James Angleton’s desk was deeply buried in folders, case files and paperwork and bathed in the glow of a single lamp. He dug deeply into the material, constantly searching for answers, hunting for truth, yearning to know. He spent a decade hunting for the elusive truth he so desperately wanted, looking for the truth he’d been paid to find. The biggest vault in his office contained 40,000 files in a tall set of huge racks stretching 40 feet down the room. None of the records were computerized. Angleton didn’t trust the information out of his sight. Hidden somewhere in the haze of his ever-present cigarette smoke lay answers to his fervent quest — or did they?
James Angleton, born in Idaho and raised in Ohio, had spent time at a private school in England where he rubbed shoulders with the upper crust. He rarely talked about his middle name — apparently it illuminated a past he wanted to forget. Instead, he aspired to live like the British gentry. After attending Yale and Harvard Law School, he began training to sniff out double agents — people posing as friendly to U.S. interests but actually working for foreign governments. At the end of World War II, his interests began to focus on spotting Communist infiltrators. Before long, he found himself at the head of the CIA counter-intelligence efforts and working closely with his British friends. He developed a close friendship with a British MI6 agent in 1949 — a good Cambridge University man, in fact. They spent long lunch hours together gossiping, swapping agency stories and trying to out-drink each other. James Angleton’s handsome British friend, born, bred and formed in wealth and privilege, had been recruited, trained and working for Soviet intelligence for nearly 20 years.
When James found out the truth about his friend, he wouldn’t believe it — he couldn’t have been so wrong. When the proof finally reached the front page of every newspaper, James would never fully trust again. He never let go of his suspicions. Maybe you’ve been burned, betrayed, fooled and are not ready to trust again. So many have been deceived, but the worst effects seem to come when the relationship was deep — a mother, father, uncle, wife or religious leader. Maybe like James you want to retreat, watch with cynicism and never get caught again. Your brain carries a deep locked vault with racks of thousands of suspicions. Each little lift of the eyebrow, tone of voice and chance remark is triple-checked for meaning. Who can you trust? Not me. I’ve lied before. But there’s someone who hasn’t. Not once. Not ever. Peter wrote about Jesus Christ, “who did no sin, neither was guile found in His mouth” (1 Peter 2:22). Guile, deceit, shaded truth and getting someone to believe a lie are pretty destructive — but everyone’s done it, right? Remember the time you hurriedly switched from the sports page back to the spreadsheet when your boss approached? After all, you had been working really hard and had your project done already. No need to leave the boss with the “wrong” impression. What about the time you looked your husband in the eye and told him you were late because you’d gotten stuck in traffic? True enough but not the whole truth. There was more he just didn’t need to know. What did Peter know about Jesus that you don’t?
In 1963 when Angleton’s British friend fled to Moscow and James could no longer deny the truth that his friend was a Soviet spy, he doubled down in his search for double-agents. As someone said, “Angleton’s behavior would increasingly reflect his deep mistrust of nearly everyone he encountered.” But we all have to put our trust somewhere, and James put his faith in Anatoliy Golitsyn, a Soviet defector who was passing on secrets to the CIA. Golitsyn insisted that all who came after him would be liars looking to discredit him. He had other grand claims about Soviet and Chinese relations. Some of what he said was true and verified — just enough for Angleton to put his full trust in Golitsyn. Golitsyn pointed to the secret hiding place of listening devices in the American Embassy in Moscow and to three different Soviet double agents in Canada and England. Someone who knew so much could be trusted! Couldn’t they?
Yuri Nosenko, a self-proclaimed KGB operations officer, defected and passed on a pile of information. Some of it was verifiable; some of it wasn’t. But Nosenko made one big “mistake.” He contradicted some of the things Golitsyn was telling James Angleton, and Angleton became convinced that Nosenko was a double agent. When Nosenko was brought to the U.S. in 1964, Angleton had him illegally imprisoned in an attic room near Washington D.C. There he was interrogated non-stop in a relentless search for truth. He was verbally abused by his guards. He was lied to. He was kept in a tiny room with no heat or air conditioning. He was cut off from a toothbrush and toothpaste. His teeth began to fall out. Despite interrogations that kept him in his chair for 24 hours while being hammered with questions, Nosenko stuck to his story.
Did Angleton give up? There was no way he was going to be fooled. He had a special concrete house built and transferred Nosenko to a 100-square-foot room with no pillow. The lights in the room were never turned off. He had very little to eat but instead was forced to smell the good food his guards ate nearby. When he made himself a little chess set out of threads, the guards found and destroyed it. He was given a “confession” to sign and pestered for hours to sign it. Finally he picked it up, grabbed a pen and scribbled on it. The guards looked down to see, not the words “Yuri Nosenko,” but instead “Not True.”
Corroboration of Nosenko’s information continued to trickle in. Did the mounting facts that Nosenko had told the truth change Angleton’s mind? Instead Angleton said “that Nosenko’s superhuman stamina only proved his point that the KGB was insidious and extraordinarily skilled in the art of espionage.” Sometimes the truth is just plain uncomfortable. It strikes at the heart of our cynicism. It challenges deeply held beliefs. It forces us to recognize that we just might be wrong.
So why believe what Peter said? Peter spent three and a half years traveling with Jesus, eating with Him, listening to Him speak, watching how he treated children, seeing Him in a glorious display of personal beauty, listening when He was put on trial. Peter also got burned by a fake, taken in by Judas like his other friends were. So who did he trust? Here’s what Peter said: “Christ also hath once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, that He might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh, but quickened [made alive] by the Spirit” (1 Peter 3:18). He trusted Jesus Christ, not just as an honest and good man, but as One who had died for him. Peter calls Jesus “just” and himself an “unjust” one for whom Jesus died. Then he talks about how Jesus Christ had come back to life in the power of God’s Spirit. That’s a pretty ringing endorsement from a man who was willing to die — and in fact did die — for what he believed.
Eventually Angleton’s suspicions caught up with him. He illegally spied on U.S. citizens and was forced from his job. Few doubted Angleton’s loyalty to his country, but his deep fear of being fooled steered him in the wrong direction. He tried to bribe the reporter that was about to expose him but failed. The old British friend who duped Angleton was Kim Philby, perhaps the most famous Soviet double agent ever, and it was this incident that led James Angleton far from truth into a world of fear and distrust. He had been wrong — sincerely wrong. As he lay dying of lung cancer in May of 1987, one of the last coherent things he said to his wife was “I’ve made so many mistakes.”
Perhaps your search for truth has led you down some blind alleys. Maybe you’ve been “burned” by religious people. I encourage you to consider the words of Jesus Christ, “I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by Me” (John 14:6). You have to put your trust somewhere. Incidentally, James Jesus Angleton was ashamed of his middle name. It had been given to him by his Mexican mother. Perhaps the name quietly condemned many of his daily habits. Are you ashamed of or hiding from that name, the name of Jesus? Are you convinced of your own rightness and doubtful of His? Pick up His Word, the Bible. Read it with an open, eager heart. Search it and test its claims. It will show you that deep inside you have your own hidden secrets — we all have them. It will expose your rebellion against God, that He calls sin. But it will also show you His love for you. It will display to you “God, that cannot lie” (Titus 1:2). You won’t have to come to the end of your life and say, “I’ve made so many mistakes.” Instead, you’ll be able to say with full confidence, “The Son of God, who loved me, and gave Himself for me” (Galatians 2:20).
You can find out a lot more about the certainty found in the Bible in The Soldier’s Book.