Pod Insights Conspiracy Theories James Angleton: The Man Who Broke the CIA From the Inside About this episode James Angleton ran counterintelligence for the CIA for 20 years. His job was to find Soviet spies hiding inside Western intelligence. He was brilliant, obsessive, and almost certainly right that the threat of a mole was real. But the hunt he launched tore the CIA apart from the inside, and the greatest deception of his career was one he never saw coming. Help us reach 10k followers on Instagram! @theconspiracypod
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Transcript 0:06 Speaker 00 There's a phrase that intelligence people use to describe the world of counter espionage. They call it "a wilderness of mirrors." The man who coined that phrase borrowed it from a T.S. Eliot poem. He was a poetry editor before he was a spy. He grew orchids in a greenhouse he built in his backyard. He tied his own fly-fishing flies. He chain-smoked his way through 18-hour days in a locked, windowless office at CIA headquarters, hunched over files, searching for patterns that may or may not have been there. His name was James Angleton.
0:48 Speaker 00 For 20 years, he ran counterintelligence for the Central Intelligence Agency. His job was to protect the agency from enemy infiltration, to find the spies hiding among spies. And he was, by many accounts, very good at it. He helped uncover secret correspondence between Hitler and Mussolini. He obtained a copy of Khrushchev's secret speech denouncing Stalin, one of the biggest intelligence coups of the Cold War. But James Angleton also launched a mole hunt that consumed the CIA for over a decade.
1:30 Speaker 00 A hunt that ruined the careers of innocent officers that paralyzed the agency's operations against the Soviet Union. How does the same man end up on both sides of that story? The answer involves a best friend, a Soviet defector, and a mole hiding somewhere inside the CIA.
1:57 Speaker 00 Welcome to Conspiracy Theories, a Spotify podcast. I'm Carter Roy. New episodes come out every Wednesday. We'd love to hear from you. So if you are listening on the Spotify app, swipe up and give us your thoughts, or check us out on Instagram at the conspiracy pod. Stay with us.
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3:49 Speaker 00 March 1944. Twenty-six-year-old American officer James Angleton begins his intelligence career. London is under siege. German V-2 rockets slam into apartments and pubs and churches. The city is in ruins. James, who usually goes by Jim, has been in the Army for about a year. Before that, he was at Yale editing a poetry magazine, corresponding with famous poets like Ezra Pound and E.E. Cummings. He graduated in 1941 and was admitted to Harvard Law School, but before he could finish, Jim was drafted to fight in World War II.
4:32 Speaker 00 Now he's in London, assigned to the Office of Strategic Services, the OSS, America's wartime intelligence agency and the precursor to the CIA. Specifically, he's in a unit called X-2, which handles counterintelligence. His job is to figure out who's working for the enemy. It's a remarkable fit. The skills Jim honed analyzing poetry, looking for hidden meanings and reading between lines, turn out to be exactly the skills you need to catch spies. One officer would later put it this way: "Both poetry analysis and counterintelligence
5:14 Speaker 00 require recognizing patterns, examining the assumptions hidden in words and phrases, and grasping the whole structure, not just the surface." Jim takes to it immediately. He often works through the night, and when he doesn't, he sleeps on a cot in his office. Within six months, he's running the X-2 program in Italy. His unit uncovers secret correspondence between Hitler and Mussolini that's later used as evidence at the Nuremberg Trials. But before any of that happens, shortly after arriving in London, Jim is introduced to a British intelligence officer.
5:57 Speaker 00 The man is charming, confident, and about a decade older. He's already a rising star in MI6, Britain's Foreign Intelligence Service. He's been fighting the Nazis and the fascists from the field for years. His name is Kim Philby.
6:18 Speaker 00 Jim is dazzled. Kim is everything Jim wants to be. Worldly, experienced, effortlessly competent. And Kim takes a shine to the young American too. He mentors him. He explains how counterintelligence really works. Not just on paper, but in the field. Where the rules blur and nothing is quite what it seems. From Kim, on Jim learned something crucial about wartime intelligence that will become the foundational principle of his entire career. The British have been running an operation called the Double Cross System. Here's how it works.
