Nexus - 0704 - New Times Magazine-pages

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THE CIA, UFOs, MJ-12, JFK & JAMES JESUS ANGLETON CIA, UFOs, THE MJ-12, JFK ANGLETON JAMES JESUS As the CIA's Counterintelligence Chief, James Jesus Angleton had access to the Agency's most closely guarded secrets, including MJ-12 files on UFOs. ames Jesus Angleton was born on December 9, 1917 in Boise, Idaho, to NCR busi- nessman/OSS Colonel James Hugh Angleton and Mexican-born Carmen Mercedes Moreno. Upon graduation from Yale in 1941, Angleton moved to Harvard Law School where he met his future wife, Cicely d'Autremont, of Duluth, Minnesota. Inducted into the US Army on March 19, 1943, Angleton was recruited into the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in August through the efforts of Angleton's father and Norman Pearson, his old English professor from Yale who at that time was head of the OSS Counterintelligence division in London.! OSS COUNTERINTELLIGENCE OPERATIONS DURING WW II James Jesus Angleton was assigned the Rome desk after Italy's capitulation to the Allies, and was made an OSS Lieutenant who ran counterintelligence (CI) activities in such countries as Austria, Germany, Spain and Switzerland as well as the Mediterranean area. As part of OSS operations in the European theatre, Angleton mastered the arts of "black" propaganda and "playback"—that is, the method of reading the effectiveness of one's own disinformation on the enemy. In 1944, he was given charge of the OSS Special Counterintelligence Unit Z, made up of US and British agents, and was the youngest member of X-2 and the only American member allowed access to the top-secret British ULTRA code-breaking intelligence. After the war, Angleton was promoted to Captain and was awarded the Legion of Merit from the US Army which cited him for successfully apprehending over a thousand enemy intelligence agents. He was also decorated by the Italian Government and was awarded the Order of the Crown of Italy, the Order of Malta/Cross of Malta and the Italian War Cross for Merit. In October 1945, President Truman dissolved the OSS and had all research and analysis units moved to the State Department and operational units to the War Department, and redesignated it as the Strategic Services Unit (SSU). Angleton stayed on in the SSU in Rome and became the vital station chief in charge of the 2677 Regiment, which made Angleton the senior US intelligence officer in Italy until the SSU became the Central Intelligence Group (CIG) in 1946, forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).’ THE MAKING OF JAMES ANGLETON AS A MASTER SPY HUNTER Angleton's war experience in counterintelligence operations had affected him to the extent that he became absorbed into the "hall of mirrors" world of intelligence and refused to leave the service, despite much insistence and disappointment from his father. James would pour over the many CI files he had amassed while in Italy and was forever changed by the intrigue and the possibilities of a career in the CIG. In the summer of 1947, Angleton returned to the United States to live in Tucson, Arizona, to be with his wife and family, but his love for the service was overpowering. On December 30, 1947, he was hired by the CIA as a senior aide to the Director of the Office of Special Operations (OSO).* It was during this period that Army G-2 and other intelli- gence agencies were trying to crack the Soviet Venona code, used by espionage agents operating in the United States to send back sensitive information regarding the Manhattan Project based at Los Alamos, New Mexico. It is possible that Angleton was on special assignment prior to officially reporting to the OSO, which had the responsibility of running counterespionage operations.* Angleton's primary mission in the OSO included oversee- ing a classified component that operated espionage and counterespionage activities abroad, and reading all sensitive material coming across his desk and passing it to OSO operators by Timothy S. Cooper © 2000 PO Box 1206 Big Bear Lake, CA 92315 USA Telephone: +1 (909) 878 5929 PO Box 1206 Big Bear Lake, CA 92315 USA Telephone: +1 (909) 878 5929 JUNE — JULY 2000 NEXUS - 59