in England in the period 1934 to 1941, and is at work on a biography of Guy Burgess. His earlier books include Writing as Social Action, with Marilyn Cooper, and Lukacs's Road to God.

He is the author of the Schott Foundation's series Public Education and Black Male Students: A State Report Card and Lost Opportunity: A Fifty State Report on Opportunity in America. He was researcher for America's Youngest Outcasts, a report on childhood homelessness for the National Center on Family Homelessness. He is an evaluator of the City University of New York's Black Male Initiative Teachers as Leaders project.

He has been an advisor to the Rockefeller Foundation's National Minority Female Single Parent Employment Skills Program, an evaluator and advisor to the Rockefeller Foundation's teacher professional development initiatives in the arts and humanities in Los Angeles and Philadelphia, and project director of the Bruner Foundation's evaluation of the New York State Community Schools initiative. With Dr. Jane MacKillop, he designed an adult literacy initiative for Philadelphia and co-edited The Gateway: Paths to Adult Learning, a national literacy program that enabled at least 30,000 adults to learn to read.

Dr. Holzman was a founding Senior Advisor for the Panasonic Foundation, where he participated in the development of the Foundation's "school-house to statehouse" systemic school reform initiative. His responsibilities at Panasonic included evaluation, analysis, planning and implementation of structural reform and standards-based curricular improvements in school districts from San Diego to Miami, Minneapolis to Baton Rouge and a number of state departments of education.

As Program Officer for Education at the American Council of Learned Societies, Dr. Holzman designed and operated a national humanities teacher development program, which brought outstanding teachers together with world-class scholars at UCLA, the University of Colorado, Harvard and other sites around the country. He created and implemented a teacher exchange program between the United States and China, which improved the English language skills of teachers of English in selective Chinese secondary schools and introduced American teachers and their students to Chinese language and culture.

Dr. Holzman has served as a program director and development officer for a variety of other organizations and as a consultant to a wide variety of educational, arts, legal and public health organizations in the United States, United Kingdom and the Middle East, helping them to raise support for their work. He taught and was an administrator at the University of California and the University of Southern California. He served as director of the California/USC Writing Project (k-12 teacher professional development) and the Model Literacy Program at the University of Southern California.

He received a doctorate from the University of California, San Diego in Literature.

Customer Reviews

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6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Fascinating Portrait of America's Master Spy during the Cold War, May 4, 2010

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Roger D. Launius "Historian" (Washington, D.C., United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: James Jesus Angleton, the CIA, and the Craft of Counterintelligence (Paperback)

James Jesus Angleton is a name that has become famous only after his death in 1987, but in the period of the high Cold War he was one of the most powerful individuals in the United States if not the world, masterminding plots and counterplots in the complex game a espionage between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. As the CIA's long-serving chief of counterintelligence staff Angleton was essentially the nation's senior spy. Amazingly, in the bureaucratic world of government service, Angleton was able to maintain his place at the head of the CIA's counterintelligence office through the terms of six heads of agency, including Gen. Walter Bedell Smith, Allen W. Dulles, and Richard Helms. Angleton's work at the CIA focused on obtaining secrets from other nations that would serve American interests, especially those relating to the Soviet Union during the Cold War, and protecting secrets and preventing penetration into the American intelligence system.

This very fine biography of James Jesus Angleton is a major contribution to the literature of Cold War intelligence activities. Focusing on the career of Angleton in the CIA we see for the first time a fuller picture of the expansive efforts of one-upmanship between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. A centerpiece of this book is the story of the Cuban Bay of Pigs invasion, dealing with its aftermath with John and Robert Kennedy, and a concerted effort to find a spy that had infiltrated the CIA in the early 1960s. At some level, as author Michael Holzman makes clear, Angleton's efforts rode off the rails as he demonstrated a paranoia--perhaps partially understandable in a profession dominated by distrust and caution--far beyond any acceptable limits. Angleton chased supposed spies everywhere, even accusing British Prime Minister Harold Wilson and U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger of aiding the Soviet Union. He also turned his considerable spy network on internal U.S. dissidents in the Vietnam War, significantly overstepping his legal authority.

