Did James Angleton have his own monster plot?

Substack seems to have turned into something of a James Angleton seminar over the past week. It started with a post at Spytalk by Jefferson Morley, on Angleton's still redacted testimony to Congress about his role as the CIA's main liaison with Israel from the mid-50s to the mid-70s. That prompted a series of follow-up posts by Seymour Hersh, whose reporting at the New York Times in the 70s helped to end Angleton's career and to bring about some of those Congressional hearings.

My 2 cents is more of a question than a contribution, albeit one informed by some of my own research. For much of his career, Angleton's responsibility was counterintelligence, the art of frustrating, and possibly manipulating, adversary intelligence services.

His introduction to this subject came during World War Two, as an OSS officer in London, where the British intelligence services had gained effective control of German espionage through the Double-Cross system, using it as a vehicle to send disinformation to Germany.

Angleton got a second powerful lesson about the potential of counterintelligence in the early 1960s, when it was conclusively proven that a close friend, the MI6 officer Kim Philby, was a Russian spy.

In the wake of that experience, Angleton came under the influence of Anatoliy Golitsyn, a defector who claimed that the KGB was involved in a 'monster plot', a counterintelligence deception campaign so vast that the Sino-Soviet split of the 1960s was merely one of its ruses.

Such paranoid theses would ultimately contribute to Angleton's downfall in the 1970s, as the CIA experienced a new era of scrutiny in the wake of Watergate and Vietnam. His supporters would seek to rebuild his counterintelligence vision during the Reagan administration. In my book, State-Private Networks and Intelligence Theory, I show that Roy Godson's Consortium for the Study of Intelligence was one vehicle for this.

One of Angleton's former staffers, Newton S. Miler, wrote the chapter on counterintelligence, in the Consortium's study Elements of Intelligence.

...Miler argued that ‘US intelligence was devastated in the mid to late 1970s, and is still in disarray’. However, he went on to state that problems in counterintelligence were rooted in an internal CIA decision to dismantle its centralised counterintelligence programme in 1973, ‘some 18 months before the concerted media and congressional attacks on the intelligence community began’. He called for the restoration of a counterintelligence system that was ‘monolithically centralized and apolitical,’ with extensive authority to conduct double agent and deception operations, to carry out counterintelligence liaison with foreign intelligence services, to review the CIA’s other clandestine operations, and to maintain a compartmented counterintelligence record system (State-Private Networks and Intelligence Theory, pp.125-126).

An attempt to implement something on these lines led to a power struggle in 1981, pitting the Deputy Director of the CIA, Admiral Bobby Ray Inman against Ken DeGraffenreid of the National Security Council.

Bureaucratic battles over counterintelligence were widely blamed for Admiral Inman’s resignation the following year. The New York Times reported that Inman feared a White House review would lead to ‘a consolidation of counterintelligence responsibility in a new organization vested with broad authority to collect information within the United States’. This may have been a reference to National Security Study Directive 2/ 82, which mandated ‘a comprehensive review of US capabilities to detect, analyse, and counter the foreign intelligence threat’. Citing Ken DeGraffenreid’s April 1980 CSI paper, the New York Times article noted that its author was among those on the NSC advocating ‘an upgrading of counterintelligence capabilities and the creation of a central records system’ (State-Private Networks and Intelligence Theory, p.146).

My question is this: to what extent did the Angletonian drive towards counterintelligence centralisation derive from offensive rather than defensive considerations?

From a defensive point of view, centralisation has obvious flaws. The more centralised a counterintelligence service, the more vulnerable it is to a mole who has reached that centre. MI6 narrowly avoided such a disaster when it came close to appointing Kim Philby as head of counterintelligence.

From an offensive viewpoint, the considerations are different. The wartime double-cross system required a high-degree of co-ordination to ensure the right message was being delivered through German intelligence channels, and assess how that message was received in Germany.

To what extent did the aspiration to do something similar motivate Angleton's empire-building within the CIA? And what would such a campaign have looked like?

My own suspicion, and it is no more than speculation, is that offensive considerations might have given intelligence services an interest in Western Communist Parties that was out of proportion to their influence. How far the Eastern Bloc took such parties seriously as a channel for information collection is another question.

*Incidentally, I am currently reading Morley's Angleton biography, The Ghost, which may bear on these questions. What I can say on the basis of the first few chapters is that is very well-written and an excellent primer on Angleton's early career.