Long sought by historians, the 72 pages of transcription from the hearing remained classified and hidden from the public for nearly 50 years.
Some of the topics covered are still hot-button political issues nearly half a century after the hearing took place.
Committee members expressed concern that hostile foreign nations’ intelligence services were involved in covert espionage activities targeting U.S. elections.
“There’s no question that influence has been brought to bear,” Angleton said, noting that “propaganda, among other things,” presents significant challenges for domestic intelligence officials.
Longtime Angleton aide Scotty Miler, who testified alongside his boss, acknowledged the infiltration of companies in the United States by foreign spy agencies.
“We’ve had a number in the past,” he said.
Asked by senators whether division chiefs and other officials were kept in the dark about operations, Angleton said sometimes only two or three people were aware of plans and ongoing actions.
“If it’s a major matter, it’s on the basis of need to know,” Angleton told the committee.
He described the prospect of double agents infiltrating the U.S. government as a top priority and national security concern, suggesting that some officials failed to recognize the nature of the threat.
“The question of penetration in this government or penetration in any agency has never been brought to a responsible level of finding out how it happened and what has gone wrong,” Angleton said.
He suggested that the directors of the CIA and the Federal Bureau of Investigation were not collaborating, though he believed it was necessary to work together to verify the quality of information they were receiving and review counterintelligence operations with objective oversight.
“You have to have some higher authority to whom you can make an appeal when decisions of this sort are made so that it is aired, and it is not done without the knowledge of anyone,” Angleton said.
“Anything that involves penetration has always been swept under the rug.”
Angleton and Miler also said a lack of communication between agencies contributed to intelligence failures. They told the committee that, at times, the CIA needed information from the FBI but did not have access to it.
Angleton acknowledged that some military officials similarly expressed frustration with the CIA because the agency only chose to share details of operations “when and as needed.”
“Military services have complained to me ... because we were not as forthcoming in providing them information about our possible assets and so forth as they were,” he said.
Following a shakeup in the agency, the two former agents suggested leadership lacked adequate knowledge of internal operations to successfully manage counterintelligence efforts, and communication breakdowns blocked meaningful collaboration.
“I do suggest there is a naivete,” Angleton testified. “There’s never been a forum where you can actually have a confrontation with other people who hold contrary views.”
As the longtime spy chief told the senators on the committee, he started his career in the Army before joining the Office of Strategic Service, the precursor to the CIA, in 1943.
He worked in Italy and London before earning a promotion to chief of counterintelligence for the agency in Italy and then rising to strategic services chief until President Harry Truman terminated the organization in late 1945.
After returning to Washington in late 1947, Angleton performed various roles with the newly established CIA until he was appointed counterintelligence chief in 1954 and held the position until 1974.
According to a 1993 report written by CIA station chief and historian Cleveland Cram—the draft of which was uncovered in the archives on March 27 by The Epoch Times—Angleton’s aggressive style of seeking to root out double agents and his policy toward document classification led to a dust-up with other senior officials.
Conflicts with then-director William Colby led to his dismissal from the agency, which Colby described in his book “Honorable Men: My Life in the CIA,” published in 1978.
As the CIA’s lead for two decades on identifying moles—a term describing foreign agents pretending to be loyal agency operatives—speculation persisted that Angleton himself was a double agent, with some suggesting he was a Soviet spy and others pointing to his close cooperation with Mossad as evidence that he was a secret Israeli agent.
No unclassified documents revealed to date have proven either circumstance, and Richard Helms—who served as director of central intelligence between 1966 and 1973—praised Angleton in his autobiography, published posthumously in 2003, as a “formidable figure” with an “extraordinary grasp of the Soviet threat.”
Though millions of other pages related to the assassination of former President John F. Kennedy were ordered declassified by Congress in 1992, with a deadline of 25 years from the law’s passage, many documents were redacted.
The Angleton testimony was withheld in full until President Donald Trump, in an executive order signed three days after taking office for a second time, directed the declassification of all JFK collection documents.
After the National Archives released approximately 63,000 documents on its website on March 18, a slew of social media posts questioned the absence of Angleton’s Church committee testimony and the other nearly 17,000 files that were not included.
A White House spokesperson told The Epoch Times on March 19 that the pages are available at the National Archives but only for in-person research.
A related transcript of Angleton’s testimony to the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1978 currently includes 19 redactions.
A spokesperson from the National Archives and Records Administration told The Epoch Times that archivists are requesting the previously redacted documents from respective agencies.
