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- [00:07]
Carter Roy
There's a phrase that intelligence people use to describe the world of counter espionage. They call it a wilderness of mirrors. The man who coined that phrase borrowed it from a T.S. eliot poem. He was a poetry editor before he was a spy. He grew orchids in a greenhouse he built in his backyard. He tied his own fly fishing flies. He chain smoked his way through 18 hour days in a locked, windowless office at CIA headquarters, hunched over files, searching for patterns that may or may not have been there. His name was James Engleton. For 20 years, he ran counter intelligence for the Central Intelligence Agency. His job was to protect the agency from enemy infiltration, to find the spies hiding among spies. And he was, by many accounts, very good at it. He helped uncover secret correspondence between Hitler and Mussolini. He obtained a copy of Khrushchev's secret speech denouncing Stalin on one of the biggest intelligence coups of the Cold War. But James Angleton also launched a mole hunt that consumed the CIA for over a decade. A hunt that ruined the careers of innocent officers, that paralyzed the agency's operations against the Soviet Union. How does the same man end up on both sides of that story? The answer involves a best friend, a Soviet defector, and a mole hiding somewhere inside the CIA. Welcome to Conspiracy Theories, a Spotify podcast. I'm Carter Roy. New episodes come out every Wednesday. We'd love to hear from you. So if you are listening on the Spotify app, swipe up and give us your thoughts or check us out on Instagram. He conspiracypod. Stay with us. This episode is brought to you by ZipRecruiter. Among the many, many conspiracy theories out there, the JFK assassination is the most enthralling to me because of all the avenues it goes down. But if you're hiring, you're lucky. Instead of going down research rabbit holes, you can uncover exactly what you're looking for with ZipRecruiter. And even better, you can try it free@ziprecruiter.com theory. Its powerful matching technology works fast to find qualified cand. And a new feature was just added that helps identify candidates who have an interest in your role. They can even send a personal response for why they're interested, which is an excellent way to learn more about them. Cut through the standard and get to the standouts with ZipRecruiter. Four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day. And now you can try it for free@ziprecruiter.com theory. That's ZipRecruiter.com theory meet your match on ZipRecruiter. This episode is brought to you by OnStar. Looking for something gripping to listen to? Tell Me what Happened is a podcast about ordinary people who are suddenly met with the unexpected. Like a van flipping, a hiker disappearing in the desert, or a man and his dog plunging through ice. Then something amazing happens. Strangers step in, making split second choices that save lives. And the best part? You hear the story straight from the people who lived it. Listen to season six of Tell Me what Happened out now.
- [03:58]
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- [04:29]
Carter Roy
March 194426 year old American officer James Engleton begins his intelligence career. London is under siege. German V2 rockets slam into apartments and pubs and churches. The city is in ruins. James, who usually goes by Jim, has been in the army for about a year. Before that, he was at Yale editing a poetry magazine, corresponding with famous poets like ezra Pound and E.E. cummings. He graduated in 1941 and was admitted to Harvard Law School. But before he could finish, Jim was drafted to fight in World War II. Now he's in London, assigned to the Office of strategic services, the OSS, America's wartime intelligence agency and the precursor to the CIA. Specifically, he's in a unit called X2, which handles counterintelligence. His job is to figure out who's working for the enemy. It's a remarkable fit. The skills Jim honed analyzing poetry, looking for hidden meanings, and reading between lines turn out to be exactly the skills you need to catch spies. One officer would later put it this way, both poetry analysis and counterintelligence require recognizing patterns, examining the assumptions hidden in words and phrases, and grasping the whole structure, not just the surface. Jim takes to it immediately. He often works through the night, and when he doesn't, he sleeps on a cot in his office. Within six months, he's running the X2 program in Italy. His unit uncovers secret correspondence between Hitler and Mussolini that's later used as evidence at the Nuremberg trials. But before any of that happens, shortly after arriving in London, Jim is introduced to a British intelligence officer, the man is charming, confident and about a decade older. He's already a rising star in MI6, Britain's foreign intelligence service. He's been fighting the Nazis and the fascists from the field for years. His name is Kim Philby. Jim is dazzled. Kim is everything Jim wants to be. Worldly, experienced, effortlessly competent. And Kim takes a shine to the young American too. He mentors him. He explains how counterintelligence really works, not just on paper, but in the field, where the rules blur and nothing is quite what it seems. From Kim, Jim learns something crucial about wartime intelligence that will become the foundational principle of his entire career. The British have been running an operation called the Double Cross system. Here's how it works. When they capture a German spy, they don't just lock him up, they turn him. They compel him to keep reporting back to Berlin. Except now the information he sends is a careful mix of truth and lies, calibrated to give the Germans a distorted picture of reality. The genius of it is that the Germans can't tell the difference. The reports look real, the sources check out. But the picture they assemble from all these seemingly reliable reports is completely wrong. It's like looking at a jigsaw puzzle where every individual piece is authentic, but someone has swapped the box lid so you're building toward the wrong