Angleton on Our War
Another page from the Angleton files.

By Michael Ledeen, NRO contributing editor & resident scholar in the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute. He is author, most recently, of Machiavelli on Modern Leadership
October 2, 2001 9:40 a.m.

Editor's note: For Michael Ledeen's previous conversations with James Jesus Angleton see 1 and 2.

hat with all the disruptions in the communications systems — even the redoubtable NRO e-mail nets were down for days on end — it was tough getting my Ouija board to work well, but I finally got through to James Jesus Angleton, the long-time head of CIA counterintelligence who died more than a decade ago, to ask him the obvious questions about our war on terrorism. He was in a feisty mood.

ML: The first question is the obvious one. Can we get these guys?

JJA: Yes, we can, and the really good news, at least from this distance, is that the president clearly wants to get them. All of them, the terrorists themselves and their handlers.

ML: And public opinion is very solid.

JJA: Public opinion is solid today, but it's very fickle. We're going to have some setbacks, and it's good that we're taking our time. The absolute worst thing is to screw up the first operations. And that's fairly likely, actually. We've been out of this business for such a long time. It's like an athlete who's been in a hospital bed for a couple of months, his muscles atrophying, suddenly asked to jump up and run a marathon. Odds are, he's gonna tear a muscle or something.

ML: But I thought our Special Forces were first class...

JJA: They're pretty good, but they can't be any better than the intelligence, and the intelligence is weak, as you know. Look at the first reactions: They thought they knew who the terrorists were, because they had passport information, and they thought the terrorists had thoughtfully left them all kinds of clues in their cars, parked at the airports. There was obviously lots of disinformation, false scents, misleading documents, and so forth. It's incoherent. Why would they go out of their way to tell us who they were? Now, of course, it turns out that some of those Saudi passports were reported stolen months and years ago.

It gets even more preposterous. Look at that "letter" that Ashcroft put out the other day. Can you believe the terrorists saved their instructions instead of destroying them? It's a total violation of all the rules of clandestine operations. I mean, it's as if they desperately wanted us to believe that the only thing that matters here is Islam, when we all know, indeed we have known for years, that two out of the three major sponsors are certainly not religious states: Iraq and Syria. Iran is a different matter, of course.

ML: Are you saying that you don't think this is part of bin Laden's holy war against the West?

JJA: Not at all. Bin Laden is a true fanatic, and anyone who flies a plane into a skyscraper is a True Believer of some sort. But if this is a state-sponsored operation, the states would do everything possible to paint a false picture, to say to us that it's ONLY bin Laden, that it's ONLY Islamic fanaticism, and to cover any tracks that lead back to professional intelligence services.

ML: And do you see hints of a professional intelligence service?

JJA: Of course! Somebody organized a long-term sleeper network inside the United States, and that requires considerable spycraft. The sleepers need money, clandestine communications, and considerable coordination between the various cells, which were probably not in contact with one another, but were linked back through a central control. They needed false documents — and it's not easy to get really good, false passports, by the way — and they needed to be trained to assume their "cover" identities. It was a thoroughly professional operation, top to bottom. The whole thing reeks of an intelligence service.

ML: And our counterintelligence was obviously not very good, was it?

JJA: Our counterintelligence has been systematically corrupted for more than 25 years. It all goes back to the Church Committee in the Senate and the Pike Commission in the mid-seventies, and of course my purge by CIA chief William Colby at that time. Ever since, the counterintelligence units have been penetrated by foreign agents over and over again, most recently the FBI with Hanssen and the CIA with Ames.

ML: Yeah, but that was Russian, wasn't it? And these are Muslims.

JJA: You have to ask yourself, what happened after the fall of the wall? The Russians didn't stop spying on us, and who knows whether they maintained ties with Middle Eastern terrorist groups? We know that they trained PLO terrorists. We know that they were at least in contact with Arab sleeper groups in the United States back in the 1980s. Did they cut those ties? Did they turn them over to "friendly" governments? I have no idea. But somebody had better figure it out. The history is enormously important.

ML: Do you think we're serious enough to get to the bottom of it?

JJA: I do hope so, but there are some worrisome signs. Nobody has been fired, which tells the men and women in the field that they're still playing by the old rules, whatever may be said in public. And, good grief, what in the world is Gary Condit doing on the congressional committee dealing with homeland defense? I mean, if ever there were an easy target for blackmail...it was bad enough that they kept him on the Intelligence Oversight Committee, but to put him at the very heart of our antiterrorist efforts...it worries me.

Plenty to think about, as usual. I thanked him for his time, and promised to get back to him in a couple of weeks.