Wilderness of Mirrors

by David C. Martin

  Angleton had never aspired to anything higher than chief of counterintelligence. With the exception of J. Edgar Hoover, probably no other senior official in the United States government had held the same job for so long. In the two decades Angleton had headed the Counterintelligence Division, there had been no fewer than six directors and seven heads of the Operations Directorate. Angleton had chosen his station and remained at it. Promotion would only have taken him from the depths of espionage to the shallows of administration. There was no one to whom Helms delegated more authority. He knew that Angleton would always be a collaborator, never a rival. He knew that the leadership of the Counterintelligence Division would not change and that operations entrusted to Angleton would not be passed along from successor to successor until the circle of knowledge became so wide that the secret was no longer safe. Privately, Helms would call Angleton a “strange, strange man,” but counterintelligence was a strange, strange business, and there was no one better suited to its practice.

  Angleton. Even the name suggested labyrinthine conspiracies. His body seemed stooped and cocked to one side in a way that hinted of both deformity—as if his very frame had been twisted out of shape by machinations—and conspiracy—as if he were perpetually bending toward someone’s ear to whisper a secret. He spoke in a voice so low of tone, so slow of pace, so absent of modulation that it seemed he had been fitted with a speech alteration device. In a secret agency, he was the most secretive of men. All CIA officers adopted an alias for communications between headquarters and the field—Angleton’s was Hugh Ashmead—but when he traveled abroad he carried a private set of code pads in his belt to give his cables to headquarters even greater security. His aura of clandestine genius drew people into his web of intrigue, prompting them to entrust him with their most intimate confidences, as if the secret would somehow be safer in his care than in theirs. Even the diary and letters of a woman who had had a brief liaison with President Kennedy were entrusted to Angleton for safekeeping. He had so worked his spell on the Washington liaison officer of the French intelligence service that his superiors in Paris concluded he had been recruited by Angleton as an agent.

  Angleton had dedicated his life to the CIA and the craft of counterintelligence. In his leisure hours he would use his considerable talents as a goldsmith to make personalized cuff links for the heads of foreign intelligence services. He cultivated rare orchids and sent them to his allies in the secret war against Russia. Like his passion for fly-casting with handcrafted lures, his fascination with orchids seemed an allegory of his chosen profession—cultivating plants for years until they burst into brief but glorious bloom. Angleton had even attempted to dedicate his property to the CIA, offering to donate a tract of land he owned along the Potomac River to the Agency as a site for the Director’s house.

  There was a certain poetic justice to be found in suspecting Angleton of being the KGB’s mole. It was nothing more than he had done to others. But whether the suspicion was outrageous or deserved, the only question that mattered was whether it was true. Certainly such a grave allegation had to be based on something firmer than speculation about the bona fides of Golitsin and Nosenko. In the wilderness of mirrors, the ground was soft and treacherous. Footprints were everywhere. Which way did they lead?

  Upon his defection, Golitsin had beat a path straight for Angleton, refusing to cooperate with any of the case officers assigned to him until he was handed over in frustration to the counterintelligence staff. Had the KGB “targeted” Golitsin for Angleton, or was it merely a coupling of kindred souls? If it had been by design, it had worked to perfection. Careers had been ruined, espionage operations against the Soviet Union paralyzed, and relations with several friendly intelligence services crippled. Through it all, Angleton’s faith in Golitsin never wavered. When Golitsin said David Murphy was a Soviet agent, Angleton passed the warning on to the French, even though CIA investigators had satisfied themselves about Murphy’s loyalty. When Golitsin suggested that Averell Harriman was a Soviet agent, Angleton badgered Helms to warn the President, even though the case fell of its own weight.

  When other defectors made equally startling and unlikely claims, Angleton chose to ignore them. He did not take it upon himself to advise the FBI, for instance, when Michal Goleniewski claimed that Henry Kissinger, then at the height of his Middle East shuttle diplomacy, was a Soviet agent. No one was going to build a case of treason on the basis of Angleton’s lassitude in the face of a warning about Kissinger, particularly since Goleniewski was by then claiming to be the last of the Romanovs. The case of Leslie “Jim” Bennett of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police seemed more to the point.

