PERSONALITY: The Making of a Master Spy

In the best tradition of the spy masters, James Jesus Angleton, 57, always worked in the shadows, his identity as the Central Intelligence Agency’s chief of counterintelligence known to few besides other key spooks, his family and a handful of close friends. Now, the controversy over the CIA’s domestic activities, in which Angleton’s staff was accused of having spied massively and illegally on U.S. citizens, has made his name notorious. He was forced to resign from the CIA in December, and last week he testified for 2½ hours before the presidential commission investigating the CIA. He denied any role in the domestic spying, saying that the secret unit that ran the operation reported directly to then CIA Director Richard Helms and was only nominally under the counterintelligence chiefs control. For all the interest in him, Angleton remains a mysterious figure, his 31-year career as a highly successful spy virtually unknown. To fill in some of the blanks, TIME asked Angleton’s longtime friend and admirer Charles J.V. Murphy, a former editor and Washington correspondent of FORTUNE, for this highly personal portrait of the master spy:

I had known Jim Angleton for years, but I had never fully appreciated some of his qualities until a fishing trip to the Adirondacks 14 years ago. It was a bone-chilling early spring day, and with another member of the party, I had retired fishless to the bank for a consoling drink and to wait for Angleton. Finally, he came into view, waist-deep in the icy water and feeling for safe footing among the slippery rocks. He was using a 2¾-oz. Leonard rod and casting with easy grace, the tiny fly landing lightly 80 or 90 ft. below him. He took 1 ½ hours to draw abreast of us, never quitting a run or a pool until he had tested every inch of the surface with one or another of some dozen flies. In the end, though, he had five fine native trout in his creel.

Such meticulousness stood him well in the grinding, exhausting and unforgiving discipline of counterintelligence. His job was to locate, identify and neutralize the operations of hostile espionage agents, particularly those of the Soviet KGB, at home and abroad. The task offered few rewards and demanded an angler’s perseverance and patience, unflagging watchfulness and a passion for anonymity. General William Donovan, the director of the Office of Strategic Services (a precursor to the CIA), called him the OSS’s “most professional counterintelligence officer.” In the years that followed, all the directors of the CIA leaned on him. Allen Dulles seldom made a move on the clandestine side without first consulting him. Walter Bedell Smith made him his youthful éminence grise and bequeathed him his cherished fly-tying equipment. John McCone found him a fascinating and shrewd counselor.

Trusted Bridge. Angleton had a storybook background for his work. His Illinois-born father, James Hugh Angleton, joined the National Guard in Idaho in 1916 and chased Pancho Villa south of the border under General John J. (“Black Jack”) Pershing. While there, Angleton courted and married a beautiful Mexican girl of 17. On returning to Boise, where their first son, christened James Jesus, was born in 1917, Angleton pére established himself as a star salesman for the National Cash Register Co. In the 1920s he took charge of the company’s European operations. In 1933 he bought the firm’s franchise for Italy and moved his family to Milan and later to Rome, where they lived in a handsome old villa. For years he headed the American Chamber of Commerce in Italy and was the trusted bridge between the American embassy and Italian industry.

His son’s familiarity with high cuisine, wine and good tailoring was thus all naturally acquired. So too was his profound abhorrence of totalitarianism. Says Angleton: “If one has lived much of his life abroad, as I have, one is apt to judge his country more precious than do those who know no other country well.” He recalls the day in 1936, when he was 18 and working through a summer holiday as an apprentice mechanic in National Cash Register’s Paris factory, that the workers heard about the Wehrmacht reoccupation of the Rhineland. Says Angleton: “The workers to a man threw down their tools and standing at attention sang the Marseillaise. Then they streamed into the street, cursing the government. I stayed up all night, listening to the furious talk of the workers in the bistros. It was my first political experience—an experience in despair. And the war lengthened the experience. While gathering evidence for the Nuremberg war trials, I came upon the horrifying proof of the extermination of 6 million Jews. To prevent war, to preserve freedom are continuing causes with me. They have shaped my life.”

