James Jesus Angleton and the ‘Third Way’
The CIA counter-intelligence expert James Angleton has for years been regarded as one of the keenest of cold warriors, who turned the CIA inside out in the search for Soviet ‘moles’ and ultimately had to be retired to prevent further damage to the Agency. But interesting current research shows that Angleton’s politics were by no means those of the conventional anti-Communist: he appears to have been a man of convictions but these were not necessarily those of modern capitalism.
These reflections derive from the work of an American resetter, Michael Holzman, who has written an as yet unpublished biography of Angleton, based on extensive researches into the latter’s papers in Yale University library. Angleton, who studied English at Yale from 1937-40, was a devoted scholar of modern poetry, especially of writers such as ee cummings, T. S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound, and established a successful literary review, Furioso, which lasted until 1950 (although he was not the editor by then). All three writers were out of sympathy with the times. Cummings’ unhappiness was largely kept for private correspondence but the other two were not afraid to speak out in public. Pound, of course, went all the way to Fascism and supported Mussolini, living in Italy and broadcasting for the dictator during the war. Eliot rejected totalitarian movements but shared Pound’s distaste for materialism and his interest in the Social Credit ideas of the Scottish engineer Major Douglas (1879-1952).
Social Credit advocated a managed banking system which would control the money supply to ensure both low inflation and cheap money. At the same time the State would provide all citizens with a ‘dividend’ designed not just to guarantee a basic minimum but also to avoid economic crisis resulting from ‘under-consumption’, the curse of modern capitalism. Social Credit ideas attracted a lot of attention in the 1930s and became the foundation of a successful political party, the Social Credit Party, in Canada. Advocates believed reform of the banking system and the introduction of a universal benefit was a progressive alternative to socialistic or even communistic measures. Many Social Credit supporters were farmers and small business people who were staunch defenders of the free enterprise system, albeit in the idealised form of small-scale, competitive production even then decades out of date.
Social Credit attracted many repelled by the rampant individualism of the post 1918 world. It tuned in with a critique of contemporary economic and political ideas mounted by Catholic writers of the time such as G. K. Chesterton and Christopher Dawson in Britain and Montgomery Belgion and Emmanuel Mounier in France.(1) These authors, including Eliot (a High Anglican), searched for a middle or a third way between fascism and communism. This was not exactly Keynesian social democracy (although Keynes was interested in some of Eliot’s ideas, a point made in Skidelsky’s biography (2) ) but a society in which the market place remained at the centre of economic activity – except that commerce between buyer and seller would be conducted according to a strict ethical code which ensured all vendors a just price and all labourers a fair wage. The inspiration was medieval Christianity, where the concept of private accumulation was frowned on by the Church and where society was organised not to maximise wealth for its own sake but to prepare all for the world to come. Since no entry to this world was possible for those who renounced justice in all its forms, preferring greed and envy to charity and love, it followed that Church and State (a distinction not made until the latter stages of the medieval period) had a duty to regulate economic activity in accordance with Christian principles. The distinguished Marxist scientist Joseph Needham told the Cambridge University Socialist Society in 1932 that ‘if we were to define the socialist state as one which tended towards a maximum of social justice we should have to call the conditions of the Middle Ages socialistic’.() This was probably going too far for most of the supporters of a ‘middle way’, but it squared with their commitment to the construction of a society founded on non-material principles where markets served human need.
This might seem a long way from the activities of the CIA in the post-war era but Simon Matthews’ interesting article in Lobster 44 (‘Argentina, the Nazis and the original Third Way’) allows us to make the connection. During the 1920s and 1930s, the Catholic Church, with the help of SIS, had established Intermarium, an organisation dedicated to fighting Communism in eastern Europe. During the war some of the Nazis’ leading collaborators, such as Petain in France, Admiral Horthy in Hungary and Anton Pavelic in Croatia, attempted to remodel politics and economics in their countries on authoritarian, anti-Communist and anti-materialist lines. In France ‘Work, Family, Country’ replaced ‘Liberty, Equality and Fraternity’. With the collapse of the Hitler regime these structures also fell and were replaced by leftist regimes in which the Communists either predominated (as in eastern Europe) or held ministerial office (as in France). In Italy the well-organised Communist Party, capitalising on its role in leading partisan activity against the Germans after 1943, threatened to win power at the ballot box. The Catholic collaborators, with Vatican help, sought exile in Argentina where President Peron raised the banner of the ‘third way’.(4)
Angleton, whose father had worked as an executive for the Rome branch of National Cash Register, had been brought up in Mussolini’s Italy. At the end of the war he became the OSS counter-intelligence chief in Italy and continued in that post after the formation of the CIA. It led him into running covert operations designed to frustrate the highly popular Communist Party at the polls, using contacts made during the latter stages of the war. These included Mafia businessmen, Christian Democratic politicians and trade union leaders, as well as sources in the Church hierarchy (including the future Pope Paul VI, then Cardinal Montini) a loose coalition which held together throughout much of the post-war era not just in Italy but in many countries where the ‘third way’ was followed. In addition to this Angleton was responsible for an American input into Intermarium, which by then was operating the ‘ratlines’ network whereby many of the authoritarian Catholic, clericalist wartime collaborators with Nazi Germany were spirited out of western Europe to Latin America. (5)
There can be little doubt that in assisting these elements Angleton was following the time-honoured precept of ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’; and that is certainly how many in the US intelligence establishment viewed the strategy of providing aid and comfort to anti-communist forces even if they did not possess liberal democratic credentials. Yet there may have been more to it for Angleton. From adolescence he had demonstrated an interest in ‘third way’ regimes and philosophies which rejected the ideologies of the modern world materialism, liberal capitalism, democratic socialism and communism and proposed to substitute for these a distributive utopia of small scale producers living under the firm but benign rules of clerical government. The Cold War gave him a chance to run his own, private crusade.
