Breaking History - How a Russian Spy Destroyed a Beautiful Mind

Episode Date: September 3, 2025

This week Breaking History dives into a century-old mind game: Russia’s information war against America. More specifically, how it keeps driving us crazy. From Soviet spycraft to this summer’s Russiagate revelations, the story is often familiar: a kernel of truth is then buried in lies.  We look back at the haunted mind of James Jesus Angleton, the CIA’s original paranoia prophet. He spent his life chasing Russian ghosts, and what he saw and what he feared still echo through Washington today. CREDITS Executive Producer: Poppy Damon Associate Producer: Adam Feldman Sound Designer: Volkan Kiziltug A special thanks to our sponsors: Listen to Boundless Insights wherever you get your podcasts for smart, honest conversations about the biggest stories shaping Jewish life, Israeli politics, and their global impact. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome back to Breaking History. In this episode, we dive into the dynamics of Russia's long-standing information war against America and how it drives us crazy every few decades. We tell this story through the life of James Jesus Angleton, one of the founding fathers of the CIA who lost his beautiful mind trying to unravel the deceptions of the Kremlin. You've got this next year's model. Lee Harvey-Od, Irming, Berlin.

What happened once happens again? I want to tell you about a podcast. I can't recommend enough. It's called Boundless Insights, hosted by Aviva Clumpus. Aviva is sharp, fearless, and deeply informed, the kind of host who challenges assumptions without turning up the volume. On Boundless Insights, she sits down with diplomats,

military leaders and legal scholars, people who actually know what they're talking about to make sense of the chaos in the Middle East and beyond. No hot takes, no tribal echo chambers, just smart, honest conversations about the biggest stories shaping Jewish life, Israeli politics, and their global impact. If you're tired of the noise and ready for something deeper, check out boundless insights. You'll come away with new insights and a deeper understanding of the issues. Find Boundless Insights. Available wherever you get your podcasts. All right, President Trump weighing in on that bombshell report from just the news.com and John Solomon this week right here on this program, writing on truth social, quote,

Just Out, irrefutable, proof that Adam Shifty Schiff approved. a plan to leak classified information to damage Donald Trump. It's back. Yes, RussiaGate is the story that never seems to die. Over the summer, the Trump administration began declassifying reams of revelatory documents that showed just how deceptive many of the leaders of our own intelligence community were in the presidential transition between Barack Obama and Donald Trump. They declassified some terrible documents.

talking about Democrats and what they did. Radical left lunatics. Russiagate in our recent political history is a shapeshifter. First, it was the insta scandal of the Trump era. The elected president's sources say was a Kremlin asset, story developing. America had once again traveled down a rabbit hole to Moscow. What is clear is this? The Kremlin repeatedly told the campaign it had dirt on Clinton and offered to help it, and at least one top Trump official. the president's own son accepted.

But over time, that narrative was exposed as a fraud. Just consider what we heard from the representative, and now Senator Adam Schiff. It's true that Donald Trump Jr. expressed interest in 2016 in hearing from a Russian lawyer who promised dirt on his father's opponent, Hillary Clinton. But that dirt had nothing to do with the Russian meddling in the 2016 election.

Indeed, the information was prepared by the same opposition research firm hired by the Democrats to frame Trump on Russian collusion in the first place, Fusion GPS. We didn't learn any of that until 2020. But when the first partial story broke in November 2017, Washington was gripped by a moral panic. All of the dots were connected. And that's why the latest state secrets being disclosed have gained so much attention. What they show is that men like James Comey and John Brennan, the leaders of the FBI and CIA, were engaged in the very same tactics as the Russians that they blamed for Trump's election. They were running a kind of disinformation campaign.

Mr. Trump's policies and statements and interactions with Mr. Putin are really quite perplexing. Are they perplexing or are they becoming more obvious? Are you perplexed? Well, I'm still perplexed as to why he is not doing what he is. needs to do on behalf of this country. And I know that he's looked at... Why wouldn't he? Well, you know, people have speculated, and I have speculated, that maybe he has something

to fear from Mr. Putin and from Russia. That was John Brennan in 2018, speculating that the American president may have had something to fear from Vladimir Putin, the compromise, the peatate, the threat of blackmail. Now, we know that Brennan himself. was aware that there was no intelligence that suggested Trump had cooperated with Russia's influence scheme and that his own CIA analyst didn't believe the only source for the Russian compromise story, the dossier commissioned by Hillary Clinton's campaign. Brennan, because of his former job, made it appear that he knew something that he didn't. And in the throes of Russiagate,

Washington's most powerful journalists, legislators, and former officials embraced a paranoid fantasy they could not shake and consequently fed. All of that said, the full story is more complicated. Yes, RussiaGate was a political dirty trick, sanitized by a cynical, paranoid, and credulous Washington elite, bogus intelligence commissioned by Hillary Clinton's campaign, was fed to the FBI to implicate the Trump campaign

in a conspiracy with Russia. Nonetheless, the reason that narrative was plausible, 2016, especially to those who found it useful, it's because there was a kernel of truth mixed in with the lie. The Russians really were trying to influence the 2016 election. They really did hack Hillary Clinton's campaign and Democratic Party emails, and they really did pass them on to the internet. This is the nature of information warfare. Facts are mixed in with lies aimed at moving public opinion. Hillary's emails were real, but Russian bots trying to boost the algorithm for fringy memes and gifts were fake. Russian meddling was real. Trump's collusion with Russia

was fake. You get the picture. And when it comes to this kind of deception, the Russians are masters. They have been waging information war against America since at least the 1920s. They infiltrated nodes of the anti-war movement, they stoked racial tensions by distributing propaganda that alleged the U.S. government had murdered Martin Luther King. In the 1960s, they paid vandals to spray paint swastikas on synagogues and Jewish cemeteries. One of the more infamous campaigns was in the 1980s, when the KGB planned a fake story about the CIA's invention of the AIDS virus. It began in an obscure Indian newspaper, and that eventually was picked up by the mainstream media in the West. A Soviet military publication claims the virus that causes AIDS leaked from a U.S. Army laboratory conducting experiments in biological warfare.

