Angleton's career is, like just about everything to do with the relevant lore, controversial, but I have been struck by both the widespread (though not universal) assessment of Angleton as a paranoid man whose deluded version of counterintelligence did much to wreck the CIA in the process of coming up with absolutely nothing--and his firmly established predilection for Modernist poetry of the T.S. Eliot variety, with all its interpretive "challenges," which, of course, have had so many revering those works as they sifted them over and over again, looking to unearth significances from beneath the meaningless surfaces.
Some would seem to have suggested a connection between Angelton the spy-hunter and Angleton the poetry-lover, which seems to me about right. However, it seems to me that few, if any, have baldly stated the connection I see. If indeed the image of Angleton as deranged is the true one, his fascination with such a poetry seems to me to have been a clue to, if not symptom of, his derangement--all as the exaltation of figures like Eliot, the worship of the associated irrationalism and anti-rationalism, the pointless search for meaning in it, bespoke the derangement of the literary Establishment's standards and practices, to terribly damaging effect for the past century--one might say, doing the same damage to the literary world that Angelton did to the Agency in which he made his famous career, however loathe the respecters of cultural Authority may be to admit the all too evident fact.
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