The Angletonian Afterlife

How the CIA counterintelligence chief's supporters rebuilt their influence after the Church Committee

James Angleton (Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain).

More than three decades after his death, and almost half a century after he left the CIA, the agency's former counterintelligence chief James Angleton continues to fascinate historians.

There are a number of dimensions to this. In the 1960s, the revelation that Angleton's friend Kim Philby was a Soviet mole led him to embark on an obsessive hunt for further spies that turned Western intelligence upside down. In the 1970s, the investigation of Angleton’s sprawling domestic operations contributed to a new era of scrutiny for the CIA.

His statement to the Church Committee, ‘It is inconceivable that a secret intelligence arm of the government has to comply with all the overt orders of government’, came to be seen as a classic expression of Cold War skulduggery, the public denouement of a secret career (ref 1, loc. 4774). Angleton's subsequent influence has received less examination, but warrants attention.

The Church Committee's chief of staff, Bill Miller, described its deliberations on the CIA's record as a struggle between the 'King's Men', determined to protect untrammelled executive authority, and the constitutionalists, seeking to protect the rule of law (ref 1, loc.4573). Jefferson Morley's biography Ghost cast Angleton as a key player among the Kings' Men, alongside the young Dick Cheney, who would govern in the same imperious spirit as George W. Bush's vice-president during the War on Terror (ref 1, loc.4576).

The supporters of the old guard saw the struggle as much in policy as in constitutional terms. Their viewpoint was expressed with particular clarity by conservative scholar Angelo Codevilla in a 1985 interview with the Washington Times.

Mr Codevilla said the congressional and press "attack" on U.S. intelligence agencies during the mid-1970s grew out of internecine bureaucratic conflict within the intelligence community on resource allocation. What was portrayed as a fight over civil liberties was really a struggle between proponents of detente and cold warriors over the agencies' reliance on technical systems - as opposed to human agents - for collecting and analyzing data' (ref 2).

Codevilla regarded the dramatic cuts in the staff of the intelligence community during this period as a purge of the 'Old Boys' (ref 2).

Almost 1,000 officers from the CIA's clandestine service were fired during the brief tenure of Nixon appointee James Schlesinger as Director of Central Intelligence in 1973 (ref 3, p.376). Angleton himself resigned the following year, with many of his counterintelligence staff leaving in his wake (ref 4, p.271).

A similar turnover affected many of the private organisations which had collaborated with the CIA during the early Cold War, once their covert connections became known. Jay Lovestone, Angleton's closest ally in the American labour movement, left the AFL-CIO earlier in 1974, ostensibly because of the discovery of his ongoing CIA connection (ref 5, p.351).

Rather than slip quietly into retirement, many of the old guard joined a wave of organisations which sprang up to represent former intelligence professionals. By the early 1980s, many of these groups had come together in an informal alliance known as the Common Interest Network.

Angleton himself was personally involved with two of these organisations, the American Security Council (ASC) and the Security and Intelligence Foundation (Ref 6). The involvement of the conservative ASC underlined the extent to which this intelligence lobby was part of a wider movement against détente.

Perhaps the most visible fora for the intelligence old guard were the colloquia of the Consortium for the Study of Intelligence. Founded in 1979, the Consortium sought to defend the legitimacy of intelligence as an intellectual discipline. The attendance at its meetings underlined the extent to which it was an instrument of the cold warrior faction in Codevilla's dichotomy (ref 7).

The majority of the CIA veterans involved came from the Directorate of Operations, the clandestine arm of the agency, whose activities had received so much attention from the Church Committee.

Angleton's supporters, those who biographer Tom Mangold dubbed 'intelligence fundamentalists' for their adherence to his theories, were prominent (ref 8). This meant primarily his own former Counterintelligence Staff, but also some of the allies he had gained through liaison with the FBI and foreign intelligence services, and though his courting of the media after his downfall.

Another important contingent included military intelligence officers, and members of the Defense Intelligence Agency, traditionally more hawkish than CIA analysts. A number of the attendees from beyond the intelligence community were anti-détente activists, often labour Cold Warriors in the Jay Lovestone mould. The Consortium's key organiser, Roy Godson, was in this latter group.

There were fewer attendees from the rival wing of the intelligence community which former DIA head Daniel O. Graham called the 'estimating‐analyzing hierarchy' (ref 9). Those best placed to contest the Consortium's dominant ideas were a trio of Old Boys, Bill Colby, the CIA chief who had fired Angleton, George Kalaris, who has replaced him as counterintelligence chief, and Ray Cline, the analyst who had challenged his view of the Sino-Soviet split.

