In a signed New York Times editorial titled “Mr. Angleton and Mr. Ames,” Philip Taubman advised, with an air of world-weary wisdom, that the Central Intelligence Agency was brought low by twin destroyers: James J. Angleton and Aldrich Ames. Angleton was the 20-year counterintelligence chief of the CIA, unquestionably brilliant and fiercely anti-communist, but about whose effectiveness legitimate debate takes place; Ames is the traitor whose betrayal led to, among other things, the torture and murder of American agents. (Taubman writes that “America’s real spies inside the Soviet Union were unmasked by Mr. Ames and they were replaced or manipulated by the KGB.” ” Replaced”!)
Taubman discerns “a cruelly ironic connection between the two men.” “They we re both obsessed with deception, and in the end deception devoured them both, and with them, the CIA.” “[T]hey twisted the agency into knots that have yet to be completely untied.” “Only two men could create such a maze.” “[T]heir story is the story of the failure of the CIA. Mr. Angleton, the mole hunter, and Mr. Ames, the mole, burrowed so deep into the recesses of American intelligence that they reached a lightless place where one man’s effort to protect secrets and another man’s effort to destroy them seemed barely distinguishable because both gravely damaged the CIA.”
This is, to put it mildly, an infamy. Whatever sins Angleton may have committed in life, he was a patriot whose belief in the existence of moles was posthumously vindicated by the discovery of Ames. Ames, by contrast, was responsible for the deaths of 10 people, at a minimum. To call this moral equivalence is not enough. Moral idiocy would be more appropriate.