7:01 Speaker 00 When they capture a German spy, they don't just lock him up. They turn him. They compel him to keep reporting back to Berlin. Except now, the information he sends is a careful mix of truth and lies. Calibrated to give the Germans a distorted picture of reality. The genius of it is that the Germans can't tell the difference. The reports look real, the sources check out, but the picture they assemble from all these seemingly reliable reports is completely wrong. It's like looking at a jigsaw puzzle where every individual piece is authentic, but someone has swapped the box lid so you're building toward the wrong image.
7:44 Speaker 00 The deception is so effective that in the run-up to D-Day, the Germans massed their forces away from the actual landing point at Normandy. And they're expecting the invasion hundreds of miles away. The Allied armies land with the German military in disarray. Jim is watching in real time how manufactured reality can determine which armies live and which armies die. How a lie, properly constructed and patiently maintained, can be more powerful than the truth.
8:18 Speaker 00 It's a lesson that will define the rest of his life, for better and for worse. After the war, Jim stays in Italy, building intelligence networks and establishing relationships with Allied spy services in Europe. When the CIA is officially created in 1947, Jim is among its founding officers. Eventually, he moves to Washington DC and quickly rises through the ranks. By 1951, he takes on a role that will prove enormously valuable for decades. He becomes the CIA's exclusive liaison with Israeli intelligence.
8:57 Speaker 00 In 1949, his friend Kim Philby gets a sweet assignment: MI6's liaison officer in Washington DC, the British government's top intelligence representative to the Americans. The two men pick up right where they left off. They have lunch together regularly at a restaurant called Harvey's, a high-end Washington establishment known for its lobster and powerful clientele. The secrets flow as freely as the bourbon. These lunches become a ritual, week after week, year after year. And as Jim takes on more power inside the CIA, the information he's sharing across
9:41 Speaker 00 that table becomes more and more valuable. But in May of 1951, something shakes the intelligence world. Two British intelligence officers, Guy Burgess and Donald McLean, suddenly vanish. They've defected to Moscow. They were Soviet spies. Suspicion quickly falls on Kim Philby, who's friends with both men. Investigators believe Kim may have tipped them off that they were about to be exposed. Jim doesn't believe it, not for a second. He defends Kim inside the CIA and assures senior officials that he trusts him completely.
10:23 Speaker 00 Some of Jim's colleagues at the CIA aren't so sure. Some of them have been suspicious of Kim for a while, but Jim pushes back. "Well, the idea isn't possible. You don't spend hundreds of hours across a table from someone and entertain the possibility that they're feeding every word to Moscow."
10:44 Speaker 00 The friendship itself becomes a kind of evidence. How could he be a spy? I know this man. But in counterintelligence, you can't ever risk it. Jim's word isn't enough. So Kim is recalled from Washington and forced to resign from MI6. Eventually, the British government agrees with Jim. And in 1955, the Foreign Secretary publicly clears Kim of any wrongdoing. Case closed. Kim settles into a new life as a journalist in Beirut, writing stories for The Economist.
11:23 Speaker 00 What almost nobody knows is that MI6 has quietly brought Kim back into the fold. He hasn't been formally reinstated, but they still treat him as a useful source in the Middle East. So he's a trusted asset once again. Jim's faith in his old friend seems justified. Meanwhile, Jim's power and influence continues to rise. In 1954, CIA Director Allen Dulles asked Jim to become chief of the counterintelligence staff. Jim accepts. He will hold this position for the next 20 years. It's during this period that Jim's relationship with Israel pays off.
