James Jesus Angleton - Early Life

Early Life

James Angleton was born in Boise, Idaho, to James Hugh Angleton and Carmen Mercedes Moreno. His parents met in Mexico while his father was a cavalry officer serving under General John Pershing. James Hugh Angleton purchased the NCR franchise in pre-war Italy, where he became head of the American Chamber of Commerce and later joined the Office of Strategic Services (OSS).

Angleton spent much of his youth in Milan, Italy, where his family moved after his father bought NCR's Italian subsidiary, then studied as a boarder at Malvern College in England, before going to Yale. Angleton was a poet and, as a Yale undergraduate, editor, with Reed Whittemore, of the literary magazine Furioso, which published many of the best-known poets of the inter-war period, including William Carlos Williams, E. E. Cummings and Ezra Pound. He carried on an extensive correspondence with Pound, Cummings and T. S. Eliot, among others and was particularly influenced by William Empson, author of Seven Types of Ambiguity. He was trained in the New Criticism at Yale by Maynard Mack and others, chiefly Norman Holmes Pearson, a founder of American Studies, and briefly studied law at Harvard. He joined the US Army in March, 1943, and in July married Cicely d'Autremont, a Vassar alumna from Tucson, Arizona. They lived in the Rock Spring neighborhood, of Arlington, Virginia.

During the Second World War, Angleton served under Pearson in the counter-intelligence branch (X-2) of the Office of Strategic Services in London, where he met the famous double agent Kim Philby. Angleton was chief of the Italy desk for X-2 in London by February, 1944 and in November was transferred to Italy as commander of SCI Unit Z, which handled Ultra intelligence based on the British intercepts of German radio communications. By the end of the war he was head of X-2 for all of Italy. He remained in Italy after the war, establishing connections with other secret intelligence services and playing a major role in the victory of the US-supported Christian Democratic Party over the USSR-supported Italian Communist Party in the 1948 elections.