THENEWYORKER, SEPTEMBER 2, 2019 57
went to India, having embraced vari-
ous kinds of pantheistic mysticism. And
yet the fantasies that Gottlieb’s work
indulged are part of the woof and warp
of the James Bond novels, a good index
of the period’s inner life. Biological war-
fare through posthypnotic suggestion
is the thread running through the best
of them, “On Her Majesty’s Secret Ser-
vice” (1963), and Bond himself is turned
into a programmed assassin in “The
Man with the Golden Gun” (1965), with
orders to go back to headquarters and
kill M. (M, of course, has anticipated
the attack, and installed a descending
shield in the ceiling above his desk.)
That none of this was real did not make
it less emotionally credible. What seems
ridiculous to us now was then not just
part of the currency of fantasy but part
of the currency of the plausible, no more
or less absurd than our own particular
set of accepted pulpish horrors, like the
fear that makes us all obediently take
off our shoes and have them X-rayed
in honor of a single failed “shoe bomber,”
nearly two decades ago. A time’s ter-
rors are its own, and each age gets the
agents it deserves.
As Kinzer’s book repeatedly shows,
the pursuit of fantasy produces real ca-
sualties. One of White’s friends was the
C.I.A. officer James Jesus Angleton,
with whom White, in the fifties, once
enjoyed a round of LSD-laced gin-and-
tonics—truly, the C.I.A. cocktail. Per-
haps the acid affected Angleton’s con-
duct afterward, making him one of the
few successful mind-control subjects.
For it was Angleton who, as the agen-
cy’s counterintelligence chief during
the height of the Cold War, kept the
C.I.A. in the grip of a confident para-
noid belief—which lower-ranking op-
eratives were required to adopt, at the
risk of banishment or expulsion—in
what insiders came to call the Black
Hat theory. The theory held that the
agency had long been penetrated by a
high-ranking mole and that the K.G.B.,
to protect him, was sending a steady
stream of fake defectors with “disinfor-
mation.” The defectors who did arrive,
almost all of them real, were subject to
hostile skepticism and, in one case, vi-
cious mistreatment.
A truly fascinating man, Angleton
was a devoted student of the matchless
British literary critic William Empson,
who descried, in the densely metaphoric
poems of Donne and Shakespeare, pat-
terns of subtle contradiction, self-refer-
ence, and ambiguity. Angleton had, in
effect, weaponized this strategy of in-
terpretation—convinced that any ap-
parently straightforward reference in
the world in fact meant something shad-
owier than it seemed to. And so he wove
a web of Empsonian doubleness and
interlineated meaning into a Cold War
“text” that was brutally simple in in-
tention. It was as if a reader trained in
Donne had been given a lyric by Tommy
James and the Shondells: it can’t possi-
bly be this obvious. (They keep saying,
“My baby does the hanky-panky!” What
do they really mean?) A dose of acid
was the last thing this kind of highbrow
paranoia needed.A
n older and overlooked book raises
similar questions about the intel-
ligence of national intelligence. “Cir-
cle of Treason: A CIA Account of Trai-
tor Aldrich Ames and the Men He
Betrayed,” first published in 2012, by
the Naval Institute Press, was written
by Sandra Grimes and Jeanne Verte-
feuille, two of the C.I.A. officers who,
after several years of investigation, de-
termined in the early nineteen-nineties
that Ames, the agency’s head of So-
viet counterintelligence, was a Soviet
spy. Their triumph, somewhat less-
ened by the reality that Ames had been
doing pretty much everything short
of wearing a nametag written in Rus-sian, is made more touching because of
the bureaucratic obstacles they had to
overcome at each turn. (Among them
was the way female agents were al-
most always relegated to less impor-
tant tasks, and were handed this urgent
one largely as an afterthought.) Their
account, more a document than a book,
shows a purely civil-service mind-set
intersecting with what seems like ex-
traordinarily high stakes: the discovery
of the ultimate mole.Competition with the F.B.I. is
Grimes and Vertefeuille’s obsessive sub-
ject—they tell us at length how unfairly
medals and money, not to mention
media attention, got handed out after
the nation was saved from the mole.
And how underpaid the people who
are entrusted with national security are!
Ames, who started spying for Russia in
the mid-eighties, typically received sums
of between twenty thousand and fifty
thousand dollars for delivering infor-
mation, and was seen as wildly greedy,
this at a time when traders at Drexel
Burnham Lambert were making mil-
lions a year. A giveaway of his guilt came
when one of the C.I.A. officers, speak-
ing to Ames’s “spendthrift” wife, learned
that the Ameses were planning to do
all the window treatments of their new
home at once, instead of having them
done one at a time, like normal C.I.A.
agents. Only a Russian spy would have
that kind of dough!
Grimes and Vertefeuille make plain
the extent to which internal C.I.A. pol-
itics remained an absolute clusterfuck
throughout their time in the agency,
owing to the long hangover of Angle-
ton’s Black Hat theory. Our mole hunt-
ers patiently explain to the reader, as
others tried to explain to their superi-
ors, that the idea of a fake defector was
prima-facie impossible within the So-
viet system, because of “one word—trust.”
No K.G.B. superior would equip a de-
fector with enough bona-fide informa-
tion to be even superficially helpful, since
the odds of his going over for real were
too great. This simple calculation, self-
evident to the Soviets, was far too self-
evident for a mind like Angleton’s.
The information that these penetra-
tion agents delivered wasn’t the design
for the hyper-cobalt-quantum bomb
but, almost invariably, inside dirt about
the competing organization: who did
what, who sat where, who reported to
whom, who was up or down—office
politics, essentially. Ames’s first gift to
his K.G.B. handlers consisted of C.I.A.
phone lists. Meanwhile, the C.I.A.’s
Russian assets were supplying parallel
information. Such dispatches, Grimes
and Vertefeuille say, provided a thrill-
ingly complete picture of what the
K.G.B. was doing. It is as if the New
York Times and the Washington Post
had decided to start a hyperaggressive