12:06 Speaker 00 In 1956, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev gives a secret speech to the Communist Party Congress. Behind closed doors, to an audience of Soviet insiders only, Khrushchev denounces his predecessor, Joseph Stalin. He admits to the mass murders, the political terror, the cult of personality that had defined Soviet rule for decades. This is the leader of the Soviet Union essentially confessing that the system had been built on lies. No one in the West is supposed to know about it. But a Polish journalist with connections to Israeli intelligence gets his hands on a copy.
12:50 Speaker 00 It makes its way to Tel Aviv, and from Tel Aviv, it lands on Jim's desk. He passes it to the Eisenhower administration, who leaks it to the New York Times. The speech goes public worldwide. The fallout is enormous. Communist parties around the globe are thrown into crisis. Soviet allies start questioning Moscow's leadership. It's arguably the most damaging piece of intelligence the West obtains during the entire Cold War, and Jim is the one who delivered it. It cements his reputation inside the agency as someone who produces results.
13:35 Speaker 00 At this point, James Angleton is at the peak of his powers. He's the dominant counterintelligence figure in the Western world. He has every reason to trust his own judgment, every reason to believe he can tell the difference between what is real and what is staged, between a loyal ally and a carefully constructed deception. He's about to find out what happens when he can't. This episode is brought to you by ZipRecruiter. Among the many, many conspiracy theories out there, the JFK assassination is the most enthralling to me because of all the avenues it goes down.
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16:12 Speaker 00 December 1961. A Soviet intelligence officer walks into the American Embassy in Helsinki, Finland, and announces that he wants to defect. His name is Anatoly Golitsyn. He is a high-ranking member of the KGB. And he has a story. Something big. Something that will consume Jim Angleton for the rest of his career. Anatoly is brought to the United States and debriefed with the CIA. Officers who first speak with Anatoly find him arrogant and demanding. He insists on being interviewed by Jim personally.
16:53 Speaker 00 Says nobody else at the agency is smart enough to understand what he has to say. Jim doesn't argue, he just pulls up a chair. Anatoly explains he's become disillusioned with the Soviet system and is ready to spill its secrets. He gives Jim information about KGB operations in Helsinki. He provides a dossier of KGB personnel, structure, and methods. And this gives him credibility. For Jim, this is the moment he's been preparing for his entire career. The CIA hasn't landed a KGB defector of this caliber since 1954.
17:35 Speaker 00 Anatoly was inside the KGB's Strategic Planning Department, the part of the organization that decides how the whole machine operates. He doesn't just know what the KGB is doing, he knows how they think. Anatoly tells Jim that the KGB reorganized itself in the late 1950s, and that the reorganization was designed to do one thing: deceive the West on a massive scale. According to Anatoly, the KGB had essentially turned itself inside out. The bulk of its visible operations were theater.
18:16 Speaker 00 The real power sat with a tight inner circle running the show from behind the curtain. And those Soviet officers and diplomats that Western agencies kept recruiting as spies? Anatoly says most of them were already working for Moscow. The CIA thought it was gathering intelligence on the Soviet Union. In reality, Moscow was deciding what the CIA got to see. And yes, if you think that sounds a lot like the double-cross system that Jim learned about from Kim during the war, where captured spies are turned and used to feed false information back to the enemy, you're right. And that's exactly why it resonates with Jim.
18:59 Speaker 00 He has spent his career understanding how deception operations work. He knows firsthand that reality can be manufactured. And now Anatoly is telling him the Soviets have been doing it to the Americans for years.
19:17 Speaker 00 But that's not all. Anatoly also claims the CIA itself has been infiltrated by a high-ranking Soviet mole, someone embedded deep inside the agency. If that's true, the implications are staggering. Every operation the CIA has run could be compromised. Every source it's developed could be in danger. Every intelligence assessment it's produced could be wrong, or worse, designed to be wrong. People could be dying because of this person. People may have already died. He provides a handful of details.