Now, none of this is unique to Russia. Disinformation is as old as warfare. One of the earliest examples is the Trojan horse, a giant hollow horse filled with Greek. soldiers presented to the city of Troy as a gift. But the Soviet Union, a totalitarian society which made elaborate use of disinformation to persuade its own population that they were building a better world, no matter how stripped of freedom or poor their material circumstances, were truly experts in this dark art. At the height of the Cold War, the Kremlin waged a ruthless information war, aimed not only at rival spies and generals, but at presidents and prime ministers. Mechanics and factory workers are very society itself.

Now, we should say that intelligence services, including our own, have dipped into these dark arts from time to time. But the Kremlin elevated deception to an art form and made propaganda, an essential component of its statecraft both then and now. And you can't understand our own deep state without appreciating the guile of its greatest adversary, which helped to make it what it is. Yes, America spies on its rivals and friends, but no other country consumed our national security bureaucracy the way Moscow has for the last 100 years. And there was no one more attuned to Russia's deceptions and deceit than James Jesus Angleton, one of the founding fathers of the CIA, and one of the most powerful and mysterious cold warriors in our country's history.

Angleton grew singularly focused on the machinations of his Soviet rival, an obsession that nearly ruined him and the CIA in the process. One can find his legacy today, or perhaps its perversion in the paranoid theories of Rushagate, in the anti-disinformation industry that has sprouted up in the last decade at social media companies and think tanks. Before the farce of James Comey, John Brennan, and Rachel Maddow, there was the tragedy of James Hesus Angleton. There was a connection in the CIA's response to Trump's presidency that did, you know, follow those Cold War reflexes.

This is Jefferson Morley, author of The Ghost, a biography of Angleton. Which turn intentions into realities, right? Or possibilities into certainties. The Russians are trying to influence our election. Therefore, they did in the Trump era. You know, yeah, there were contacts between Trump and Russian intelligence people. That was a real thing. You know, was it like a Soviet master plan?

that's where the whole thing got a little Angletonian. This drive to unspool Russian disinformation was a central feature of Angleton's career. At the end, he became convinced that the Russians had placed a mole deep inside of the American deep state. Allied prime ministers and presidents were unwitting or witting Soviet assets. No one and nothing could be trusted.

A few years after he retired from the CIA, he explained the threat on British television in 1976, 40 years before the 2016 election that turned half the country into Russian conspiracy theorists. It presents to the West by the various themes that it promulgates what I call a wilderness of mirrors. They can have you believe whatever they desire you to believe. And if you have, as they do, control over both

not both, but all forms of communication with the West, whether it be the media, diplomats, tourists, students, culture, all playing the same thing. That becomes a very convincing, conglomerative information to a man who's attempting to do an overall evaluation. That sounds like a defeated man. Hard as he tried, he could not convince his bosses to see the wider conspiracy.

You're listening to Breaking History. After the break, we examine the life of James Hazus Angleton and how the Russians destroyed his beautiful mind. I call me the flow between the white, and that born me calls, you finally retire. Walking, we talk, they try to listen, we cover it up. Go into bruce, internal affairs, half of dissent, congressional jails, congressional jaded, want us repenting, subpoenas are here, in unity pending, the agency's clear, they're not defending, burn on your files, call your attorneys, white house oversight,

End of the journey And even as friends But be in control We never forget We never imagine With Amex Platinum Access to exclusive Amex Pre-Sale tickets can score you a spot trackside

So being a fan for life Turns into the trip of a lifetime That's the powerful backing of Amex Presale tickets for future events subject to availability And varied by race Terms and conditions apply. Learn more at mx.ca. slash yanex. James Jesus Angleton.

He is one of the most fascinating people of the 20th century. He played charades with the Kennedys, stirred martinis for Ben Bradley, and dined alone with David Ben-Gurion on his quiputs. Angleton was the spy in charge of watching our spies. He created the counterintelligence exact. at the CIA, the heart of our intelligence service, the deepest node of the deep state. Thirty years, he was Jay Edgar Hoover's doppelganger at the agency, a last line of defense against communist infiltration. And yet the two men were opposites. The former FBI director read middle-brow spy novels. Angleton read Dante and James Joyce. Jay Edgar Hoover also

Authorized Political Warfare against Martin Luther King Jr., Angleton read Lee Harvey Oswald's mail. Hoover's mind was a steel trap containing the secrets of Washington's various dukes and barons. Angleton's mind was a work of art, a thing of beauty, weaving elaborate stories connecting events that only he could see. Inside the CIA, Angleton was known by many names. To his agents, he was mother. Through his rivals, he was the cadaver. Other aliases included the gray ghost, the fisherman, the fly, and Virginia Slim, the brand of cigarettes he perpetually smoked. Angleton loved to cultivate orchids. He was obsessed with them.

He was a crafter who made silver tie clips and cufflinks for his friends. When Angleton needed to relax, he loved the patient pursuit of fly fishing. He was expert in this sort that demands deception. The prey is lured through the patient study of shadows cast on streams and the fabrication of insects the fish desires. Well, he was a very odd fish. I used fish deliberately

because when he came to the door, the first time he was wearing his regimental CIA trench coat and a bowler hat. Not a bowler. What do you call those other heads? This is Barbara Ledeen, who knew Angleton through her late husband, Michael Ladeen. He was wearing a Hamburg in his raincoat and had aluminum foil in his hands and presented me with what he said was a fish.

