A Look Over My Shoulder

by Richard Helms

  In his thirty-two years of active service, James Angleton remained relatively unknown beyond the confines of the secret intelligence world. It is all the more ironic that since Jim’s dismissal from CIA, the only one of his Agency contemporaries to have inspired more public attention is Allen Dulles. Much of what has been published is unfair to Angleton, to the various DCI’s for whom he worked, to the Agency, and to history.

  At the time James Angleton relinquished his post in Rome, he was one of the few wartime OSS officers who remained in the field to become chiefs of station and who determined to make their careers in secret intelligence. Angleton’s activity in Italy during the final months of the war had attracted General Donovan’s attention and won praise from Allen Dulles in Bern. In the immediate postwar years, Angleton’s work covered the spectrum of secret operations—liaison, intelligence collection on the new targets in Eastern Europe, Communist Party penetrations, counterintelligence, and communications. Some of the operations he established lasted years after his departure. By the time he returned from Italy in late 1947, Angleton was recognized as one of our outstanding field operatives. After a stretch of sick leave, he began work as a special assistant to Admiral Hillenkoetter, then DCI.

  I met Jim in 1948 when he became a staff assistant to Colonel Donald Galloway, then running the operational component, Office for Special Operations (OSO). Jim’s area of responsibility was intelligence collection. It was in the process of attempting to push some of my correspondence through the occasional traffic jams in Colonel Galloway’s office that I got to know Jim. We didn’t always agree, but I profited from some of his insights, and I think he learned a bit about the operations climate north of downtown Milan. Nevertheless, we were both gratified when the Agency was reorganized in 1954. Frank Wisner became deputy director for plans (DDP), and at about that time I stepped up to replace Kirkpatrick as Frank’s deputy and chief of operations. Bill Harvey moved from Staff C—then the counterintelligence component—to the communications intelligence assignment that would lead him to Berlin. Staff C became the Counterintelligence Staff and Jim was named chief, the job he most wanted and which he was to occupy until December 1974 when he was fired by William Colby. Contrary to some of what has been published, Angleton and Harvey were never competitors. Each followed a separate career path. They worked closely together and were friends—no matter that I have never encountered two men who differed more completely in experience, background, appearance, taste, and hobbies than this odd couple.

  The best of Angleton’s operational work is still classified and in my view should remain so. In his day, Jim was recognized as the dominant counterintelligence figure in the non-communist world. He succeeded in establishing an intimacy of counterintelligence and security liaison with the NATO powers and other non-communist countries that exceeded any that had previously existed in peacetime. In most instances these relations were at least as candid as those that existed under the blast furnace pressure of World War II. This was a considerable accomplishment and unprecedented.

  In managing the Agency’s liaison with the FBI, Jim’s ability to maintain an even course and profitable relationship through the turf battles, bickering, misunderstandings, and collisions with the encrusted J. Edgar Hoover was outstanding. Jim’s interest in Israel was of exceptional value. Various countries have honored their own officers and agents on postage stamps, and with official biographies and films. To my knowledge, only Israel has ever dedicated a monument to a foreign intelligence officer. In Jim’s case, it is two monuments—one on a battlefield a few miles from Jerusalem, the other a plaque on a huge stone near the city center.

  In the years since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the restructuring of the KGB into a domestic security organ and a separate foreign intelligence service, some of the KGB old boys have claimed, with knowing chuckles, that Angleton had turned out to be their biggest asset in the West. Not that Jim was a KGB agent, but that his alleged harebrained security measures had paralyzed the ability of the Western powers to operate against the USSR. And, incidentally, to protect the democracies from the depredations of the KGB and its sister services. This is less the opinion of ostensibly unemployed KGB hacks than blunt disinformation intended to warn the world’s security services against ever again letting a deluded American talk them into wasting effort and money worrying about the KGB’s offspring, the SVR. The Cold War is over, they remind us. The hatchets are buried, you democracies don’t have a thing to worry about. Just relax, and let things get back to the way they were before that Gouzenko fellow walked out of the Soviet embassy in Canada with all those cables, and the lovesick Ms. Bentley began to blab a lot of nonsense. Indeed, why worry?