20:00 Speaker 00 The mole is of Slavic descent, may have been stationed in West Germany, has a last name that started with K and might have ended in SKY, and operates under the KGB codename Sasha. I mean, think about that for a second. Slavic descent, stationed in Germany, last name starts with K, might end in SKY, spelled S-K-Y. You could probably find a dozen people in any government agency who fit that description. But Jim doesn't see it that way. To Jim, this is the thread he's been waiting for.
20:42 Speaker 00 And when he gets a thread, he pulls. He never stops pulling. Now, this is a man who slept on a cot in his office during the war because he couldn't stop working. His whole career has been built on the idea that if you look closely enough, the pattern reveals itself. And now, for the first time, someone from inside the KGB is handing him the edge of something. And maybe thin, maybe vague, but it's real. He can feel it.
21:16 Speaker 00 And Anatoly isn't done. He makes one more prediction. And it's the one that seals Jim's devotion. He tells Jim, "The KGB will send another defector after him. A false one. His sole purpose will be to discredit Anatoly's information and protect the mole already inside Jim's agency." "If that happens," Anatoly says, "don't believe him, no matter how convincing he is." Jim files that away. Then, the mole hunt begins.
21:58 Speaker 00 Jim starts by scouring personnel files for anyone inside the CIA who might fit the outline Anatoly has given him. The first person in the crosshairs is a career CIA officer named Peter Carlo. Peter lost a leg during World War II. He spent the 1950s rising through the ranks of the CIA's Technical Services Division, the division responsible for the gadgets and tactical tools the agency uses in the field. Think Q from the James Bond films. Peter's in line to become its chief. He also fits Anatoly's description. And Jim discovers that Peter was actually born Peter Klobansky, a Slavic name ending
22:43 Speaker 00 with sky. He served in Germany and had access to sensitive operations. On paper, this looks promising. Jim's team starts pulling the thread. The FBI puts Peter under intensive surveillance. They watch his movements, they monitor his contacts, they dig into his finances, his relationships, his history. Weeks go by, then months, and they find... nothing. No secret meetings, no unexplained money, no contact with Soviet agents, nothing incriminating at all. But Jim insists that doesn't exonerate Peter.
23:25 Speaker 00 There's a difference in Jim's mind between "we didn't find anything" and "he's clean."
23:32 Speaker 00 It just means Peter is careful. Peter is forced to resign in 1963. He is entirely innocent. He will spend the next two decades fighting to clear his name. The CIA eventually pays him close to half a million dollars in compensation and gives him a secret medal, but his career is gone. And Peter is only the beginning. Jim's counterintelligence staff draws up a list. Forty CIA officers fall under investigation. Fourteen are considered serious suspects. Promotions stall. Raises are withheld.
24:15 Speaker 00 Careers that officers spent decades building are quietly dismantled. Not through formal charges or trials, but through suspicion, paranoia, and the word of one defector. One of the more painful cases involves a man named Leslie James Bennett. He's not a CIA officer, but a senior counterintelligence official for Canada's Royal Canadian Mounted Police. In 1962, Jim actually trusts Leslie enough to have him interview Anatoly. But Jim being Jim, that trust doesn't last. Not long after, he starts to suspect Leslie of being Sasha.
24:58 Speaker 00 He opens an investigation, and eventually, the Canadian police launch one too. They put Leslie under surveillance. They tap his phone, they bug his house, including his bedroom. The operation ends in Leslie being taken to a safe house for a five-day interrogation. During those five days, his interrogators ask him humiliating personal questions about his sex life, based on recordings from the bug in his bedroom. They find nothing. No evidence that Leslie was ever disloyal to anyone.
25:35 Speaker 00 But his top-secret clearance is revoked anyway, and his career is over. His wife and children leave him, and eventually, he's living in poverty in Australia. By the mid-1960s, the damage is mounting. Peter Carlo is gone. Leslie Bennett's career is destroyed. Estimates vary, but according to author David Wise, the careers of more than 100 CIA officers are damaged or derailed by the mole hunt. Some are formally investigated. Some are quietly passed over for promotion with no explanation. Some simply realize they've been frozen out and leave on their own.