And thank you very much, Jim. You brought me a fish. How kind of you? you. Little did I know that he was an expert fisherman, I mean, to the point of beyond expert, to be monomaniacal, really. Barmer Ladeen knew James Angleton after his time at the CIA. She recalled to me that he once invited her to a lecture on James Joyce at the Library of Congress. And she remembers the long dinners with her late husband, Michael, where they spoke in Italian and English. And that really

gets to the spy's first love, literature. One of his favorite poems was Gorantium by T.S. Eliot, about an old man gazing upon Europe after the First World War, confused and exhausted by the strange new land left in its wake. These were the thousand small deliberations, protract the prophet of their chilled delirium, excite the membrane when the sense is cooled, with pungent sauces multiply variety in a wilderness of mirrors. What will the spider do, suspend its operations? Will the weevil delay? Debelage, fresca, Mrs. Camel, world beyond the circuit of the shuddering bear. In fractured atoms, gull against the wind, in the windy straits of Belle Isle, or running on the horn,

white feathers in the snow, the gulf claims, and an old man driven by the trades to a sleepy corner. I want to linger on that wonderful phrase, Wilderness of Mirrors. It's a a concept that Angleton would adopt to explain the treachery and deceptions of the world of espionage. Angleton knew T.S. Eliot when he was a precocious undergraduate at Yale in the late 1930s. At the age of 19, Angleton co-founded a poetry journal, Furioso, that published original works from Elliot, E. E. Cummings, William Carlos Williams, and Dylan Thomas. In this period, Yale is one of the centers in the world for a new criticism that treats literature as a puzzle

with several hidden meanings and ambiguities. The text becomes a gateway to a subtext and another subtext below it. And if you think about it, it's not unlike the intelligence business trying to decipher whether information from the adversary is true or false. Angleton in this period develops a platonic crush

on one of the greatest poets in the English language of all time, Ezra Pound. Here again is Jefferson Morley. Engleton, you know, writes him flattering letters. He's a precocious young man, and he's flattering this literary giant, and befriends him, goes to see him in the summer of his junior year because he goes home for summer vacation. He goes down and introduces himself and charms Ezra Pound and his wife.

And that's the beginning of their friendship. And, you know, if the war hadn't intervened, James Angleton probably would have been an avant-garde literary publisher. That was the world, a high-end literary publisher. That was the world that he loved and he was headed towards. So Angleton's pursuit of pound lands him in Rapallo. At the time, his family was living in a mansion in Milan. His father was the sole proprietor in Mussolini's Italy of the National Cash Register Company.

and as a result, the family rocketed from a humble middle-class life in Boise, Idaho to great wealth in this Italian cosmopolitan city. So just imagine the scene. Pound, living in Rapala, comes to the door, and the gangly Angleton is there, unannounced. He urges him to contribute to Furioso and stays with the pounds for the next few days. The chief be said here that in the 1930s, Ezra Pound was becoming a... Craig. He was obsessed with obscure monetary theories, and he believed that Jewish control of the banks was responsible for the global depression. Pound also admired Italy's fascist leader Benito

Mussolini. During World War II, Pound broadcast commentaries on Radio Roma praising the Axis powers, an act that earned him a secret trial in Washington, where eventually he was convicted of treason. After World War II, he was captured by the Allies, and eventually, eventually cheated the hangman's news by pleading insanity. As opposed to rape suicide. And did not and does not please the Dalmuggins choose who want to kill off all other races whom they cannot substitute and drive down the race into wage slavery or scoviet slavery under the goddamn tight.

Now before America's entry into the war, Angleton took on the opinions of his hero in one letter from Descartes. December 28, 1939, Engleton wrote to Pound, The Jews cause a devil of a lot of stink. Here in New York will be the next great pogrom. And they do need about a thousand ghettos in America. Jew, Jew, and Jew, even the Irish are losing out. But unlike Ezra Pound, Angleton took the side of the Allies.

After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Angleton quit Harvard Law School and entered the army as an enlisted man, even though he was offered the officer's track. He was soon spotted by a Yale Literature Professor Norman Pearson and asked if he might want to join the Office of Strategic Services, the espionage and sabotage agency that birthed the CIA. Angleton was a natural fit for espionage, and he threw himself into his work.

First assigned to London in the division known as X2, which conducted counterintelligence against the Nazis, Angleton brought an army cot to his rider's street office and often slept there because he would work late into the evenings. His former secretary recalled how after one nasty bombing, he showed up the next morning, got back down to work, wearing his heavy overcoat and a muffler because the windows were blown out and the heat no longer worked.

It was in London that Angleton learned about the double cross. This was where the MI6 would discover Nazi penetration agents and then turn them back on Germany to feed Berlin disinformation. Doublecross was one reason why the Axis powers were surprised by the D-Day landing in Normandy. The Allies took great pains to make it appear that the invasion was planned much further north. The double-cross is a great introduction

into this tangled web of counterintelligence and intelligence because the British had to give up a lot of true information to get the Nazis to trust their own agents were not doubled. As John Masterman, a CIA officer who penned an official evaluation of the operation, wrote years later, the challenge of the double cross was to strike a balance, so as to, quote, not give to the enemy information so valuable that it would likely outweigh any subsequent benefits which might accrue through him, end of quote.

Now, this is a crucial concept to understanding Angleton and espionage in general, general. Just like the Russian influence operation in the 2016 election, there was a mix of fact and fiction, truth and lies, to earn the enemy's trust as preparation for a later deception. In his book, Wilderness of Mirrors, David C. Martin describes the hazards of this kind of methodology as follows. Carried to its logical extreme, the calculation became an absurdity, since it was always possible to conjure up a deception that was greater than the intelligence. Everything read backward, as in a mirror. The more valuable in agent's service, the more reason to fear a deception, the greater the truth, in short, the bigger the lie.

That paradoxical principle would serve as the bedrock of Angleton's own counterintelligence theories for the next 30 years. So one of Angleton's tutors in these dark arts was a charming alcoholic named Kim Filby. I'm involved in a dangerous game. Every other day I change my name. My face is different, but my body's the same. Oh, baby, I'm a spy. After the break, Angleton meets his best friend and worst enemy. Now, the story of Kim Filby is legendary.

