COLD WARRIOR: James Jesus Angleton, The CIA’s Master Spy Hunter, by Tom Mangold, Simon & Schuster, 462 pages, $24.95.

James Jesus Angleton, the CIA’s legendary chief of counterintelligence from 1954 to 1974, claims to have turned back at least 22 Soviets he believed to be double agents.

Unfortunately, Tom Mangold’s new book paints a less successful picture of the country’s top mole hunter. “Cold Warrior” maintains that the CIA and FBI have established that “every single one” of the 22 defectors rebuffed by Angleton was genuine.

The defector Angleton should have turned away, or at least paid less attention to, was Anatoliy Golitsyn. Angleton and Golitsyn were extremely paranoid and their actions immobilized the CIA’s counterintelligence division during the 1960s and early 1970s.

Golitsyn told Angleton that the Soviet-Sino split was a deception. He also said the Soviet Union had a complex plan to deceive the United States using disinformation.

As part of the plan, Golitsyn said, the Soviet Union would send Soviet agents to discredit him. Any Soviet agent seeking asylum after Golitsyn’s defection should not be trusted, he warned Angleton.

Angleton believed Golitsyn, and as a result several important agents working for the United States were betrayed.

Perhaps the most well-known failure during Angleton’s tenure is that of Yuriy Nosenko. The KGB lieutenant colonel first contacted the CIA in 1962 and defected two years later. Angleton didn’t believe he was a true defector and had Nosenko held in isolation from 1964 to 1967.

Nosenko found himself in the middle of a CIA war fought between two camps divided over the path Golitsyn and Angleton were following. This battle lasted 12 years and essentially paralyzed the counterintelligence division. More than that, it interfered with America’s intelligence operations with other countries, ruined people’s careers, and resulted in the deaths of several agents.

CIA Director William Colby finally forced Angleton to give up his job in 1974. Colby was not pleased with Angleton’s handling of the counterintelligence division. “I couldn’t find that we ever caught a spy under Jim,” Colby said. The counterintelligence division “was so secretive and self-contained that its work was not integrated into the rest of the agency’s operations. … I found that situation quite impossible.”

Mangold’s revelations in “Cold Warrior” blow the lid off the Angleton years at the CIA. After each chapter you’ll say, “I can’t believe this could happen.” And Nosenko’s story about his treatment at the hands of the CIA will shock you.

“Cold Warrior” is without a doubt the best book on Angleton since David Martin’s “Wilderness of Mirrors” in 1980. Mangold’s book, however, benefits from the passage of time and his disclosures will have an impact for years to come.

Jim Emple is an assistant design editor on the NEWS display desk.