26:19 Speaker 00 The CIA eventually pays compensation to at least three officers under what agency employees grimly call "The Mole Relief Act." And it's not just the people being investigated who are impacted. It's everyone around them. If your colleague is under suspicion, does that make you suspicious too? If you vouch for someone and they turn out to be guilty, does that mean you're compromised? People stop talking to each other. They stop sharing information. They stop trusting. Jim has a yellow line painted on the floor of the CIA vault room, cordoning off the safes that only his staff can access.
27:03 Speaker 00 If you work in that building, you see it every day. A physical reminder that someone is watching. Meanwhile, the Soviet Division, the part of the CIA responsible for actually gathering intelligence on the Soviet Union, is grinding to a halt. Meetings with potential sources are vetoed. New operations are questioned before they begin. Intelligence coming in from the field is dismissed as possible disinformation. Soon, the suspicion becomes its own kind of trap. Push back against the mole hunt, and you look like you're protecting the mole. Defend a Soviet source, and you're naive. Question Anatoly's credibility,
27:47 Speaker 00 and you're doing exactly what a false defector would want. There's no way to win. And as the mole hunt drags on, Jim is increasingly the only one who still believes in it.
28:01 Speaker 00 FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover initially cooperates with the CIA after Anatoly defects, but he quickly grows skeptical of his sweeping claims about a Soviet mole at the top of Western intelligence. By the mid 1960s, the Bureau has largely distanced itself from Jim's search, leaving him to pursue the theory inside the CIA long after others have stopped believing in it. Jim has searched for Sasha for three years and has almost nothing to show for it but hundreds of damaged careers. And then, right when Jim is at his most isolated, right when the rest of the agency is starting
28:45 Speaker 00 to wonder if he's lost his mind, another Soviet defector arrives, exactly as Anatoly predicted. His name is Yuri Nosenko. In early 1964, he shows up to a CIA office and he's carrying a bombshell. The year prior, President Kennedy was assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald, who lived in the Soviet Union for some time. And yes, by the way, we might as well call this show "The Six Degrees of JFK" at this point, he pops up in so many episodes. Anyway, Yuri claims that he personally handled the KGB's file on Oswald in 1959.
29:27 Speaker 00 According to Yuri, the KGB considered Oswald unstable and essentially worthless. They had no interest in recruiting him. Jim doesn't believe a word of it, and from his perspective, the reasons are overwhelming. First, the timing is almost too convenient. JFK has just been assassinated by a man who lived in the Soviet Union for three years? And months later, a KGB officer shows up volunteering that Moscow had nothing to do with it? If you're Jim, well, that doesn't look like a coincidence. It looks like a cleanup operation. Second, Yuri's story keeps changing. During his initial contact with the CIA in Geneva in 1962,
30:12 Speaker 00 he gives one version of events. When he defects in 1964, some of the details have shifted. His reasons for defecting change. To Jim, those inconsistencies aren't the normal fog of memory. They're the tell. A real defector gets the details right because he lived them. A fake defector gets them wrong because he's reciting a script that's been revised between performances. And finally, there's the overlap. Yuri's information touches on the same cases and the same operations that Anatoly reported on, but reaches different conclusions.
30:55 Speaker 00 To most people, that might suggest two honest sources who simply disagree. To Jim, it's proof of something far more sinister. The KGB wouldn't send a defector who contradicts their previous defector unless the second one is designed to neutralize the first. Anatoly predicted this would happen. He told Jim years ago that the KGB would send a false defector to discredit him. And now, right on schedule, here's Yuri. Jim's mind is made up. Yuri is a plant. In April 1964, on Jim's recommendation,
31:39 Speaker 00 Yuri is held in a secret CIA detention facility in southern Maryland. He's kept alone. The food is bare minimum. He later says they gave him LSD, and they tell him that this is his life for decades unless he admits he's working for Moscow. This goes on for over three years. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover is so outraged by Yuri's treatment that it effectively destroys the cooperation between the FBI and CIA for the remainder of Hoover's tenure, which is a significant thing to break, given that these are the two agencies most responsible for protecting the United States from foreign espionage.
