Cold Warrior: James Jesus Angleton. The CIA's Master Spy Hunter
New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991. First Printing. Hardcover. 25 cm, 462, illus., notes, bibliography, index, pages slightly off white (as printed? ), some wear and small stains to DJ. Thomas Cornelius Mangold (born 20 August 1934) is a British broadcaster, journalist and author. For 26 years he was an investigative journalist with the BBC Panorama current affairs television programme. Mangold was a reporter with the Sunday Mirror and then the Daily Express. After spending nearly two years investigating the Profumo affair, he joined BBC TV News in 1964 to be a war correspondent covering conflicts in Aden, Vietnam, Nigeria, Northern Ireland, the Middle East and Afghanistan. In 1971 he moved to BBC TV Current Affairs working for 24 Hours, then Midweek, becoming involved in some of the first investigative news documentaries of the BBC. In 1976 Mangold transferred to Panorama, concentrating on investigative journalism and making over 100 documentaries in 26 years. In 1993 he won both the Business / Consumer Investigative Reports category in the CableACE Award in and also the Royal Television Society's Journalism Award. These were followed in 1996 by the bronze award in the Best Investigative Report Category at the New York Television Festival and in 1999 he won Investigative Reporting / News Documentary category in the Chicago International Television Competition. Between 2004 and 2008 Mangold helped Mayfield, Kentucky resident Susan Galbreath investigate and solve the case of the murder of Jessica Currin, which had occurred in 2000 but remained unsolved until 2008. Mangold has been described in The Times as "the doyen of broadcasting reporters." Cold Warrior: James Jesus Angleton: The CIA's Master Spy Hunter is a 1992 book by Tom Mangold about James Jesus Angleton, who served as the head of the Central Intelligence Agency's Counterintelligence Staff from 1954 until 1974. The book is based on interviews, many of them attributed, instead of documentary evidence. Cold Warrior was the basis for a May 1991 episode of Frontline titled The Spy Hunter. Writing in The Washington Post, Charles R. Babcock praised Mangold's research, calling his book "a major revision in the history of American espionage." In The New York Times, Joseph Finder hailed Cold Warrior as "fascinating and superbly researched." Raymond L. Garthoff of the Brookings Institution stated that in regard to Angleton the book is the "best and most complete and accurate account so far as one can tell." Intelligence scholar Gregory F. Treverton called Cold Warrior a "commanding indictment" of Angleton. CIA Chief Historian David Robarge stated that the book is "the most factually detailed, thoroughly researched study of Angleton." Counterintelligence specialist Cleveland Cram highlighted Mangold's research and called Cold Warrior "an honest and accurate book." Derived from a Kirkus review: Among the top men who kept the CIA's secrets during the height of the cold war was James Jesus Angleton, chief of counterintelligence. Whether the austere and obsessive operative did more harm than good is the central issue in this evenhanded but unsparing biography by senior BBC TV correspondent Mangold. Drawing on interviews with Angleton's associates, friends, enemies, and widow plus unclassified archival material, Mangold offers an arresting portrait of a charismatic paranoid. A veteran of WW II's OSS, Angleton decided to make a career of intelligence and signed on with the CIA when it opened for business in 1947. Chosen by Allen Dulles in 1954 to become the agency's first counterspy, he tackled his new assignment with a missionary fervor that never flagged. Over the next two decades, this true believer pursued a single-minded agenda based on a series of interlocking assumptions holding, for example, that the Sino-Soviet split was a delusion, that monolithic Communism aimed at nothing less than world dominion, and that the Kremlin's moles abounded in Western capitals. Surrounding himself with kindred spirits, Angleton conducted unavailing witch hunts, betrayed loyal field agents, provoked allied intelligence services, rejected virtually all defectors as KGB plants, and otherwise hobbled crucial CIA campaigns against the USSR. Paradoxically, this ultrasuspicious man was completely gulled by Great Britain's Kim Philby and Anatoli Golitsyn, a low-level but like-minded refugee from the Soviet Union. After Angleton was eased out of the agency in Watergate's wake, his successors found a wealth of secret files that had never been incorporated in the organization's central registry. Damningly documented judgments on an intelligence agent who played at the patriot game. Condition: Very good / Good.
Keywords: CIA, Cold War, Counterespionage, Defectors, Soviet Union, KGB, GRU, Communism, Nosenko
ISBN: 0671662732
[Book #47081]
Price: $45.00