James Jesus Angleton

James Jesus Angleton was the CIA's director of counterintelligence and was also responsible for liaison with Israel. He was known for his insistence on secrecy and his paranoia about Soviet penetration of the Agency. Angleton's increasing inability to deal with the real world eventually led to his firing in late 1974. He had worked closely with members of the Jewish resistance in Italy at the end of World War II, during a period when thousands of Jewish refugees and concentration camp survivors were being illicitly funneled from Europe into Palestine.¹

Angleton's closest colleague was Meir Deshalit, an Israeli intelligence official. Angleton shared Deshalit's view of the Soviet and Arab threat to Israel, and his personal contacts and strong feelings made him the logical choice to handle liaison between the CIA and the Israeli government. His assignment was crucial in the 1950s and early 1960s due to the continuous flow of Soviet and Eastern European refugees into Israel. Angleton and his Israeli counterparts ran the "rat lines," as the Jewish refugee link became known, which provided the West with important insights into the Soviet bloc. Some of these programs were financed off the shelf by CIA contingency funds, as part of KK MOUNTAIN.¹

Despite his love for Israel and shared views on the Arab and Soviet question, Angleton investigated any Israeli or American Jew he suspected of trafficking in classified information, particularly nuclear technology. The CIA suspected that Israel's quid pro quo for French help at Dimona included access to design information purloined from U.S. nuclear laboratories. While no evidence of such a link was found, investigators discovered Angleton's personal files revealing a long-running and questionable study of American Jews in the government, based on a "Jewishness index" that included synagogue attendance as a basis for suspicion.¹

Angleton also sponsored a highly secret CIA operation, through the CHAOS program, involving the Agency's purchase of a Washington, D.C. trash collection company. This firm had contracts to pick up garbage at various Third World embassies, including the Israeli embassy, and the trash was systematically sorted and analyzed for intelligence.¹

Angleton's first intelligence report on Israel's plans to build the bomb was filed routinely in the late 1950s. He continued to produce intelligence on Dimona based on information from his personal contacts, but never learned or reported the full extent of Israel's deception regarding its nuclear weapons progress. His reports on Dimona, even when buttressed by U-2 data, did not result in an official CIA estimate that Israel was going nuclear, as analysts in the CIA's Office of National Estimates (ONE) did not find his HUMINT sources reliable.¹