To anyone who knows it, the name James Jesus Angleton means counter-intelligence, and a scurrying mistrustfulness that comes close to diagnosable paranoia. It means red lines through type-written lists of names because of no more than a whispered doubt. This was a man who thought that Harold Wilson was a Soviet spy, who even was suspicious of Henry Kissinger. I am intrigued by him because he was a resolute man, a flawed man who rose and fell because of his flaw.
It is hard to know if he was even an anti-Communist: he was perhaps not a zealot, but a man who enjoyed the feeling of zeal. That is his appeal to me. He was so mistrustful that people were mistrustful of him, and the outcome of that was obviously that he was ousted from the CIA in disgrace. I wonder if he knew that that was coming; I wonder if he saw the inevitability of it all. Perhaps that made him resolute and defiant.
But that is not the only reason he appeals to me. Angleton was a modernist poet. At Yale in the 1930s, he edited Furioso, which published poems by Pound, Williams and Cummings, and he had an extensive correspondence with them, and with Eliot. I get the image of free verse forming in his mind as he interrogates someone through files and reports - the double agent, the triple agent - thinking do I trust him, must I trust him, when was he turned?
This is a sketch I drew from a photograph of him.
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