In the end this story of James Jesus Angleton has all of the elements of Greek tragedy where hubris, zeal, and failure of wisdom brings down the central character. Angleton, the son of an American businessman and a Latina mother, was the product of an Ivy League education who entered clandestine service as a result of the need to defeat Nazi Germany in World War II. He came to believe that the Soviet Union was the great threat of the post-war era, not an usual conclusion for people of his perspective and his class, and he continued his work as a spy into the 1950s and beyond. Consumed with the belief that a life and death struggle was underway, virtually any action necessary to win was acceptable. This led to all manner of actions instigated by Angleton, many of which were questionable, that were eventually exposed and rebuked in the 1970s. Damaging findings from congressional and presidential inquiries into the CIA's operations led to the resignation of Angleton on Christmas Eve of 1975. Never prosecuted for any wrongdoing, Angleton lived until 1987.

Author Michael Holzman offers a compelling concluding statement about the career of James Jesus Angleton: Quoting Justice Louis Brandeis, "`The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.' Angleton and his colleagues, the `like-minded men' of zeal who created the Central Intelligence Agency, forgot this, and a time liberty itself was the victim. It is a danger that recurs" (pp. 322-23). There is a certain ambiguity, however, in assessing the career of Angleton. Much of what he did was commendable, some comtemptable.

15 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An odd man in an odd job, September 26, 2008

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Retired Reader (New Mexico) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: James Jesus Angleton, the CIA, and the Craft of Counterintelligence (Paperback)

This book argues that for a period of twenty years James Jesus Angleton was considered by CIA to be the principal authority on counter-intelligence (CI). As such Angleton set the priorities for the agency's CI program and the tradecraft that was used to execute it. On a different level the book shows how the old boy network of former WWII Office of Strategic Services (OSS) operatives came to dominate CIA's leadership and its approach to its missions.

Angleton was an Ivy League (Yale) intellectual trained in the then prevalent techniques of literary analysis. He was a highly cosmopolitan figure in that he was a Mexican-American and had spent his much of his formative years abroad. This background made him an ideal candidate for the OSS and in 1943 he became an OSS officer.

Angleton's first OSS posting was London where he immediately became involved in CI working closely with the UK CI staff of MI6 (Secret Intelligence Service). This, more than anything, was a learning experience for Angleton and he took to CI analysis so readily that he at the end of the war when he had been reposted to Italy, he was a recognized OSS expert in CI. Ironically his principal tutor in CI tradecraft was Kim Philby, who in the end turned out to be a Soviet agent.

After the war Angleton along with many of his OSS colleagues was recruited into the rapidly developing Cold War intelligence establishment. He became part of that group of OSS officers who shaped the culture and tone of the newly created CIA. In 1954 he became chief of the CI office of CIA, a position which he held until he was sacked in 1974. Because he was part of the `inner circle' of CIA he was also given the important and sensitive Israeli account. During his tenure Angleton prosecuted CI tradecraft as he understood it and trained others to do the same. Whether he did a good or bad job of CI will have to be sorted out by future intelligence historians.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars James Jesus Angleton, the CIA and the Craft of Counterintelligence, December 5, 2010

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Nathan Muir (Fairfax, VA) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: James Jesus Angleton, the CIA, and the Craft of Counterintelligence (Paperback)

Michael Holzman examines James Jesus Angleton's life in his biography, James Jesus Angleton, The CIA and the Craft of Counterintelligence. In this biography Holzman struggles to present a thesis, though by the conclusion of his work he seems to have danced his way around a thesis without explicitly stating one. Holzman seems to subliminally present a thesis that states Angleton was an extremely talented and dedicated individual who excelled at the tasks and orders given to him and was responsible for creating and maintaining the Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA) ultra secretive counterintelligence division and the methods they used until 1974.