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  In the years we worked together, I got to know James Angleton well and to value him as a colleague and a friend. I remember him as one of the most complex men I have ever known. One did not always have to agree with him to know that he possessed a unique grasp of secret operations. As a friend remarked, Jim had the ability to raise an operational discussion not only to a higher level but to another dimension. It is easy to mock this, but there was no one within the Agency with whom I would rather have discussed a complex operational problem than Angleton. This notwithstanding, Jim’s counterintelligence competence had to be balanced against an understanding of the many aspects of his personality.

  I find it difficult to square the Angleton I knew with the images of Jim that appear to have been written by those who knew him slightly if at all. One element of the problem is that late in life Jim was not above spoofing uninformed supplicants who assumed they had outwitted him, and gulled their way into his confidence. This was less an intended disservice to history than a sardonic reaction to having been taken too lightly.

  One of Jim’s dominant traits was an obsessive approach to things that interested him. This was as apparent in his social life and hobbies as in his work—his commitment to counterintelligence was lifelong and relentless. Setting aside the responsibility for the routine security housekeeping encompassed by the all-purpose counterintelligence canon, Jim remained convinced that in peacetime it would be possible to achieve the level of counterintelligence practiced in World War II. Wartime security disciplines allowed both the Allied and Soviet services to stage brilliantly conceived and executed deception operations. The techniques involved in penetrating an enemy service and dousing it with enough disinformation and deception to turn its momentum and energy against itself cannot, however, be practiced on a broad basis or by inexperienced operatives. At some cost to his reputation, Jim continued to pursue possible instances of high-level peacetime deception. Given sufficiently high stakes, it is within the ability of sophisticated intelligence services to execute peacetime deception operations. Unless security can be maintained at an ultra-high level, such operations cannot be conducted on a broad basis or sustained indefinitely.

  Jim went overboard from time to time. His conviction that the Sino-Soviet split was a mirage created by Soviet deception experts was interesting but simply not true. I let him push this view and arranged for him to express it to experts, including Henry Kissinger. When Jim failed to rally any support, I instructed him to knock it off, and to leave high-level political punditry to others.

  Jim approached hobbies with the intensity he devoted to his work. His interest in fly-fishing led to collecting antique tackle and tying museum-quality specimens of trout flies. In an unguarded moment, I mentioned that my wife, Cynthia, and I would be vacationing with friends who planned to take us trout fishing. The next Saturday afternoon, Jim equipped us with some of his less delicate equipment and bundled us off to Battery-Kemble Park. For two hours, and to the amusement of a stream of passersby, we cast fly after fly in the general direction of a cluster of daffodils. Only when we were reaching the vicinity of our targets three out of five times were we allowed to call it a day.

  Jim’s interest in breeding orchids is as well known as his practice of controlling his inventory by bringing
plants to friends. Cynthia telephoned to ask Jim why her favorite orchid seemed to languish. Too little of this, too much of that? she asked. Two days later, the postman delivered two single-spaced pages of possible remedies. The old-fashioned parlor game of charades, in which a member of one team had three minutes to mime a quotation or title proposed by the opposition, had a brief vogue in Washington. I recall Jim’s confounding a party by guessing “Clot the bedded axle-tree” in thirty seconds and “Gamma Gurton’s Needle” in less time.

  Some critics have charged Angleton with having given away the store in his Washington liaison with Kim Philby. There is no doubt that Philby did immense damage to British and American interests, not the least of which came from his dealing with Agency and FBI officers who had little or no experience in coping with wily foreign liaison chaps. Jim was one of the most experienced CIA officers Philby encountered in Washington. I would guess that he was at least as accomplished as Philby in the tit-for-tat aspects of liaison. The hitch, of course, was that Philby—representing both the British and the KGB—had the vast advantage of playing on both sides of the net.

