Volume 36, Number 13 · August 17, 1989
Spook of Spooks
By Thomas Powers
Deception: The Invisible War Between the KGB and the CIA
by Edward Jay Epstein
Simon and Schuster, 335 pp., $19.95
'The threat' was James Jesus Angleton's preferred term for the Soviet Union during his twenty years as chief of the CIA's Counterintelligence Staff. He did not distinguish between the country itself and the Soviet Union's Committee for State Security, the KGB and its allied intelligence services in Eastern Europe. Angleton was a convinced man, and for a dozen years, until his forced retirement in 1974, he had the intelligence services of the West tied up in knots trying to prove that the chief instrument of 'the threat' was deception on the grand scale. This deception consisted of a twin effort to penetrate and ultimately to control Western intelligence services, and to divide and disarm the West politically through agents of influence and the artful manipulation of events and appearances. For years, to take a notorious example, Angleton claimed that the apparent split between the Soviet Union and China was a brilliantly conceived act of deception. How the Soviets planned to exploit this deception was something Angleton never spelled out exactly; he never spelled out anything so far as I know. But he suspected the worst—not surprise attack and nuclear war, but a kind of slow chipping away at the independence of Soviet neighbors in everwidening circles.
Review, 5454 words
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