Page 53 - Malcolm Gladwell - Talking to Strangers

1 But wait. Don’t we want counterintelligence officers to be Holy Fools? Isn’t this just the profession where having someone
who suspects everyone makes sense? Not at all. One of Scott Carmichael’s notorious predecessors was James Angleton, who
ran the counterintelligence operations of the CIA during the last decades of the Cold War. Angleton became convinced there
was a Soviet mole high inside the agency. He launched an investigation that eventually covered 120 CIA officials. He couldn’t
find the spy. In frustration, Angleton ordered many in the Soviet division to pack their bags. Hundreds of people—Russian
specialists with enormous knowledge and experience of America’s chief adversary—were shipped elsewhere. Morale
plummeted. Case officers stopped recruiting new agents.
Ultimately, one of Angleton’s senior staffers looked at the crippling costs of more than a decade of paranoia and jumped to the final,
paranoid conclusion: if you were the Soviet Union and you wanted to cripple the CIA, the most efficient way to do that would
be to have your mole lead a lengthy, damaging, exhaustive hunt for a mole. Which meant the mole must be Angleton.
The final casualty of James Angleton’s witch hunt? James Angleton. He was pushed out of the CIA in 1974, after thirty-one years.
Had Scott Carmichael behaved like James Angleton and suspected everyone of being a spy, the DIA would have collapsed in a
cloud of paranoia and mistrust like the CIA’s Soviet division.