William Empson's influence on the CIA
Counterintelligence, argued James Angleton, called for the kind of practical criticism he learned at Yale
Terence HawkesRyder Street in the City of Westminster might not currently seem a site to conjure with, but in 1943, when Section V of MI6 moved to offices there, it stood as the core of Anglo-American chicanery and cozenage. If you came to work early enough you could see, from the upper floors, the employees of Quaglino’s restaurant recycling its garbage from the night before.
Counter-intelligence, the concern of the office members, is also a mode of recycling. The task is not to detect and remove the enemy’s agents: quite the reverse. Counterintelligence aims to collect and master the enemy’s intelligence in order to turn it against him. By sifting and ordering the information that the enemy’s agents transmit, it analyses the questions they are aiming to answer, obtains evidence of their plans and intentions as a result, and then tries to influence or supplant these by the answers that it carefully supplies. Rather than execute spies, counterintelligence aims to “turn” them. This proved a handy skill when Russia threatened India, the jewel in the British Empire’s crown, and Kipling’s novel Kim offers a fitting memorial to what was called the Great Game. An updated scheme called the “Double Cross” later emerged from Whitehall as a way of dealing with the subsequent threat from Hitler’s Germany. When the American allies arrived in London in 1942, they were so impressed by the massive British card index of agents that they modelled the system of their own Office of Strategic Services (OSS) on it.
Norman Holmes Pearson, formerly an instructor in the English Department at Yale University before becoming a major element in the OSS, was wholly approving. As a student of literary criticism, he was naturally attracted to the subtleties of a text-based system that put a crucial emphasis on recognition of thematic and structural patterns. New Criticism, as the practice was called at Yale, concerned itself not with literary history and the personality of authors, but with the specific use poems made of language on the page. It fostered an interest in multiple levels of meaning, ambivalence, paradox, wit, puns and the peculiarities of Sprachgefühl: all devices on which cryptic codes or obscure messages might draw. In fact, when he described the whole Double Cross system, Pearson made it sound like a poem elucidated in class, its ironies nicely balanced, its contrasts wittily shaped. The power produced by this kind of close reading was intense, and as a result he was delighted to welcome as one of his new assistants in the OSS a graduate of Yale who had studied these mysteries: James Angleton. Based in Europe, educated at Malvern and clad in bespoke English tailoring, James Angleton fitted comfortably into an Anglophiliac Yale. The photo on the cover of Michael Holzman’s book makes him look remarkably like T. S. Eliot. Yet his full name, James Jesus Angleton, sets free its own vitalizing American ambiguity. He was the son of the US-born James Hugh Angleton and Carmen Mercedes Moreno from Nogales, Mexico. And though he never used his Mexican name in later life, that “Jesus” marks him, by our standards, as a Chicano: from a British perspective he seems exotically transatlantic.
Holzman’s brisk, uncluttered book offers valuable access to previously untapped material on Angleton, who became the first head of the Counter-intelligence Staff of the CIA. In particular, it makes incisive use of his years as a student of English at Yale and the influence on him of the New Critics and modernist poets of his day. Previous biographers such as Robin Winks have pointed out that at Yale he was co-editor of the literary journal Furioso. But Holzman takes a more spirited line, publishing two of Angleton’s grating undergraduate poems and a list of his correspondence with writers such as T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, I. A. Richards, William Empson, Ezra Pound and Louis MacNeice. These famous poets all “took this young man very seriously” and he, in return, was greatly impressed by their writings, particularly the book that became a crucial text of New Criticism, Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity. For Empson, ambiguity is the central aspect of language. Not a minor stylistic flourish, it is an unavoidable linguistic feature permanently in place and in effect seems to exploit the fundamental characteristics of language itself. This means that “opposite” meanings will always illuminate and invade the primary meanings of ordinary words, so that “in a sufficiently extended sense any prose statement could be called ambiguous”. Thus, Empson argues, a word may have several distinct meanings; several meanings connected with one another; several meanings which need one another to complete their meaning; or several meanings which unite together so that the word means one relation or one process . . . what often happens when a piece of writing is felt to offer hidden riches is that one phrase after another lights up and appears as the heart of it; one part after another catches fire.