Cline was virtually alone in his experience of the Department of State's Bureau of Intelligence and Research. Cline's former subordinates in the CIA's analytical wing, the Directorate of Intelligence, were also under-represented, chiefly by dissidents like David S. Sullivan, fired for leaking his own hawkish estimates to Senator Henry Jackson (ref 10). The technical intelligence experts of the National Security Agency were completely absent, although this may have reflected the NSA’s traditional ‘no such agency’ secrecy.

While Angleton himself did not attend the colloquia, his ideas were influential. When CIA staffers asked him about his view of the future of counterintelligence in 1983, he showed them a paper submitted to Roy Godson by his former chief of operations Newton Miler (ref 11).

The CIA summarised Angleton’s view thus:

Turn the clock back to the period before 1973. Give the present CI Staff all the powers and responsibilities the pre 1973 staff had and add powers that Angleton has always believed a properly constituted CIA staff should have, but which DCIs beginning with Dulles down to Helms were never willing to grant him (ref 11).

The essay that Angleton showed the CIA may even have been the chapter in the first volume of the Consortium's proceedings in which Miler called for the US 'to restore, and then increase, the central counterintelligence capabilities lost in 1973' (ref 12) This emphasis was repeated at the Consortium's April 1980 colloquium on counterintelligence, at which two other former Angleton staffers, Norman Smith and Donovan Pratt, also presented papers (ref 13).

The Angletonian aspiration for centralised counterintelligence was in some tension with the desire of the Pentagon hawks to break the CIA’s domination of Soviet intelligence estimates. Even Consortium members who were personally close to Angleton at this time, like Angelo Codevilla, did not all share his institutional loyalty to the CIA (ref 11).

This would be reflected in their prescriptions when the election of Ronald Reagan brought the opportunity to influence policy. The Reagan transition team was filled with prominent Consortium participants, including Godson, Cline, Codevilla, and Ken deGraffenreid (ref 7). In December 1980, the Telegraph’s Robert Moss highlighted the CSI’s call for a recentralisation of counterintelligence in a report which suggested that the transition team would seek a review of Soviet deception operations (ref 14).

The team quickly alienated the incumbent CIA hierarchy by proposing to sack dozens of senior officers (ref 15). The incoming head of the CIA, Bill Casey, instead dispensed with the transition team in order to bolster his support within the agency (ref 16, p.193).

The new CIA leadership was itself something of a balanced slate in the terms of the divisions within the intelligence community. Casey, the director, was an Old Boy, a veteran of the Second World War-era Office of Strategic Services. His deputy, Bobby Ray Inman, was a former director of the NSA, the stronghold of technical intelligence (ref 16, p.192).

Key Consortium players from the transition team, notably Ken deGraffenreid, would find their powerbase outside the CIA, as political appointees in the National Security Council.

Attempts to shape the intelligence policy to be set out in Reagan’s executive order 12333 quickly led to bureaucratic conflict. Future CIA director Robert Gates wrote of this period:

Inman’s opposition to creation of new and centralized counterintelligence organization located in the NSC and to removal of restrictions on collection against Americans earned him the enmity of some of the more conservative elements of the administration, especially on the NSC staff (ref 16, p.220).

This struggle contributed to Inman’s 1982 resignation, according to a New York Times article which noted that deGraffenreid had advocated a new national counterintelligence organization in his contribution to the April 1980 Consortium meeting (ref 17).

The continuing arguments over the issue were reflected in a report by the CIA’s John Bross on a meeting with deGraffenreid the following year.

I said that some of the misunderstanding and distrust which had developed during the transition period had revolved, not around the multi-disciplinary concept or the need for consolidated all-source material to identify hostile activity, but about organisational matters.

I said that Angelo Codevilla’s idea of breaking CIA into three parts and creating a new consolidated counterintelligence agency has alienated most of us involved in the discussions and that I personally remained convinced that an attempt to create a monolithic counterintelligence agency made no sense (ref 18).

The concept of multi-disciplinary counterintelligence (MDCI) was endorsed by Angleton in his 1983 meeting with the CIA (ref 11). The debate over MDCI focused in practice on the potential for enemy manipulation of US technical collection, a critical issue for arms control verification, and hence for détente.

The extent of such strategic denial and deception was still a divisive question the following year, when an attempt took place to hash out the issue with a conference at Airlie House, in Warrenton, Virginia. An account of the meeting by CIA officer James Bruce recalled the molehunt debates of the 1960s, dividing participants into believers, non-believers and agnostics (ref 19, p.19).

