“One of the Most Diabolical Figures in All of Human History”: James Jesus Angleton

“There was a reason why former military intelligence officer and historian John Newman, author of Oswald and the CIA, a person with more than twenty years of experience as an analyst for U.S. military intelligence, told me during an interview for this book that he considered Angleton as ‘one of the most diabolical figures in all of human history’.” –Peter Janney in his book Mary’s Mosaic

James Jesus Angleton (1917-1987) was the chief of the counter-intelligence wing of the CIA. His evil influence over American society and global politics has left a legacy which still does not allow the world to rest in peace. Please note that John Newman, a soldier and a PhD, has referred to Angleton as one of the most diabolical figures in all of human history. It is therefore extremely important to try to become familiar with who Angleton was, and with what he did to earn such an evaluation.

James Jesus Angleton was born in Boise, Idaho. His father, James Hugh Angleton, a former cavalry officer, had married a Mexican woman who was a devout Catholic. She was responsible for the Jesus part of his name. Hugh Angleton was a well built, masculine and tall man of six foot four, admired by his son. Eventually Hugh Angleton moved to Milan, Italy, in 1931, to pursue his business. He had strong pro-Mussolini leanings. James was sent to England to study at Malvern College where he studied for three years. James was not well built like his father but was lean and good looking.

James entered Yale University in the year 1937. He was not a very successful student but managed to get through, though not with good grades in general. His friend at Yale, Reed Whittemore, assessed his performance as follows: “All through Yale, Jim was backward at completing school papers... It may be that he was just lazy - or maybe he had a psychological problem. He had the class record for incompletes, but he could invariably whitewash over these missing grades because he had a favorable presence with the teachers, who for the most part liked him a lot.”  Angleton was among the last quarter of his class.

Angleton had poetic talent and, on one of his visits to Italy, met the great Ezra Pound. Pound held the richest Jewish banking families, and their subservient allies, responsible for instigating World Wars. It was Ezra Pound who had said in one of his 1941 radio broadcasts from Italy: “No Rothschild is English, No Baruch, Morgenthau, Cohen, Lehman, Warburg, Kuhn, Kahn, Schiff, Sieff or Solomon was born an Anglo-Saxon. And it is this filth that you fight for. It is this filth that has destroyed your empire. It is this filth that elects and selects ‘your politicians’.” Jefferson Morley remarks: “Angleton had not been uncomfortable with fascism or fascists at Yale, sometimes to the consternation of more liberal classmates. Anti-Semitism didn’t seem to bother him.” That was probably due to his father’s and Ezra Pound’s influence.

Angleton wished to pursue law at Harvard but was not admitted initially on account of his poor record. However, a letter from a friend of his named Norman Pearson, an assistant professor of literature at Yale, got him into Harvard Law School in 1941. In spring 1943 he was drafted in the army. The same year he proposed to his sweetheart Cicely d’Autremont, whom he had met at Harvard, and who belonged to a rich family of Duluth, Minnesota. The two married in a church against the wishes of Angleton’s father.

Norman Pearson, who hailed from a rich New England family, was associated with the OSS, the US intelligence agency established in 1942. No wonder Kris Millegan, writing about the Yale Secret Society, Skull and Bones, states: “The story begins at Yale where three threads of American social history – espionage, drug smuggling and secret societies – entwine into one.” Angleton not only joined Skull and Bones, he, on Norman Pearson’s advice, also joined the OSS. And his life had all three components – secret society, intelligence and drugs that he used to control others.

OSS was established on the initiative of British intelligence by President Roosevelt. Therefore, OSS operatives were initially trained by the British MI6. Prior to being sent to Britain, Angleton underwent a rigorous basic training course as part of a group of around 60 OSS recruits. The recruits were taught to walk uphill, overcome obstacles, use night compass while walking through woods and so on. The men who succeeded in the course became Angleton’s lifelong friends and later they mostly joined the CIA when it was created in 1947. The names that became prominent later included Richard Helms. William Colby, Frank Wisner and others. Winston Scott, whom Angleton, mostly likely, had had killed in 1971, was also among the OSS recruits.

Angleton was then sent to Britain where he was trained at the then unknown, but now world famous facility at Bletchley Park, north of London.  He was tutored in the art of counter-intelligence by Pearson, the man who had lured him into the OSS, and by a British spy, who was to acquire fame as a Russian mole later, Kim Philby. Eventually Angleton was posted as Head of the X-2 (X-2 was counter-espionage) Italy desk. It was here that Angleton first revealed his lethal side. It was, as a result of his determination, that the allied forces were able to carry out “speedy liquidation of a pre-arranged set of CE [counter-espionage] targets” in the city of Florence. Sixteen men were killed in the operation and thus Angleton tasted blood.

When the war was about to end Italy was divided among the Fascists and the partisans (i.e. communists) who were killing each other. Angleton played a key role in saving a Fascist leader, an Italian Naval commander, named Prince Junio Valerio Borghese. He was the most famous Fascist military commander and his life was in danger. He joined hands with Germans against the communists and on account of his brutality, became known as the Black Prince. He commanded thousands of men. Borghese was convicted of minor crimes. He was never tried for murders committed by his men, because someone, presumably Angleton, had falsified his records. He had saved the Black Prince for post-war Italy, as an effective force against the communists. Borghese was also to play a key role in the subversive Operation Gladio in post-war Italy.

