what did angleton say about golitsyn?
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What Did Angleton Say AboutGolitsyn?Jerry D. EnnisPublished online: 06 Jun 2008.
To cite this article: Jerry D. Ennis (2007) What Did Angleton Say AboutGolitsyn?, Intelligence and National Security, 22:6, 905-909, DOI:10.1080/02684520701770667
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What Did Angleton Say About Golitsyn?
JERRY D. ENNIS
In an earlier issue of this journal I examined statements attributed to
James J. Angleton, then Chief of the CIA Counterintelligence Staff, that
Anatoli Mikhailovich Golitsyn had worked secretly for the CIA for
many years prior to defecting in Helsinki in December 1961. Further
research shows that Angleton had made similar remarks on a number
of occasions, but intended something other than the usual meaning of
the phrase‘worked for’.
My earlier article addressed information in the literature that Anatoli
Mikhailovich Golitsyn had worked secretly for the CIA for many years prior
to defecting in 1961. The reported source for the statements was James J.
Angleton, then chief of the CIA Counterintelligence Staff.1 I chose to address
the claim because, as one former CIA officer put it, ‘the literature on
Golitsyn . . . has been contaminated to the point that the truth is hard to find’.2
If this bit of information about Golitsyn was incorrect, I believed it was
important to clarify the record for other students of intelligence. I am
revisiting the matter because my conclusion as to what Mr. Angleton said
about Golitsyn and why he said it was incorrect.
Information from a number of former CIA officers who had been deeply
involved with James J. Angleton and the Golitsyn case over the years
established that Golitsyn had not been recruited by or otherwise
secretly provided intelligence information to the CIA prior to defecting.
The question then remaining was, why would Angleton have said such a
thing?
Finding a conclusive answer to that question was more difficult. Neither
Thomas Powers nor Loch K. Johnson, authors who had reported that Golitsyn
had worked for the CIA, had detailed notes of their conversations with
Angleton, which took place in the mid-1970s, and each felt his recollections
of Angleton’s remarks might have been mistaken – but they were not.3 There
was no obvious reason for Angleton to try to mislead Powers, but in 1975–76,
Professor Johnson was on the staff of the Senate Select Committee to
Study Governmental Operations With Respect to Intelligence Activities
Intelligence and National Security, Vol.22, No.6, December 2007, pp.905 – 909ISSN 0268-4527 print 1743-9019 onlineDOI: 10.1080/02684520701770667 ª 2007 Taylor & Francis
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(the Church committee) and Angleton had made no secret of his low opinion
of that body’s work.
Walter Elder, a former executive assistant to Director of Central
Intelligence John McCone and CIA liaison officer to Congress, recalled a
late-night visit from Angleton in August 1975. Angleton had been before the
committee that day and wanted to tell Elder about a ‘diabolical plot’.
Angleton told Elder, ‘The Church committee has opened up the CIA to a
frontal assault by the KGB’, and, ‘The committee is serving as an unwitting
instrument of the KGB’.4 In June 1976, Angleton told an interviewer from the
Lewiston, Idaho newspaper that Senator Frank Church was conducting ‘a
type of McCarthyite hearing in which the denigration of the intelligence
community was its goal’.5 Professor Johnson heard similar comments during
some of his meetings with Angleton. During a February 1976 lunch meeting,
Johnson wrote that Angleton ‘became highly agitated as he discussed the
congressional inquiries, comparing them to the pillaging of intelligence
services that had been overrun and occupied by a foreign power. ‘‘Only we
have been occupied by the Congress,’’ he said, ‘‘with our files rifled, our
officials humiliated, and our agents exposed’’’.6 One source speculated that
Angleton might have said almost anything to a representative of the Church
committee just to muddy the waters. After all, Angleton had previously told
Johnson that ‘the task of the counterintelligence officer was to construct a
‘‘wilderness of mirrors’’ in which the opponent would be forever lost and
confused’. Johnson later wrote
In 1975, the chief enemy of the CIA was – in the eyes of many CIA
officers, including Angleton – the United States Congress. I wondered
if Angleton’s ploy was to lead the Church committee into his
‘wilderness’, where everything revealed reflected something concealed,
and the maddening multiplicity of images spun dizzily in the mind.7
Perhaps. But comments made to a member of the committee’s staff at public
lunches at the Army–Navy Club seem an unlikely way to try to lead the
committee (or Johnson) into the wilderness.
Some additional support for the ‘muddy the waters’ and ‘wilderness of
mirrors’ theories can be found in an article by Seymour Hersh concerning
Nikita Khrushchev’s 1956 speech to the Twentieth Congress of the
Communist Party of the Soviet Union in which he denounced Stalin.
Angleton, Hersh wrote:
has repeatedly told friends, and some reporters, that his office began
planning a major disinformation operation even while the Eisenhower
906 INTELLIGENCE AND NATIONAL SECURITY
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Administration was still debating whether to make the speech available
to the press.
‘What Jim did’, one of his friends told me, ‘was to doctor the speech
with some pejorative stuff and leak it to the neutrals, the Indians among
them. They all swallowed it. There were some nasty things about the
heads of 15 or 20 governments that were written by Jim and attributed
to Khrushchev.’ The resulting furor, his friend said, was ‘a tremendous
coup for Jim. It completely disrupted Communist efforts all over the
world.’
