One of the CIA’s most powerful and infamous spymasters is at the center of potential new revelations about the John F Kennedy assassination.
Among the 80,000 pages that Donald Trump says he will release today are a dozen concerning former counterintelligence chief James Jesus Angleton.
Angleton, who died in 1987 aged 69, ran the powerful arm of the agency, which roots out enemy spies trying to infiltrate the US, from 1954 to 1975.
Such was his mystique that he was nicknamed ‘Mother’ within the agency and ‘the spider’ by many of his critics as he ruined careers obsessively hunting traitors.
He was a brilliant agent, but was intensely polarizing within the CIA as his power grew, and became increasingly paranoid to the point where he was forced to resign.
One of the documents that could be revealed in full is a 113-page transcript of an Angleton’s June 19, 1975, testimony before a Senate committee.
The hearing was concerning his department’s surveillance of JFK assassin Lee Harvey Oswald in the four years before he murdered the president, including his three years living in the Soviet Union.
Among other revelations, the unredacted transcript could reveal whether foreign agents were used to monitor Oswald.
James Jesus Angleton, who died in 1987 aged 69, ran the powerful arm of the agency, which roots out enemy spies trying to infiltrate the US, from 1954 to 1975
US President John F Kennedy, First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy, Texas Governor John Connally, and others smile at the crowds lining their motorcade route in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963. Minutes later the President was assassinated as his car passed through Dealey Plaza
Another 12 documents in the trove of known JFK files concern Angleton in some way.
They include a summary of CIA surveillance operations monitoring Oswald in Mexico City before the assassination that could give insight into how the agency spied on him for six weeks before he shot Kennedy dead on November 22, 1963.
The secrecy around the JFK assassination and subsequent investigation has spawned conspiracy theories including that the CIA – perhaps even Angleton himself – had the president killed to protect its interests.
Angleton’s descent into paranoid madness over the nearly 12 years between JFK’s assassination and his testimony was in part driven by its aftermath.
The CIA received two prominent defectors in 1961 and 1964 – Anatoliy Golitsyn and Yuri Nosenko – who had completely different intelligence on Oswald.
Golitsyn span an audacious tale to Angleton of a ‘monster plot’ by the Soviet KGB to so thoroughly penetrate American intelligence agencies that much of the information it received would be planted.
Angleton called his new asset ‘the most valuable defector ever to reach the West’ and believed his warning – sending him on a decade long ‘mole hunt’.
Crucially, Golitsyn claimed that fake defectors would soon arrive to discredit him, at the behest of the Russians.
Angleton’s department conducted surveillance of JFK assassin Lee Harvey Oswald in the four years before he murdered the president
Anatoly Golitsyn and his wife Svetlana at Coconut Grove in Los Angeles in 1961 soon after his defection to the US
So when Nosenko showed up three years later, Angleton was intensely suspicious and believed him to be a KGB plant until proven otherwise.
This included Nosenko’s claim that he had been Oswald’s case officer and the KGB had nothing to do with JFK’s assassination, and in fact considered Oswald too unstable to be any use to them.
Distrustful of Nosenko, the spymaster may have come to believe that Oswald was part of the overarching Soviet plot.
Angleton had Nosenko held in solitary confinement for more than three years, much of it in abominable conditions at CIA black sites.
He spent 16 months in a small, windowless attic without furniture, heating, or air conditioning, with all human contact banned except for numerous interrogations.
The defector was allowed only one shower a week and no books, TV, radio, exercise, or even a toothbrush.
Nosenko spent another four months in 10ft by 10ft concrete bunker. Throughout his confinement, he was told he would be there 25 years if he didn’t confess to being a Soviet double agent.
Angleton’s superiors finally freed him, judging him to be legitimate, and he became a longstanding CIA source.
Yuri Nosenko at the Geneva Disarmament Conference in February 1964, a few days before he defected to the US
Typed CIA report on an interview with Soviet defector, Yuri Ivanovich Nosenko, regarding KGB interaction with Lee Harvey Oswald during his stay in the Soviet Union
The seeds of Angleton’s paranoia, that led to a rampage through the CIA ranks as he obsessively searched for a mole, were planted early in his career.
Angleton, born in 1917 in Boise, Idaho, spent much of his childhood in Europe before studying at Yale and Harvard.
Some of his many eccentricities were his love of poetry, often reading and writing it during his World War II service, and growing orchids for relaxation.
He and his Yale roommate Reed Whittemore, a future US poet laureate, started the literary magazine Furioso.
Indeed, his shared interest in poetry, literature, and history with Golitsyn was one of the reasons he became so enamored with his favorite defector.
Two years after graduating Yale, Angleton was recruited by a professor to the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner to the CIA during the war.
He served mostly in Italy during the war and rose to the rank of major, then was instrumental in preventing a communist takeover of the country in the 1948 elections.