32:25 Speaker 00 Meanwhile, Anatoly's claims are growing stranger by the year. He tells Jim that British Prime Minister Harold Wilson is a Soviet agent, that the rift between China and the Soviet Union that every other analyst in the Western world considers genuine is a charade, a massive deception staged for Western consumption, that the KGB's influence reaches into the highest levels of virtually every Western government. These claims are, to the rest of the intelligence community, absurd. The FBI privately mocks what they call
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34:08 Speaker 00 Anatoly's monster plot. And I can see why. The Prime Minister of Great Britain is a Soviet agent? China and the Soviet Union are secretly best friends and just pretending to hate each other?
34:23 Speaker 00 Sounds like a bad spy novel. But Jim buys it. All of it. By this point, Jim has been searching for Sasha for about a decade. He's nearly torn the CIA apart. He's destroyed careers. He's imprisoned a man who may be telling the truth. He's lost the trust of the FBI, his own colleagues, and most of the intelligence community. And he has nothing to show for it.
34:53 Speaker 00 But there's something I haven't told you yet. Something about Jim's closest friend through all of this. Kim Philby.
35:11 Speaker 00 Okay, remember at the beginning of this episode when I told you about Jim's friend, Kim Philby, the British intelligence officer who mentored Jim during the war, then had lunch with him every week in Washington? He'd been implicated as a spy back in 1951 when his pals Guy Burgess and Donald McLean defected to Moscow. But just four years later, his name was cleared. He's been living in Beirut ever since, working as a journalist. He and Jim are still the best of friends. Jim has defended him for over a decade. Yeah, about that. It turns out, Kim Philby actually is a KGB spy.
35:56 Speaker 00 He has been since 1934, before he ever joined MI6, before he ever met Jim Angleton. He was recruited as a young communist idealist, and for nearly 30 years, he passed everything he learned to Moscow. Every one of those lunches at Harvey's, where Jim shared secrets about CIA operations, personnel, sources, and methods, all of it went straight to the Kremlin. And Jim has no idea. Okay, so let me back up for a second, because I need to show you how this fits into what you already heard. Anatoly defected in December 1961.
36:40 Speaker 00 When he sat down with Jim, he didn't just tell him about Sasha. He also revealed something about the 1951 defection of Guy Burgess and Donald McLean, the two British spies whose disappearance first raised suspicion about Kim. They weren't acting alone. According to Anatoly, they were part of what he calls "The Cambridge Five", a group of British men recruited by Soviet intelligence back in the 1930s, all of whom knew each other, all of whom had been at Cambridge University together. Guy and Donald were two of the members. Kim Philby, Anatoly tells Jim, is the probable third. Anatoly doesn't know the names of the fourth and fifth.
37:25 Speaker 00 He clarifies that Kim isn't Sasha, the Soviet mole hiding in the CIA, but an entirely different mole altogether. Now, here's where it gets awkward for Jim. Anatoly is his most trusted source. Jim believes virtually everything this man tells him, and Anatoly is telling him that Kim is a Soviet agent. Jim doesn't reject this outright, but he doesn't exactly act on it either. He's been defending Kim since 1951, and now his own star defector is telling him he was wrong.