  Bennett was the guiding force within Canadian counterintelligence, much like Angleton in the United States. Like Angleton, he had spent almost his entire career in counterintelligence and had no hesitancy about suspecting even the most respected government official of disloyalty. Where Angleton suspected Averell Harriman, the onetime American ambassador to the Soviet Union, Bennett suspected John Watkins, the onetime Canadian ambassador to the Soviet Union. He had personally confronted Watkins with the evidence provided by Golitsin’s and Nosenko’s lurid tales of homosexual blackmail, but his attempt to extract a confession ended with Watkins’s fatal heart attack. Now, in the spring of 1972, doubts were raised about Bennett’s loyalty. If they were well founded and if Watkins had indeed been working for the KGB, Bennett’s interrogation of the ambassador had been an extraordinary event—one KGB agent promoting his career over the body of another.

  Angleton was outraged to learn that the RCMP had begun an investigation of Bennett without his knowledge. The two men had worked closely together in pursuing Golitsin’s leads to KGB penetrations in Canada. Once he learned of the case, Angleton took an intense interest in it, making Golitsin available to review and analyze the RCMP’s findings. Golitsin concluded that the case was well founded, but that was of little help to the RCMP in developing the kind of evidence that could support a legal prosecution. Finally, Bennett was confronted with the evidence against him and interrogated for four days. At the end of his interrogation, he was given a “medical discharge” from the RCMP.

  The Bennett case resembled the Philby affair of twenty years before. Much as Angleton would have liked to take credit for developing the case, he could not. Had Angleton been duped again? Had he been so busy raising suspicions against members of his own service that he had allowed himself to be taken in by a senior member of an allied service? Or was something more sinister afoot? The Bennett case was considerably more ambiguous than the Philby affair. At least Philby could be said with certainty to have been a Soviet agent. Bennett had admitted nothing. The Solicitor General of Canada assured Parliament that “there is no evidence whatsoever that Mr. Bennett was anything but a loyal Canadian citizen,” and Bennett himself filed a libel suit when a transparently fictionalized account of his case appeared in print. Nevertheless, the FBI was sufficiently concerned about Bennett’s loyalty to conduct a review of the American cases that he might conceivably have blown to the Soviets.

  One such case was that of Nicholas Shadrin, the Soviet defector whom the CIA and the FBI had been running as a double agent since 1966, when he had been fed to Igor, the bold KGB officer who had approached Helms with an offer to spy for the United States. In 1971, Shadrin had traveled to Montreal for a meeting with his Soviet control, and the CIA had asked the RCMP to provide surveillance of the meeting. If Bennett was working for the KGB, he might have warned Moscow that the CIA knew all about Shadrin’s secret meeting. In a way, speculation about whether Bennett had exposed Shadrin’s game was irrelevant since Angleton’s conviction that Igor was a Soviet provocation agent assumed that Shadrin had been compromised from the start. Whether blown in 1966 or 1971, Shadrin would later be sent to Vienna to continue his clandestine meetings with the KGB, an act which displayed a cavalier attitude toward Shadrin’s safety but which was explained by the fact that his Soviet contacts had given him a “burst” t
ransmitter. For the Soviets to entrust Shadrin with a sophisticated communications gadget which American intelligence had badly wanted to get a look at was seen as an encouraging sign that they suspected nothing, although the double-cross school contended that the transmitter was just one more indication of how far the KGB was willing to go to deceive the CIA. In the event, the CIA got its hands on the transmitter, and Shadrin disappeared without a trace in Vienna. Igor, despite his success in recruiting Shadrin, never received the Washington assignment he claimed to covet. He continued to meet sporadically with the CIA overseas in what Angleton characterized as the most sophisticated provocation the KGB had ever mounted. Provocation or not, Igor was scheduled to meet with the CIA in Vienna on the very weekend that Shadrin disappeared.