He is, for my money, the Michael Jordan of treason. The goat, recruited at Cambridge University in 1932 by the story. Soviet NKVD. Filby was part of what is known as the Cambridge Five, a circle of Soviet agents plucked from the upper crust of British society. When Kim Filby met James Angleton on Ryder Street, he was a Soviet agent. His code name was Stanley. One of his handlers, a Russian spy named Boris Crotten Shield,

believed he was the Kremlin's most valuable agent in all of Europe. This is a secret. British and American colleagues would not learn for some time until Philby was able to do enormous damage to the Western struggle against international communism, as well as the special U.S.-UK. relationship. To get a sense of how good Philby was in the field of espionage, consider that he is the only person in history to earn intelligence medals from the fascists, the communists, and the capitalists. That's right. In order, these are the Red Cross medals, from Generalissimo Franco in Spain,

which he earned while he posed as a journalist in the Spanish Civil War, the Order of the British Empire for his service during World War II, and the Soviet Order of the Red Banner for penetrating the highest echelons of England's spy service. Kim Vilby was a comer, as the Brits might say.

He dressed impeccably and was a quick wit. He could drink most of his peers under the table, and he went to the right school, pools, Eaton and Cambridge. In other words, he was on the inside track for a great career in the British Secret Service. Hugh Trevor Roper, the spy turned Oxford historian, wrote this assessment of Philby and his peers. I looked around at the part-time stockbrokers and retired Indian policemen, the agreeable epicureans from the bars of whites and boodles, the jolly conventional ex-Navy officers, and the robust adventurers from the bucket.

shop. And then I looked at Philby. He alone was real. I was convinced that he was destined to head the service. And for Angleton, Philby was more than just a tutor in the arts of the double cross and the importance of ciphers. Philby was often the older brother that James never had. When his marriage was strained, it was Philby who counseled him to stick with it. Ironic advice from a habitual philanderer whose second wife would commit suicide due to Philby's own neglect. During the Great War, Philby's real masters were on the same side as the Allies. That would not be the case, though, after the fall of the Third Reich. This is Jefferson Morley again.

He befriends, Angleton, and then Angleton goes off to Rome. But they are friends, and Philby goes off to an assignment in Turkey. They stay in touch. Philby drops by and visits him in 1946. you know, so they become fast friends and Philby has his eye on them. And in 1949, Philby achieves another promotion. He's sent ahead the British intelligence station in Washington, D.C. And there's Engleton, Chief of Foreign Intelligence for the new CIA. So they become fast friends and they eat all the time at Harvey's, the restaurant in the basement of the Mayflower Hotel right there

on Connecticut Avenue, right in the heart of Washington, a couple blocks from the White House. and they become fast friends, and Philby's, you know, sending everything to Washington. So this is the Russians' highest-level penetration of the new CIA, and Engleton has no idea. So imagine these weekly lunches at Harvey's oyster salute. You have to remember, this is an era when alcoholism was quite common for the upper crust in the UK and America. The lunches began with bourbon on the rocks. then lobster and wine and a finale of brandy and cigars

according to Philby biographer Ben McIntyre and it was over these boozy meals that Philby picked Angleton clean here is Philby's account of the lunches at Harvey's in his memoir My Silent War that he published in 1968 after he defected to Moscow

Our close association was I am sure inspired by genuine friendliness But we both had ulterior motives. By cultivating me to the full, he could better keep me under wraps. For my part, I was more than content to string him along. The greater the trust between us overtly, the less he would suspect covert action. Who gained most from this complex game, I cannot say. But I had one big advantage.

I knew what he was doing for the CIA, and he knew what I was doing for the SIS. But the real nature of my interest was something he did not know. These boozy lunches would become a liability after Philby was unmasked because Angleton was quite chatty. He discussed some of the CIA's most sensitive operations, how the agency co-opted Reinal Gailen's Nazi spy ring after the war. He talked about Operation Valuable, America's covert support for an Albanian insurgency. That loose talk led to the deaths of what the CIA called the Pixies,

trained agents sent to infiltrate that small Balkan nation. In this period, Philby was on top of the world. Not only was he still stealing secrets from the British, but in his new post, he was handed CIA operations on a silver platter. As I said before, he is the greatest traitor of all time. But Philby's luck was soon about to run out. It started with a dinner party. So it's January 19th, 1951.

Kim Filby and his wife Eileen host a very boozy showre with some of the top men and their wives from the CIA. Jim and Cicley Angleton are there. Another important guest is Bill Harvey and his wife Libby. Harvey was a bit of an odd man out at the agency. He was very smart, but he came from the Midwest and graduated from Indiana University, not one of the ivies that dominated the CIA in those days.

Harvey was portly. He loved guns. He also had a terrible temper. He was known to pull out his pistol in arguments. But for all of that, he was a daring spy with a world-class bullshit detector. This is a man who dug a tunnel underneath the U.S. Embassy in West Berlin to spy on the Soviets in East Berlin. Also, at the dinner party, was Guy Burgess.

Like Kim Filby, he was a traitor. And Philby himself recommended Burgess to the NKVD when they were both at Cambridge. Remember, this is the Cambridge Five. And at the moment, Guy Burgess was crashing at the Philby home as he awaited his next assignment for the MI6. So unlike Philby, Burgess was a terrible spy. He would often identify fellow intelligence officers in public. He would drink to excess and was a terror behind the wheel.

He never paid his bills, and he was, at a time when gay men and women were largely in the closet, very indiscreet in his own homosexual appetites. He would call his bedroom the playing fields of Eaton. Philby made fools of his American and British colleagues by tending to their egos and cultivating friendships that felt genuine to his marks. Burgess, on the other hand, enjoyed little more.

than insulting Americans to their face. Among Burgess's talents was that he was a world-class caricature artist. So Libby Harvey, who stuck out like her husband from the Ivy League Sophisticates at the CIA, was intrigued. She begged Burgess to draw a caricature. Now, I should stress that the Harvey's come from small town, Indiana, and this is 1951. It was still illegal in many cities and states to sell contraceptions.

let alone pornography. I mention all of this because Guy Burgess eventually draws a sketch of Elizabeth Harvey, spread eagle. No panties with apparently a look of animal desire in her eyes. No copy of the drawing remains. Yet needless to say, Bill Harvey would not stand for this assault on his wife's honor.

