Photo:
Henry Burroughs/AP
January 1 2018, 2:15 p.m.
VETERAN
CIA OFFICER Cleveland Cram was nearing the end of his
career in 1978, when his superiors in the agency’s directorate of operations
handed him a sensitive assignment: Write a history of the agency’s
Counterintelligence Staff. Cram, then 61, was well qualified for the task. He
had a master’s 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’s station in London. He knew the senior officialdom of MI-5 and MI-6, the
British equivalents of the FBI and CIA, the agency’s closest partners in
countering the KGB, the Soviet Union’s effective and ruthless intelligence
service.
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’s 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.
In
December 1974, CIA Director William Colby fired Angleton after the New
York Times 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’s charter. Coming four months
after the resignation of Richard Nixon, Angleton’s fall was the denouement of
the Watergate scandal, propelling Congress to probe the CIA for the first time.
A Senate investigation, headed by Sen. Frank Church, exposed a series of other
abuses: assassination conspiracies, unauthorized mail opening, collaboration
with human rights abusers, infiltration of news organizations, and the MKULTRA
mind-control experiments to develop drugs for use in espionage.
The Intercept
