James Jesus Angleton: Was He Right?

In his new biography of James Jesus Angleton, Edward Jay Epstein answers the question: was Angleton right after all about penetrations in the CIA? Angleton was the legendary head of CIA counterintelligence during most of the Cold War. In May 1987, in one of his last phone calls, he told Dick Cheney, who was then a member of the House Intelligence Committee, that he needed to tell him in person something of vital importance. Even though Angleton died before the scheduled meeting, taking this secret to the grave with him, his mystery lived on. John Le Carre could not have invented a character as intriguing as Angleton. He was ridiculed in the media, Congress, and in the CIA itself, when his mole hunt failed to find a spy in the CIA Investigative journalist Edward Jay Epstein tells of his rise, fall, and the astounding revelations that emerged in the CIA after his death. Epstein spent hundreds of hours interviewing him to understand the mind of this unique mind warrior. He met with him in orchid greenhouses in Kensington, Maryland, dining clubs in Washington DC, and his home in Tucson, Arizona to follow the convoluted layers of his universe of deception. Epstein also was one of the few journalist to interview his arch nemesis: Yuri Nosenko. In this extraordinary book, he sets out to answer a single question: Was Angleton right that the CIA had been penetrated? Along the way we also learn much about the CIA and KGB during the cold war years, including: + Why KGB defector Yuri Nosenko was imprisoned by the CIA. + What was Angleton’s role in the CIA assassination plots against Castro. + How the CIA allowed the KGB to disinform two Presidents. + What weaknesses KGB spies Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen exposed in the CIA Praise for Edward Jay Epstein "Edward Jay Epstein is the first journalist to have investigated the official accounts of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. He remains the only one to have interviewed all the members of the Warren Commission, and would go on to be one of the great investigative journalists of the era. — Michael Wolff, USA Today “Epstein believes that conspiracies are more common than most journalists credit; for much of his career, he has reveled in the kind of tantalizing clues that could lead somewhere, or nowhere.” — Joe Nocera, The New York Times “Epstein is a bulldog researcher.” — Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post “A brilliant investigator.” — Lou Dobbs