Given the allure of this, it seemed quite appropriate that Angleton should be sedulously practising in Ryder Street the reading arts he had learned in the Yale classroom. Of course the issue of ambiguity is insignificant when it involves intelligence data of a practical kind. The decoding of military messages is a relatively simple matter. But when counter-intelligence is at stake, when agents may be recognized as “turned”, so that what they supply either prevents access to the enemy’s spy system or actively penetrates our own, they themselves become “texts” which demand complex analysis. A sensitivity to ambiguity then becomes a crucial weapon. The improbable but undeniable impact of modern literary criticism on practical politics has no better model, and Angleton later described his work in counter-intelligence as “the practical criticism of ambiguity”. His rise was swift. In November 1944, Pearson became chief of the OSS counterintelligence department, or X-2, for all of Europe, and his protégé Angleton was transferred to Italy as the commander of SCI (Special Counter Intelligence) Unit Z. One of his tasks was to deal with fascist placemen, and he frequently used double agents. A particular experience in Italy was the capture of Ezra Pound. The spectacle of the much admired poet dejectedly emptying his night-bucket was presumably chastening, and Angleton left a “bottle of good spirits” to Pound in his will.
Angleton was one of a number of professionals in intelligence who chose to remain in government service at the end of the war. In 1947, with the capital of the Western world starting to shift from Whitehall to Washington, he returned to the US. On December 20 of that year he joined the Central Intelligence Group, one of the organizations designed to succeed the OSS. The Italian election of the following year turned out to be a major coup for the intelligence services. A great deal of money was raised in the United States, a massive letter-writing campaign was organized from Italian immigrant neighbourhoods, and Frank Sinatra made a Voice of America broadcast, all designed to browbeat the electorate into voting against the Communists. The campaign’s success aided the establishment of the Central Intelligence Agency, legislation supporting it was passed in June 1949, and Angleton joined the organization immediately. He was just thirty-two years old.
Holzman’s account of the rest of Angleton’s career is unsparing. A special relationship between Angleton and Israel’s secret intelligence service, Mossad, gave him a major role in preserving Israel’s secrecy in respect of Suez. As the officer in charge of the Israeli “account”, he supported the Israeli atomic bomb programme, and he managed to obtain a copy of the “secret speech” in which Khrushchev denounced Stalin. Of course there were reverses. Angleton’s most significant defector was Anatoly Golitsyn of the KGB. Golitsyn believed that there were moles in the highest reaches of Western intelligence, and for a time it seemed that the KGB had a disturbingly senior agent in the CIA. The suspect, Peter Karlow, was finally drummed out, only to be vindicated in 1989 and, under the “Mole Relief Act”, given half a million dollars and a medal. There were other suspects, most of whom turned out to be innocent. By the end wholesale psychotic zeal reigned as Angleton decided that the entire Soviet division of the CIA had to be “cleaned out”, and every single member was removed.
Further low points began to appear. One involved another defector from the KGB called Yuri Nosenko. Nosenko named Golitsyn as a fraud and, in the light of Angleton’s prior commitment, this meant that Nosenko was forced to undergo “hostile interrogation”. That required solitary confinement, lack of proper heating, no air-conditioning, no books or writing materials and sometimes not even a toothbrush. Under these conditions Nosenko was held by the CIA for nearly five years. The spirit of Guantánamo Bay was clearly alive even then, and the sentence tells us a great deal about the notion of language that the CIA seems to have internalized. When Nosenko was questioned, New Criticism ruled. As Holzman points out, the New Critical methodology indicates that “read with sufficient care, all texts, no matter how thoroughly encoded, would yield at least two messages: the overt meaning and the hidden meaning; the latter inherent in some larger pattern, visible only to the elect”. Hence, for Angleton, the evasions and lies of prisoners were bound to be confounded, the ambiguities in which they dealt would be exposed and truth, even after five years, would finally be ferreted out.
Yet this oversimplifies the problem by demanding a response only in the stark terms in which its questioners deal. It offers an American solution, but only to issues the presuppositions of which make it into an American problem. Empson’s British reflection that ambiguity is the heart and soul of language offers quite different proposals. Had Angleton misread Empson? Winks’s earlier study cites Angleton’s animus against “the amateur’s tendency to attempt to reconcile conflicting statements, as though both might be true, rather than both being false”. But Empson took the amateur’s tendency as wholly acceptable. He identified a kind of universal, all-purpose ambiguity in human relations which melted simple-hearted trust and wrought havoc with lame notions of truth and clarity. One kind of dramatic irony may result:
Irony in this subdued sense, as a generous scepticism which can believe at once that people are and are not guilty, is a very normal and essential method . . . . This sort of contradiction is at once understood in literature, because the process of understanding one’s friends must always be riddled with such indecisions and the machinery of such hypocrisy; people, often, cannot have done both of two things, but they must have been in some way prepared to have done either; whichever they did, they will have still lingering in their minds the way they would have preserved their self-respect if they had acted differently; they are only to be understood by bearing both possibilities in mind.