image. The deception is so effective that in the run up to D day, the Germans mass their forces away from the actual landing point at Normandy. They're expecting the invasion. Hundreds of miles away, the Allied armies land. With the German military in disarray. Jim is watching in real time how manufactured reality can determine which armies live and which armies die. How a lie, properly constructed and patiently maintained, can be more powerful than the truth. It's a lesson that will define the rest of his life, for better and for worse. After the war, Jim stays in Italy, building intelligence networks and establishing relationships with allied spy services in Europe. When the CIA is officially created in 1947, Jim is among its founding officers. Eventually, he moves to Washington D.C. and quickly rises through the ranks. By 1951, he takes on a role that will prove enormously valuable for decades. He becomes the CIA's exclusive liaison with Israeli intelligence. In 1949, his friend Kim Philby gets a sweet assignment. MI6's liaison officer in Washington DC, the British government's top intelligence representative to the Americans. The two men pick up right where they left off. They have lunch together regularly at a restaurant called Harvey's, A high end Washington establishment known for its lobster and powerful clientele. The secrets flow as freely as the bourbon. These lunches become a ritual, week after week, year after year. And as Jim takes on more power inside the CIA, the information he's sharing across that table becomes more and more valuable. But In May of 1951, something shakes the intelligence world. Two British intelligence officers, Guy Burgess and Donald McClane, suddenly vanished. They've defected to Moscow. They were Soviet spies. Suspicion quickly falls on Kim Philby, who's friends with both men. Investigators believe Kim may have tipped them off that they were about to be exposed. Jim doesn't believe it, not for a second. He defends Kim inside the CIA and assures senior officials that he trusts him completely. Some of Jim's colleagues at the CIA aren't so sure. Some of them have been suspicious of Kim for a while. But Jim pushes back while the idea isn't possible. You don't spend hundreds of hours across a table from someone and entertain the possibility that they're feeding every word to Moscow. The friendship itself becomes a kind of evidence. How could he be a spy? I know this man. But in counterintelligence, you can't ever risk it. Jim's word isn't enough, so Kim is recalled from Washington and forced to resign from MI6. Eventually, the British government agrees with Jim, and in 1955, the Foreign Secretary publicly clears Kim of any wrongdoing. Case closed. Kim settles into a new life as a journalist in Beirut, writing stories for the Economist. What almost nobody knows is that MI6 has quietly brought Kim back into the fold. He hasn't been formally reinstated, but they still treat him as a useful source in the Middle East. So he's a trusted asset. Once again, Jim's faith in his old friend seems justified. Meanwhile, Jim's power and influence continues to rise. In 1954, CIA Director Allen Dulles asked Jim to become chief of the counterintelligence staff. Jim accepts. He will hold this position for the next 20 years. It's during this period that Jim's relationship with Israel pays off. In 1956, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev gives a secret speech to the Communist Party Congress. Behind closed doors, to an audience of Soviet insiders only, Khrushchev denounces his predecessor, Joseph Stalin. He admits to the mass murders, the political terror, the cult of personality that had defined Soviet rule for decades. This is the leader of the Soviet Union essentially confessing that the system had been built on lies. No one in the west is supposed to know about it. But a Polish journalist with connections to Israeli intelligence gets his hands on a copy. It makes its way to Tel Aviv. And from Tel Aviv it lands on Jim's desk. He passes it to the Eisenhower administration, who leaks it to the New York Times. The speech goes public worldwide. The fallout is enormous. Communist parties around the globe are thrown into crisis. Soviet allies start questioning Moscow's leadership. It's arguably the most damaging piece of intelligence the west obtains during the entire Cold War. And Jim is the one who delivered cements his reputation inside the agency as someone who produces results. At this point, James Angleton is at the peak of his powers. He's the dominant counterintelligence figure in the Western world. He has every reason to trust his own judgment, every reason to believe he can tell the difference between what is real and what is staged, between a loyal ally and and a carefully constructed deception. He's about to find out what happens when he can't. This episode is brought to you by ZipRecruiter. Among the many, many conspiracy theories out there, the JFK assassination is the most enthralling to me because of all the avenues it goes down. But if you're hiring, you're lucky. Instead of going down, research rabbit holes. You can uncover exactly what you're looking for with ZipRecruiter. And even better, you can try it free@ziprecruiter.com theory. Its powerful matching technology works fast to find qualified candidates, and a new feature was just added that helps identify candidates who have an interest in your role. They can even send a personal response for why they're interested, which is an excellent way to learn more about them. Cut through the standard and get to the standouts with ZipRecruiter. Four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day. And now you can try it for free at ZipRecruiter.com theory that's ZipRecruiter.com theory. Meet your match on ZipRecruiter Spring Black
- [15:52]
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- [16:21]
K Pop Demon Hunters, Haja Boy's Breakfast Meal and Hunt Trick's Meal have just dropped at McDonald's. They're calling this a battle for the fans. What do you say to that, Rumi? It's not a battle. So glad the Saja Boys could take breakfast and give our meal the rest of the day.
