Cold Warrior: James Jesus Angleton - Cia's Master Spy Hunter

Tom Mangold bases this exciting, well-crafted account not on newsclippings and surmise but on dozens of insider interviews. These interviews must have been authorized from "on high," so it is clear that the Agency had turned against Angleton, or at least had decided to clean up the mess he had left. At the same time, Mangold does not tell the full story. One cannot expect him to do so while maintaining access to all of those sources. For example, there is ample evidence that Angleton ran his own assassination squad. Mangold doesn't tell the story of Angleton's (probable) theft of J. Edgar Hoover's files, as told in Curt Gentry's biography of Hoover. And Mangold doesn't really emphasize the fact that Angleton's "fundamenalist" group included a lot of people outside the Agency. Still, for anyone interested in researching the most devious and fascinating of the founding CIA members -- someone whose paranoia was so destructive that he was eventually accused (wrongly) of being a KGB asset himself -- this book is essential.

Good book

I was expecting a book about James Jesus Angleton to be more of a chronological narrative of his life and career and to have something in it that explained some positives about the man/legend. I was quite surprised to read of one negative expose after another, listing and explaining Mr. Angleton's screwups while head of counterintelligence with the CIA and the damage he caused while in that position. I knew he had a big reputation and the book lists him as a master spy catcher, which if you read the book is an exercise in sarcasm at best. I am near the end of the book and have yet to read anything that would justify giving him that title. Even if he was chief of CI and not a KGB agent he did more damage to the CIA than if he was a KGB asset. At least according to the author. Mr. Mangold's writing is adequate, but the real test is whether the facts are those . . . facts and the nature of the topic always creates doubts, but I was interested in the time, history and information on the subject and the book was extremely informative with a huge listing of notes in the back and some in the chapters. A good read.

After reading this my sphincter pucker factor more than doubled. Outraged at complete lack of oversight in CIA that lead to destruction and death from the hands of one of our “legendary heroes.”

It really shows, maybe unintentionally, how the secret service all over the planet is something to be banned. These men have created a career for themselves enacting childhood spy games. The public gains nothing from them. The book is informative, well researched. The authors tries to be impartial (he explains why), but it is difficult to not come out against this 'spy vs spy' nonsense. I highly recommend it. You may come out with a different take on the whole thing. But it will sway you one way or another, for it is truly quite a story excellently written.

If you'll read the free-to-read (just google "spy wars" and "archive" simultaneously) 2007 Yale University Press book "Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries and Deadly Games" by false defector Yuri Nosenko's former CIA case officer, Tennent H. Bagley, you'll realize that Mangold's book is full of lies. While you're at it, google "ghosts of the spy wars" and "archive" simultaneously and read Bagley's 2014 follow-up 35-page PDF "Ghosts of the Spy Wars" in which he writes scathingly about one of Mangold's main sources, Soviet Russia Division Reports & Requirements officer, Leonard V. McCoy. As John M. Newman points out in his 2022 book, "Uncovering Popov's Mole," the KGB mole for whom Angleton was vainly searching for so long was none other than his Kim Philby-like confidant, mentor and mole-hunting superior, Bruce Leonard Solie, in the mole-hunting Office of Security.

An amazing story of idiots at the helm of the CIA. James Angleton did more damage than any Russian mole could have dreamed of. Proof of Barabara Tuchman's thesis in "March of Folly" that we are led by buffoons and misguided idealogues from catastrophe to catastrophe. Exhaustively sourced this book must be the last word on Angleton.

Great