The fact, however, is that the Angleton plan was killed by higher
officials before it could be put into operation. When one newspaper
editor reproached Angleton recently for continuing to tell the story to
reporters, Angleton replied, ‘Why not tell it? It muddies the waters,
doesn’t it?’8
Finding no better explanation, I concluded that Angleton may have
believed that ‘muddying the waters’ was justification enough for his
comments that Golitsyn had worked secretly for the CIA for years. However,
further research has caused me to change my conclusion.
When we say ‘X worked for Y’, we generally mean that an employee–
employer relationship existed and that both parties were aware that this
relationship existed. However, it can also mean ‘X worked on behalf of Y’,
without necessarily having an employee–employer relationship. And that is
the meaning Angleton intended.
In an Executive Session of the Church committee on 19 June 1975,
Angleton testified that Golitsyn ‘had decided to defect many years prior to
December of 1961, if the opportunity ever arrived. And therefore he used
those many years breaking down the compartmentalization of the KGB in
order to acquire the kind of information which would be more valuable to the
U.S. and to our allies’.9 In a 1978 deposition to the John F. Kennedy
Subcommittee of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, Angleton
removed all doubt about Golitsyn’s status vis-a-vis the CIA. Angleton
testified, ‘But because Golitzen [sic] had made up his mind to defect many
years before he actually arrived, he was actually without our knowing an
agent in place’.10
The third, and most explicit, statement comes from an undated
document (probably from 1963) marked ‘COPY (from SIG files),
SUBJECT: GOLITSYN Biographical Highlights’. This record provides
further information on Angleton’s views, since the SIG (Special Investiga-
tions Group) was a unit within Angleton’s Counterintelligence Staff.11 The
document notes:
WHAT DID ANGLETON SAY ABOUT GOLITSYN? 907
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Subject is the first major KGB defector since 1954 with extensive and
intensive knowledge of the KGB. Not only does he have a rich 16-year
career as a counterintelligence operations officer, but it is important
that seven of these years were spent in formal counterintelligence
training, including the four-year advanced counterintelligence-internal
security course at the KGB’s Juridical Institute. The latter course was
taken after Subject’s 1955 decision to fight against the system. Thus
Subject might be characterized from 1955 as almost a self-run
penetration agent within the KGB, who made it a point to read,
observe, and overhear information for purposes of future utilization
against the KGB and the Soviet communist dictatorship system.12
In other words, what Angleton intended to convey was that Golitsyn,
having decided in 1955 to defect if the opportunity presented itself, had
worked to acquire information with the intent to furnish it to the CIA at some
future date – but without the CIA’s knowledge, control or direction – for
many years prior to December 1961. This additional information shows that
Angleton was neither trying to muddy the waters nor to lead anyone into the
wilderness of mirrors by his statements – at least not in this case.
NOTES
1 Jerry D. Ennis, ‘Anatoli Golitsyn: Long-time CIA Agent?’, Intelligence and NationalSecurity 21/1 (February 2006) pp.26–45. Claims that Golitsyn had worked for the CIA priorto defecting appeared in Loch K. Johnson, ‘Spymaster Richard Helms: An Interview with theFormer US Director of Central Intelligence’, Intelligence and National Security 18/3(Autumn 2003) pp.24–44 (specifically, note 12) and Thomas Powers, The Man Who Kept theSecrets: Richard Helms and the CIA (New York: Alfred A. Knopf 1979) p.70.
2 Tennet H. Bagley, letter to author, 17 March 2004.3 Thomas Powers, e-mail to author, 29 June 2004; Loch Johnson, e-mail to author, 30 August2004; Editor’s Note to Ennis, ‘Anatoli Golitsyn: Long-time CIA Agent?’ (note 1) p.41.
4 Tom Mangold, Cold Warrior (New York: Simon & Schuster 1991) p.350.5 Jay Shelledy, ‘Former Top Spymaster has Bitter Words for Harshest Critic of the Cloak andDagger’, Lewiston Morning Tribune, 6 June 1976, p.5A.
6 Loch K, Johnson, A Season of Inquiry (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky 1986)p.193.
7 Ibid., pp.82–83.8 Seymour Hersh, ‘‘The Angleton Story’, The New York Times Magazine, 25 June 1978, pp.68–69.
9 ‘Testimony of James Angleton’, The United States Senate, Report of Proceedings, Hearingheld Before Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations With Respect toIntelligence Activities, Executive Session, 19 June 1975, available at 5http://www.maryfarrell.org/mffweb/archive/viewer/showDoc.do?docld¼14474, p.18 (last viewed 21May 2007).
10 ‘Deposition of James Angleton’, House of Representatives, Select Committee on Assassina-tions, Subcommittee on John F. Kennedy, 5 October 1978 (emphasis added), available at5http://www.maryfarrell.org/mffweb/archive/viewer/showDoc.do?docld¼1234, p.64 (lastviewed 21 May 2007).
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11 ‘Extracts from CI History’, p.1. This document consists of 24 non-consecutive pages from anunidentified document released by the Assassination Records Review Board in 1998. Thereleased pages are available at 5http://www.maryfarrell.org/mffweb/archive/viewer/showDoc.do?docld¼160474, p.2 (last viewed 21 May 2007).
12 ‘GOLITSYN Biographical Highlights’, p.4. Document released to the House SelectCommittee on Assassinations and available at 5http://www.maryfarrell.org/mffweb/archive/viewer/showDoc?docld¼521704, p.26 (emphasis added) (last viewed 21 May2007).
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