- [16:36]
Carter Roy
It is an honor to share.
- [16:37]
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- [16:39]
Carter Roy
It is our larger honor.
- [16:41]
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- [16:48]
Carter Roy
Ba da ba ba ba and participate in McDonald's while supplies last December 1961, a Soviet intelligence officer walks into the American Embassy in Helsinki, Finland and announces that he wants to defect. His name is Anatoly Golitsyn. He is a high ranking member of the kgb. And he has a story, something big, something that will consume Jim Angleton for the rest of his career. Anatoly is brought to the United States and debriefed with the CIA. Officers who first speak with Anatoly find him arrogant and demanding. He insists on being interviewed by Jim personally, says nobody else at the agency is smart enough to understand what he has to say. Jim doesn't argue. He just pulls up a chair. Anatoly explains he's become disillusioned with the Soviet system and is ready to spill its secrets. He gives Jim information about KGB operations in Helsinki. He he provides a dossier of KGB personnel structure and methods. This gives him credibility. For Jim, this is the moment he's been preparing for his entire career. The CIA hasn't landed a KGB defector of this caliber since 1954. Anatoly was inside the KGB's strategic planning department, the part of the organization that decides how the whole machine operates. He doesn't just know what the KGB is doing, he knows how they think. Anatoly tells Jim that the KGB reorganized itself in the late 1950s and that the reorganization was designed to do one deceive the west on a massive scale. According to Anatoly, the KGB had essentially turned itself inside out. The bulk of its visible operations were were theater. The real power sat with a tight inner circle running the show from behind the curtain and those Soviet officers and diplomats that Western agencies kept recruiting as spies. Anatoly says most of them were already working for Moscow. The CIA thought it was gathering intelligence on the Soviet Union. In reality, Moscow was deciding what the CIA got to see. And yes, if you think that sounds a lot like the double cross system that Jim learned About from Kim during the war, where captured spies are turned and used to feed false information back to the enemy. You're right, and that's exactly why it resonates with Jim. He has spent his career understanding how deception operations work. He knows firsthand that reality can be manufactured. And now Anatoly is telling him the Soviets have been doing it to the Americans for years. But that's not all. Anatoly also claims the CIA itself has been infiltrated by a high ranking Soviet mole, someone embedded deep inside the agency. If that's true, the implications are staggering. Every operation the CIA has run could be compromised. Every source it's developed could be in danger. Every intelligence assessment it's produced could be wrong, or worse, designed to be wrong. People could be dying because of this person. People may have already died. He provides a handful of details. The molecules is of Slavic descent, may have been stationed in West Germany, has a last name that started with K and might have ended in ski, and operates under the KGB codename Sasha. I mean, think about that for a second. Slavic descent, stationed in Germany, last name starts with K, might end in ski, spelled S K, Y. You could probably find a dozen people in any government agency who fit that description. But Jim doesn't see it that way. To Jim, this is the thread he's been waiting for. And when he gets a thread, he pulls. He never stops pulling. This is a man who slept on a cot in his office during the war because he couldn't stop working. His whole career has been built on the idea that if you look closely enough, the pattern reveals itself. And now, for the first time, someone from inside the KGB is handing him the edge of something that may be thin, maybe vague, but it's real. He can feel it. And Anatoly isn't done. He makes one more prediction, and it's the one that seals Jim's devotion. He tells Jim the KGB will send another defector after him, a false one. His sole purpose will be to discredit Anatoly's information and protect the mole already inside Jim's agency. If that happens, Anatoly says don't believe him, no matter how convincing he is. Jim files that away. Then the mole hunt begins. Jim starts by scouring personnel files for anyone inside the CIA who might fit the outline Anatoly has given him. The first person in the crosshairs is a career CIA officer named Peter Carlo. Peter lost a leg during World War II. He spent the 1950s rising through the ranks of the CIA's Technical Services Division, the division responsible for the gadgets and tactical tools the Agency uses in the field. Think Q from the James Bond films. Peter is in line to become its chief. He also fits Anatoly's description. Jim discovers that Peter was actually born Peter Klabansky, a Slavic name ending with Sky. He