  I have no doubt that the exposure of Kim Philby was lodged in the deepest recess of Jim’s being. He had accepted Philby as a friend, and respected him as one of the most effective British operatives. This view was shared by Philby’s English colleagues who had known Kim longer and more intimately than Jim ever did. The fact that Bill Harvey, who had no previous experience in dealing with the British, was the first Agency officer to be convinced of Philby’s treason can only have intensified Jim’s profound determination never again to be betrayed. Ironically, Harvey’s dislike for Philby was fueled by a vulgar cartoon of Mrs. Harvey drawn by Philby’s pal Guy Burgess.

  The criticism leveled against Angleton since his dismissal by Colby seems to ignore Jim’s accomplishments and the reasons General Donovan and six directors of Central Intelligence—General Vandenberg, Admiral Hillenkoetter, General Smith, Allen Dulles, John McCone, and I—valued his service. There were any number of channels, formal and otherwise, through which any of Angleton’s post facto critics might have expressed their views of Jim’s performance while he was still in office. I recall no one within the Agency having raised even a fraction of the criticism they began to express after his dismissal.

  In the 1960s the White House appointed an interagency team to examine various CIA stations abroad. Discussions were concentrated on Agency operations against the USSR. A senior FBI officer accompanied the team. Not once was any complaint made against Angleton, nor was there any suggestion that he was in any way hampering operations.

  In the 1970s the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB) made a similar inspection. PFIAB members are appointed from private life by each president and given full security clearances. They are free to conduct any investigation they wish, and report only to the President. Again, a senior FBI man served as a liaison officer with the inspection group. The PFIAB members visited various field stations and poked thoroughly into the nooks and crannies of our Washington headquarters. No criticism of Angleton or the Counterintelligence Staff was raised in the field or in Washington.

  I do not recall anyone in the Agency or elsewhere—board-certified in psychiatry or merely a self-recognized lay expert—ever diagnosing Jim as paranoid, or otherwise psychologically unfit for office. Extensive counterintelligence experience is likely to create a tendency in even the most sanguine officers to distrust some of what might be called received wisdom. In an imperfect world, we all need occasionally to be reminded that all that glitters is not necessarily eighteen-karat treasure.

  One of the more difficult problems various writers have laid at Angleton’s door bore the unhappy cryptonym MHCHAOS, most often shortened to CHAOS. During the Johnson administration and throughout my tenure under Nixon, CHAOS was my responsibility. Nothing in my thirty-year service brought me more criticism than my response to President Johnson’s insistence that the Agency supply him proof that foreign agents and funds were at the root of the racial and political unrest that took fire in the summer of 1967. LBJ simply could not believe that American youth would on their own be moved to riot in protest against U.S. foreign policy. Nixon’s reaction was, as always, more subjective, but he also remained convinced that the domestic dissidence was initiated and nurtured from abroad.

  The broiling summer of 1967 had reached midpoint when President Johnson instructed me to obtain proof that the direction and funding of the antiwar movement and the domestic dissident political turmoil was coming from abroad. I explained that such an investigation might risk involving the Agency in a violation of the CIA charter limiting our activity to operations abroad and forbidding anything resembling domestic police or security activity.

  LBJ listened for some fifteen seconds before saying, “I’m quite aware of that. What I want is for you to pursue this matter, and to do what is necessary to track down the foreign communists who are behind this intolerable interference in our domestic affairs.”

  I had no quarrel with LBJ’s objective; his concern was legitimate. With tens of thousands of troops on the battlefield, the President’s decision was obvious. It lay within the Agency’s responsibility to determine if and how foreign powers might be provoking and funding antiwar and political dissidence within the United States.