Holzman structures his book in a way that examines Angleton's life by looking at key operations in which Angleton was intimately involved while serving in England and Italy with the counterintelligence branch X-2 and while head of CIA's Staff A in the Office of Special Operations and later as the Head of Counterintelligence for CIA. While Holzman ultimately examines Angleton's entire life, he does so in blocks that are often loosely tied together.

Holzman begins his work with a brief look at Angleton's heritage and personal life; noting that his mother was of Mexican descent, something Angleton would conceal in his later professional life. It is noteworthy that Holzman examines Angleton's life largely through his interest in poetry and the structure of the New Criticism method that emphasized a close reading of the material in question, usually a poem, though in Angleton's case, intelligence documents and interactions. Angleton grew up overseas in Italy after his father, who worked for NCR Corporation in the United States selling cash registrars, bought the Italian division of NCR Corporation and moved the family to Italy. While growing up overseas, Angleton boarded at Malvern College in England before returning to the United States to complete his undergraduate education at Yale. Angleton would briefly study law at Harvard before joining the United States Army in 1943 and marrying his wife, Cicely d'Autremont, a few months later.

After joining the US Army in 1943, Angleton was quickly shipped off to England where he worked in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) with the British intelligence services learning the craft of counterintelligence. While working in the OSS, Angleton worked directly with the counterintelligence branch X-2. By February of 1944 he was chief of the Italy desk for X-2 and in November of 1944 he was transferred to Italy to take command of Secret Counterintelligence (SCI) Unit Z that was in charge of handling ULTRA intelligence in Italy. By the late 1940s, Angleton had returned to the Washington DC area and was named head of Staff A in CIA's Office of Special Operations. By 1954 Angleton, under Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) Allen Dulles, had been named head of Counterintelligence Staff at CIA. This was a position that Angleton would maintain until his departure from CIA in December of 1974.

As the head of Counterintelligence for CIA, Angleton would oversee several controversial assignments, including Operation CHAOS, which lasted from 1967 to 1973 and was the infiltration of US based antiwar student groups to look for foreign involvement and HT/LINGUAL, which lasted from 1952 to 1973 and was the opening of mail sent to and from the USSR and China. Angleton would also conduct a sweeping mole hunt that sought to expose Soviet agents. This mole hunt touched virtually every department and agency of the US government as well as several foreign governments and their leaders. It is notable that this mole hunt essentially began when Angleton joined the newly formed CIA in the late 1940s and continued until his departure in 1974 and served as the basis for many controversial operations, such as those listed above. Angleton would eventually be forced out of CIA by DCI William Colby in December of 1974 for these controversial operations, specifically the public fallout from HT/LINGUAL, and his overall secretive nature as head of CIA's counterintelligence division. Upon his retirement from CIA, Angleton worked for the fledging lobby that had grown to rally public and professional support of CIA in the 1970s and 1980s as a result of the Church and Pike Congressional committee investigations into CIA. Angleton died in May of 1987, his last words were allegedly "I've made so many mistakes."

Holzman's work, in large part, fails to examine Angleton's life directly. Holzman instead chooses to provide a substantial amount of contextual and background information and examines situations in which Angleton was intimately involved, such as Operation CHAOS and HT/LINGUAL. While the reader is provided with a great deal of background information and insight in understanding how and why Angleton undertook the operations and made the choices that he did, Holzman does so at the detriment of actually examining Angleton's personality and character. By choosing to examine the unique situations Angleton found himself in rather than Angleton himself, Holzman has failed to make Angleton the primary target of this biographical work and has examined Angleton indirectly.

However, even in failing to make Angleton the primary, direct target of this biographical work, Holzman provides a substantial amount of primary source material which gives the reader an extraordinary first hand look at the events Holzman discusses. Holzman also utilizes a number of interviews he personally conducted with relative persons that adds greatly to his examination of Angleton's character. Overall Holzman provides an interesting indirect and informative look at Angleton's life and accomplishments.