Wilderness of Mirrors: Intrigue, Deception, and the Secrets that Destroyed Two of the Cold War's Most Important Agents Paperback – September 18, 2018

Very well written. New revelations. Good insights. Bravo . Highly recommended. Pick up a copy. Worth the time. I couldn’t put it down

Since its establishment in 1947, CIA has enjoyed some modest successes as an agent for regime change, but does not to appear to have been a very effective intelligence agency. Yet during the first 25 years of its existence under the freewheeling influence of the many WWII Office of Strategic Services (OSS) veterans who formed its original cadre, it certainly seems to have been an interesting place to work. Indeed its halls were apparently filled with interesting and colorful characters who may or may not have been very good intelligence officers, but who were never boring. This very good book provides the story of two such characters who were at the heart of the CIA counterintelligence program.James Jesus Angleton was clearly CIA material with his WWII OSS experience, Ivy League education, and international background. Yet he was also by all accounts one the strangest intelligence officers CIA ever recruited. An orchid growing intellectual, Angleton began his long involvement with counterintelligence with the OSS under the tutorship of Kim Philby, who even then was a Soviet mole. He appeared to thrive on the intellectual challenges presented by convoluted and complex work that was counterintelligence. From the first he applied himself to seeking out Soviet agents within CIA with the passion and zealotry of a Jesuit converting a heretic. In the end his efforts failed to find real evidence of Soviet penetration of CIA, but in the notorious `mole' search he initiated succeeded in virtually destroying its ability to run clandestine operations against the Soviets. Ironically for all his zeal, Angleton was unable to recognize that his mentor and friend Philby was a Soviet plant in heart of the delicate U.S. and UK intelligence relationship.William King Harvey was Angleton's complete opposite in every respect. He was a small town lawyer turned FBI agent who was sacked because his behavior came too close to breaking the number one rule of the FBI in the post war period, don't embarrasses Mr. Hoover. Somewhat like Angleton however, Harvey had developed a passion for counterintelligence work and when he was sacked was probably the FBI's leading expert in this arcane subject. The newly created CIA was struggling to create a counterintelligence program and was happy to take Harvey on board. He and Angleton quickly learned to loathe each other. The hard drinking, womanizing Harvey tended to shoot from the hip, while the aesthetic Angleton tended to move carefully and intellectually. Fortunately Harvey decided that he would like the rough and tumble of overseas work and got a plume assignment in the then divided city of Berlin where he was clearly at home. Prior to taking this assignment however, Harvey presented CIA with what in the end was an accurate argument that Philby was indeed a Soviet plant.In the end the careers of both men were destroyed by the very things that made them effective counterintelligence agents and the sea changes that shook CIA in the 1970's

This is an extremely interesting read for anyone who is not only interested in cold war intelligence activities, but Deep An interesting book into how Both intelligence and counterintelligence can be Distracted And misdirected By the actions of only a few.

this is an important book, but of course it leaves the unknowable its due. perhaps even in 1963 the answers were unknowable. did angleton set into motion a plot the horrific outcome of which surprised even himself? anyone have any thoughts?

Not easy reading re style, but stunning in content: the millions and millions spent on projects (Berlin Tunnel) etc. which, not only were we comproised by traitors at the outset, but not even questionable as to info the east fed us. Tax payer's $$ and yet, there is no oversight. They just go right ahead and do what they dream up. Also: Anyone working at FBI and/or CIA must have, or still do, more than just a touch of paranoia. Amazing read, not delightful, not entertaining, but the real world sans all the hyper gloss. I do recommend it.

I first read this book 30 years ago at the suggestion of a friend who operated for the CIA. It does a great job of showing how confusing the dark world of espionage can be.

I found myself wanting to know more about the beginnings of the CIA as well as their cold war exploits. This book was recommended to me by a friend and is a good starting point to find out about some of the key players in the US intelligence of previous years. There isn't much about background or the beginnings of the CIA, this book is more of a character study of two men, James Jesus Angelton, who most people are familiar with and William Harvey, whom most people seem not to know(including me at the time). It is an interesting tale of how two men got so wrapped up in their own ego's as well as paranoia that they brought CIA intelligence operations to a halt. It also paints the CIA as an agency without a clear direction and poorly managed. This book had the effect that all good non-fiction books have on me, it casued me to do more research on the events and people in the book. Great read if you want to see the effect 2 men can have on an agency but don't expect a broad history of the CIA.