President Truman was fearful that the OSS might become another Gestapo and therefore disbanded it at the end of WWII. However, with the Cold War heating up, he, in order to counter Communism, set up the CIA in 1947. Many former OSS officers joined the CIA and Angleton was among them. In view of his knowledge of Italy he was posted in Italy once gain. In order to counter the Communist Party in Italy (CPI), Angleton managed to procure 10 million US$ in a slush fund for the candidates he supported, and also engaged in other propaganda activity. In the April 1948 elections the powerful and popular CPI lost to the Christian Democrats and has never since won power. So under Angleton the U.S. had begun to interfere in elections of even European countries.

Angleton headed a secret, utterly illegal and brutal mind control program known as MKULTRA in the early 1950s. MKULTRA was preceded by Project ARTICHOKE in 1952. MKULTRA aimed at using chemical substances and other procedures such as hypnosis and torture to weaken people and force them to confessions. Drugs were used to alter the state of mind of subjects to see if these induced various kinds of behaviors in the subjects. Many of the subjects were unaware that they were targets of such a program. The program operated through a number of universities and institutes such as hospitals and clinics, through mostly front organizations. The famed LSD was introduced into US life under MKULTRA and Angleton also tried the drug on himself.

According to researchers “MKUltra's scope was broad, with activities carried out under the guise of research at more than 80 institutions aside from the military, including colleges and universities, hospitals, prisons, and pharmaceutical companies.” H.P. Albarelli Jr. writes: “Human experimentation on unwitting patients were conducted at the Lafayette Clinic as well as Michigan’s Ionia State Hospital for the criminally insane. Ionia State Hospital was particularly abusive and cruel to inmates confined there, who were considered mere human fodder for any behavior modification quackery that the CIA and US Army thought might yield domination over the mind of others.” 

Many of the subjects were impaired for life but did not know that they had been permanently damaged by the CIA. Of course every evil is committed in the name of national security and Angleton did not care what happened to those who went through the procedures of the program. The names of two scientist most prominently associated with MKULTRA were Dr. Sidney Gottlieb and Donald Ewen Cameron, both of whom devised experiments and procedures to which they subject those who fell into their hands.

The Wikipedia article on MKULTRA states: “His [Cameron’s] ‘driving’ experiments consisted of putting subjects into drug-induced comas for weeks at a time (up to three months in one case) while playing tape loops  of noise or simple repetitive statements. His experiments were often carried out on patients who entered the institute for common problems such as anxiety and postpartum depression, many of whom suffered permanent effects from his actions.   His treatments resulted in victims' urinary incontinence, amnesia, forgetting how to talk, forgetting their parents and thinking their interrogators were their parents.”

H.P. Albarelli Jr. writes: “Frank Olson, the CIA scientist assigned to the Technical Services Staff [CIA] was thrown through a window of the NY Statler Hilton…” He was associated with MKULTRA and his death was ruled suicide until researcher H.P. Albarelli Jr. was able to establish that it was wanton murder by the CIA. All human damage done under MKULTRA was the responsibility of Angleton, but what did he care? In 1973 Richard Helms, the then Director of CIA, ordered the illegal destruction of all files pertaining to MKULTRA.

In 1952 CIA had, illegally, started to intercept mail of U.S. citizens to and from the Soviet Union. Initially the CIA simply noted the names and addresses of the addressees and the senders.  In December 1954 Angleton became the head of the counter-intelligence section of the CIA and in 1955 the program was renamed as HT/LINGUAL. Under cover of this program the CIA started opening the mail of such prominent individuals as Linus Pauling, Martin Luther King Jr., John Steinbeck, Bobby Fischer, and many others. All of this was conceived and masterminded by Angleton. He had no qualms of conscience whatsoever about such a serious violation of law.

Angleton also revived a counterintelligence program abbreviated as COINTELPRO. Jefferson Morley has summed up Angleton’s involvement very well in the following words: “Historians and journalists usually describe COINTEPRO as a Hoover [i.e. FBI] creation, which is not quite the case. It was created by Hoover with critical help from Angleton, and it functioned as a joint FBI-CIA venture, with a bureaucratic division of labor. The Bureau took the lead in targeting dissidents inside the United States… Angleton used CIA mail surveillance program to feed the COINTELPRO beast.”

Although, at a rather young age, Angleton was mildly anti-Semitic, he more than compensated for that by completely aligning himself with the Zionists in Israel. As the chief of counter-intelligence he maneuvered to influence things in such a manner that an even-handed U.S. policy in the Middle-East evolved into a policy that favored Israel. He did not let his government know that Israel was pursuing a nuclear program intended to produce nuclear weapons. And by so doing he helped generate an imbalance of power in the Middle East that has made the place a source of perpetual bloodshed.