38:07 Speaker 00 It's a hard thing to sit with when your entire professional identity is built on reading people correctly. So, instead of investigating his friend, Jim throws himself into searching for Sasha, and as we talked about, destroys many careers in the process. But MI6 doesn't ignore it. After Anatoly raises the possibility that Kim is part of the Cambridge spy ring, MI6 decides to confront him. In January 1963, they send Nicholas Elliot, one of Kim's oldest and closest friends in British intelligence, to Beirut to confront him. Nicholas has defended Kim for years,
38:52 Speaker 00 and now he's been given the job of getting a confession out of him. The two men meet in Kim's apartment in Beirut's Christian Quarter. To anyone passing outside, it would sound like a polite conversation, two old friends catching up. But what's actually happening is the end of a 30-year lie. Nicholas tells Kim that British intelligence knows the truth. Kim pushes back at first, then slowly, he begins to admit things. Not everything, just enough to confirm the worst.
39:34 Speaker 00 And then he asks Nicholas for a few days before they continue the conversation. Nicholas agrees, maybe he shouldn't have, because Kim uses those days to disappear. He slips out of Beirut under cover of darkness, boards a Soviet freighter, and flees to Moscow. Now, think about what this does to Jim's mind. He's already been told by Anatoly that the KGB's penetration of Western intelligence goes deeper than anyone imagines, and now, the single most important relationship of his professional life has been exposed as a fraud.
40:16 Speaker 00 The irony is so precise, it almost doesn't feel real. Jim built his career on the lesson Kim taught him, that reality can be manufactured, that the person sitting across from you might be feeding you a picture designed in Moscow. And the man who taught him that lesson was himself the manufactured reality Jim never detected. And Jim didn't just miss it, he actively defended Kim. He stakes his professional judgment on it, and he was wrong. Catastrophically, publicly, undeniably, wrong.
41:00 Speaker 00 There were very real consequences to the information Jim shared. Agents behind the Iron Curtain were captured and killed in various Soviet operations. For a man who built his entire life on being the one who sees what others miss, it's not just an embarrassment, it may have been an existential crisis. If Jim was wrong about Kim...
41:27 Speaker 00 What else has he been wrong about? And I have to wonder if this is part of what drove Jim to obsessively search for Sasha. Jim doesn't just believe there's a mole in the CIA, maybe he kinda needs it. It's possible finding Sasha becomes the thing that makes the Kim failure mean something. If Jim can catch this one. If he can prove that his instincts are still sharp, then maybe the years he spent trusting Kim weren't a fatal flaw. But as we know, he can't catch this one either. Kim flees to Moscow in January 1963.
42:07 Speaker 00 That same year, Jim forces Peter Carlo out of the CIA based on nothing but a vague description from Anatoly. By 1964, he's locked Yuri Nosenko in a concrete room in Maryland. By the mid 60s, the FBI has walked away, over 100 careers are damaged, and the Soviet Division is all but destroyed. It's been over 10 years since Anatoly first said the name Sasha, and Jim has nothing to show for it, except the wreckage. Still, the hunt grinds on for the next decade. More officers investigated, more careers stalled, more dead ends.
42:50 Speaker 00 And the longer it goes with no Sasha, the harder it is to justify Jim's actions. In 1973, William Colby becomes Director of Central Intelligence. And unlike Jim's previous bosses, Bill isn't willing to look the other way. Bill looks at Jim's track record and sees a simple problem. 20 years of mole hunting, zero moles caught. One best friend who really was a Soviet spy that Jim totally missed.
43:25 Speaker 00 He strips Jim of the Israel desk. He reorganizes their counterintelligence staff. And in December 1974, he calls Jim into his office and tells him he's done. Jim resists. Bill doesn't budge. It takes Jim nine months to clean out his office. When he finally leaves, he destroys counterintelligence files, including, at some point, Jim's memos about his conversations with Kim. What else went with them, we'll never know. After his forced retirement, Jim is adrift. He's 58 years old.