Definitely a classic. Inspires me to do further reading on Angleton. I found the Philby section quite interesting. I am presently reading Fair Play by Olson which is also quite good.

but twice removed

Livre abîmé déjà lu, couverture défraîchie. Pas satisfait du tout.

Wilderness of Mirrors is a succinct and engrossing account of the Cold War battle of wits between the CIA and the KGB. It should be said that the word ‘wits’ here is something of a misnomer as far as the CIA was concerned at least, since it was for the most part outwitted by the KGB, thus belying its purported role as an ‘intelligence’ agency.It could be argued that the CIA was at a disadvantage compared to its Soviet counterpart in that, unlike the KGB, it was constrained by the transparency and accountability of a purportedly democratic society. However, it’s not that simple as the 1948 National Security Council directive NSC 10/2 gave the CIA power to act outside the law under the cover of ‘plausible deniability’. The author acknowledges this in his Afterword where he says, ‘there were virtually no constraints on the tactics it could employ’ (page 226).The Cold War was a Manichean projection of human stupidity and paranoid insanity on a global scale. It was actually and potentially catastrophic for the lives of untold millions of people and not least for the casualties of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki which began the Cold War.As explained in The Untold History of the United States by Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznik (page 177), “Six of the United States’ seven five-star officers who received their final star in World War II – Generals MacArthur, Eisenhower, and Arnold and Admirals Leahy, King, and Nimitz – rejected the idea that the atomic bombs were needed to end the war”. The purpose of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was to demonstrate to the Russians the utter ruthlessness of the US in its bid for world domination.Nevertheless, much of the contents of this book verge on black comedy. The title of one of the book’s chapters, ‘The poet and the Cop’, is a reference to its two main characters, James Jesus Angleton and William King Harvey. Angleton was head of CIA counterintelligence from 1954 to 1974. He was an Ivy League intellectual, poet manqué and orchid grower. As editor of the literary magazine Furioso during his student days at Yale University, Angleton corresponded with luminaries such as TS Eliot, the author of the poem Gerontion from which he (Angleton) later took the phrase ‘wilderness of mirrors’ to describe the world of counterintelligence. Angleton graduated from Yale in the lowest 25% of his class and went on to study law in Harvard.‘Two-gun’ Harvey was a hard drinking communist-hating former small town lawyer and FBI agent who made his reputation as a man of action and who was resentful of Ivy League East Coast establishment types. He was once introduced to President Kennedy (half jokingly given Harvey’s rather unBond-like physique) as the American James Bond (p. 128). Before meeting the President Harvey had to divest himself of the two pistols he habitually carried about his person.One of Harvey’s most spectacular operations was Operation Gold, the excavation begun in 1954 of a huge tunnel from West to East Berlin sometimes dubbed ‘Harvey’s Hole’. The purpose of the tunnel was to intercept messages transmitted on the Soviet underground telephone and telegraph cable system of which Berlin was a hub second only to Moscow.Excavation of the 1,476 foot long and 6½ foot high tunnel involved among other things the removal of 3,100 tons of soil at a cost of $25 - $30 million. However, the value of the project was questionable. As the author points out:“Processing the take was a task of staggering proportions. The three cables contained a total of 172 circuits carrying a minimum of 18 channels each. The CIA was in danger of becoming a victim of its own success. Having plugged into the Soviet command net¬work, the Agency had to devise a method of sifting through the miles and miles of tape before the intelligence died of old age. What if the tapes recorded Soviet preparations for an attack on West Berlin but were not processed in time to sound the alarm?” (page 84)It also seems that the Soviets were informed of the tunnel from the start by MI6 double agent George Blake and were transmitting disinformation on the intercepted cables long before April 21st 1956 when the Americans realised the Soviets had discovered it.As noted by the author, similar problems attended the CIA postal surveillance operation HT/LINGUAL:“From the beginning, [Angleton] recognized that the operation was illegal and that exposure would cause "serious public reaction in the United States," perhaps leading to a congressional inquiry. But an aide to Angleton was confident that if the operation were blown, "it should be relatively easy to 'hush up' the entire affair." At worst, "it might become necessary ... to find a scapegoat to blame for unauthorized tampering with the mail." In any case, "the effort was worth the risk."