James Angleton
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James Angleton was the long-serving chief of counterintelligence at the Central Intelligence Agency, "almost his whole career was spent on counterintelligence," John Kiriakou notes, correcting the common impression that he ran European affairs. He appears in Kiriakou's accounts three times over: as the custodian of illegal files on Americans, as the victim of the most famous betrayal in intelligence history, and as the officer who tried to recruit Lee Harvey Oswald.

The file-folder anecdote

The story Kiriakou tells most often came from a CIA mentor and former boss, whose first assignment was in counterintelligence as an intern on a master's-degree programme. On his first day the office secretary gave him the standard walkthrough, pointed at a large wall of file folders and told him that every so often he would find himself alone in the office, and "whatever you do, don't look in those files."

The first moment he was alone, everyone out at a going-away party, he ran to the files. Per Kiriakou:

> Every single one of those folders was on an American citizen. And the CIA is forbidden by law from spying on Americans.

Kiriakou invokes the episode as a representative reference point for the gap between the agency's statutory restrictions and its actual domestic-surveillance practice, a gap he treats as a continuous feature across decades rather than confined to any period.

Philby

Angleton was obsessed with moles, believing everyone at the CIA was potentially a Soviet one. The mole was his best friend. Kiriakou stresses how close the relationship was: Angleton and Kim Philby were best man at each other's weddings, and Angleton was godfather to Philby's daughter, a bond for which he says there is no real English word, reaching instead for the Greek koumbaros and its Italian equivalent, meaning something like being part of the family.

The Philby story Kiriakou tells around it: number two or three in MI6, recruited by the KGB while at university and directed to join the service, not realising he would end up its deputy director. When suspicion narrowed on him, others objected that someone that senior, who met the queen, could not possibly be the mole; there was enough circumstantial evidence to remove him from his post and send him to Beirut. Another mole then tipped off the KGB that the British intended to arrest him. At the British ambassador's Christmas party in Beirut, Philby received a message triggering an emergency meeting with his handler, a signal that could only mean he had been outed and had to run. He excused himself from dinner for the bathroom, climbed out of the window, reached the Soviet embassy and was smuggled to Moscow, appearing at a press conference there six days later.

Kiriakou treats what happened next as the anomaly. Philby lectured at the KGB training centre to new officers and was given a staff and teaching position, unlike almost any other mole or defector. His explanation is one of the trade's dirty secrets: a service flatters its penetration agents extravagantly while they are running, but once they surface "deep down, we consider you to be a traitor. We're glad that you were a traitor for us, but you're still a traitor", the reasoning being that someone who will commit treason against their own country will commit it again.

What it did to him

"Angleton never got over that." Kiriakou's evidence is an old-timer he knew at the agency, head of research for an office he worked in, who, as a junior analyst, would turn around and walk the other way down the hall rather than pass Angleton. That man's assessment: Angleton "kind of went kooky after a while. When he first learned that it was Philby that was the mole the whole time, he kind of lost his mind and never got it back."

Kiriakou lays out why the injury was total. It was not only that the traitor was his best friend and his child's godfather, it was that "you've been looking for traitors all over the agency all these years, decades, and that's the traitor. It's the guy that you've been sharing the information about your hunt for traitors with." On top of that came the professional consequence: colleagues asking behind his back what kind of judgment the man had, with everything he had ever concluded called into question. The cost fell on others, he "ruined lives, countless lives, by accusing everybody of being a KGB mole."

Kiriakou's final judgment separates him from Allen Dulles, and not in Angleton's favour. Dulles knew he had been doing filthy things; "Angleton didn't.", "Angleton was a bad guy."

Oswald

Angleton reappears in the declassified Kennedy assassination files, and Kiriakou calls it the single biggest revelation in the release: that Angleton, as deputy director for counterintelligence, ordered CIA officers to formally recruit Lee Harvey Oswald as a source. "That's long been speculated on and long dismissed as a conspiracy theory. Was not a conspiracy theory. It was the truth."

He treats it as the exact opposite of what the agency told the public for sixty years, and raises the obvious question against the official account: if the Russians had concluded Oswald was a nut while he lived in Minsk and did not want him back, why was the CIA interested in recruiting him at all? He also notes, without endorsing a conclusion, that the files have led people to look for the first time at the Israeli angle to the case.

See also

- Central Intelligence Agency
- Allen Dulles
- JFK Assassination
- CIA National Resources Division
- MK-Ultra