served in Germany and had access to sensitive operations. On paper, this looks promising. Jim's team starts pulling the thread. The FBI puts Peter under intensive surveillance. They watch his movements, they monitor his contacts. They dig into his finances, his relationships, his history. Weeks go by, then months, and they find nothing. No secret meetings, no unexplained money, no contact with Soviet agents, nothing incriminating at all. But Jim insists that doesn't exonerate Peter. There's a difference in Jim's mind between we didn't find anything and he's clean. It just means Peter is careful. Peter is forced to resign in 1963. He is entirely innocent. He will spend the next two days decades fighting to clear his name. The CIA eventually pays him close to half a million dollars in compensation and gives him a secret medal. But his career is gone. And Peter is only the beginning. Jim's counterintelligence staff draws up a list. 40 CIA officers fall under investigation. 14 are considered serious suspects. Promotions, stall raises are withheld. Careers that officers spent decades building are quietly dismantled, not through formal charges or trials, but through suspicion, paranoia, and the word of one defector. One of the more painful cases involves a man named Leslie James Bennett. He's not a CIA officer, but a senior counterintelligence official for Canada's Royal Canadian mounted police. In 1962, Jim actually trusts Leslie enough to have him interview Anatoly. But Jim being Jim, that trust doesn't last. Not long after he starts to suspect Leslie of being Sasha. He opens an investigation, and eventually the Canadian police launch one too. They put Leslie under surveillance. They tap his phone. They bug his house, including his bedroom. The operation ends in Leslie being taken to a safe house for a five day interrogation. During those five days, his interrogators ask him humiliating personal questions about his sex life based on recordings from the bug in his bedroom. They find nothing. No evidence that Leslie was ever disloyal to anyone. But his top secret clearance is revoked anyway, and his career is over. His wife and children leave him, and eventually he's living in poverty in Australia. By the mid-1960s, the damage is mounting. Peter Carlo is gone. Leslie Bennett's career is destroyed. Estimates vary, but according to author David Wise, the careers of more than 100 CIA officers are damaged or Derailed by the mole hunt. Some are formally investigated. Some are quietly passed over for promotion with no explanation. Some simply realize they've been frozen out and leave on their own. The CIA eventually pays compensation to at least three officers under what agency employees grimly call the Mole Relief Act. And it's not just the people being investigated who are impacted. It's everyone around them. If your colleague is under suspicion, does that make you suspicious too? If you vouch for someone and they turn out to be guilty, does that mean you're compromised? People stop talking to each other. They stop sharing information. They stop trusting. Jim has a yellow line painted on the floor of the CIA vault room, cordoning off the safes that only his staff can access. If you work in that building, you see it every day, A physical reminder that someone is watching. Meanwhile, the Soviet division, the part of the CIA responsible for actually gathering intelligence on the Soviet Union, is grinding to a halt. Meetings with potential sources are vetoed. New operations are questioned before they begin. Intelligence coming in from the field is dismissed as possible disinformation. Soon, the suspicion becomes its own kind of trap. Push back against the mole hunt, and you look like you're protecting the mole. Defend a Soviet source and you're naive. Question Anatoly's credibility, and you're doing exactly what a false defector would want. There's no way to win. And as the mole hunt drags on, Jim is increasingly the only one who still believes in it. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover initially cooperates with the CIA after Anatoly defects, but he quickly grows skeptical of his sweeping claims about a Soviet mole at the top of Western intelligence. By the mid-1960s, the bureau has largely distanced itself from Jim Search, leaving him to pursue the theory inside the CAA long after others have stopped believing in it. Jim has searched for Sasha for three years and has almost nothing to show for it but hundreds of damaged careers. And then, right when Jim is at his most isolated, right when the rest of the agency is starting to wonder if he's lost his mind, another Soviet defector arrives, exactly as Anatoly predicted. His name is Yuri nosenko. In early 1964, he shows up to a CIA office, and he's carrying a bombshell. The year prior, President Kennedy was assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald, who lived in the Soviet Union for some time. And yes, by the way, we might as well call this show the 6 degrees of JFK at this point. He pops up in so many