Martin, David C. Wilderness of Mirrors. New York: Ballantine Books, 1981. 233 pages.

Journalist David C. Martin tracks a CIA Odd Couple across the years of the high Cold War: James Jesus Angleton, the CIA's patrician counterspy- in-chief, and William King Harvey, the ex-FBI fat man who nursed a grudge against Ivy League spooks.

In the case of the most famous spy of the century, Harvey's instincts were better than Angleton's. Englishman Kim Philby of Britain's MI6 was close to Angleton, whom he had known in wartime London. But he was also a KGB penetration agent, and it was Harvey rather than Angleton who figured this out. Philby's defection to Moscow set off Angleton's long-running, destructive CIA "mole-hunt," whose excesses eventually brought down Angleton himself. (See Mangold's "Cold Warrior," indexed in NameBase.)

The pistol-packing Harvey, meanwhile, oversaw the famous Berlin tunnel that briefly tapped Soviet communications. Later he ran the CIA's notorious Operation Mongoose, whose avowed object was to assassinate Castro. Harvey got so close to mobsters like John Roselli that he was eventually fired by Robert Kennedy -- a biographical detail that has not escaped the authors of JFK assassination books. What these two radically unlike men shared was their fanaticism. -- Steve Badrich
ISBN 0-345-29636-2

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