Harold Wilson’s illness
In March British television broadcast a number of programmes about the late Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson, marking the 30th anniversary of the announcement of his resignation in March 1976. Wilson’s resignation caused a sensation at the time, and many commentators believed there was more to it than met the eye. Their suspicions included stories that he was in fact a Soviet agent who had stepped down to avoid being unmasked and that there was a massive financial scandal brewing.
All these tales were complete nonsense and had been put about by Wilson’s enemies on the far right, which included some powerful figures in the intelligence and security establishment. It is now widely accepted that these groups had attempted to undermine the 1964-70 and 1974-76 Wilson governments,(6) that they failed, and that in a last act of vindictiveness they allowed malicious stories about the ex-Prime Minister to be circulated when he had gone into retirement. The campaign against Wilson, along with his own attempt to place the story in the public domain, was the subject of one of the recent documentaries. (7)
Ludicrously, in the face of all the evidence (8) MI5 still maintain that there was no plot, and detractors of the argument point to Wilson’s deteriorating health in later years. They argue that there is nothing to the story of conspiracies except the ex-Prime Minister’s paranoia, itself an indication of the dementia which would in time erode his memory. This view has been repeated this year by Joe Haines, Wilson’s Press officer from 1969-76 and by Denis Healey, Defence Secretary 1964-70 and Chancellor 1974-79. But although Wilson did often see plots in the making he always seems to have had grounds for his suspicions, whether it was to do with colleagues, the intelligence services and their contacts, or Lord Mountbatten (who was seen by Wilson’s enemies in 1968 and maybe in 1974-76 as leader of a ‘National Government’). It turned out that Wilson’s colleagues were not always very loyal, that in 1966-68 especially there were frequent discussions involving Ministers and MPs in the Parliamentary Labour Party on how to replace him as Prime Minister, that Mountbatten’s conduct was sometimes rather strange, and that there were elements in the secret state which worked covertly against the Prime Minister.
Quite clearly, by 1984-5 Wilson’s mental faculties were in decline. As Dr Thomas Stuttaford, a Conservative MP who appeared on one of the documentaries, pointed out, Wilson himself was aware that this might happen to him – there was a family history. His mother had developed Alzheimer’s disease and had carried on in denial, attempting to live normally, for some years.(9) Wilson knew that the same illness might claim him. He determined to leave the front line of politics before there was any chance that declining health might affect his judgement. In due course he does seem to have developed the same syndrome as his mother. But whatever became wrong with him there is no evidence that he was suffering from it while Prime Minister, nor for some years afterwards, and his medical problems need to be disassociated from his anxieties about coup plots. It is not even a case of post hoc ergo propter hoc: the illness came after the allegations and not the other way around and there is no justification at all for using it as an excuse for refusal to take his allegations seriously.
Notes
[1] Michael R. Stevens, ‘T. S. Eliot’s Neo-Medieval Economics’, in Markets and Morality, vol. 2, no. 2 (1999).
[2] Robert Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes, a biography. Volume 2: The Economist as Saviour (London: Macmillan, 1992).
[3] Quoted in Stevens (see note 1), ‘T. S. Eliot’s Medieval Economics’.
[4] See Uki Goni, The Real Odessa (London: Granta, 2003).
[5] Mark Aarons and John Loftus, Ratlines (London: Mandarin, 1991), pp. 235-40.
[6] All this has been dealt with in Stephen Dorril and Robin Ramsay, Smear! Wilson and the Secret State (London: Fourth Estate, 1991)
[7] ‘The Plot against Harold Wilson’, first shown at 9.00 pm on BBC2, Thursday 16 March 2006.
[8] And this included not just the efforts of Dorril and Ramsay but other sources with first hand material, such as Paul Foot’s Who Framed Colin Wallace? (London: Macmillan, 1988) and a Channel 4 TV documentary in 1996 called ‘Wilson: the Final Days’. The latter even included a admission on the part of Wilson’s Cabinet Secretary, Sir John Hunt, that a small group in MI5 had engaged in the spreading of ‘damaging and malicious stories about some members of the Labour Government’ (see my ‘Historical Notes’ in Lobster 40 (2000).
[9] Cudlipp papers Cardiff University, HC 2/4, May 1968, ‘Dismissal of CHK from IPC Chair’.