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As the war came on, Angleton's father moved the family to New York and joined the OSS. He took part in the planning of the Italian invasion, went ashore with the assault forces at Anzio and rose to colonel. Son Jim had meanwhile entered Harvard Law School and married Cicely d'Autremont of Tucson, Ariz., a junior at Vassar. He was called up in 1943, put through basic training and also assigned to OSS and sent to Italy. His unit uncovered some of the secret correspondence between Hitler and Mussolini that was later introduced into the Nuremberg trials as proof of their conspiracy.
After the war, Donovan asked him to help the provisional Italian government beat off a threatened Communist takeover. Angleton assisted the carabinieri in rebuilding a counter-intelligence service. Through it, he acquired the Soviet instructions to the Italian Communists for supporting the Greek Communists in the civil war in Greece. He and his principal associate for all of his career, Raymond Rocca, who retired recently from the CIA, where he had been Angleton's chief deputy, ferreted out the exchange of correspondence between Stalin and Tito that foreshadowed the 1948 breach between them.
Late in 1947 Angleton resigned from the Army as a major and returned to Washington. By then, he had become, as he puts it, "sharply aware of the Soviet long-term objectives in subversion." Having long ago turned his back on law, he joined the CIA, which had been created some months earlier. Angleton was put in charge of helping to organize its clandestine side.
Many of Angleton's covert operations after he joined the CIA remain secret. The only people who know what he really did are his superiors and those who worked with him. One exploit that can be told came early hi 1956. In collaboration with a friendly intelligence service, his unit acquired a copy of Nikita Khrushchev's famed denunciation of Stalin to the 20th Party Congress. Angleton and his lieutenants also developed the evidence that helped lead the FBI in 1957 to the KGB agent Colonel Rudolf Abel, who had operated since 1948 from an obscure photographer's shop in Brooklyn. The numbers of spies who have been caught in Angleton's net run into the dozens. They include George Blake, a senior officer in the British Secret Service; George Paques, a NATO official whose activities were in part the basis of the book and film Topaz; and Heinz Felfe, a high-ranking officer of the West German intelligence service.
Angleton's CIA staff was small—no more than a few score, mostly senior men who had been with him since the agency's founding. They were chiefly specialists on the "adversary" services; a foreign intelligence officer says that the operation was "the best in the world." Three of Angleton's people, including Rocca, have left the agency, angry over its failure to stand by their boss.