ezrapound | (no subject)

HIGH ACHIEVER, DON'T YOU SEE? BABY, NOTHING COMES FOR FREE!
james jesús angleton, jim to everyone around him, is the counterintelligence chief in the nascent american cia during the height of the cold war - and, until the bitter end comes, the best friend of notorious british traitor kim philby, who fed information to the soviets as mi6's head of soviet counterintelligence. he's a paradox in terms - deeply eccentric, almost shy at some times and chokingly condescending at others, touchy at personal slights but capable of abhorrent behavior in the name of stopping the specter of 'global communism'. he's anti-communist, someone who is condescendingly amused by senator mccarthy but who does not regard him as the enemy despite his own love of poetry and the arts. he's used to answering to nobody and has little regard for laws or norms of decency where his own counterintelligence measures are concerned, going so far as to bug a friend's home - but, on the whole, is a deeply loyal friend, someone who unfailingly appears in his colleagues' times of need even when it means flying across the atlantic for a funeral, who will staunchly defend those close to him at the risk of his own reputation. in philby's case, it is his own deep, nigh-romantic attachment that blinds him longer than any other character even in the face of a tremendous body of evidence.

(ARE YOU SATISFIED WITH AN AVERAGE LIFE?)
by default i play him late in E06, after one of his agents has been killed, proving kim's guilt. jim is a man reeling, struggling to maintain dignity in the eyes of his subordinates and decide where to go next as he copes with the reality that his best friend of twenty years, someone he trusted so deeply that he disclosed state secrets that likely got people killed, was the enemy this entire time; jim is still in the process of trying to parse that he, the man who should in theory be better at sniffing out a mole than anyone else in the country, was fooled for that long. he's not quite at the point of beginning to grieve yet, because to grieve would be to fully acknowledge the sheer magnitude of what's just happened.