The Long-Suppressed Church Committee Testimony of CIA Counterintelligence Chief James Angleton
Part 1: Angleton and the "Israeli Account"
This is the first part of planned series of posts which will feature edited excerpts from a recent episode of Devils Chess Club in which I discussed a newly declassified, less redacted version of the executive session testimony of James Angleton to the Church Committee in 1975. The transcript has been edited for clarity and precision.
As promised, I'm now going to discuss something that I think is fascinating and very relevant to the conversations that I've been having on my podcasts—on American Exception, on Devil's Chess Club, and elsewhere. I have to thank a patron and friend of the podcast, Scott Alfieri, for sending me a link to this because otherwise I don't know that I would have found it. The link was to a LinkedIn post by someone named Geoff Cruickshank, and he wrote a fairly useful summary of this new document. It's not a document that has never been seen before. Rather, it was heavily redacted up until now. I don't believe that people have commented on this or noticed it because these document dumps are so large.
There are some remarkable things in here—all things people have talked about before in one aspect or another. Strangely, I've hypothesized some of these things without knowing that there was as much actual basis for them as there seems to be based on these documents. I find this really fascinating and it is further confirmation of some of the things I've been discussing of late. The document in question is the testimony to the Church Committee of CIA counterintelligence chief James Jesus Angleton. The person that he is talking to, or one of the main people leading the questioning, is John Tower—the senator that we (Larry Wilkerson and I) were talking about earlier. That to me is pretty fascinating… And then, of course, Senator Tower eventually died in a plane crash in 1991—the day before or the day after another Republican senator died as well, John Heinz. It is a very strange case. Tower is also the guy who Dick Cheney replaced in order to become Secretary of Defense after Tower was basically forced out by this media witch hunt, calling him a womanizer and a guy who drank too much; I would guess that both of those things are true. But as I said before, I had heard—or the urban legend or the hearsay or whatever was—that John Tower was really puzzled after this and thought, Well, of course I am a womanizer and enjoy drinking. I'm an American senator. What do you expect, right?
Maybe that's not really that important. What is more important is the testimony. This is a little bit more complicated, maybe more of a close reading of classified documents more so than some of the things that I do typically on this podcast. If you find this material complicated or confusing, this might not be your cup of tea. But for those of you who are interested in the JFK case, I hope that you would find this interesting. If you've been following my work of late, as I've tried to talk about the neocon takeover of US foreign policy and the move towards this unipolaity uber alles mentality of the US Empire, then you may find this fascinating.
I am going to go through some of the main areas that I found more interesting. There are other things that have been newly unredacted that are a bit more complicated. Honestly, the whole thing is worth reading, but I am going to focus on the areas I find most explosive.
From the testimony:
Let’s consider this discussion over James Angleton having two jobs at the CIA. He is asked, “Can you briefly state this connection between your counterintelligence work and blank redacted? or even more generally. how did you happen to have both of these jobs?”
The reader doesn’t know what the second job is. Of course, he's known as the counterintelligence chief because that's what he's famous for. He's notorious—famous or infamous, one of the two—as the head of counterintelligence. Now, as far as this redaction goes, it's not the most useful because they essentially tell us what was redacted in a bit.
He continues, “So you developed a kind of relationship, perhaps a friendly relationship with persons connected with the new state of Israel or the hoped-for state of Israel back in the 1940s?” So, you already are getting a hint that this is something related to Israel. Now, finally, the redaction, we're able to see what it is, but I'll get to that.
Angleton offers this: “One of my men married, I might say, the head of the Zionist movement in Italy, the underground. So, I had a connection to this man. He was very important.” It would be really interesting to know more details about that.
“In 1954, I had a special operational unit and was made head of the counterintelligence.” And then he's asked, “In the period beginning in 54 and until 74 when you left the agency, did you have any relationship? Is the Israeli account the wrong way to say it?” Now we know what the redacted part is: “the Israeli account.” It would seem that that is what it is in reference to, and it kind of makes sense in the context of everything else in the document, as you'll see.
If anyone has any different interpretation on this and wants to correct or dispute anything that I am arguing, because sometimes these statements don't make perfect sense, let me know. There are questions about any sort of transcription like this. There are grammatical errors, there are some spelling errors, and, of course, we are dealing with James Jesus Angleton—a notorious professional liar. He considers lying part of his tradecraft. What a wonderful occupation he chose!
So…reconstituting the Israeli account… Angleton says, basically, Yeah, sure. Call it the Israeli account. That's as good as any other name. So he is asked, “Did you have any relationship with the [Israeli] account?” This part is confusing to me. Angleton must mean in regards to the new unit, which Angleton took over in 1954. [This may be an assassination unit. That was the year of Operation PBSUCCESS in Guatemala and the drafting of the CIA’s assassination manual, created in conjunction with the Guatemalan operation. I'm not sure exactly, but Angletyon says, no, that began in 1951. There was no relationship between the agency and the Israeli account before 1951.
Angleton says “There wasn't any from 1947—1946 on.”
“It was reconstituted in 51. And I was the negotiator of the arrangement.” I believe he's saying that in the time when he was with the (CIA precursor) OSS, there was this relationship between the US and the Zionists… That would have ended when the OSS was dissolved formally at the end of World War II, but of course there are going to be links between people like Angleton and people connected to Israeli/Zionist intelligence. He says, “It was reconstituted in 1951 and I was the negotiator of the arrangement,” so that must be what he is referring to here.
He is asked, “How was that arrangement negotiated?” Angleton answers that, “It was negotiated by finding what we have in common. It was reviewed by Hillenkoetter who was then [CIA] director… [and then] succeeded by General Walter Bedell Smith.” These two guys were not Wall Street lawyers like other CIA people of the time were. Harry Truman intentionally wanted to have army military people running this because he had a bit of mistrust of the Dulles crowd and some of these Wall Street people. I believe this to be the case even though Truman was basically Wall Street’s man, whether he knew it or not. Even so, there were traces of some New Deal political beliefs in Truman that would occasionally surface. This is not to deny that what history records: Harry Truman was the handmaiden and the midwife, really, of the post-war US empire.
Said Angleton, “We would go ahead and reestablish a relationship, and after a lot of bureaucratic problems they gave me the account.” So apparently there was some sort of debate and discussion throughout the bureaucracy. Eventually they decided to make Angleton the manager of the “Israeli account.” The CIA’s “Israeli account” became a very sensitive and compartmentalized element of the CIA—i.e., its details or even existence were very narrowly held secrets. Even more troubling, the “Israeli account” was managed by the CIA officer in charge of counterintelligence which included management and security of the Agency’s most sensitive secrets and operations.
In the next installment, I will look at how this sensitive, compartmentalized arrangement was implicated in a number of CIA scandals and intrigues.