>>5614133

https://theintercept.com/2018/01/01/the-complex-legacy-of-cia-counterintelligence-chief-james-angleton/

ETERAN CIA OFFICER Cleveland Cram was nearing the end of his career in 1978, when his superiors in the agency’s directorate of operations handed him a sensitive assignment: Write a history of the agency’s Counterintelligence Staff. Cram, then 61, was well qualified for the task. He had a master’s and Ph.D. in European History from Harvard. He had served two decades in the clandestine service, including nine years as deputy chief of the CIA’s station in London. He knew the senior officialdom of MI-5 and MI-6, the British equivalents of the FBI and CIA, the agency’s closest partners in countering the KGB, the Soviet Union’s effective and ruthless intelligence service.

Cram was assigned to investigate a debacle. The Counterintelligence Staff, created in 1954, had been headed for 20 years by James Jesus Angleton, a legendary spy who deployed the techniques of literary criticism learned at Yale to find deep patterns and hidden meanings in the records of KGB operations against the West. But Angleton was also a dogmatic and conspiratorial operator whose idiosyncratic theories paralyzed the agency’s operations against the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War, and whose domestic surveillance operations targeting American dissidents had discredited the CIA in the court of public opinion.

In December 1974, CIA Director William Colby fired Angleton after the New York Times revealed the then-unknown counterintelligence chief had overseen a massive program to spy on Americans involved in anti-war and black nationalist movements, a violation of the CIA’s charter. Coming four months after the resignation of Richard Nixon, Angleton’s fall was the denouement of the Watergate scandal, propelling Congress to probe the CIA for the first time. A Senate investigation, headed by Sen. Frank Church, exposed a series of other abuses: assassination conspiracies, unauthorized mail opening, collaboration with human rights abusers, infiltration of news organizations, and the MKULTRA mind-control experiments to develop drugs for use in espionage.

>>5614213

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2017/11/13/jfk-files-controversy-surrounding-cia-counterspy-chief-fed-assassination-conspiracies/857616001/

The CIA delayed responding to requests for information about its longtime counter-espionage chief, James Angleton, as it tried to minimize the disclosure of his activities related to Soviet defectors and the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, newly released documents show.

"Don't answer his initial request any sooner than necessary," said a May 31, 1979, internal CIA memo about a Freedom of Information Act request from author David Martin, who is now a CBS News correspondent. "When we do, deny release of any of the information, maintaining it is still classified and involves protection of sources and methods."

Martin was seeking information about the agency's handling of Yuri Nosenko, a former KGB agent who defected to the United States in 1964. Angleton and some of his colleagues in the CIA and FBI considered Nosenko a possible double agent.

The CIA memo was one of dozens about Angleton included in the 13,213 files released last week by the National Archives. They show the concerns and frustrations about the work Angleton did during his CIA tenure and the difficulty investigators had in getting access to his files at the agency.

Angleton was the agency's main conduit of information to the Warren Commission, the seven-member panel appointed by President Lyndon Johnson to investigate the assassination. Angleton did not tell the commission about the CIA's involvement in attempts to overthrow or kill Cuban communist dictator Fidel Castro, which factored into later conspiracy theories.

>>5614263

and from the land of Oz..

https://www.smh.com.au/world/did-the-cias-chief-james-angleton-fall-for-british-traitor-kim-philby-20171207-h00b7m.html

​Kim Philby and Jim Angleton first met at Bletchley Park, in early 1944. A precociously literate 26-year-old Yale graduate, Angleton had been spotted as a promising spy by his professors and sent to the British intelligence centre for espionage training. There, Philby, chief of MI6 intelligence operations in Spain and Portugal, taught him the black arts of counter-intelligence.

The two formed a friendship. Philby, then aged 32, preferred Angleton's quiet good manners to the fawning Anglophilia of his more provincial countrymen. A year later, when Angleton was assigned to run the US counter-intelligence office in Rome, Philby dropped in from his posting in Turkey. They compared notes on marriage and the growing threat of the Soviet Union.

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