A charmer? Yes. James Jesus Angleton? No

There is probably something otherworldly, if not quite cosmic, about legendary intelligence operatives. This may have been what Oliver Stone wanted Matt Damon to convey in the film "Good Shepherd". Or maybe not.



Damon looked nothing like James Jesus Angleton, but for spy buffs who saw the film, that was clearly the role he was playing. Angleton's ouster as the CIA's head of Counterintelligence in 1974 led to the effective end of U.S. counterintelligence, in his own view at least. Witness Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen.

We and a few other journalists made Angleton's acquaintance while he was alive but he was so obsessed with secrecy that it was the bad guys like Seymour Hersh who, during the gloomiest days of the Cold War, got him ousted in disgrace in 1974. The Church Committee then continued with the castration of U.S. intelligence to the point that with Plame-gate, elements in the CIA arguably got away with undermining a U.S. president in the midst of a war. How surreal is that?



Angleton described his espionage world as a "wilderness of mirrors" in which the KGB too often mesmerized naive Americans. Hollywood is now trying to get wise. "The Good Shepherd" starring Matt Damon comes pretty close to telling the real story of James Angleton except for a few major changes in substance and style.

A newer film, "Breach ", about one of the worst espionage diasters in U.S. history probably came closer to facts than Good Shepherd. But the hero of that movie, we are told at the conclusion, ditched his budding career as an FBI agent to become a lawyer in Washington. How much further down to earth, can one get?


Published by the editors of www.CosmicTribune.com