episodes. Anyway, Yuri claims that he personally handled the KGB's file on Oswald in 1959. According to Yuri, the KGB considered Oswald unstable and essentially worthless. They had no interest in recruiting him. Jim doesn't believe a word of it. And from his perspective, the reasons are overwhelming. First, the timing is almost too convenient. JFK has just been assassinated by a man who lived in the Soviet Union for three years. And months later, a KGB officer shows up volunteering that Moscow had nothing to do with it. If you're Jim, that doesn't look like a coincidence. It looks like a cleanup operation. Second, Yuri's story keeps changing. During his initial contact with the CIA in Geneva in 1962, he gives one version of events. When he defects in 1964, some of the details have shifted. His reasons for defecting change. To Jim, those inconsistencies aren't the normal fog of memory. They're the tell. A real defector gets the details right because he lived them. A fake defector gets them wrong because he's reciting a script that's been revised between performances. And finally, there's the overlap. Yuri's information touches on the same cases and the same operations that Anatoly reported on, but reaches different conclusions. To most people, that might suggest two honest sources who simply disagree. To Jim, it's proof of something far more sinister. The KGB wouldn't send a defector who contradicts their previous defector unless the second one is designed to neutralize the first. Anatoly predicted this would happen. He told Jim years ago that the KGB would send a false defector to discredit him. And now, right on schedule, here's Yuri. Jim's mind is made up. Yuri is a plant. In April 1964, on Jim's recommendation, Yuri is held in a secret CIA detention facility in Southern Maryland. He's kept alone. The food is bare minimum. He later says they gave him lsd, and they tell him that this is his life for decades, unless he admits he's working for Moscow. This goes on for over three years. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover is so outraged by Yuri's treatment that it effectively destroys the cooperation between the FBI and CIA for the remainder of Hoover's tenure. Which is a significant thing to break, given that these are the two agencies most responsible for protecting the United States from foreign espionage. Meanwhile, Anatoly's claims are growing stranger by the year. He tells Jim that British Prime Minister Harold Wilson is a Soviet agent, that the rift between China and the Soviet Union that every other analyst in the Western world considers genuine is a charade, a massive deception staged for Western consumption. That the KGB's influence reaches into the highest levels of virtually every Western government. These claims are, to the rest of the intelligence community, absurd. The FBI privately mocks what they call
- [33:51]
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- [34:59]
Carter Roy
Why wait?
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- [35:04]
Carter Roy
Anatoly's Monster Plot and I could see why. The Prime Minister of Great Britain is a Soviet agent. China and the Soviet Union are secretly best friends and just pretending to hate each other. Sounds like a bad spy novel, but Jim buys it. All of it. By this point, Jim has been searching for Sasha for about a decade. He's nearly torn the CIA apart. He's destroyed careers. He's imprisoned a man who may be telling the truth. He's lost the trust of the FBI, his own colleagues and most of the intelligence community. And he has nothing to show for it. But there's something I haven't told you yet, something about Jim's closest friend through all of this. Kim Philby. Okay, remember at the beginning of this episode when I told you about Jim's friend Kim Philby, the British intelligence officer who mentored Jim during the war, then had lunch with him every week in Washington. He'd been implicated as a spy back in 1951 when his pals Guy Burgess and Donald McLean defected to Moscow, but just four years later, his name was cleared. He's been living in Beirut ever Since working as a journalist, he and Jim are still the best of friends. Jim has defended him for over a decade. Yeah, about that. It turns out Kim Philby actually is a KGB spy. He has been since 1934. Before he ever joined MI6, before he ever met Jim Angleton, he was recruited as a young Communist idealist. And for nearly 30 years, he passed everything he learned to Moscow. Every one of those lunches at Harvey's where Jim shared secrets about CIA operations, personnel, sources and methods, all of it went straight to the Kremlin. And Jim has no idea. Okay, so let me back up for a second, because I need to show you how this fits into what you already heard. Anatoly defected in December 1961. When he sat down with Jim, he didn't just tell him about Sasha. He also revealed something about the 1951 defection of Guy Burgess and Donald McLean, the two British spies whose disappearance first raised suspicion about Kim. They weren't acting