So he took a swing at Burgess, and the dinner party soon broke apart. Angleton had to take Harvey aside and walk him around the block just so he would cool down. It was an international incident within the deep state. When the horrified guests left,

Philby knew he was in trouble. He apparently scolded Burgess. How could you, Guy? How could you? According to McIntyre's biography. So at this point, we should say that Philby knew two things that Guy Burgess didn't. The first was that Bill Harvey was very good at hunting communist.

He left the FBI because no one wanted to act on the drop-dead evidence he gathered on the Alger Hiss spy ring in 1945. It would take a young Richard Nixon another two years before he blew the whistle on hiss in that affair. In 1951, Harvey was still an important officer on counter-espionage and the U.S. government had just figured out the identity of another member of the Cambridge Five, Donald McClain. The other thing that Philby knew was that the U.S. military was very close to cracking the ciphers

that concealed Soviet cable traffic in a top-secret project known as Venona. As they put the pieces together, the codebreakers learned of a Soviet agent named Homer who had a pregnant wife in 1948 residing in New York City. That was McLean. They also picked up that there was another Soviet agent named Stanley. That's Philby's alias. and that Stanley was part of a spy ring in London in 1945. Philby learned all of this from Meredith Gardner,

the American in charge of the code-breaking project. Gardner welcomed him to the top-secreted facility known as Arlington Hall when Philby got word of the hunt for his friend, McLean. Philby quietly learned what the codebreakers knew, all while keeping cool, calm, and collected. As I said earlier, Philby really is the goat of treason. At this point in the story, Philby informs much, Moscow and Burgess that they could all be in a lot of danger.

Burgess returns to London to help McLean escape. Philby pleads with him not to run, too, but Burgess doesn't listen. He and McLean find a vintage acid market and speed to Portsmouth, where they hopped the ferry to Sherbert, France. Then with new identity papers provided by the Soviets, both men board a train to Paris, then Warsaw, and then finally, Moscow. By the time the Brits realized both McLean and Burgess were missing, Philby becomes a suspect, of course.

Burgess had just been a house guest of Philby's. Back at the CIA, the director of Beatle Smith asks Harvey and Angleton to write up a report on what they think about Philby. Angleton's report is charitable. He writes off the Philby Burgess relationship as poor judgment when it came to an old college chum. Harvey is less kind. he accuses Philby outright of being a Soviet mole.

And when he gets a copy of Angleton's report, Harvey writes in large red letters, Where's the rest of the story? In the UK, though, Philby is forced to officially resign from MI6. He is suspected by the British domestic security services, MI5, to be the third man in the McLean Burgess affair. Someone had to have tipped them off,

and Burgess was staying at Philby's home in Washington. But Philby has friends at MI6, and they just don't believe it. The scandal roiled British society quietly for the next few years, eventually forcing Philby to go public. This is footage from one of the most bizarre moments of the Cold War, a press conference with a bona fide KGB spy, trying to clear his name. Would you still regard Burgess, who lived with you for a while in Washington?

Would you still regard him as a friend of yours? How do you feel about him now? I consider his action deplorable On the subject of friendship I prefer to say as little as possible It is very complicated Mr. Felby The disappearance of Burgess and McLean

Is almost as much of a mystery today as it was When they went away about four years ago or more Can you shed any light on it at all? No, I can't In the first place I'm debarred by the official secret facts from saying anything that might disclose to unauthorized

information derived from my position of a former government official. In the second place, the Burgess-McClein affair has raised issues of great delicacy in the sphere of international affairs. I left the service

some four years ago and I haven't any means of knowing whether words of mine, perhaps lifted from context, perhaps even garbled as they sometimes have been, wouldn't severely prejudice or damage the government in its conduct of international affairs. After the break, Philby skates and Angleton builds his empire. At this stage of the story,

one might think that James Jesus Angleton's career would be finished. Everyone knew that Angleton had those boozy lunchy luncheon. with Philby. Add to this, the CIA was getting its clock cleaned in the early 1950s by the KGB. One example is a CIA-funded Polish underground movement known by the Polish acronym Wynn between 1945 and 195. The U.S. poured millions into this network, which was entirely penetrated by Polish and Soviet intelligence. Eventually, the ruse was revealed in a humiliating fashion. The so-called anti-communist held a press conference, if you can believe it, and announced that they were straining the CIA along for years. They then announced that they

were sending the agency's cash to the Italian Communist Party. Oof, it's quite possible the Kremlin learned about this operation because of Angleton's close friendship with Kim Filby. But Angleton had friends at the top of the CIA, including Alan Dulles. It was about to be the next director under President Eisenhower in 1953. Dulles named Angleton to an advisory board to study Soviet penetrations of CIA operations. Angleton's recommendations were accepted, and he was named the new chief of the agency's counterintelligence executive or counterintelligence staff. Angleton was now the CIA's chief spy hunter, even though he still believed his old friend, Kim Filby, was guilty of nothing more than misplaced loyalty to an old

college friend. Being the chief of counterintelligence made Angleton one of the most powerful men in the American deep state. He had access to every program. He could see the personal security files for every CIA employee. Angleton was read into all signal intercepts. He got the take from domestic collections by the FBI. In a world where secrecy as power, Angleton kept the most secrets. In this period, Angleton also made a shrewd gamble. in the Middle East. He began to cultivate Israel's intelligence services. As a matter of background, Israel was distrusted by the Blue Bloods in the State Department and the CIA for most of the 1950s. This is largely because Jews represented a small minority within the region. And the rest of the Arab world

