![]() Angleton had been retired for 18 months and was free to speak. When we met I knew nothing about intelligence professionals but was trying to learn. ![]() But the thing I carried away at the end of two hours was the way his person, so focused and unhurried, and his style of thinking had fused over the previous thirty years. No man was ever more deliberate, from the way he lit and held that cigarette, and followed it with another, to the cock of his head and the play of his eyebrows and his wide mouth, which said much that he declined to put into words. But it was the man himself, sitting on the edge of an overstuffed club chair, pulling a Virginia Slim from a cigarette packet, that really left an impression. Everything about him held my attention, starting with his history as a counterintelligence officer in London during the Second World War, fresh out of Yale. ![]() I spent an afternoon with him once in the old Army and Navy Club in Washington. Once experienced, his history, his appearance, his manner, and his stubborn refusal to be clear were all indelible. There was nothing ordinary about Angleton. The ideal spy is a mouse-coloured blur in the crowd, someone like George Smiley, described by his wife as ‘breathtakingly ordinary’. ![]() , chief of counterintelligence at the CIA for twenty years, was not the ideal spy. ![]()
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