James Jesus Angleton (December 9, 1917 – May 11, 1987) was an American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer who served as chief of the counterintelligence department of the CIA from 1954 to 1975. According to the director of central intelligence, Richard Helms, Angleton was "recognized as the dominant counterintelligence figure in the non-communist world".
Angleton, who had an academic background in literary criticism, served in the Office of Strategic Services at London and Rome between 1943 and 1946, where he rapidly rose through the ranks. In 1947, he returned to Washington, D.C. to become one of the founding officers of the CIA. He was initially responsible for the collection of foreign intelligence and liaison with counterpart organizations in allied countries.
In 1954, Allen Dulles promoted Angleton to chief of the Counterintelligence Staff. As chief, Angleton was significantly involved in the defection of Soviet KGB agents Anatoliy Golitsyn and Yuri Nosenko. Through Golitsyn, Angleton became convinced the CIA harbored a high-ranking Soviet mole and engaged in an intensive search. Whether this was a highly destructive witch hunt or appropriate caution remains a subject of intense historical debate.
Investigative journalist Edward Jay Epstein agrees with the high regard in which Angleton was held by his colleagues in the intelligence business, and adds that Angleton earned the "trust of six CIA directors—including Gen. Walter Bedell Smith, Allen W. Dulles and Richard Helms. They kept Angleton in key positions and valued his work."
James Jesus Angleton, nicknamed "Jim", was born December 9, 1917, in Boise, Idaho, the eldest of four children of James Hugh Angleton (1888–1973) and Carmen Mercedes Moreno (1898–1985). He had a brother, Hugh, and two sisters, Carmen and Dolores. His parents met in Nogales, Arizona, while his father was a United States Army cavalry officer serving under General John Pershing.
Carmen Moreno was born in Mexico, but was already a naturalized American citizen before she married James H. Angleton in December 1916. Angleton was raised speaking his mother's Spanish, and later learned Italian, German, and French.
James Hugh Angleton joined the National Cash Register Corporation, rising through its ranks until in the early 1930s, he purchased the NCR franchise in Italy. In Italy, he became head of the American Chamber of Commerce. Despite holding "ultra-conservative" views, according to OSS officer Max Corvo, James Hugh informed the State Department on fascist activities, and later returned to the US and work for the OSS during the Second World War. Because of his father's work, Angleton's boyhood was spent in Milan, Italy. He studied as a boarder at Malvern College in England from 1933 to 1936 before enrolling at Yale University.
Angleton entered Yale in 1937. He quickly took an interest in poetry and literary criticism, and delved into the young field of New Criticism under the tutelage of Maynard Mack and Norman Holmes Pearson, a founder of American studies. His study of New Criticism was inspired by William Empson, the author of Seven Types of Ambiguity, whom he successfully invited to lecture at Yale and lobbied to have appointed to the faculty.
In early 1939, he became the inaugural editor-in-chief of Vif, a magazine dedicated to French poetry and prose and staffed by students from Yale, Vassar, and Mount Holyoke. A few months later, Angleton and his friend Reed Whittemore founded a new "little magazine" of poetry, Furioso. Furioso published many of the best-known poets of the interwar period, including William Carlos Williams, E. E. Cummings, Marianne Moore, and Ezra Pound. The magazine was well-received, attracting the attention of notables including Archibald MacLeish and occasionally being sent abroad for readers in Europe.
In connection with his work at Furioso, Angleton carried on extensive correspondences and friendships with Pound, Cummings and T. S. Eliot, among others, some of which continued long after his departure from Yale. He visited Pound at his home in Rapallo in 1937, and arranged for a 1939 American tour by him, the only such tour in Pound's "fascist period". Furioso would continue to be published privately by Whittemore until 1953, and was revived by him as Carleton Miscellany from 1960 until 1980.
Despite his intellectual activities, Angleton graduated from Yale in the bottom quarter of his class, having little time for subjects other than poetry, Italian, and literary criticism. His thesis concerned the poetic work of T.S. Eliot. After his first application to study at Harvard Law School was rejected, he was admitted in 1941 on the recommendation of Pearson, but did not graduate. Before he left, he met his wife, Cicely d'Autremont. As the Second World War took its course, Angleton provided information about Pound beginning in 1943, providing photographic portraits he had taken of Pound to the FBI and Army which were used to identify him after the invasion of Italy.
On March 19, 1943, Angleton enlisted in the U.S. Army. He was initially assigned to an MP Battalion, but after a few months, he was transferred to Washington, DC to work at the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), probably by his former professor Norman Holmes Pearson, who worked for the organization. He arrived in London in September 1943, affiliated with the OSS's X-2 Counter Espionage Branch.
While he initially processed FBI information forwarded to London (including about his erstwhile friend Pound) as a technician fifth grade, Angleton's self-confidence and competence resulted in a rapid chain of promotions. By February 1944, he was chief of the Italy desk for X-2 in London. While in London, Angleton befriended Kim Philby, his liaison contact with MI6. By one account, Philby became Angleton's "prime tutor in counterintelligence" during his time in London.
In August 1944, Angleton arrived in Rome as the commander of SCI-Unit Z, making him the only American in Italy empowered to read top secret ULTRA information. By March 1945, he was the head of X-2 for the entirety of Italy, and had cultivated an extensive network. The most urgent task of X-2 in 1944 and 1945 was neutralizing the extensive network of German agents and informants left behind by Sicherheitsdienst, a task he went about with great skill, which relieved and impressed his superiors. Angleton's effectiveness was in spite of his character, which was criticized as arrogant and imperious by some officers.
Soon after assuming command in Rome, Angleton reactivated the OSS Maritime Unit in Italy, which had been suspended due to security concerns. Angleton attempted to neutralize the stay-behind network of the SS-collaborating Decima Flottiglia MAS, which resulted in commander Junio Valerio Borghese's defection to the OSS. Angleton personally drove Borghese from Milan to Rome for interrogation, where he provided a wealth of useful information until the Italian government forced his transfer to Italian custody in the fall 1945. Due to its use of British ULTRA information, X-2 was in practice, subordinate to British intelligence aims by the end of the war. Between January and April 1945, Angleton skillfully distilled ULTRA intelligence and intelligence won from interrogations to develop a "Key" for understanding German and Italian espionage tactics for officers not permitted to view ULTRA information.
Upon the end of the war, Angleton's duties pivoted from providing military security to undertaking "long-range counterespionage" aimed at drawing information out of foreign intelligence services. Angleton used information generated by his father (who represented X-2 in negotiations with Pietro Badoglio and leaders within the SIM in 1943 and 1944) to deepen collaboration with all of Italy's five major intelligence services.
By the end of 1946, Angleton and his subordinates had amassed a network of over 50 informants within seven foreign intelligence services, including the Yugoslavian OZNA, French SDECE, and Italian SIS. Angleton's liaisons within the reestablished Italian services were affordable and effective: X-2 leadership deemed the network the "most spectacularly productive" of any of X-2 's operations.