The advocates included DCI Casey, SSCI Chairman Wallop, PFIAB members Weiss and Foster, senior staffers deGraffenreid and Lenczowski from the NSC, and Codevilla from the SSCI. Opponents included National Security Agency Director Lincoln Faurer, CIA’s chief of counterintelligence, and the DO’s senior Soviet reports officer. C/NIC and DDI Gates along with an array of seasoned IC analysts and operations officers from key agencies were favorable to D&D or generally open to it; a few opposed (ref 19, p.19).

A belief in the pervasiveness of adversary strategic deception was arguably the greatest Angletonian contribution to the conservative counter-establishment in the intelligence community. It dovetailed neatly with wider aspirations to overturn the primacy of CIA intelligence analysis.

At the time of Angleton’s death in 1987, the hawks were about to go into retreat, thanks to the Iran-Contra Scandal. When the Soviet Union collapsed a few years later, Angleton’s key intellectual influence, the defector Oleg Golitsyn, became a laughing stock for his belief that this too was part of the grand Soviet deception plan.

Yet the Angletonian emphasis on strategic deception was also a powerful influence on the intelligence counter-establishment that returned to office under George W. Bush.

Returning to their strongholds in the NSC and the Department of Defense, they once again did battle with CIA analysts. Roy Godson held out particular hopes for a Pentagon Iraq intelligence unit, telling journalist Robert Dreyfuss in 2002, that ‘it might turn out to be a David against Goliath’ (ref 20).

This time they won the battle, and the result was the Iraq War. The intelligence failure was in part the result of the continuing influence of the Angletonian worldview.

References

Ref 1: Jefferson Morley, The Ghost: The Secret Life of CIA Spymaster James Jesus Angleton, St James Press, 2017.

Ref 2: Bill Gertz, Hill oversight of intelligence shifts focus to effectiveness, Washington Times, 30 July 1985. Archived at the CIA FOIA Reading Room.

Ref 3: Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes, Penguin, 2008.

Ref 4: David Wise, Molehunt: How the Search for a Phantom Traitor Shattered the CIA, Avon Books, 1992

Ref 5: Ted Morgan, A Covert Life - Jay Lovestone: Communist, Anti-Communist and Spymaster, Random House, 1999

Ref 6: David Robarge (2003) Moles, Defectors, and Deceptions: James Angleton and CIA Counterintelligence, Journal of Intelligence History, 3:2, 21-49, DOI:10.1080/16161262.2003.10555085

Ref 7: Tom Griffin, State-Private Networks and Intelligence Theory: From Cold War Liberalism to Neoconservatism, Routledge, 2022.

Ref 8: Tom Mangold, Cold Warrior - James Jesus Angleton: The CIA's Master Spy Hunter, Simon and Schuster, 1991

Ref 9: Seymour Hersh, C.I.A. AD NAMES ESPIONAGE CHIEF, New York Times, 1 March 1973.

Ref 10: Don Oberdorfer, David S. Sullivan: Peppering the Soviets on Breaches of SALT, Washington Post, 23 June 1986.

Ref 11: Emma North-Best, Even mandatory retirement couldn’t stop spymaster James Angleton’s influence, Muckrock, 21 February 2017.

Ref 12: Roy Godson, ed., Intelligence requirements for the 1980s: Elements of Intelligence, National Strategy Information Center, 1983.

Ref 13 Roy Godson (ed), Intelligence Requirements for the 1980's: Counterintelligence, National Strategy Information Center, 1980

Ref 14: Robert Moss, The Intelligence War: Putting the Muscle in the CIA, Daily Telegraph, 20 Dec. 1980. Archived at the CIA FOIA Reading Room.

Ref 15: Jack Anderson and Dale Van Atta, Conservatives had CIA 'hit list', Washington Post, 16 March 1987.

Ref 16: Roy Godson, ed., Intelligence requirements for the 1980s: Elements of Intelligence, National Strategy Information Center, 1983

Ref 17: Philip Taubman, Inman Resignation Tied to Debate on Widening Intelligence Activity, New York Times, 23 April 1982. Archived at the CIA FOIA Reading Room.

Ref 18: John A. Bross, Meeting with Kenneth deGraffenreid, Central Intelligence Agency, 29 August 1983. Archived at the CIA FOIA Reading Room.

Ref 19: James B. Bruce, The Rise and Fall of an Intelligence Discipline–and Its Uncertain Future, Studies in Intelligence 64 (1), pp.13-29, Central Intelligence Agency, 2020.

Ref 20: Robert Dreyfuss, The Pentagon muzzles the CIA, American Prospect, 21 November 2002.