  The following day, I established the Special Operations Group (SOG) and named Richard Ober, a tall, levelheaded Harvard alumnus and third-generation oar on a winning crew, chief of the unit. I informed him that at the direction of the President, his group’s sole purpose was to examine all the evidence from all possible foreign sources indicating any foreign support to domestic political dissidents, including student antiwar protesters. I then made SOG an appendage of the Counterintelligence Staff but not subordinate to Angleton. Political dissidence was scarcely a counterintelligence responsibility, but because the President had directed us to sail so closely to the wind, I wanted to keep this activity compartmented from other operational activity and firmly under my control. All of the Agency’s CHAOS reporting went through me. Jim did not ask for this arrangement nor did I consult him before leaving this sensitive baby on the stoop beside his door.

  In November, a month after a large demonstration on the steps of the Pentagon, the Agency forwarded its first report based on data the SOG had developed. However optimistically President Johnson may have opened his copy of the “International Connections of the U.S. Peace Movement,” he can only have suffered a thundering disappointment. For all our effort abroad, we had not uncovered any significant foreign involvement or funding for any of the dissidence. I expected an explosive reaction from the White House, and in my darker moments thought there might even be a suggestion from the President that “we reason together for a few moments.” LBJ’s notion of reasoning together was the equivalent of discussing the ownership of a side of beef with a Bengal tiger.

  There was no protest from the White House, only the demand that we intensify our search for foreign influence. At this juncture, we moved closer to infringing on our charter and produced a study, “Restless Youth.” I forwarded two versions to the White House. One contained a domestic section and was restricted to the President and two of his closest advisors. In the cover letter to the President, I reminded him that he should “be aware of the peculiar sensitivity which attaches to the fact that CIA has prepared a report on the student activities both here and abroad.” (When President Nixon asked for information on antiwar protests in early 1969, I sent a copy of this report to Henry Kissinger and the President with a similar caution in respect to the Agency charter. Nixon shared LBJ’s conviction that foreign support was at the root of the political dissidence and antiwar activity.)

  The pressure for results increased, and our efforts continued to expand. If there were any foreign support of the American dissident movement, it most probably would have come from the KGB, its sister services, and the North Vietnamese. Our existing foreign sources detected no such act
ivity. If any artfully concealed support actually existed, we reasoned, it would likely be funneled through the European dissident student movements. If so, a well-cloaked American graduate student might wriggle his way deeply enough into the European movement to catch a glimpse of it. Two or three mature American volunteers acquired the necessary antiwar patina, and went abroad to continue their studies. They made contact with people who might be close to the most plausible foreign sponsors of the movement in the United States. Again, there was no trace of evidence to support the Johnson-Nixon convictions.

  In this connection, a violation of our charter occurred when we accepted several reports from agents on the activity of the groups they had joined here in order to develop the camouflage that would give them access to the foreign dissident groups. This information was passed to the FBI. In strict compliance with the Agency charter, we should have destroyed these reports without allowing the FBI to see them.

  Considering the pressure we were under, and the immense amount of material we were handling—some 7000 FBI files were studied and more than 300,000 of the names were incorporated into the CHAOS data bank—I think an assessment in the Rockefeller Commission* report is a fair judgment of our effort: “The Presidential demands upon CIA appear to have caused the Agency to forgo to some extent, the caution with which it might otherwise have approached the subject.” Given the temper of the times, this was at the least a generous judgment. A more accurate assessment would have stated bluntly that without the President’s insistence, CIA would never have investigated or reported on anything touching on domestic political violence.*

  The Rockefeller report goes on to declare that the “proper functioning of the Agency must depend in large part on the character of the Director of Central Intelligence.” The fact that significant areas of the Agency’s activity must remain cloaked from public view magnifies the DCI’s responsibility for keeping the President and appropriate congressional committees fully informed of all Agency operations, and has little to do with the DCI’s character. The regulations, rules, and practices under which the DCI labors are as clearly established as those of other government agencies and departments. It scarcely needs to be stated that a DCI who, on his own, ignores or violates these boundaries should expect no more consideration than might be given the chief of any other federal agency or department. However obvious, this is a less than useful guide come crunch time, when a president orders his DCI to step out-of-bounds.