was, at the time at least, committed to reversing what they saw as the catastrophe of 1948 when five Arab armies and Palestinian militias failed to extinguish Israel in its cradle. Why compromise America's relationship with Saudi Arabia, Egypt, or Jordan by reaching out to plucky little Israel, so they thought. But Angleton thought different. He had gotten to know the future leaders of Mossad and Shinbet, its foreign and domestic intelligence services, respectively when he was stationed in Italy. This is when the Jewish agency was coordinating the immigration of Jews fleeing Europe to mandate Palestine. And Angleton was impressed by their dedication and grit. That said, he also didn't trust the Zionists. Many of them were socialists,

even a few of them were communists, and Engleton didn't like that one bit. Here is what Amos Manor, the first counter-espionage chief for the Shinbet, told Tablet magazine in 2010 about his first meeting with Angleton. It wasn't easy to persuade the anti-communist Angleton that we could be friends. Even I was suspected by him that I was a Soviet spy. Over time, Angleton and the Israeli spies formed a deep friendship. The breakthrough was in 1956. Dulles had heard rumors that Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev had delivered a secret speech to the leaders of the Communist Party

denouncing the cult of personality around the now-departed former premier Joseph Stalin. So Dulles ordered his spies to find a copy of that speech. This was the number one priority. I want to play now a snippet of an AI-generated version of that Khrushchev speech. In the main and in actuality, the only proof of guilt used against all norms of current legal science was the confession of the accused himself. And as subsequent probing proved, confessions were acquired through physical pressures against the accused. This was very big news.

And Khrushchev gives this really bracing speech and says, We're going to end this cult of personality. Stalin was not good, and we're starting anew. So sensational revelation, if word begins to leak out... Again, this is Jefferson Morley. And Khrushchev gives this really bracing speech and says, we're going to end this cult of personality, Stalin was not good, and we're starting anew.

So sensational revelation, word begins to leak out. Alan Dulles hears about this through European diplomatic circles mainly. They're hearing it from their contacts. And so what's going on? Well, Soviet Union is a complete police state. CIA has very little ability to penetrate what's going on inside the government. They don't have high-level spies at that point. So, you know, they want to know, is this for real?

What does this mean for Soviet foreign policy? So, and then Angleton comes up with the text of the speech. And this was like a miracle. And this was what made Angleton's reputation. So how did Angleton do it? His friends in Israel cultivated a low-level Polish official whose girlfriend worked at the Soviet embassy, and she allowed him to take written versions of the speech and copy it.

He gave it to the Mossad, and the Mossad passed it on to Angleton. Now remember that a theme of information warfare is to mix in the fact with the fiction. So Dulles then leaks the speech to the New York Times. But Angleton and Dulles also sprinkle in a few paragraphs that were not in the original Khrushchev speech. Again, this is Jefferson Morley. What they did was they wanted to amplify divisions. And there was one section that they added, which was designed to offend India. Right.

Because India's pursuing this non-aligned policy. They lean towards the Soviet Union. Sometimes they lean to the U.S. the US wants to incur you know wants to disrupt their relationships so they stick it in there I mean this is that was the way people thought then in the CIA which if you could take an advantage you took it and you didn't really think about well would that reflect badly on us it was like you took every advantage and they did it to us it seems a little odd but you know we live in a different time that the cold war it was like we're at war anything is

justify anything, you know? And so I think that was the rationale. Across the pond in the United Kingdom, Kim Filby was also in his second act. He was now a journalist in Beirut writing for the economist and the observer. He was also an MI6 asset, largely because his dear friend, Nicholas Elliott, a fellow spy, brought him back into the fold of MI6. Philby at this point could have ended his relationship with the KGB altogether, but the man was committed. He continued to report to a Soviet handler in Beirut. Philby's days in Beirut were numbered. He was brought down eventually by a Jewish woman named Flora Solomon. She had been reading him in the observer and didn't care for his

Arabist coverage of the Middle East. So at a dinner party at the Chaim Weizmann Institute in Israel, she asked Lord Victor Rothschild, why the observer had hired a communist. Rothschild, who had once worked for, MI5, was curious as to why Flora Solomon was so sure that Kim Filby was a red. And then she explained that in 1933, he had tried to recruit her. If this had come out of the blue, it may have been survivable for Filby, a kind of he-said-she-said situation. But after the whole scandal with Burgess and McLean and the lingering doubts about him by MI5, this was really the last nail in the coffin.

Flora Solomon told her story again this time, officially to MI5, and then it was decided that Nicholas Elliott would have to confront his old friend. The showdown happened at a Bayward apartment bugged for sound by the MI5 on January 12, 1963. What follows is a part of the conversation between Elliot and Philby, as recorded by the British spy catchers, taken from Ben McIntyre's book,

A Spy Among Friends. Kim, the game's up. We know what you did. We penetrated the KGB, Kim. There's no doubt in my mind any more. that you were a KGB agent. Look how stupid this seems. Astonishing.

A man is suspected for a long time of mortal sin. They can't prove a thing. They're embarrassed in front of the whole world. They apologize. Then ten years later, some chief is struck by the old idea again. They decide to send an old friend. A wise and decent man with only one goal. To persuade an innocent.

man to confess that he's a Russian spy. Is that why you're here? Kim, if you were in my place, if you knew what I know. I wouldn't talk to you the way you're talking to me. Then how would you talk to me? I would offer you a drink instead of this lousy tea. Do you want me to give you my version of your work for the Russians? Do you want me to tell you what you were thinking? Nicholas, are you serious? I am. By all accounts, this should have been curtains for Kim Filby. He ended up making a partial confession. He said that he was a Soviet agent in the 1930s, but did not admit to the full extent of his treachery. And then incomprehensibly, Philby was left to his own devices after the confrontation. The British had the confirmation

they thought they needed, but they still had to figure out what to do with Kim Filby. The traitor was offered immunity if he gave up everything he knew. And the leverage here was that if Philby fled, his family would suffer the humiliation of his betrayal, both financially and socially. Well, it turns out Philby didn't care. He arranged his defection to Moscow and vanished before Elliot could return to Beirut. Angleton found out about Philby's betrayal from the CIA station chief in Beirut, but Elliot also felt obliged to tell him the bad news personally. Elliot would later tell the novelist and former British spy Jean Le Carre that Philby's betrayal crushed his old friend.