alone. According to Anatoly, they were part of what he calls the Cambridge Five, a group of British men recruited by Soviet intelligence back in the 1930s, all of whom knew each other, all of whom had been at Cambridge University together. Guy and Donald were two of the members. Kim Philby, Anatoly tells Jim, is the probable third. Anatoly doesn't know the names of the fourth and fifth. He clarifies that Kim isn't Sasha, the Soviet mole hiding in the CIA, but an entirely different mole altogether. Now, here's where it gets awkward for Jim. Anatoly is his most trusted source. Jim believes virtually everything this man tells him, and Anatoly is telling him that Kim is a Soviet agent. Jim doesn't reject this outright, but he doesn't exactly act on it either. He's been defending Kim since 1951, and now his own star defector is telling him he was wrong. That's a hard thing to sit with when your entire professional identity is built on reading people correctly. So instead of investigating his friend, Jim throws himself into searching for Sasha and, as we talked about, destroys many careers in the process. But MI6 doesn't ignore it. After Anatoly raises the possibility that Kim is part of the Cambridge spy ring, MI6 decides to confront him. In January 1963, they send Nicholas Elliot, one of Kim's oldest and closest friends in British intelligence, to Beirut to confront him. Nicholas has defended Kim for years, and now he's been given the job of getting a confession out of him. The two men meet in Kim's apartment in Beirut's Christian Quarter. To anyone passing outside, it would sound like a polite conversation, two old friends catching up. But what's actually happening is the end of a 30 year old lie. Nicholas tells Kim that British intelligence knows the truth. Kim pushes back at first. Then slowly he begins to admit things. Not everything, just enough to confirm the worst. And then he asks Nicholas for a few days before they continue the conversation. Nicholas agrees maybe he shouldn't have, because Kim uses those days to disappear. He slips out of Beirut under cover of darkness, boards a Soviet freighter and flees to Moscow. Now think about what this does to Jim's mind. He's already been told by anatoly that the KGB's penetration of Western intelligence goes deeper than anyone imagines. And now we the single most important relationship of his professional life has been exposed as a fraud. The irony is so precise, it almost doesn't feel real. Jim built his career on the lesson Kim taught him, that reality can be manufactured. That the person sitting across from you might be feeding you a picture designed in Moscow. And the man who taught him that lesson was himself. The manufactured reality Jim never detected. And Jim didn't just miss it. He actively defended Kim. He stakes his professional judgment on it. And he was wrong. Catastrophically, publicly, undeniably wrong. There were very real consequences to the information Jim shared. Agents behind the Iron Curtain were captured and killed in various Soviet operations. For a man who built his entire life on being the one who sees what others miss, it's not just an embarrassment, it may have been an existential crisis. If Jim was wrong about Kim, what else has he been wrong about? And I have to wonder if this is part of what drove Jim to obsessively search for Sasha. Jim doesn't just believe there's a mole in the CIA. Maybe he kind of needs it. It's possible finding Sasha becomes the thing that makes the Kim failure mean something. If Jim can catch this one, if he can prove that his instincts are still sharp, and then maybe the years he spent trusting Kim weren't a fatal flaw. But as we know, he can't catch this one either. Kim flees to Moscow in January 1963. That same year, Jim forces Peter Carlo out of the CIA based on nothing but a vague description from Anatoly. By 1964, he's locked Yuri Nasenko in a concrete room in Maryland. By the mid-60s, the FBI has walked away. Over 100 careers are damaged and the Soviet division is all but destroyed. It's been over 10 years since Anatoly first said the name Sasha. And Jim has nothing to show for it except the wreckage. Still, the hunt grinds on for the next decade. More officers investigated, more careers stalled, more dead ends. And the longer it goes with no Sasha, the harder it is to justify Jim's actions. In 1973, William Colby becomes Director of Central Intelligence. And unlike Jim's previous bosses, Bill isn't willing to look the other way. Bill looks at Jim's track record and sees a simple problem. 