“Virtually every other CIA officer who reviewed ht/lingual came to exactly the opposite conclusion. The Agency's Inspector General found very little counterintelligence potential in the opera¬tion, since it must "be assumed that Russian tradecraft is as good as our own and that Russian agents communicating with their headquarters would have more secure channels than open mail”.” (pp 70-71)One of James Angleton’s biggest mistakes was being duped by his mentor and long time friend, MI6 double agent Kim Philby. The author notes that after Philby was unmasked by others (including Harvey) in 1951 “Angleton would spend the rest of his professional life in counterintelligence as if he were trying to atone for his failure to detect Philby”. (p 58).Angleton lost his way in a wilderness of mirrors under the influence of Anatoli Golitsin who defected from the Soviet Union in 1961.Golitsin persuaded Angleton that a KGB mole had penetrated the CIA. Angleton spent the remainder of his career searching unsuccessfully for the mole.The situation was complicated by, among other things, the defection of another KGB agent, Yuri Nosenko, in 1962. Despite the fact that Nosenko provided almost as much valuable information as Golitsin, Angleton suspected Nosenko had been sent to sidetrack him (Angleton) from Golitsin’s leads to the KGB’s man inside the CIA (page 178). In contrast to the pampered treatment received by the man known as Angleton’s ‘pet’, Golitsin, Nosenko was treated harshly, kept in solitary confinement for years and subjected to prolonged hostile interrogations.Harvey was exiled to Rome as head of the CIA station there after he fell foul of Attorney General Robert Kennedy. Kennedy had discovered that Harvey had sent three unauthorised commando teams into Cuba at the height of the October 1962 missile crisis.Regarding Harvey’s Rome assignment, one CIA officer remarked, "They couldn't have picked a bigger bull for a better china shop." Harvey’s hard drinking, brusque gung ho manner and his Italophobia ruffled too many feathers in Rome and his career ended in disgrace when he was removed from his position.As noted by the author, “The downfall of Harvey, the CIA’s most aggressive clandestine operator, was symbolic of the fate that had befallen the Agency’s espionage operations against the Soviet Union. Both were totally incapacitated” (page 190).The state of paralysis to which CIA counterintelligence was reduced as a result of Angleton’s obsessive molehunting led many to suspect that the mole was none other than the man most responsible for the paralysis, Angleton himself. As noted by the author, “There was a certain poetic justice to be found in suspecting Angleton of being the KGB’s mole. It was nothing more than he had done to others” (p 207).Angleton was eventually fired in 1974 by CIA Director William Colby not because the case against Angleton was proved but because of the destructive effect Angleton’s machinations and the suspicions about him were having on the Agency.One of the most spectacular escapades described in the book is the springing of the aforementioned George Blake from Wormwood Scrubs Prison by Limerick man Sean Bourke and two accomplices in October 1966. Blake escaped to the USSR and is still alive in Russia. Shortly afterwards, Bourke joined Blake in Moscow, where he lived for a year and a half on a pension provided by the Russians. However, he disliked Russia and returned to Ireland. He died almost penniless in 1982 while living in a caravan in Lahinch.One of the chapters in the book, ‘Murder Corrupts’, deals with the CIA’s involvement in assassinations or ‘executive actions’ to use the CIA terminology. It touches briefly on the CIA’s involvement in the assassination of the Congo political leader, Patrice Lumumba on 17th January 1961, three days before John F Kennedy took office as US President.In November 1961 William Harvey was ordered to activate an assassination plot against Fidel Castro. This became part of what became known as the ZR/RIFLE project. In this enterprise Harvey enlisted the help of some prominent Mafiosi and especially Johnny Rosselli.When a situation arose in May 1962 where Sheffield Edwards and Lawrence Houston of the CIA had no alternative but to inform Attorney General Robert Kennedy that there had been a similar CIA-Mafia plot to assassinate Castro at the time of the Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961, Kennedy vehemently expressed his disapproval. As described in the book:‘Houston and Edwards assured Kennedy that the plot had been terminated, a statement that Edwards knew to be a lie. To back up his lie, Edwards returned to the CIA and wrote a memo for the record stating that “Mr Harvey called me and indicated that he was dropping any plans for the use of Subject [Rosselli] for the future”. The memo “was not true,” Harvey conceded, “and Colonel Edwards knew it was not true.” But then, as General Carter, the Agency’s Deputy Director, once said, “Memorandums [sic] for the record have very little validity in fact.”’ (pp 139-140)Following President Richard Nixon’s downfall in 1974 there was irresistible public demand for transparency and accountability in government and this resulted in a number of Congressional enquiries into the activities of the CIA. In his book on John and Robert Kennedy, Brothers, the Hidden History of the Kennedy Years, David Talbot describes (pp 109-114) how Richard Helms, Deputy Director of the CIA in 1962 and Director from 1966 to 1973, falsely insinuated to the Church Committee in 1975 that Robert Kennedy had instigated the Castro assassination plots and when that subterfuge failed he tried to blame William Harvey.However, as described at the Spartacus Educational website (http://spartacus-educational.com/JFKhelms.htm), some of Helms’ lies caught up with him:“In 1975 the Senate Foreign Relations Committee began investigating the CIA. Senator Stuart Symington asked Richard Helms if the agency had been involved in the removal of Salvador Allende. Helms replied no. He also insisted that he had not passed money to opponents of Allende.“Investigations by the CIA's Inspector General and by Frank Church and his Select Committee on Intelligence Activities showed that Helms had lied to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. They also discovered that Helms had been involved in illegal domestic surveillance and the murders of Patrice Lumumba, General Abd al-Karim Kassem and Ngo Dinh Diem. Helms was eventually found guilty of lying to Congress and received a suspended two-year prison sentence.”For various well founded reasons there has been much speculation as to whether and to what extent the CIA was involved in the assassination of President John F Kennedy. James Angleton and William Harvey among other CIA personnel have been linked to the assassination but there is no mention of this in Wilderness of Mirrors.James Douglass has presented a cogent case for the CIA’s involvement in the assassination in his book, JFK and the Unspeakable. Douglass’ thesis is that JFK’s support for democracy and self-determination in Third World countries, his anti-imperialism, his abhorrence for the nuclear arms race, his moves towards rapprochement with the Soviets and his independent mindedness and clear sighted intelligence were anathema to the ideologically blinkered Cold War hawks of the US National Security State and the warmongering military-industrial complex (as Eisenhower called it) plutocrats. From that point of view JFK was a traitor and therefore a legitimate target for ‘executive action’.It is not possible to do justice that subject in a review such as this apart from a few brief observations. The book The Assassinations contains two lengthy essays by Lisa Pease on the subject of James Angleton and the JFK assassination. The following introductory extract from the first essay give an indication of the scope of the topic:“And no single figure is more prominent in this outline [of the JFK assassination] than the man who headed the CIA’s counterintelligence unit for 25 years, James Jesus Angleton. It was in his realm that a secret, restricted file on a man named Lee Oswald was opened, long before the assassination. History professor and former intelligence analyst John Newman has deemed this curious item "the smoking file" because the lies related to it are so serious as to suggest the CIA had much to do with Oswald’s activities just prior to the assassination of President Kennedy, something the CIA has consistently denied. What was the nature of that involvement and how far did it reach? One cannot answer that without examining the near omnipresence of Angleton in all matters surrounding the assassination...” (The Assassinations, p. 136)James Angleton was principally responsible for CIA dealings with the Warren Commission’s investigation into the assassination of JFK. Among other things, he admitted that he had discussed beforehand with the FBI the negative replies both agencies should give to two questions (a) whether Lee Harvey Oswald had been a CIA agent and (b) whether the assassination was the result of a conspiracy. (Anthony Summers, The Kennedy Conspiracy?, p. 106)Angleton also admitted that he had discussed the JFK assassination with Allen Dulles, his former CIA boss and Warren Commission member, during the Commission’s investigation. Dulles had been sacked as CIA chief by JFK after it emerged that the CIA had misinformed JFK about the situation on the