Yet during Angleton’s seemingly lawless reign, he also proved himself to be a formidable adversary to America’s enemies, acquiring a mythic stature within the CIA that continues to this day. In this gripping biography - the first in over 20 years - investigative reporter Jefferson Morley reveals the man behind the myths: from Angleton’s friendship with the poets Ezra Pound and TS Eliot, to his links with the underground gay milieu of mid-century Washington from the intelligence secrets he unwittingly shared with British double agent Kim Philby, to his obstruction of the investigation into the JFK assassination and from his initiation of the US’s first foray into mass surveillance of its citizens, to his obsession with hunting for communist moles - a search that nearly destroyed the Agency. Virtually untouchable, he operated beyond the view of the public, Congress, and even the president himself. Legendary head of the CIA James Jesus Angleton was one of the most powerful unelected government officials in American history. It probably would have been healthier for the system if they had been aired and if we had had more of a reckoning with what exactly the government was undertaking.A revelatory new biography of the sinister, powerful, and paranoid man at the heart of the CIA for more than three tumultuous decades.

Now, if Angleton had been prosecuted in 1977, would that have changed what happened after the passage of the Patriot Act? Obviously we will never know, but it would have created legal issues that anyone engaging in mass surveillance would have had to address and those issues were not addressed after 2002 because of the desire for increased security. The fact that he was not prosecuted meant that other national security bureaucrats could return to surveillance and not worry about the legal implication either. Angleton knew that there was no plausible cover story. The postal code is quite explicit on that. law to open the mail of 10,000 Americans every year. These operations, and Angleton understood this, were illegal when they were undertaken. There was definitely a legal case to be made. In January of 1977, the Justice Department decided that they would not prosecute Angleton and they released a memorandum, about 60 pages long, very detailed, about the legal considerations and the legal implications of the kinds of surveillance programs that Angleton was running.

The ghost jefferson morley