James Jesus Angleton
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James Jesus Angleton headed the CIA Counterintelligence Center in the early 1970s, where he prohibited a new officer from accessing a wall of files on American citizens, highlighting the agency's illegal surveillance practices. 

Under James Jesus Angleton's leadership, the CIA Counterintelligence Center maintained a wall of files on American citizens, which was patently illegal. A new officer was prohibited from accessing these files, but later discovered their contents. 

Files on Americans, and the Philby wound

John Kiriakou says old-timers were "genuinely afraid" of counterintelligence chief James Angleton. His first boss, who once worked in Angleton's office as a young grad fellow, was warned never to look in the wall of file folders, and when he did, found that "every single one" was on an American citizen. Angleton, obsessed with hunting Soviet moles, was undone by the discovery that the mole was his own best man and koumbaros, Kim Philby; Kiriakou says he "kind of lost his mind and never got it back."

The exhaustion he left behind

Kiriakou also treats Angleton's obsession as one of the reasons the next mole survived so long. Explaining how Aldrich Ames went undetected for nearly two decades, he names a fear of moles that had tormented successive CIA directors and deputy directors, "most famously deputy director for counterintelligence James Jesus Angleton", and the reaction it produced: "a lot of people inside the CIA were just exhausted by this constant hunt for moles." Alongside it ran the Directorate of Operations' refusal to entertain the idea at all, which Kiriakou calls "this culture of misplaced secrecy [that] covered for its brethren regardless of their errors, failures, misdemeanors and outright crimes."