In the words of his biographer Jefferson Morley: “By the mid-1950s, Angleton liked nothing better than to leave the cramped office politics of Washington for the austere frontier of the Holy Land.” He became very close to various senior Israeli intelligence officers, the head of Mossad and Shin Bet, etc. “On his visits, Angleton stayed in Ramat Gan, on the suburban coastal plain north of Tel Aviv, home to many Israeli intelligence officers and diplomats. When he traveled up to the hill of Jerusalem, he favored the plush elegance of the King David Hotel.”   So much so that when, in 1956, the Israelis were planning to attack Egypt to undo the nationalization of Suez Canal by Nasser, Angleton concealed this knowledge from his government. 

When the State Department learned in October 1956 that Israel was calling up its armed forces, including reservists, an urgent joint meeting of U.S. intelligence agencies was called. At the meeting Angleton tried to underplay the Israeli buildup by saying Israel was merely bolstering its defenses on the borders with Jordan. Robert Amory of the Directorate of Intelligence predicted, correctly, that Israel will attack Egypt and called Angleton a “co-opted Israeli agent” to his face. Amory wanted to inform President Eisenhower but Angleton resisted. As a result, when Israel, Britain and France attacked Egypt, President Eisenhower was furious – he had not been informed and had not been consulted.  Because of American threats, Israel and its allies had to surrender whatever they had gained on the battleground. Morley comments: “Angleton’s faith in his Israeli sources was unshaken.” How could that be unless Angleton was betraying his own government in Israeli interest.

The assassination of President John F. Kennedy was masterminded by the CIA. Nobody could control or intimidate or pressurize him. And he was so angry at the betrayal by the CIA in the Bay of Pigs that he practically sacked Allen Dulles and two of his most important deputies. He had then said that nobody had dealt with the CIA and that he would break it into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds. He had understood that the CIA had become a monster.

John Newman wrote: “When I put my conspiracy cap and muse about who were the powerful men that are ultimately responsible for JFK’s assassination, be they mafia bosses or corporate bosses or whoever they were, I cannot envision a plan that did not have designed into its very fabric a failsafe mechanism to neutralize the intelligence and security apparatus and insure that there would be no real investigation. Whoever they were, their reach extended into this apparatus to someone who knew its workings so well that he could design a plot that could do this. My pick is James Jesus Angleton for who he was, who he knew, and because [Lee Harvey] Oswald was his creature from cradle to grave.”

The JFK assassination destroyed every possibility of real peace on earth.  It led to the Vietnam war where millions died and the U.S. lost men and money, and eventually the war. It destroyed the rapprochement between the East and West that was building up between JFK and Khrushchev. It allowed Israel to proceed with its nuclear program unfettered. JFK was succeeded by a crypto-Jew, Lyndon B. Johnson, who not only turned a blind eye to Israel’s nuclear program, but also armed Israel to such an extent that  it felt free to lauch the 1967 attack on Arab states. 

Further, the U.S. was hit by a spate of killings after the JFK assassination. Investigative reporters, intelligence officers, and many people who happened to stumble across information linking the assassination to the CIA, were killed. All these killings of Americans were carried out at Angleton’s behest. From JFK’s beloved Mary Pinchot Meyer who had concluded that the CIA had killed JFK, to his CIA colleague Winston Scott, who had planned to publish his memoirs that contradicted the CIA position on the assassination, all fell victim to Angleton’s unfettered killing spree. Angleton “threatened” his widow that if the memoirs were published the pension could be stopped! He was so ruthless – Winston Scott was his colleague and friend from the OSS days! And he knew Mary Meyer very well, being godfather to her three sons. As Jefferson Morley aptly puts it: “Angleton was a ghoul, a specter who showed up the time of death.” He turned up at the residences of Mary Meyer as well as Win Scott when they died!

The world now lives and suffers under the evil that James Jesus Angleton did as head of the CIA counterintelligence wing. When Angleton lay dying of cancer, author Joseph Trento interviewed him. Trento writes: “Within the confines of [Angleton’s] remarkable life were most of America’s secrets. ‘You know how I got to be in charge of counterintelligence? I agreed not to polygraph or require background checks on Allen Dulles and 60 of his closest friends… They were afraid their own business dealings with Hitler’s pals would come out. They were so arrogant to believe that the Russians would not discover it all. … We played with lives as if we owned them. We gave false hope. We – I – so misjudged what happened.’”

In view of the above remarks Joseph Trento asked him what happened. “I asked the dying man how it all went so wrong. With no emotion in his voice, but his hand trembling, Angleton replied: ‘Fundamentally, the founding fathers of U.S. intelligence were liars. The better you lied and the more you betrayed, the more likely you would be promoted. These people attracted and promoted each other. Outside of their duplicity, the only thing they had in common was a desire of absolute power. I did things that, in looking back on my life, I regret. But I was part of it and loved being in it. … Allen Dulles, Richard Helms, Carmel Offie, and Frank Wisner were the grand masters. If you were in a room with them you were in a room full of people that you had to believe would deservedly end up in hell.’ Angleton slowly sipped his tea and then said, ‘I guess I ill see them there soon.’” 

As Shakespeare said: “The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft-interred with their bones.” The world of today lives under the evil done by Angleton, the colleagues he mentioned, and of course their true masters, the Satanic High Cabal.