Cold Warrior: James Jesus Angleton - The CIA's Master Spyhunter. - book reviews

Washington Monthly, June, 1991 by Tom Braden

What had Angleton revealed to Philby during those many meetings and liquor-laden lunches? Did he tell Philby of the projected parachute drop into Albania and thus doom the parachutists to the hail of bullets that awaited them? Did he tell him of other operations and plans?

All that Mangold knows-and we now know-is that Angleton's Philby file has disappeared. All those carefully dictated memoranda of conversations, gone. So we are entitled to wonder how a man in charge of counterespionage might feel upon discovering that he had personally invited the fox into the coop. Might not such a man go over the edge?

I'm not going to list here the bona fide Russian defectors Angleton destroyed (or the colleagues who defended them whose careers he ruined) in the wake of Philby's betrayal. I won't even list the names of the naive bumblers who built their professional lives on the basis of his suspicions. Mangold has listed some of them already. You can read the list. And you should. But here's the lesson. No, an intelligence agency cannot exist without a counterintelligence chief. Yes, the job of counterintelligence chief is to be skeptical, to know details, to try to put those details together, always with suspicion. But the line between suspicion and paranoia is a fine one. Angleton crossed it many, many years ago.

-Tom Braden