Within the directorate of plans was the counterintelligence division, a hermetic, secretive fiefdom which for over thirty years was headed by one of the most controversial personalities in the history of the CIA, James Jesus Angleton. Angleton was a legend within the agency. He was a skilled fly-fisherman, orchid grower, and leather tooler. He would give fishing flies and leather cigarette boxes that he made himself as presents to friends. His nicknames testified to his reputation. "Virginia Slim" after the cigarettes he chain-smoked; "Skinny Jim"; a man who looks "like his ectoplasm has run out" said a colleague; the "Delphic Oracle", and "The Ghost". Officers could work for years at Langley without ever setting eyes on him.
Counterintelligence is a very specialised and sophisticated activity. It has an in-built institutional paranoia which sooner or later overwhelms every counterintelligence officer and Angleton himself was not immune. As head of the counterintelligence staff, Angleton's task was to police the CIA, to frustrate attempts to penetrate the agency and confuse it with disinformation. Because of connections he made with Israelis in the 1940s in Italy, he was personally given responsibility for liaison with the Israeli intelligence services.
Angleton came from Idaho and was half-Mexican through his mother, a fact of which he was extremely sensitive and which he tried to hide in a WASP upbringing. He was educated in England and then went to Yale. In 1938, when travelling in Europe, he met Ezra Pound who later visited Yale and contributed to the literary magazine Angleton edited, Furioso. During the war, his cosmopolitan background led him to the OSS where he was involved in liaison with the British in London during the war. He also became friendly with Allen Dulles. They were both fascinated by counterintelligence, for which Angleton had a real flair. When Angleton became head of counterintelligence, largely thanks to Allen Dulles who was by then DCI, he reported directly to Dulles to whom he had complete access.
Throughout the 1950's Angleton formed very close contacts not only with the main western European intelligence services but also with the Turkish, South African, Yugoslav, Taiwanese, Thai and, especially, the Israeli organisations.
Angleton's job, part policeman, part spycatcher, required him to be intensely suspicious of his closest colleagues and had a very isolating effect. Friendship was a luxury. But during his wartime stint in London he did make friends with Kim Philby of SIS. When Philby arrived in Washington after the war as SIS liaison with U.S. intelligence, Angleton showed him around and smoothed his way with introductions and contacts in the Washington bureaucracy. They lunched together frequently and dined at each other's houses. When Philby fell under suspicion in 1951 after Burgess and Maclean absconded, Angleton vehemently defended his friend to the DCI, Bedell Smith, claiming that Philby had been duped by Burgess. When confirmation of Philby's treachery finally came in 1963, Angleton was devastated. Philby was one of his few close friends and the revelation that he was the very symbol of everything Angleton had been fighting against was a shattering experience. Angleton became even more withdrawn and isolated as a result. If Philby could betray on such a scale, he concluded, then nobody could be trusted. From that point he conducted an increasingly obsessive mole hunt in the CIA.
At its start, the agency had been penetrated by Soviet spies. James Speyer Kronthal was probably the first. He had served with Allen Dulles in the OSS in Switzerland during world war II. When the CIA was created, Kronthal became the agency's first station chief in Switzerland. There he was blackmailed into becoming a Soviet spy: he was homosexual. In 1953 he committed suicide, apparently hopelessly torn between a real loyalty to the United States and his treachery.
John Arthur Paisley joined the CIA in 1953. He had been a sailor, specialising in signalling. In the agency, he worked in the DDI's electronic branch, becoming expert in Soviet communications. In 1974 he retired from the agency. Four years later he disappeared sailing off the Maryland coast just as investigations had begun to try to determine whether or not he had spied for the Soviets.
Karl and Hana Koecher were a Czechoslovak couple who came to the United States in 1965 claiming to be political refugees. In 1973 for four years, Karl was hired as a translator by the agency. In 1984 he was arrested for spying for Czechoslovakia, with his wife acting as his go-between. It was thought by some of the CIA and FBI investigators that the Koechers had worked with Paisley.
David H Barnett joined the agency in 1958. He resigned twelve years later. Then, in 1976, he became a Soviet agent, selling Moscow his knowledge of the agency and actively seeking to join the staff of the Senate intelligence committee in order to obtain more information for his paymasters. He was arrested in 1980. He confessed and was sentenced to ten years in gaol for espionage.
In 1985, Larry Wu-tai Chin, a naturalized U.S. citizen, was arrested for spying for Red China. He was an early CIA analyst, reaching senior position in the China section of the DDI. Before committing suicide weeks after his arrest, he admitted that he had been an agent for Peking for the whole of his career.
Over a thirty year period to the mid-1970s when Angleton left the agency, tens of thousands of individuals had passed through the CIA. The handful of identified penetration agents was a testimony to something - the efficiency or inefficiency of the CI staff; the effectiveness of the agency's screening procedures; the inefficiency or efficiency of Red Chinese and Soviet bloc intelligence services. Angleton fundamentally regarded it as evidence of the cleverness of the other side, and was convinced that there was at least one high-level Soviet spy in the CIA. Suspicion, after all, was his job.
EARLY AGENTS
The CI staff was not responsible for handling agents or defectors: that was the job of the Soviet bloc division of the DDP. The problems arose when counterintelligence came to assess the value of agent and defector information and the possibility that they might be disinformation agents.
Allen Dulles made the recruitment of penetration agents a prime objective of the CIA. The best ones, he considered after his wartime experience with Kolbe and Gisevius in Switzerland, were what he usually termed "walk-ins", people who out of the blue offered their services. However, it was not until 1952 that the first Soviet official was recruited: Major Vladimir Popov of the GRU, Soviet military intelligence.
William Hood, Popov's case officer in the CIA, summed up Popov's contribution until he was finally arrested in 1958:
"For six years he trundled bales of top-secret information out of the top-secret centres of Soviet power. In the process he shattered the Soviet military intelligence service, caused the transfer of the KGB chief (a four-star general and one of the most powerful men in the USSR), and saved the United States half a billion dollars in military research."1
A year after Popov was recruited, an officer serving under him in the GRU, Major Peter Deriabin, asked for asylum at American military headquarters in Vienna and gave his debriefers a wealth of information about the KGB and about the Kremlin intrigues which followed Stalin's death in March, 1953.
In 1954 Soviet defectors to the West included the KGB chief in Australia; a KGB officer stationed in Tokyo; Nikolai Kholkov, a member of the KGB's assassination section, SMERSH, who defected in West Germany, and a senior officer from the Polish intelligence service.
Over the years scores of defectors from the Soviet Union and eastern Europe contributed to the agency's knowledge of Soviet activities and plans, enabling vital cross-checking to take place. Emigrants to the west also helped with information and with such mundane items as clothes and documents that could be used
