CIA expert says Damon is too 'fat' for spy film
Mission Implausible: Matt Damon in new film The Good Shepherd
An expert on the CIA reveals how Hollywood bungled its chance to tell an astonishing true spy story...'I told Matt Damon he'd be a perfect spy - if he wasn't so short, fat, pretty and white', he reveals
It began with a meeting in Chelsea with the film producer Oliver Stone.
'I've bought your book on James Jesus Angleton and I'm going to film it,' he said rather pugnaciously.
'No you haven't, I replied. 'Yes I have,' he insisted.
We worked our way through two bottles of Pinot Noir before it turned out he'd bought a different book about James Jesus Angleton, the former head of counter-intelligence for the CIA, whose biography I had written in 1991.
Then last year I took a call from a film director friend who said: 'Can I bring Matt Damon round to your place tomorrow?
'He's playing Angleton in the film of your book.'
'It's not my book,' I replied wearily, 'but bring him over anyway.'
Damon arrived wearing a woollen hat, T-shirt and jeans. We sat in the drawing room, my wife couldn't take her eyes off him and we gossiped for two hours.
This week Damon's film The Good Shepherd opened in Britain.
It purports to be the story of Angleton, but it is a wholly fictionalised account - and the real, remarkable man has been airbrushed into a Hollywood shape.
'Am I right for the part?' Damon had asked me.
'Look,' I said, 'you're a very handsome, not unduly tall, blue-eyed, blonde-haired, open-faced Caucasian.
Jim Angleton was a 6ft 1in, half-Mexican, sallow-faced, brown-eyed, wide-mouthed, stooping, secretive, ghostly figure who always wore dark clothes and a black homburg.'
I didn't add that Damon is to Angleton what Peter Pan would have been to Marlon Brando.
The Good Shepherd is watchable if overlong.
But why mess with the truth when it is so much more dramatic than Hollywood invention?
Angleton joined the CIA in 1948 and formed a deep friendship with Kim Philby. When Philby was unmasked as an MI6 traitor, Angleton never recovered.
To be the CIA's chief spy-catcher is a rotten enough job without your best friend betraying you.
But Angleton achieved much. He helped buy democracy for Italy and Greece after the war; he understood the true evil of Stalin's regime; he was involved in procuring the top-secret, earth-shaking text of Khrushchev's speech in which Stalin was denounced; he was a one-man praetorian guard for what he perceived were the traditional values of the West.
He had a great sense of humour, too, but the secret world eventually attacked his reason.
He formed a catastrophic liaison with a deeply-flawed KGB defector, Anatoli Golitsin, who convinced him that all future Soviet defectors to the West would be fake.
At home in Washington though, Angleton was a skilled operator, passing on gossip about powerful figures to his bosses in his usual sly and mysterious nose-tapping way.
When one of John F. Kennedy's mistresses was murdered in her Washington apartment, Angleton and his men arrived within minutes of the police alert and (illegally) sanitised the property, removing marijuana, letters and photographs.
'A secret is not a secret unless it stays secret,' he used to tell his wife Cicely if she asked him about his job.
In time, however, alcohol, the influence of Golitsin and post-Philby paranoia began to wreak havoc with Angleton - The Good Shepherd would have worked better if his dark side had been explored on screen.
The truth is, Angleton was responsible for the destruction of several innocent people who were fingered as 'spies' by Golitsin or who fell foul of Angleton's prejudices.
The most disgraceful case was that of Yuriy Nosenko, which is hinted at in a wholly inaccurate sequence in The Good Shepherd.
Just as well - the truth would have left the audience hissing the hero.
Lt Col Yuriy Nosenko defected from the KGB to the West in 1964. He brought with him a treasure trove of Soviet secrets, but Angleton and Golitsin agreed he was a fake.
The Russian was seized by CIA officers in Washington.
Wires were strapped to his head and he was told this was an electroencephalograph, which could read his brain waves - utter nonsense.
He was then held in solitary confinement in a 10ft-square attic.
Endlessly interrogated, he was fed very little food, allowed to wash only once a week and given no radio, television or reading materials.
After 1,277 days he was tied up like a parcel, shot down a laundry chute into a station wagon and taken to a custom-made prison cell for the next two years.
What Nosenko did not know was that a powerful anti-Angleton faction within the CIA was trying to release him.
On March 1, 1969 he was acknowledged to be a genuine defector, formally released and employed by the CIA.
When his personal belongings were returned, his most valuable possession, a Sputnik-commemoration watch, was missing.
He later saw it on the wrist of a CIA doctor who had examined him.
'The handling of Nosenko was a frolic of others,' said a cowardly Angleton as the truth was revealed.
He left the CIA, addicted to alcohol and in disgrace - though, to be fair, no real Soviet spy penetrated the CIA on his watch.
Perhaps this is material for another film, not one 'based on' true events. This version could be fully documented as an account of the awesome pressures some Cold War warriors had to endure, and the terrible price we must pay for eternal vigilance.
Tom Mangold's book Cold Warrior - James Jesus Angleton