The knowledge that he, Jim, the top expert in the world on Soviet espionage, had been totally deceived, had a cataclysmic effect on his personality. Jim henceforward found it difficult to trust anybody to make two and two add up to four. Oversus suspicion can sometimes have more tragic results than over-credulity. His tragedy was that he was so often deceived by his own ingenuity, and the consequence were often disastrous. Here is how Jefferson Morley described it. Brilliant, and at the end, he was a bit of a fool.

First of all, this is where the question of when did he realize he had been betrayed. I think he believed all along, which made the psychological impact so much worse. Everybody who was close to Angleton said this was a huge psychic blow to him that happened in January, 1963. And I mean, and his wife said that. and his friends like Dick Helms said that. So that psychic blow, I think, tilted his intelligence into an I-day fix, that this betrayal was the central thing.

And so he kind of gets this picture that just as he has been betrayed, the CIA itself has been penetrated by a mole. He's trying to find that mole maybe as a way of vindicating himself. His search becomes increasingly irrational. his colleagues are like, you're tearing up the organization, you're destroying it, and so it all ends very tragically. Now, there is no way that back in 1932, anyone in the KGB knew that when they would recruit Kim Filby at Cambridge University, it would end up that some 30 years later, he would drive

a CIA spymaster into epistemological despair. But that is exactly what ended up happening. of all of Philby's accomplishments as a Soviet spy, his greatest was the destruction of his American friend's beautiful mind. At the peak of his powers, Angleton became a paranoid wreck. The man who kept the CIA's darkest secrets now suspected nearly everyone of betrayal. The best way to illustrate Angleton's unraveling is through the story of Yuri Nosenko. In 1962, Nosenko, a KGB agent working on arms control,

approached the State Department official on a trip to Geneva's Listerland. Now, Nosenko was no ordinary KGB officer. He came from an elite communist family. His father oversaw Soviet shipbuilding in the 1940s and 1950s. At first, he just wanted money. But after the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963, Nosenko arranged a defect to America. Nosenko had been one of the officers initially assigned to Lee Harvey Oswald,

JFK's assassin, after Oswald had traveled to Moscow and renounced his American citizenship. And Nosenko reported that the Soviets did not turn him into an assassin. Crucial information for the U.S. government at the time. Oswald, Nosenko said, was mentally unstable. He tried to commit suicide in a Moscow hotel after his initial request to emigrate to the USSR was rejected. the KGB watched his every move while he was in the Soviet Union. They bugged his apartment in Minsk. They regularly queried his associates at the television factory where he worked.

And Nosenko passed all of this along to the CIA. So here's the thing. Nosenko's information checked out for the most part. A CIA assessment declassified in the 1990s says that Nosenko provided the locations of 52 hidden microphones inside the U.S. embassy in Moscow, for example. He fingered Soviet agents working abroad. Nosenko was really a gold mine in a sense. For Angleton, though, all of this was too good to be true.

And here you have to remember what Angleton learned from his time in X2 in London. When you double foreign agent, you start off by feeding the enemy true information to set them up for a later deception. That lesson was all the more poignant after the shattering news of Philby's treason. Finally, Angleton was taken in. by an earlier defector, Anatoly Galitzin. Yolitsin persuaded Angleton that future Soviet defectors would all be double agents. So Angleton wanted to know more.

And this is where the story takes a very dark turn. Angleton arranged for Nosenko to be taken to the attic of a safe house in southern Maryland where he was chained to a metal bed in a room with no ventilation or air condition. At times he was dosed with LSD. He was interrogated over and, over again. This torture continued for nearly five years. All the while, Angleton kept insisting that this man was a double. Eventually, the CIA had to relent. In 1968, Nosenko was provided with a pension in a home, and Angleton was overruled. His influence was beginning to come to an end.

This didn't stop him from pursuing his colleagues, we should say. At one point, at the end of his career, he asked the French intelligence service to surveil the CIA station chief in Paris, even though his own counterintelligence staff had already investigated him and found nothing. Angleton believed there was a Soviet mole buried deep inside of the CIA. This was known as the monster plot. Here is how Tim Weiner described it in his history of the agency, legacy of ashes. To believe in the master plot, it was necessary to take four things on faith. First, that Moscow would trade all that information to protect one mole.

Second, that all communist defectors were agents of deception. Third, that the immense Soviet intelligence apparatus existed solely to mislead the United States. And last, that an impenetrable communist conspiracy lay behind the Kennedy assassination. Angleton went to his grave believing the monster plot was true. The CIA has studied it three times, and each time they concluded that the monster plot was fiction. Angleton actually had protected the CIA for the 20 years that he was in charge of counterintelligence. There was no mole on his watch. It's a bitter irony that James Jesus Angleton could never take credit for his success because he was convinced the Soviets had outwitted

him. What is this? It's an electronic device. I see. I'm not familiar with him. It's much more perfected than anything we have in the agency. Why do you resign? I think the time comes to all men when they no longer serve their country. As determined by whom? By themselves and their superiors. That was James Hazer's Angleton on Christmas Eve 1974.

He was out. The new director, who Angleton knew from his OSS days, William Colby, had lost patience with Angleton's elaborate theories of Soviet penetration. The CIA was chasing phantoms because Angleton could not give up on his monster plot. But there was more to it. Colby himself had just confirmed Cy Hirsch, then working for the New York Times, the most consequential scoop of the Cold War, known as the Family Jewels. For more on this, I recommend the two-part series from my old podcast, the re-education, church and deep state.

