James Jesus Angleton, the CIA, and the Craft of Counterintelligence (review)

The arcane techniques of literary criticism prosper little on soil outside the academy. They thrive in classrooms, particularly in seminars where the intricacies of poetic device can be scrutinized and the more delicate points of irony and recessed meaning can gently be brought to the surface. Imagine, then, a moment in recent governmental history when a young man tutored in such skills (indeed, within the very sanctum-Yale-of such techniques) had risen to a commanding position at the Central Intelligence Agency. Imagine him constructing methods over many decades whereby the movement of covert agents, turncoats, traitors, and even "triple-agents" could be studied as if such an intricate design were itself a kind of poem. Imagine the paranoia that at last enveloped him and profoundly damaged the agency. This is the story of James Jesus Angleton, chief of counter-intelligence at the CIA for two decades, from the early 1950s to 1974, as put forth by Michael Holzman.

Holzman wants to believe that he, working in his own way as a detective, has found the key to Angleton's spectacular rise in the CIA and, later, his spiraling downfall. Yale, in the persons of his teachers-Norman Holmes Pearson and Maynard Mack, among others-had trained Angleton never to give credence to the surface of things but always to look for the buried tensions beneath. Appearances were never to be trusted. According to Holzman, Angleton in the end took such lessons too seriously and wound up convinced that all was seeming and all seeming was suspect. This is an enticingly melodramatic way to look at Angleton and the CIA, but can it be trusted? Can everything the CIA so ignobly did over the decades-and Holzman names them: lists of Americans to be interned, the attempted destruction of the alternative press, the assassination of Black Panthers, the audits of ordinary citizens, and what Holzman calls the "coup d'état that replaced the Nixon government"-really be traced back to one man and his days in New Haven? Did Angleton indeed have such power? Did the New Criticism have such a long reach? Was so little else involved? Holzman gives us a hothouse world in which a singular personality appears to dominate events. Perhaps he is right; but often those who study for an extended time the claustrophobic world of conspiratorial thinking have a way of emerging with their own conspiratorial notions in hand.