It is interesting that this “generous scepticism”, which bears “both possibilities in mind”, strikes Empson as “very normal and essential” in human life. In short, ambiguity rules. When Angleton expected the fog of ambiguity to clear, as in the case of Nosenko, it pointedly refused. Empson, on the other hand, accepted the persistence of fog as an aspect of the real business of human life. Ambiguity is the air we breathe. Empson’s experience of a fractured society in the civil war in China is obviously pertinent, particularly when he talks about the ambiguous fog enveloping his own world at the time. Speaking later of lines in Macbeth which some critics claim to be verging on nonsense, he insists that “no one who had experienced civil war could say it had no sense”. Confusion was widespread in those years, but Empson countered it with a peculiarly British conception of ambiguity: “When I was crossing the fighting lines during the siege of Peking, to give my weekly lecture on Macbeth, a generous-minded peasant barred my way and said, pointing ahead: ‘That way lies death’”. Empson’s response was foggy, gnomic but swift: “Not for me, I have a British passport”.
The American approach to ambiguity was far less indulgent. By December 1954, a counter-intelligence staff within the Agency was created and Angleton was duly appointed its head: he became counterintelligence’s “chief theoretician”. It’s easy to condemn what followed. The American literary journal Ramparts was enthusiastically suppressed and any criticism of the government was automatically suspect. Huge lists were compiled of teachers and authors of socialist and even feminist persuasion. By 1967, the CIA began operation of the quaintly named CHAOS, which aimed to investigate the anti-Vietnam war press and the peace movement. The attack on universities was especially vigorous. Entire academic disciplines were sometimes shaped to the goals of the intelligence agencies, or were even initiated by them. All the members of Students for a Democratic Society were placed under surveillance, and most black groups were spied on. The end came for Angleton when the New York Times published Seymour Hersh’s story about CHAOS on December 22, 1974. It did not mince its words. “The Central Intelligence Agency, directly violating its charter, conducted a massive, illegal domestic intelligence operation during the Nixon Administration against the antiwar movement and other dissident groups in the United States.”
This was bound to make a public figure of Angleton, who resigned in the same month. A sort of epitaph was supplied in 1975 by Senator Frank Church, chairman of the Senate Committee on Government Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities: “Twenty-five years ago, this country had a matchless moral position from which it exercised immense leadership and influence in the world. Anything the United States stood for was automatically endorsed by three quarters of the governments of the world. Now we have had twenty-five years of manipulation by methods that were plainly copied from the KGB”. Angleton's replacement downgraded and all but dismantled the whole edifice of counter-intelligence. Moles were still discovered here and there, and the biggest of them all, Aldrich Ames, or Supermole, was arrested in 1994 after a career in espionage that dwarfed all previous suspicions. But Angleton had died on May 11, 1987. (It is also worth recording that Nosenko was later released as innocent, surprisingly “rehabilitated”, and then, astonishingly, paid as a CIA consultant. He died at the age of eighty-one in August 2008, having lived under an assumed name in the United States for more than forty years. Just months before, some senior officials of the Agency visited him with a letter from the current Director, thanking him for being so helpful. They presented him with an American flag.)
Back in Westminster, Ryder Street no doubt still has its ghosts. Among them the American James Jesus Angleton might manage an ambiguous glance in the direction of Kim Philby, having spied in the Englishman’s nickname an ominous allusion to Kipling’s Great Game. And both presences may perhaps be haunted by another figure. As a young man, William Empson was sent down from Magdalene College, Cambridge, for possession of contraceptives. Faced with such unambiguous rectitude, he constructed its ideological opposite, a new idea of criticism seeded with the explosive notion of ambiguity. Did the disgraced Angleton fail to grasp its implications? In an uneasy letter to I. A. Richards, Empson records a visit from Angleton in London in 1944: “The young man Jim Angleton from Yale, of Furioso, turned up here very mysteriously, and I took him to a pub to meet the BBC Features and Drama side, who mocked at him rather”. When Angleton left, he “disappeared equally mysteriously but I thought maybe in a huff”. Perhaps Angleton’s mysterious American disappearance foreshadowed his later zealotry. But Empson carried on, brandishing his British passport and flourishing in our native fog until the end. A Professor of English in Sheffield, an Honorary Fellow of Magdalene College, an Honorary Litt. D of Cambridge University, and a Fellow of the British Academy, he even wrote a masque in praise of the Queen. He was knighted in 1979. Michael Holzman’s astute study suggests that Angleton’s “huff” remained unappeased.
Michael Holzman
JAMES JESUS ANGLETON, THE CIA, AND THE CRAFT OF COUNTERINTELLIGENCE
399pp. University of Massachusetts Press. Paperback, $29.95; distributed in the UK by Eurospan. £28.95.
978 1 55859 650 7
Terence Hawkes is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Cardiff. He is general editor of the Accents on Shakespeare series and his most recent books include That Shakespeherian Rag: Essays on a critical process, which appeared in paperback last year.
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