The bottom line is that Hirsch learned about an internal file at the CIA that detailed every time the agency violated its legal charter. That meant everything from its LSD experiments on unwitting prisoners and mental patients to Angleton's own program to spy on American anti-war activists known as Operation Chaos. That's why reporters were at the door of his Arlington home on that fateful Christmas Eve. And Angleton was a mess. He had been up all hours of the night before. And he looked at his tie was askance. There were heavy bags under his eyes and his gaunt frames slumped as he answered the questions from the press.

This was a Mandarin of the American Deep State. And yet when he was finally introduced to the American people, he resembled a hapless old man looking for his lost car keys. It was the beginning of a painful period for Angleton. In the next year, he would be hauled before Congress had interrogated about his program to spy on the anti-war movement and other domestic radicals. At least that was how he defended it. In reality, Angleton's office was reading the mail of all kinds of people.

We want to know, for example, why the mail of such individuals and organizations in this country, as the Ford Foundation, Harvard University, the Rockefeller Foundation was regularly opened by the CIA, or the mail coming to or from such individuals as Arthur Burns, Bella Abzug, Jay Rockefeller, Martin Luther King, Mrs. Martin Luther King, Richard Nixon himself, as well as such senators as Hubert Humphrey, Edward Kennedy, even the chairman of this committee, whose letter to my mother was in the file, should have been regularly opened and scrutinized by the CIA against the laws of the country.

That was Senator Frank Church asking Angleton about H.T. Lingle, a top secret CIA program initiated in 1952 by Angleton to read more than 215,000 pieces of first-class mail addressed to American citizens from the Soviet bloc. Other senators wanted to know where the agency got such authority to open the mail of so many prominent Americans, and Angleton didn't have very good answers. From the counterintelligence point of view, we believe that it was extremely important to know everything possible regarding contacts of American citizens with communist countries. Engleton would later say that the illegality of the mail-opening program was a feature, not a bug.

He had concluded that the Soviets believed they could contact their American agents through the mail, and the CIA would be none the wiser. So he was breaking the law, in a sense, to uphold national security. There is, of course, a detectable arrogance in Engleton's answers to Congress. He knew better than the elected representatives of the American people, what was in their best interest. And we see an echo of this in Russiagate as well. Remember, at the height of the moral panic,

our national security elites told us a very angletonian line. The Russians were trying to hack the consciousness of our leaders and society through putting out low-tech memes on social media. We need the FBI and the CIA to protect us from Russian deceptions. Here is Clint Watts, a former FBI counterintelligence official, testifying in 2017 before the Senate Intelligence Committee that Kremlin-linked accounts, whatever that means, were posting disinformation in the hopes that President Trump would read it.

I can tell you right now today, gray outlets that are Soviet-pushing accounts tweet at President Trump during high volumes when they know he's online and they push conspiracy theories. So if he is to click on one of those or cite one of those, it just proves Putin correct that we can, use this as a lever against the Americans. That sounds an awful lot like James Angleton some 40 years earlier in that interview we played at the top of the show.

They can have you believe whatever they desire you to believe. So in some ways we've come full circle. The proponents of the initial Russiagate scandal told us that a foreign power was persuading Americans to embrace Trump and conspiracy theories just as Angleton was convinced the Russians were manipulating the leaders and citizens of the free world as well. Both theories rely on the same dubious assumption. The human mind is a blank slate that can be filled with truth or lies. The individual's free will is sporned to the schemes of the deceiver.

The problem with this theory, aside from being a very flawed explanation for human consciousness, is that it undermines the very democratic experiment that Angleton and the Russia Gators believed they were defending. If voters can be manipulated by Soviet information warriors, or Russian bots and internet trolls, then why bother having elections at all? And at the same time, one can also see how this kind of thinking is an occupational hazard

for anyone involved in intelligence work. When you are fighting an information war, even confirmed facts become suspect because they are likely a pretext for a later deception. But there's also a difference. Angleton eventually faced accountability. When the first intelligence scandals were disclosed in the early 1970s, Congress and the press finally took on the task of finding out the truth.

During Russiagate, with a few exceptions, Congress and the press collaborated with the FBI and CIA. And like Angleton, justifying his mail-opening program, those that knew the story was false, like James Comey and John Brennan, believed the lie was necessary to advance a greater good. The real story is that the Republic survived that deep state reckoning that was so rough on Angleton 50 years ago and went on to win the Cold War not because we outfox the Russians but because our ideas are better.

Our society is better. Our system is more resilient. All governments lie from time to time. But when our republic keeps faith with our Constitution, eventually the truth does out. And that is what has been happening over the last few years. From the first reports of the Justice Department's Inspector General in 2019 and 2020 to the latest declassifications this summer,

the full story about Russia Gate is finally emerging. The defenders of our national security spread disinformation about Trump's relationship with Russia to protect us from the disinformation of the Russians themselves. And as a result, many of us have been lost in our own wilderness of mirrors. Every now and again, we have to spy on our friends. It's just what our agency do. We need to make sure your intentions are pure.

What you tell our agents is true. We are reading your mail, tap in your phone. We will surveil your car and your home With eyes in the sky and FBI spies We can find a man that thinks he can hide We invented the code The firmware download

We've been in your phone since before Google Chrome We are reading your mail reading your mail, tap in your phone. We will surveil your car and your home. You understand, we knew that you would, the bugs and the taps are for your own good. We are reading your mail, tap in your phone,

We will surveil your car and your home They call me the close Between the wife And apple we cook You finally retire Walking we talk They try to listen Cover it up

Not going to Brue Internal Affairs Half of descent Irretional jets Want us repenting Subpoenas are here In unity pending

The agents is clear They're not defending Burn on your files Call your attorney White House oversight End of the journey Banish and scatter We didn't exist

It ain't good to matter It's now put to rest The man was a friend Jim was a legend He'd know by the end He was dementia Every department was hiding a moat And even the strands were being controlled

We never forget We never remind The Russian destroyed a beautiful mind BNKEV Free War Penetration when he was at Cambridge It started with drinks He went to a friendship

But who could believe Kim were a father friend Kim was reading your maid A spy till the end For he was betrayed By his only friend Thank you.