Daily Maverick
Dailymaverick logo

South Africa

South Africa, World, Maverick News

Exposed from the JFK files — the CIA chief, the Russian agent and the South African connection

Exposed from the JFK files — the CIA chief, the Russian agent and the South African connection
Caryn Dolley
By Caryn Dolley
28 Apr 2025
Facebook
4
Declassified documents show that James Angleton, who headed counterintelligence for the CIA decades ago, was in contact with Israeli spies. He also exposed a secret Russian agent in South Africa.

Shady corners of international spy dealings are illuminated in documents relating to the 1963 assassination of US President John F Kennedy (JFK) that were recently declassified on the orders of Donald Trump.

The records, some of which were previously accessible with sections redacted, became publicly available without redactions on 18 March and now fit into more than six million pages of related material.

More documents about the 1968 assassination of JFK’s brother, Robert F Kennedy, were also made public last week. Both troves of information include archived press clippings that show how the US government meticulously kept track of media coverage of interest to it from around the world, including South Africa.

The JFK documents also zoom in on some of the people who laid the international foundation on which intelligence agents and propaganda peddlers now operate. Details in these documents, paired with various global happenings, show how relations between the US, South Africa and many other countries have evolved over decades.

The US first supported apartheid South Africa. It subsequently took a stand against it, and now the Trump administration has lashed out at the democratic country under President Cyril Ramaphosa’s leadership.

The JFK documents provide some insight into the decades leading up to this. Although they do not focus specifically on South Africa, this country is referenced, and the papers provide broader clues about how it is knotted into global spook shenanigans.

The CIA and South Africa


Various sources have long said it would be naïve to think that international intelligence agents are not operating in South Africa, whereas criminals are clearly doing it.

Emanating from this realm are long-running suspicions that the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) played a role in Nelson Mandela’s 1962 arrest, which led to him spending 27 years in prison before becoming South Africa’s first democratically elected president. This reinforces beliefs that the CIA was already among the foreign agencies with undercover operatives in this country decades ago.

Among the recently declassified JFK assassination documents is a page that lists what appears to be US intelligence field distribution, in other words, where agents were located. Under its “AF division”, which was perhaps a reference to its Africa division, Pretoria and Johannesburg are listed.

The CIA obviously had much more extensive reach – overt and covert. For example, a document on 1961 briefings relating to JFK’s foreign intelligence advisory board referred to “covert action” in countries including Vietnam, Haiti, Brazil and Cuba. It also said the CIA was involved in various organisations, including Radio Free Europe.

Radio Free Europe’s website explains that in the 1950s, together with Radio Liberty, it was “funded principally by the US Congress through” the CIA. The website says all CIA involvement ended in 1971.

It is roughly this timeframe and murky arena into which James Angleton fits. He was with the CIA from the 1950s until 1974, when he was its counterintelligence chief. Various news reports say he was forced to resign over questionable decisions and dealings.

The nature of his job meant Angleton had a web of connections to various countries and they appear to have extended to South Africa.

Angleton, Israel and nuclear info


A memorandum dated 26 June 1975 forms part of the recently released Kennedy assassination documents. It summarises information in US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) files about “Israeli intelligence collection capabilities” in the US. The memorandum says Angleton was questioned about “his knowledge of Israeli capabilities to conduct intelligence collection in the United States, including nuclear information”.

Another section states: “Sensitive technical source coverage by the FBI of the Israeli Embassy [in] Washington, DC between February 1969 and October 1972 developed information showing that Angleton, during this period in his official capacity at CIA, had frequent personal liaison with the Embassy of Israel, Israeli Intelligence Service representatives involving the exchange of extremely sensitive information…”

It says the FBI at that stage had no investigation into Israeli information collection capabilities in the US, but in 1968 had looked into a matter involving the establishment “of an Israeli technical intelligence network”.

No unlawful activity was picked up.

The Trump administration


Fast-forward a few decades and US relations with Israel are now well publicised, with Trump steamrolling over the stance of his predecessor, Joe Biden.

A 1 March press release by US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said a declaration was signed to speed up about $4-billion earmarked for military assistance to Israel.

“The decision to reverse the Biden administration’s partial arms embargo, which wrongly withheld a number of weapons and ammunition from Israel, is yet another sign that Israel has no greater ally in the White House than President Trump,” it read.

Israel is a factor that has also caused the US to lash out at South Africa. A February executive order that Trump signed said the country “has taken positions against the United States and its allies”.

Read more: Middle East crisis

It added: “Merely two months after the October 7th terrorist attacks on Israel, South Africa accused Israel, not Hamas, of genocide in the International Court of Justice.”

Back to Angleton. Aside from Israeli agents, he was also linked to a matter involving Yuri Loginov, an agent with the Soviet Union’s intelligence agency, the KGB, who also provided sensitive information to the CIA for years. In other words, he had sided with the US.

Loginov was directly tied to South Africa. Among the many media articles the CIA has archived is a September 1967 New York Times report which says Loginov, “described as a Russian spy who posed as a Canadian under the name of Edmund Trinka”, was arrested in Johannesburg.

The article says South Africa’s security police chief, Hendrik van den Bergh, had announced that Loginov, who was born in Moscow in 1933 and was attached to the KGB, had confessed to espionage in 23 countries. The article adds that Loginov had been on a “mission in South Africa” and was involved in the “illegal international transfer of currency”.

Van den Bergh is quoted as saying: “We have a fantastic amount of information and material in our possession.”

‘A Soviet plant’


Another CIA-archived news report, from The Washington Post, says that in 1969, two years after Loginov’s arrest, South Africa had exchanged him for 11 “Westerners held in the Soviet Union”. Loginov had therefore, in effect, put South Africa in good standing with Western countries, such as the US.

This saga becomes more intriguing because it appears that it was Angleton who outed him to the South African authorities.

A 1991 Time article, which references author Tom Mangold’s book Cold Warrior – James Jesus Angleton: The CIA’s Master Spy Hunter, states: “Angleton decided that Loginov, then under Soviet ‘deep cover’ in South Africa, was ‘dirty’ – a Soviet plant.

“Loginov was exposed as a KGB spy to local authorities, who in 1969 turned him over to the West Germans to use in a spy swap with the East. In 1979, an agency review determined that Loginov had been above board and his information valid.”

This meant the CIA had found that Loginov had actually turned his back on the KGB and been a US ally, and that Angleton sold him out.

This thin strand in overall thick spy webs with nodes attached to Angleton and the CIA therefore involved countries including the US, Israel, Russia and South Africa. Countries that have the potential to – and do – spark geopolitical battles that have reverberating repercussions affecting other states, and countless lives.

Beneath all this, spies inevitably pull strings from the shadows, their activities often only becoming visible in retrospect. DM

This story first appeared in our weekly Daily Maverick 168 newspaper, which is available countrywide for R35.

Categories:

Tags: