James Jesus Angleton: Was He Right?

by Edward Jay Epstein

In his new biography of James Jesus Angleton, Edward Jay Epstein answers the was Angleton right after all about penetrations in the CIA? Angleton was the legendary head of CIA counterintelligence during most of the Cold War. In May 1987, in one of his last phone calls, he told Dick Cheney, who was then a member of the House Intelligence Committee, that he needed to tell him in person something of vital importance. Even though Angleton died before the scheduled meeting, taking this secret to the grave with him, his mystery lived on. John Le Carre could not have invented a character as intriguing as Angleton. He was ridiculed in the media, Congress, and in the CIA itself, when his mole hunt failed to find a spy in the CIA Investigative journalist Edward Jay Epstein tells of his rise, fall, and the astounding revelations that emerged in the CIA after his death. Epstein spent hundreds of hours interviewing him to understand the mind of this unique mind warrior. He met with him in orchid greenhouses in Kensington, Maryland, dining clubs in Washington DC, and his home in Tucson, Arizona to follow the convoluted layers of his universe of deception. Epstein also was one of the few journalist to interview his arch Yuri Nosenko. In this extraordinary book, he sets out to answer a single Was Angleton right that the CIA had been penetrated? Along the way we also learn much about the CIA and KGB during the cold war years, + Why KGB defector Yuri Nosenko was imprisoned by the CIA. + What was Angleton’s role in the CIA assassination plots against Castro.+ How the CIA allowed the KGB to disinform two Presidents. + What weaknesses KGB spies Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen exposed in the CIA Praise for Edward Jay Epstein "Edward Jay Epstein is the first journalist to have investigated the official accounts of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. He remains the only one to have interviewed all the members of the Warren Commission, and would go on to be one of the great investigative journalists of the era. — Michael Wolff, USA Today “Epstein believes that conspiracies are more common than most journalists credit; for much of his career, he has reveled in the kind of tantalizing clues that could lead somewhere, or nowhere.” — Joe Nocera, The New York Times “Epstein is a bulldog researcher.” — Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post “A brilliant investigator.” — Lou Dobbs

Genres: History, Biography, Nonfiction, Cia, Espionage

108 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2011

About the author

Edward Jay Epstein (born 1935) was an American investigative journalist and a former political science professor at Harvard, UCLA, and MIT. While a graduate student at Cornell University in 1966, he published the book Inquest, an influential critique of the Warren Commission probe into the John F. Kennedy assassination. Epstein wrote two other books about the Kennedy assassination, eventually collected in The Assassination Chronicles: Inquest, Counterplot, and Legend (1992). His books Legend (1978) and Deception (1989) drew on interviews with retired CIA Counterintelligence Chief James Jesus Angleton, and his 1982 book The Rise and Fall of Diamonds was an expose of the diamond industry and its economic impact in southern Africa.

Reviews

[Davy Bennet Surf · Rating 3 out of 5]

Author Edward Jay Epstein talked a good game early on, in regards to the JFK Assassination but he later sold out.
Despite this, I think Epstein was a good journalist and a brave man. He is mentioned in the Epstein Files but is no kin, so not sure he was a good man. Innocent until proven guilty right?

I gave this one 3 stars because I was a little aggravated when I realized half way through that it was an abridgement. I had to look up short-form book. I am wondering how much I missed out on, particularly when you are dealing with CIA-KGB stuff that is built on lies anyway.
The book served it's purpose as a brief study of Angleton and his times, but I came away with that empty feeling, with too many questions not being answered.

GR says this book is 228 pages, but mine is a thinner volume at 106 pages. This is a "Short-form Book". I guess that is french for 'very abridged'?
The Appendixes start after page 66. The first was a very poorly edited essay printed in NY Times Magazine September 28, 1980 called The Wilderness of Mirrors. Really slapped together.


I don't like abridgements but I don't think I would have read the rest of this book if it was double this size. It has been worth reading because it helped me understand odd-duck Angleton. I guess the CIA wanted to get this information into as many hands as possible, and it worked in my case.

Update: I am not sure, but I think the page number in Goodreads is wrong and all versions of this book were 108 pages, wish I knew for sure.

Angleton is more likeable to me, he even painstakingly made his own fly fishing lures, working on his craft, even if just deceiving trout.

I worked across the street from a greenhouse in the Houston area that sold orchids. I remember the owner saying that she had a few Japanese travellers looking for orchids. Probably travellers from other origins too but this was back in the halcyon days of Ronald Reagan and I can't remember. Angleton was a real afficionado of orchids and raised them when he lived in DC. He admired how they used deception to lure insects in to pollinate. I think he saw that as a metaphor for his line of work as Chief of Counterintelligence for the CIA. He was probably a good choice to try to ferret out Soviet moles, even though he lunched very frequently with Kim Philby and didn't see his treachery until after Philby defected to the Soviet Union in the early 1960s.

Epstein met JJA at Angleton's retirement crib in Tuscon and one night was entertained to a story about a predator beetle that mimicked a lightning bugs morse-code like signals to lure these fireflies to their demise.

It impressed me that Angleton was friends with TS Eliot and co-owned a quarterly journal of original poetry (Furioso) that published poets like ee cummings and Ezra Pound. Angleton studied eastern religions to the point where his family became Sikhs. I imagine with his line of work it was nearly impossible to walk the straight and narrow of his native faith. His Mom was Hispanic, thus the middle name Jesus. It adds to his strangeness.

[Nancy · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is an enlightening and comprehensive discussion of counterintelligence, what it is, and how it is used by the CIA and the KGB. Counterintelligence trade craft is such a tangled web that I had to read sections twice. The book includes case summaries from the 1960s through the 1980s that outline the back and forth between CIA and KGB, naming all the spies and counter spies involved. Excellent!

[Aṣwin Mannepalli · Rating 3 out of 5]

James Angleton is the closest this country has ever come to the romantic poet warrior figure. He did all the things that someone who was friends with TS Eliot *should* do: passionately pursue poetry, care about the arts, and dabble enough in Eastern Religion for your wife and kids to convert to Sikhism.

He was also the soul of the CIA giving it character and purpose until he was so consumed with finding moles in the organization that he was finally removed by William Colby.

This slim volume is a welcome addition. Though the author has previously known to obsess over conspiracy theories vis a vis the Kennedy assassination, this book is slightly more possible. It starts with a simple proposition: what if Angleton was right in believing that the KGB had infiltrated the CIA? Using interviews and hindsight (the case of Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen retroactively seem to confirm Angleton's paranoia) the author makes and supports a highly readable claim.

There is, however, little in the way of assessing counter arguments. And that makes this a far more febrile and conspiratorial frenzy than it needs to be.

[Kenny · Rating 4 out of 5]

Angleton was correct. Soviets controlled the CIA throughout the Cold War. Now communists run most Western governments.

[Yousseif Abdellatif · Rating 4 out of 5]

When you read James Jesus Angleton: Was He Right?, you realize Edward Jay Epstein is warning us about how easily passive observation turns into silent approval of structural injustice.

[Reader · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think Angleton was right in his belief that there was a mole within The Central Intelligence Agency.

How he went about handling potential moles was not always in the best interest of the individual's legal rights, but more so, in the best interest of the agency's investigative procedures, specifically, the newly founded "Special Investigations Unit"; founded by James Angleton.

It is this reason that today's Counterintelligence Division operates on a different mission agenda.

[George P. · Rating 4 out of 5]

 Edward Jay Epstein, James Jesus Angleton: Was He Right? (New York: EJE Publications, 2013). Paperback / Kindle

When I was younger and unmarried, I eagerly anticipated the release of new Tom Clancy novels. I would buy them after work and begin reading them at dinner, often skipping sleep (and work the next day) to finish them quickly. What drew me to Clancy’s work was the multilayered complexity of his portrait of the espionage business.

Clancy’s fiction had nothing on James Jesus Angleton’s reality. Angleton was chief of the CIA’s Counterintelligence Staff from 1954 to 1975, in many ways the height of the Cold War. His job was to discern KGB disinformation and to ferret out Soviet moles within the CIA. By the end of his career, he was reviled by many and revered by some. Many felt that his anxieties about the bona fides of the CIA’s Soviet sources were paranoid and delusional. Others felt that the arrogance of CIA staff and their unwillingness to admit the possibility of Soviet penetration made them vulnerable to deception.

The most crucial question, obviously, was whether Angleton was right. At the time of his resignation in 1975, the answer was not obvious. But the convictions of CIA counterintelligence officer and analyst Aldrich Ames in 1994 and of FBI counterintelligence agent Robert Hanssen in 2001 demonstrated that Angleton’s greatest fear (the feedback loop of disinformation from the outside and a mole on the inside) was possible, even if neither Ames nor Hanssen were operative during the Ames years.

Edward Jay Epstein tells Angleton’s story in this little book, laying out in simple form the cause and reasonability of Angleton’s alarm. Evidently, this little book is identical to the opening chapters of the author’s book, Deception: The Invisible War Between the KGB and CIA, so if you want to read the longer book, don’t buy this one. Nonetheless, a gripping story expertly told.

P.S. If  you found my review helpful, please vote yes on my Amazon.com review page.

[Richard Miller · Rating 4 out of 5]

What A great read,when spy's were spy's , in the passed.

[Tom · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had high hopes for this book, which takes the side that legendary spy hunter Jim Angleton was right about Soviet penetration of the CIA. But this short- form book is short on editing, which ultimately detracts from Epstein's usually solid writing and scholarship. One would think at least a SpellChek run through would correct some real howlers in the text.