James Jesus Angleton, the CIA, and the Craft of Counterintelligence

Chapter 2. Yale English

Yale English Jan. ,  Dear Mr. Angleton I was so pleased to hear from you. I am very glad you have started writing on your own and I am sure I wish you a long and happy literary life. John Powys In 1939, an unusually worldly Yale sophomore published two poems in a new campus magazine:  Pianola à  francs Pousse un bouton salaud, seulement un jeton de deux francs, une salée pour cinq, écoute ça salaud ? C’est oripeauswingmusique sensuel mouvement. Vois-tu ces hanches en poire, balançantes? Allant retournant une tournée, une tournée tapant et battant duvet-lèvres flouchantonnant si doucereux sente . . . Salaud, c’est toi qui l’a fait, toi et ton sale petit jeton. Caresse primordiale Trait de pinceau esquissé en vermeil, deux pétales muets, cherchant, ouvrent à trouver les siens intimes en flammettes . . . ce fruit de la connaissance, elle chuchote doucement, c’est très bon n’est-ce pas? 8 chapter two Which could be translated as: The player piano costs two francs Push a button, bastard, just a two-franc token— a set for five. Are you listening, bastard? It’s tinsel swing music— a sensual movement. Do you see these hips? Pear-shaped balances Going and coming turn and turn again tapping and hitting feather-lips crooning so sweet, feel it Bastard, you’ve done it you and your dirty little token. Primordial Caress A trace of the paintbrush sketched in filigree, two mute petals, looking, opening to find their intimates in small flames . . . This fruit of knowledge, she whispers sweetly, It is very good, isn’t it? The poet, James Angleton, was the son of James Hugh Angleton, known as Hugh Angleton, an adventurer who alternated between careers in business and in the military. The elder Angleton had taken part in Pershing’s expedition into Mexico in pursuit of Pancho Villa, during which he met and married Carmen Mercedes Moreno of Nogales, in the northern Mexican state of Sonora. The border between the United States and Mexico in that region was, and is, famously permeable. Their son returned to the area throughout his life, marrying into a wealthy Tucson family, the d’Autremonts, which, among other things, allowed him to maintain contact with his mother’s relatives a few miles across the desert in Nogales. Cicely d’Autremont Angleton said of her husband’s maternal grandmother, “She was a woman with great dignity, an individualist with a strong personality , who would not let anyone boss her around. She was a saintly woman, all her family loved her. She lived in poverty, but she never cared. She was very bright, but had no formal education. Her intellect was along intuitive and emotional lines . . . Jim was like her. He learned his patience from her, together with a strong fatalism, a Mexican Indian trait, which held that you cannot change yale english 9 destiny, and that you accept hardship. Jim’s mother was very smart, too. She had no schooling, but she had this incredible family trait of good intuition. Jim got this from her, too. This came from the Latin side.”1 Cicely Angleton was sketching her husband’s character in this account of his mother and her family—intelligent, intuitive, fatalistic, “an individualist with a strong personality .” She points to matters that seemed important to her in retrospect: the family’s poverty, its ethnic identification as “Mexican Indian,” questions of education. Early in 1917, after the Pershing interlude, Hugh Angleton took his wife home to Idaho, where he began a career with the National Cash Register Company. Hugh and Carmen Angleton had four children in Idaho: James Jesus, almost immediately (December 9, 1917); Hugh Rolla two years later; then Carmen and Dolores. From an early twenty-first-century point of view there is hardly anything more American than to be the child of Carmen Moreno of Nogales and Hugh Angleton of Boise, and there is nothing surprising in Cicely Angleton’s comment in the 1980s that “Jim was a Chicano, and I loved him for it. I never saw anyone as Mexican as he was. He was a Latino, an Apache; he was a gut fighter.”2 But at the beginning of the twentieth century these matters were looked at differently. During his Idaho childhood, James Angleton had some experience of local prejudices. In later life he never used his middle name. Hugh Angleton had begun his...