20 years of mole hunting, zero moles. Caught one best friend who really was a Soviet spy that Jim totally missed. He strips Jim of the Israel desk. He reorganizes the counterintelligence staff, and in December 1974, he calls Jim into his office and tells him he's done. Jim resists. Bill doesn't budge. It takes Jim nine months to clean out his office. When he finally leaves, he destroys counterintelligence files, including, at some point, Jim's memos about his conversations with Kim. What else went with them, we'll never know. After his forced retirement, Jim is adrift. He's 58 years old. For three decades, the CIA was his identity. And now, overnight, it's gone. He retreats to the orchid greenhouse behind his house, where he develops rare hybrids. He goes fly fishing and collects gemstones. He reads mystery novels about a private detective who solves crimes without ever leaving his house. The spy who spent his career in a locked office poring over files, now reading about a detective who does the same thing from his armchair. And every now and then, a journalist or a former colleague would visit, and Jim would hold court in his greenhouse, surrounded by orchids, chain smoking cigarettes, insisting he was right, that everything Anatoly said was true. And there's a mole codenamed Sasha still out there, maybe even more moles. James Angleton dies of lung cancer on May 11, 19, 1987. He's 69. At his funeral, his old roommate from Yale reads T.S. eliot's East Coker, a poem about an old man in a dry season. Age, uncertainty, and the limits of human understanding. About how knowledge fades the longer you chase it. Jim is buried at Morris Hill Cemetery in Boise, Idaho. Someone still decorates his grave with orchids. So there's one more thing I haven't mentioned. I know, I know. I've been dropping a lot of bombshells on you, but this one is really good. In the early 70s, when Jim was still in power, a veteran counterintelligence officer named Edward Petty launched an investigation of his own. Edward believed that if there's a mole this deeply embedded, this effective at paralyzing the CIA's ability to operate against the Soviet Union. Well, who has actually done the most damage? Who, by their actions, has accomplished exactly what a Soviet agent would want to accomplish? Edward spent about two years on the case. The file he assembled was 4ft tall. And at the end, in 1974, he concluded with 80 to 85% probability that the mole inside the CIA is Jim Engleton. I told you it was a big reveal. Even I had to read it twice.
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What?
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Carter Roy
What? What? But thinking about it, the mole hunt has destroyed the careers of loyal officers. It's paralyzed intelligence gathering against the Soviet Union. It's poisoned the CIA's relationship with allied intelligence services. It's created a level of institutional distrust so deep that the agency can barely function. If the KGB had designed an operation to neutralize the CIA from the inside side, they could not have done a better job than what Jim was already doing. Now, to be clear, most historians believe Jim was not a Soviet agent. But the fact that his own methodology, rigorously applied to himself, produces this result, that tells you something about the methodology and about how thin the line is between vigilance and destruction. And still to this day, we don't know who Sasha was or if they even existed. Author David wise, who spent 10 years investigating the mole hunt and interviewed over 200 people for his book Mole Hunt, said he found no proof that a mole ever existed inside the CIA. Some intelligence officers who worked the case came to believe that Anatoli exaggerated what he knew or made connections that weren't there, or simply told Jim what Jim wanted to hear. Because the more important Anatoly seemed to, the better he was treated. And Jim gave Anatoly extraordinary treatment. He gave him access to the CIA's own classified files to help trigger his memory. He put him up in safe houses. He protected him from other debriefers who might have challenged his claims. So was Sasha a real Soviet agent? A composite of fragments? Anatoly half remembered from a report he read 10 years earlier or a story that got bigger every time it was told because the man listening needed it to be true? We don't know, and we may never know which might be the most Jim Angleton ending possible. A wilderness of mirrors all the way down. Thank you for listening to conspiracy theories. We're here with a new episode every Wednesday. Be sure to check us out on Instagram. He conspiracypod. If you're watching on Spotify, swipe up and give us your thoughts for more information on James Engleton. Amongst the many sources we used, we found the The Secret Life of CIA spymaster James Jesus Angleton by Jefferson Morley Mulhunt the Secret Search for Traitors that Shattered the CIA by David Wise and Cold Warrior James Jesus Angleton the CIA's master spy hunter by Tom Mangold. Extremely helpful to our research. Until next time. Remember, the truth isn't always the best story, and the official story isn't always the truth. This episode was written and researched by Chelsea Wood, Fact Checked by Sophie Kemp and engineered video edited and sound designed by Alex Button. I'm your host, Carter Roy. Quick interruption worth hearing. If you love sports, TikTok is for you. Game highlights, expert breakdowns and fan reactions. Just the moments that matter. Download TikTok now.