44:08 Speaker 00 For three decades, the CIA was his identity, and now overnight, it's gone. He retreats to the orchid greenhouse behind his house, where he develops rare hybrids. He goes fly fishing and collects gemstones. He reads mystery novels about a private detective who solves crimes without ever leaving his house. Now, the spy who spent his career in a locked office poring over files, now reading about a detective who does the same thing from his armchair. And every now and then, a journalist or a former colleague would visit, and Jim would hold court in his greenhouse, surrounded by orchids, chain-smoking cigarettes,
44:49 Speaker 00 insisting he was right, that everything Anatoly said was true, and there's a mole codenamed Sasha still out there, maybe even more moles. James Angleton dies of lung cancer on May 11, 1987. He's 69. At his funeral, his old roommate from Yale reads T. S. Eliot's East Coker, a poem about an old man in a dry season, age, uncertainty, and the limits of human understanding. About how knowledge fades, so longer you chase it. Jim is buried at Morris Hill Cemetery in Boise, Idaho. Someone still decorates his grave with orchids.
45:37 Speaker 00 So, there's one more thing I haven't mentioned. I know, I know. I've been dropping a lot of bombshells on you, but this one is really good. In the early 70s, when Jim was still in power, a veteran counterintelligence officer named Edward Pettie launched an investigation of his own. Edward believed that if there's a mole this deeply embedded, this effective at paralyzing the CIA's ability to operate against the Soviet Union, well, who has actually done the most damage? Who, by their actions, has accomplished exactly what a Soviet agent would want to accomplish? Edward spent about two years on the case.
46:22 Speaker 00 The file he assembled was four feet tall. And at the end, in 1974, he concluded with 80 to 85% probability that the mole inside the CIA is Jim Angleton. I told you it was a big reveal. Even I had to read it twice. What, what, what? But, thinking about it, the mole hunt has destroyed the careers of loyal officers. It's paralyzed intelligence gathering against the Soviet Union. It's poisoned the CIA's relationship with allied intelligence services. It's created a level of institutional distrust so deep that the agency can barely function.
47:07 Speaker 00 If the KGB had designed an operation to neutralize the CIA from the inside, they could not have done a better job than what Jim was already doing. Now, to be clear, most historians believe Jim was not a Soviet agent. But the fact that his own methodology rigorously applied to himself produces this result, that tells you something about the methodology and about how thin the line is between vigilance and destruction.
47:46 Speaker 00 And still, to this day, we don't know who Sasha was, or if they even existed. Author David Wise, who spent 10 years investigating the mole hunt and interviewed over 200 people for his book Mole Hunt, said he found no proof that a mole ever existed inside the CIA. Some intelligence officers who worked the case came to believe that Anatoly exaggerated what he knew, or made connections that weren't there, or simply told Jim what Jim wanted to hear.
48:27 Speaker 00 Because the more important Anatoly seemed, the better he was treated. And Jim gave Anatoly extraordinary treatment. He gave him access to the CIA's own classified files to help trigger his memory. He put him up in safe houses. He protected him from other debriefers who might have challenged his claims. So, was Sasha a real Soviet agent? A composite of fragments Anatoly half-remembered from a report he read 10 years earlier? Or a story that got bigger every time it was told because the man listening needed
49:11 Speaker 00 it to be true? We don't know. And we may never know. Which might be the most Jim Angleton ending possible. A wilderness of mirrors, all the way down. Thank you for listening to Conspiracy Theories. We're here with a new episode every Wednesday. Be sure to check us out on Instagram @TheConspiracyPod. If you're watching on Spotify, swipe up and give us your thoughts. For more information on James Angleton, amongst the many sources we used, we found The Ghost:
49:53 Speaker 00 The Secret Life of CIA Spymaster James Jesus Angleton by Jefferson Morley, Mole Hunt: The Secret Search for Traitors That Shattered the CIA by David Wise, and Cold Warrior: James Jesus Angleton: The CIA's Master Spy Hunter by Tom Mangold, extremely helpful to our research. Until next time, remember, the truth isn't always the best story. And the official story isn't always the truth. This episode was written and researched by Chelsea Wood, fact-checked by Sophie Kemp, and engineered, video-edited, and sound-designed by Alex Button. I'm your host, Carter Roy.
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