That report, as given, means something and you can never know what, for sure, until the end of time, if then. If the report says subject X showed up in place Y on day Z, in it goes, even if you know subject X had been buried in a distant city a month before. Rigour is achieved in two ways: there is no scanting of detail and no quarrelling with the evidence. A serial is basically a file containing every bit of information on a given subject in the order it was received. The evidence that goes into a chronology is first collected in a ‘serial’. A chronology is one of the basic tools of intelligence analysis, a listing of facts on a given subject in chronological order.

‘I would say,’ Angleton told me with sombre precision, ‘that the detail given away will allow the other side to triangulate and build up a chrono that’s very deep.’Īt that his eyebrows gave up hope for Western liberal democracy. His eyebrows sighed the harm was so basic. Where is the harm?’Ī look of infinite weariness clouded Angleton’s face. ‘These secrets are all about things we were doing to them,’ I said. I wanted to know what difference it made. He was worried, almost in despair, that American intelligence was being destroyed by Senate investigators digging up and publishing the CIA’s operational secrets. Angleton had been retired for 18 months and was free to speak.

When we met I knew nothing about intelligence professionals but was trying to learn. But the thing I carried away at the end of two hours was the way his person, so focused and unhurried, and his style of thinking had fused over the previous thirty years. No man was ever more deliberate, from the way he lit and held that cigarette, and followed it with another, to the cock of his head and the play of his eyebrows and his wide mouth, which said much that he declined to put into words. But it was the man himself, sitting on the edge of an overstuffed club chair, pulling a Virginia Slim from a cigarette packet, that really left an impression.

Everything about him held my attention, starting with his history as a counterintelligence officer in London during the Second World War, fresh out of Yale. I spent an afternoon with him once in the old Army and Navy Club in Washington. Once experienced, his history, his appearance, his manner, and his stubborn refusal to be clear were all indelible. There was nothing ordinary about Angleton. The ideal spy is a mouse-coloured blur in the crowd, someone like George Smiley, described by his wife as ‘breathtakingly ordinary’. , chief of counterintelligence at the CIA for twenty years, was not the ideal spy.

The ghost james jesus angleton