Upon his return to the US he eventually acquired control of the Israel desk, helped by the extensive contacts there he built in Europe, and kept until his last years in the CIA.
His close ties with Mossad helped form a ‘special relationship’ that holds to this day, and at the time yielded vast intelligence on Soviet military hardware.
Angleton was also instrumental in catching Soviet spy Rudolf Abel, who was later exchanged for American U2 pilot Francis Gary Powers, as depicted in the film Bridge of Spies.
Probably his biggest coup, soon after getting the counterintelligence chief job, was obtaining Nikita Khrushchev’s secret speech to the 20th Congress of the Communist Party in 1956, where he denounced Josef Stalin.
Angleton (left) chatting with CIA Director William Casey at a formal OSS dinner
The seeds of Angleton’s paranoia, that led to a rampage through the CIA ranks as he obsessively searched for a mole, were planted early in his career
But arguably more significant than any of that was his close friendship with MI-6 agent, and Soviet double-agent, Kim Philby.
The pair met in London in 1944, before Angleton’s second Italian posting, and stayed close until Philby, rapidly rising through the ranks, was sent to Washington DC in 1949.
Over regular liquid lunches at Harvey’s Restaurant, they exchanged information as part of Anglo-American intelligence sharing.
But Philby, who held longstanding communist sympathies, had long since crossed to the other side.
He was one of the ‘Cambridge Five’ of Englishmen recruited by the Soviets more than 15 years earlier, through his Communist Party wife Alice ‘Litzi’ Friedman in 1934.
The marriage didn’t last long, and his colleagues and friends didn’t find out until he reported it to his bosses in 1946 when he planned to marry his longtime girlfriend Aileen Furse – and was still married to Friedman.
Philby ‘explained that, as an impetuous youth, he had married a left-wing Austrian, whom he now planned to divorce in order to make an honest woman of Aileen’.
Angleton got the same explanation, and everyone, for a time, swallowed his cover story.
Various former spies have claimed they warned Angleton of his friend’s communist sympathies, and that he kept it to himself and ignored the red flags.
It wasn’t until 1951 that Philby came under suspicion when Angleton and others uncovered two of the other Cambridge Five.
Before they could be nabbed, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean escaped to Moscow and Philby, their old university pal, was suspected of tipping them off.
Angleton defended Philby and though nothing was proven, he was stripped of his position and moved to Beirut where he worked as a freelance journalist.
Arguably the most significant event in Angleton’s career was his close friendship with MI-6 agent, and Soviet double-agent, Kim Philby (pictured in 1967 after fleeing to Moscow)
Philby at his home during his press conference held after he was cleared of involvement in Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean’s defection. He was stripped of his position anyway
Finally, in 1962, he was uncovered following intelligence from Golitsyn, and the next year partially confessed and fled to Moscow.
There he described Angleton as a ‘a brilliant opponent’ who seemed to be ‘catching on’ before his double-agent status was revealed.
Many have theorized about how much Angleton knew, and ignored, about his friend’s defection, but the betrayal appeared to cut him so deeply it fed the paranoia that marred the rest of his career.
If his close friend was a traitor, under his nose, all along… anyone could be.
Angleton saw enemies everywhere, fearful that every recruit and defector could be sent by Moscow to burrow deep into the agency.
He even accused world leaders from Canada to Sweden and even British Prime Minister Harold Wilson of being Soviet assets.
Angleton cut a swathe through the CIA ranks, investigating at least 40 agents and considering 14 serious suspects – impeding their advancement and ruining many of their careers entirely.
Years later, the CIA was made to pay compensation to three of them under what staff called the ‘Mole Relief Act’.
His obsessive mole hunt became so disruptive that his critics argue it did lasting damage to the agency’s ability to function.
Angleton’s demise only began when William Colby was promoted to CIA director and reorganized the agency to limit his power, and he was forced to resign after revelations in the press of questionable activities against anti-war protesters.
Such was his hatred for Colby that in 1978 he tried to cajole dirt on his nemesis out of a reporter about his dealing with Vietnamese spy David Truong.
Angleton’s demise only began when William Colby (pictured) was promoted to CIA director
The CIA went through a huge upheaval after Angleton’s ouster. The counterintelligence staff was cut from 300 to 80 and redirected away from human intelligence to reliance on electronic surveillance.
Only later was this proved to be an overreaction, with Angleton’s supporters claiming his was vindicated soon before his death.
‘James Angleton lived long enough to serve his country before, during and after World war II. He was the architect of the best counterintelligence the United States ever had,’ Senator Malcolm Wallop said days after his death.
‘In the mid-1970’s, Angleton went out of fashion, but he lived long enough to see time and events vindicate him and show how little his accusers understood of the difficult and inherently thankless business of counterintelligence.’