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Forced Out. His defenders regard Angleton as a casualty of the times. They believe that he was forced out because some important U.S. policymakers no longer hold counterintelligence an indispensable function and so strongly believe in the durability of detente that they are uncomfortable with a clandestine organization that persists in regarding the KGB as a serious threat. In this respect, Angleton's departure is reminiscent of the fate of a fictional counter-intelligence man, George Smiley, the sad hero of John le Carré's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Fired during a staff shake-up at the British Secret Service, Smiley was later called back to root out a suspected "mole," or traitor, who had burrowed deeply into his old organization. The mole resembles Kim Philby, the famed British double agent. It was Angleton who provided some of the information that enabled the British to nail down the case against Philby before the English spy fled to Moscow.