  All of this was what one CIA officer called “more grist for the counterintelligence mill,” but it hardly provided convincing evidence against Angleton. Even an ironclad case against Bennett was something less than an ironclad case against Angleton. It was merely one more in a string of anomalies in his career. Similar irregularities could probably be found in any career subjected to the same microscopic examination as Angleton’s. Even the simplest life became complex under scrutiny, and Angleton’s had been complex to begin with. How many anomalies added up to a sinister pattern? How many anomalies could Angleton explain away if he were confronted with them? In his private vault there were files that no one else was permitted to see. Perhaps they contained the answers to the troubling questions about his career. But it was impossible to see the files without Angleton’s permission, which would surely alert him to the fact that he had fallen under suspicion. Like all those before him, Angleton was never told that his loyalty was in doubt.

  By the spring of 1974, after nearly three years of searching through the files, all leads were exhausted. The paper case against Angleton would never be any more or less convincing than at that moment. Barring an unexpected windfall, such as a high-level defector or a communications break, any further progress would require a full-scale investigation of Angleton, subjecting him to electronic and physical surveillance. That kind of investigation of so senior an officer would have to be authorized by the Director, and he would first have to be convinced that the paper case established probable cause to suspect Angleton of treason.

  Angleton’s fate was now in the hands of William Colby, who had been unexpectedly propelled into the directorship by resignations and firings from the troubled Nixon administration. A colorless but decent man, Colby seemed the model of the faceless but faithful government servant. He had never aspired to the Director’s office. By his own account, he was “stunned” to learn that he had been picked for the top spot. In his sudden assumption of power, Colby seemed the clandestine replica of Harry Truman, even down to the clear-rimmed spectacles. Just as Truman had been faced with the insubordination of the legendary General Douglas MacArthur, so Colby was confronted with the covert legend of James Jesus Angleton.

  “I spent several long sessions doing my best to follow his tortuous conspiracy theories about the long arm of a powerful and wily KGB at work, over decades, placing its agents in the heart of Allied and neutral nations and sending its false defectors to influence and undermine American policy,” Colby related. “I confess that I couldn’t absorb it, possibly because I did not have the requisite grasp of this labyrinthine subject, possibly because Angleton’s explanation was impossible to follow, or possibly because the evidence just didn’t add up to his conclusions; and I finally concluded that the last was the real answer.” Colby had first tried to get rid of Angleton early in 1973, when as head of the Operations Directorate he had urged Director James Schlesinger to fire the counterintelligence chief on the ground that “his ultraconspiratorial turn of mind had, at least in recent years, become more of a liability than an asset to the Agency.” Schlesinger—“clearly fascinated by Angleton’s undoubted brilliance”—balked, but Colby did force a suspension of HT/LINGUAL, Angleton’s cherished but unproductive mail-opening project.

  When Colby succeeded Schlesinger, the decision on Angleton’s fate at last “was mine to make.” But Colby procrastinated despite Angleton’s refusal to bend to the will of his new chief. Privately, Angleton called Colby a “fool,” and to his face told him he was liable to a taxpayers’ suit for the damage his naïveté was doing to CIA assets. If Colby needed any further prompting, it came during a trip to Paris when the head of French intelligence confronted him with the fact that Angleton had told him that David Murphy was a Soviet agent. “After I recovered from the shock and looked into the case,” Colby said, “I discovered that … the matter had been exhaustively investigated several years before and the officer, a brilliant and effective one at that, was given a totally clean bill of health.” Colby wrote a memo for the record, expressing “total confidence” in Murphy and “resolved that I just had to get rid of Angleton.”

  Colby began by proposing to take the Israeli account away from Angleton, hoping that he “might take the hint and retire.” Angleton fought back, arguing that the Israeli account was too valuable to be entrusted to the bureaucracy. “I yielded,” Colby confessed, “in truth because I feared that Angleton’s professional integrity and personal intensity might have led him to take dire measures.”

  Nothing Colby feared could have been as dire as the news that William Nelson, the new Deputy Director for Operations, had received a mammoth report prepared by Clare Edward Petty, a member of the counterintelligence staff, detailing the evidence that suggested that Angleton was a Soviet agent. Starting from the assumption that the Agency had been penetrated, Petty’s report outlined the proposition that both Golitsin and Nosenko had been sent, all under the guidance of the real penetration agent, Angleton. It recounted in endless detail the anomalies in Angleton’s career— the Philby and Bennett cases; his irrational pressing of theories about Harriman and the Sino-Soviet split; the damage done to liaison with friendly intelligence services by his unilateral and inaccurate accusations against such innocent people as David Murphy and Ingeborg Lygren. Almost as an afterthought, Petty noted that Angleton’s three top aides—Ray Rocca, Newton Miler, and William Hood—although completely unwitting and totally beyond suspicion of any treachery, were so under his influence that they should be removed from the Counterintelligence Division.

