Cold Warrior: James Jesus Angleton - Cia's Master Spy Hunter
Mangold's first-class biography of James Angleton, CIA counterintelligence chief from 1955 to 1975, who died in 1987, concentrates on Angleton's obsessive search for Soviet double agents within the agency. When the investigation outside his own department failed to produce a "mole," Angleton moved against the counterintelligence staff itself. The result, as Mangold reveals, was an internal-affairs skirmish that claimed several innocent victims. No spy was ever found. The great "molehunt" caused so much damage to Western intelligence that some suspected Angleton himself of being a Soviet agent. Mangold relates the episode involving Yury Nosenko, who defected to the West in 1964; Angleton, convinced he was a Soviet plant, kept him a secret prisoner of the CIA throughout much of the 1960s and tried unsuccessfully to force a "confession" from him. The book is an intriguing account of self-destructive paranoia in America's intelligence community. Mangold is the author of The Tunnels of Cu Chi. Photos.Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.