James Angleton was the long-serving Chief of the Central Intelligence Agency Counterintelligence Center (CCI). His tenure is the subject of one of the most-recurring stories in John Kiriakou’s public-talk repertoire — relayed to him by a CIA mentor and former boss, identified only as having served his first assignment in CCI as a master’s-degree-program intern.[1][2]
The file-folder anecdote
On the mentor’s first day at the Counterintelligence Center, the office secretary gave him the standard new-arrival walkthrough. At one point she pointed to a large wall of file folders and instructed him explicitly: “Whatever you do, don’t look in those folders. You’re not cleared for that.”
The first moment the mentor was left alone, he opened the folders. Per Kiriakou:
Every single one of those folders was on an American citizen. And the CIA is forbidden by law from spying on Americans.[3]
The episode is invoked by Kiriakou 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 as confined to any particular period.