{"id":29309,"date":"2018-01-02T10:45:01","date_gmt":"2018-01-02T15:45:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=29309"},"modified":"2018-01-02T10:45:23","modified_gmt":"2018-01-02T15:45:23","slug":"wilderness-of-mirrors","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=29309","title":{"rendered":"WILDERNESS OF MIRRORS"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
\n
\n
\n
\"Former<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n
\n

Photo: Henry Burroughs\/AP<\/p>\n

WILDERNESS OF MIRRORS<\/a><\/h3>\n

Documents Reveal the Complex Legacy of James Angleton, CIA Counterintelligence Chief and Godfather of Mass Surveillance<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n
\n
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n

V<\/span>ETERAN CIA OFFICER<\/u> Cleveland Cram was nearing the end of his career in 1978, when his superiors in the agency\u2019s directorate of operations handed him a sensitive assignment: Write a history of the agency\u2019s Counterintelligence Staff. Cram, then 61, was well qualified for the task. He had a master\u2019s 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\u2019s station in London. He knew the senior officialdom of MI-5 and MI-6, the British equivalents of the FBI and CIA, the agency\u2019s closest partners in countering the KGB, the Soviet Union\u2019s effective and ruthless intelligence service.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

In December 1974, CIA Director William Colby fired Angleton after the New York Times<\/a> 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\u2019s charter. Coming four months after the resignation of Richard Nixon, Angleton\u2019s fall was the denouement of the Watergate scandal, propelling Congress to probe the CIA for the first time.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Photo: Henry Burroughs\/AP WILDERNESS OF MIRRORS Documents Reveal the Complex Legacy of James Angleton, CIA Counterintelligence Chief and Godfather of Mass Surveillance VETERAN CIA OFFICER Cleveland Cram was nearing the end of his career in 1978, when his superiors in the agency\u2019s directorate of operations handed him a sensitive assignment: Write a history of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[135,4016,17736,13624,5570,5567],"class_list":["post-29309","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","tag-cia","tag-counterintelligence","tag-james-angleton","tag-jefferson-morley","tag-mass-surveillance","tag-the-intercept"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29309","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=29309"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29309\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29310,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29309\/revisions\/29310"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=29309"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=29309"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=29309"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}