ground in Cuba in order to bounce him into approving the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion. After the Bay of Pigs fiasco JFK said he wanted ‘to splinter the CIA in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds’. (Douglass, page xxii). CIA Deputy Director Charles Cabell was one of two other CIA mandarins sacked along with Dulles by JFK. Cabell's brother, Earle Cabell, was Mayor of Dallas when Kennedy visited that city and was assassinated, on November 22, 1963.Not surprisingly, the prejudicial Warren Commission investigation was eventually officially confirmed as a whitewash, given that its ‘lone nut’ verdict was overturned by a subsequent official US Government enquiry conducted by the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA). Despite the non-cooperation of the CIA and a somewhat skewed agenda, the HSCA concluded in 1979 that there had been a conspiracy. The fact that the US Government has never undertaken a follow up investigation so that the conspirators could be identified and brought to justice means that every US Government administration since 1979 is an accessory after the fact to the assassination.In The Last Investigation, Gaeton Fonzi’s book about his work as an investigator for the HSCA, he describes in great detail ‘the CIA’s sabotaging the Assassination Committee’s investigation’ (p 418).In James DiEugenio’s equally excellent book Destiny Betrayed, DiEugenio relates how the CIA sabotaged New Orleans District Attorney James Garrison’s investigation of the JFK case. Garrison became convinced that a group of New Orleans right-wing activists were involved in a conspiracy with the CIA to kill John F Kennedy. In February 1967 Garrison arrested businessman Clay Shaw and charged him in this regard. DiEugenio’s account of the CIA’s subversion of Garrison begins as follows:“The CIA was making long-term plans that went to point of beyond the Shaw trial. We should also recall, that in particular cases, the attempt is not just to jail or assassinate a target, but to destroy its reputation so no one will ever follow that person or trail again. This is why the Helms-Angleton plan was always contingent on continuing after the Shaw trial. The strategy was not devised just to end Garrison's case against Shaw. That was just the beginning. The overall objective was multi-leveled. It was to end Garrison's career, ruin his reputation, place him in jail, take over his office, and then incinerate his evidence. All this to guarantee that no indictments would ever come out of New Orleans again.” (p 316)The extent of the official cover-up of the JFK assassination as summarised above is proof that the assassination was a coup d’etat.The absence of any treatment of any of the foregoing in Wilderness of Mirrors is one of the flaws in this generally excellent book. That absence is hardly surprising, however, given the author’s background and employment as a graduate of Yale and a journalist with mainstream media such as Newsweek Magazine and CBS News. Despite the gravity of the JFK assassination and its implications, the mainstream media have by and large avoided any serious scrutiny of the subject. Indeed the book also fails to mention that for decades the CIA ran a special operation, Operation Mockingbird, whose purpose was to influence the media. But of course when considered in the round, this is further proof of the coup d’etat.There is likewise no mention in the book of Project MKUltra, which is succinctly described as follows in Wikipaedia:“Project MKUltra — sometimes referred to as the CIA's mind control program — was the code name given to an illegal program of experiments on human subjects, designed and undertaken by the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Experiments on humans were intended to identify and develop drugs and procedures to be used in interrogations and torture, in order to weaken the individual to force confessions through mind control. Organized through the Scientific Intelligence Division of the CIA, the project coordinated with the Special Operations Division of the U.S. Army's Chemical Corps. The program began in the early 1950s, was officially sanctioned in 1953, was reduced in scope in 1964, further curtailed in 1967 and officially halted in 1973. The program engaged in many illegal activities; in particular it used unwitting U.S. and Canadian citizens as its test subjects, which led to controversy regarding its legitimacy.”Another flaw in the book is the lack of sourcing, footnotes and bibliography, though this may be understandable given the confidential nature of much of the contents of the book.Despite these flaws the book gives a fairly balanced assessment of those aspects of the CIA it does deal with. It is very well written and it is an invaluable guide through the often bewildering labyrinth of Cold War espionage.