  “The case against Angleton was a great compilation of circumstantial material,” Petty said. “It was not a clear-cut case.” Calling his investigation “a long and unpleasant solitary effort,” Petty retired from the CIA immediately after submitting his report.

  To Colby, the report was an epitome of the “ultraconspiratorial turn of mind” that he disliked so much in Angleton. “There was a lot of supposition, factual situations which were subject to varying interpretations,” one of Colby’s assistants said. “You could draw conclusions one way or the other, and we felt the conclusions by the fellow who was making the case were overdrawn.” Petty “was a very intense person,” this officer continued. “He was seized with this theory, and like all people in this field, once they get seized with this thing, you wonder whether they’re responsible or not.”

  Petty had been “seized” by other theories in the past, and in at least one striking instance his theory had proved correct. He had been the author of the original analysis pinpointing Heinz Felfe as the Soviet penetration agent inside the West German BND long before Goleniewski’s letters provided enough hard evidence to warrant a criminal investigation. “He made quite a reputation on it,” one officer said of Petty’s case against Felfe. This officer had conducted a postmortem of the Felfe case and had interviewed Petty at great length. “I got to know the guy quite well,” he said. “I would say he was levelheaded. I didn’t like him terribly much, but I always found Petty to be reliable.”

  Petty was the second man to suspect Angleton of being a Soviet agent. Bill Harvey had harbored a similar though much more spontaneous and not nearly so detailed suspicion many years before. Harvey, too, was a very inte
nse person who had once been seized by a theory about Kim Philby. Angleton stood twice accused by the two men in the CIA who had a proven record for spotting Soviet agents, but Colby saw no need to authorize an investigation. “I have absolutely no belief or suspicion that Angleton was a Soviet agent,” he said.

  Yet Colby had made up his mind to fire Angleton for essentially the same reasons that lay behind Petty’s more sinister interpretation of events, namely that Angleton’s pursuit of Golitsin’s leads was doing more harm than good. In December of 1974, as the scandal over the CIA’s spying on antiwar protestors broke in The New York Times, Colby demanded Angleton’s resignation. At the same time, he informed Angleton’s three top aides, Rocca, Miler, and Hood, that they would have to take jobs elsewhere in the Agency. All three chose to follow Angleton into retirement. The coincidental timing of the departure of Angleton and his aides would be inextricably linked in the public mind with the Times exposé. “No one in the world would believe [Angleton’s] leaving was not the result of the article,” Colby said. No one who knew about Petty’s report would believe that the departure of Angleton and his three aides was not related to the suspicion that he was a Soviet agent. It was as if Colby had used one scandal as a cover for disposing of an even greater one. That was not the case, Colby insisted. “I can absolutely say for certain that I did not fire Angleton because he was a Soviet agent.”

  Angleton’s resignation was announced by Nelson at the morning staff meeting. “There was a shocked silence,” recalled David Phillips, chief of the Agency’s Western Hemisphere Division. “Angleton impassively lighted another one of his filter tip cigarettes.” After Nelson had explained that there was no connection between the resignation and the Times article, Angleton spoke. “It was what some in CIA called his ‘nature of the threat’ speech—dire predictions, grim warnings and suspicion of détente,” Phillips said. “It was a gloomy forecast. We were uncomfortable…. When the meeting was over we all left hurriedly, almost as if escaping.” That evening as he was leaving for home, Phillips encountered Angleton in the parking lot. “I thought to myself that I had never seen a man who looked so infinitely tired and sad,” he recounted. “We shook hands. And I got into my car, backed out of the parking space and drove toward the exit. In the rearview mirror, I could see Angleton’s tall, gaunt figure growing smaller and smaller.”