I can't tell if Mr. Hersh is burnishing his spook/counter-spook cred or just wanted to tell the story. Maybe a bit of both.
From Seymour Hersh's substack, May 10:
My part in the sacking of the notorious counterintelligence chief
Last week I wrote a column about my unforgettable afternoon visit more than a decade ago in London with the late Pervez Musharraf, the exiled Pakistani president who bragged to me about his country’s ability to hide its nuclear arsenal deep underground. Two days later, my colleague Jeff Stein, whose SpyTalk newsletter covers American intelligence, turned over his column to Jefferson Morley, an author who has spent decades tracking the CIA and other state secrets stemming from Jack Kennedy’s assassination onward.
Morley focused on the Biden administration, battered anew last weekend in the wake of negative polling, and its willingness to continue pretending that Israel, long known to have an undeclared but significant nuclear arsenal, has no such arsenal. His main target was the administration’s refusal to declassify 48-year old Senate testimony by James Angleton, the notorious onetime head of CIA counterintelligence. Angleton turned up recently as a character in A Spy Among Friends, a television series about the murderous transgressions of Kim Philby, the brilliant British intelligence officer who spied for the Soviet Union and conned Angleton, among others, in a long career of betrayal.
After serving in the Office of Strategic Services in World War II, Angleton was assigned as station chief for the newly organized CIA in Rome, where he had two main responsibilities: he was liaison to the Israeli nuclear program and was the main architect of the CIA’s postwar mission to prevent Italian politics from turning to the left after years of fascist suppression under Benito Mussolini. Instead, the CIA supported the two most prominent anti-communist groups in Italy: the Mafia and the Christian Democratic party. Political corruption was a staple of life in Italy for the subsequent decades.
I have a few things to add to Morley’s account....
....MUCH MORE
If interested see:
James Jesus Angleton: "Documents Reveal the Complex Legacy of CIA Counterintelligence Chief and Godfather of Mass Surveillance"
Book Review: "The Ghost: The Secret Life of CIA Spymaster James Jesus Angleton"