After 3½ years at Malvern College in England, he entered Yale in the class of 1941. Says Poet Reed Whittemore, Angleton’s college roommate and still a close friend: “He was quite British in his ways, though he had treasured his Middle Western accent. He was a mixture of pixiness and earnestness, very much at home in Italian literature, especially Dante, as well as the fine points of handicapping horses. He was an owl; he stayed up late, talking, reading or playing poker.”

Original Poetry. In their junior year, Whittemore and Angleton edited a quarterly of original poetry, called Furioso, financed mostly by subscriptions raised by Whittemore’s aunt. Contributors included Ezra Pound, E.E. Cummings, Archibald MacLeish and William Carlos Williams. Rates were $1 a page. “When we were short of money, which was most of the tune,” Whittemore remembers, “we paid off our poets with fine Italian cravats from the stock that the Angleton haberdasher in Italy kept replenishing.”

As the war came on, Angleton’s father moved the family to New York and joined the OSS. He took part in the planning of the Italian invasion, went ashore with the assault forces at Anzio and rose to colonel. Son Jim had meanwhile entered Harvard Law School and married Cicely d’Autremont of Tucson, Ariz., a junior at Vassar. He was called up in 1943, put through basic training and also assigned to OSS and sent to Italy. His unit uncovered some of the secret correspondence between Hitler and Mussolini that was later introduced into the Nuremberg trials as proof of their conspiracy.

After the war, Donovan asked him to help the provisional Italian government beat off a threatened Communist takeover. Angleton assisted the carabinieri in rebuilding a counter-intelligence service. Through it, he acquired the Soviet instructions to the Italian Communists for supporting the Greek Communists in the civil war in Greece. He and his principal associate for all of his career, Raymond Rocca, who retired recently from the CIA, where he had been Angleton’s chief deputy, ferreted out the exchange of correspondence between Stalin and Tito that foreshadowed the 1948 breach between them.

Late in 1947 Angleton resigned from the Army as a major and returned to Washington. By then, he had become, as he puts it, “sharply aware of the Soviet long-term objectives in subversion.” Having long ago turned his back on law, he joined the CIA, which had been created some months earlier. Angleton was put in charge of helping to organize its clandestine side.

Many of Angleton’s covert operations after he joined the CIA remain secret. The only people who know what he really did are his superiors and those who worked with him. One exploit that can be told came early hi 1956. In collaboration with a friendly intelligence service, his unit acquired a copy of Nikita Khrushchev’s famed denunciation of Stalin to the 20th Party Congress. Angleton and his lieutenants also developed the evidence that helped lead the FBI in 1957 to the KGB agent Colonel Rudolf Abel, who had operated since 1948 from an obscure photographer’s shop in Brooklyn. The numbers of spies who have been caught in Angleton’s net run into the dozens. They include George Blake, a senior officer in the British Secret Service; George Paques, a NATO official whose activities were in part the basis of the book and film Topaz; and Heinz Felfe, a high-ranking officer of the West German intelligence service.

Angleton’s CIA staff was small—no more than a few score, mostly senior men who had been with him since the agency’s founding. They were chiefly specialists on the “adversary” services; a foreign intelligence officer says that the operation was “the best in the world.” Three of Angleton’s people, including Rocca, have left the agency, angry over its failure to stand by their boss.

Forced Out. His defenders regard Angleton as a casualty of the times. They believe that he was forced out because some important U.S. policymakers no longer hold counterintelligence an indispensable function and so strongly believe in the durability of detente that they are uncomfortable with a clandestine organization that persists in regarding the KGB as a serious threat. In this respect, Angleton’s departure is reminiscent of the fate of a fictional counter-intelligence man, George Smiley, the sad hero of John le Carré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Fired during a staff shake-up at the British Secret Service, Smiley was later called back to root out a suspected “mole,” or traitor, who had burrowed deeply into his old organization. The mole resembles Kim Philby, the famed British double agent. It was Angleton who provided some of the information that enabled the British to nail down the case against Philby before the English spy fled to Moscow.