Excerpt:

In October 1949, Wisner teamed up with the British to run rebels into communist Albania, the poorest and most isolated nation in Europe. He saw this barren Balkan outcrop as fertile ground for a resistance army formed from exiled royalists and ragtag loyalists in Rome and Athens. A ship launched from Malta carried nine Albanians on the first commando mission. Three men were killed immediately and the secret police chased down the rest. Wisner had neither the time nor the inclination for introspection. He flew more Albanian recruits to Munich for parachute training, then turned them over to the Athens station, which had its own airport, a fleet of planes, and some tough Polish pilots.

They jumped into Albania and landed in the arms of the secret police. With each failed mission, the plans became more frantic, the training more slipshod, the Albanians more desperate, their capture more certain. The agents who survived were taken prisoner, their messages back to the Athens station controlled by their captors.

"What had we done wrong?" wondered the CIA's John Limond Hart, who was handling the Albanians in Rome. It took years before the CIA understood that the soviets had known every aspect of the operation from the start. The training camps in German were infiltrated. The Albanian exile communities in Rome, Athens, and London were shot through with traitors. And James J. Angleton--the headquarters man responsible for the security of secret operations, the CIA's guardian against double agents--had coordinated the operation with his best friend in British intelligence: the Soviet spy Kim Philby, London's liaison with the CIA.

Philby worked for Moscow out of a secure room in the Pentagon, adjacent to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. His friendship with Angleton was sealed with the cold kiss of gin and the warm embrace of whiskey. He was an extraordinary drinker, knocking back a fifth a day, and Angleton was on his way to becoming one of the CIA's champion alcoholics, a title held against stiff competition. For more than a year, before and after many a liquid lunch, Angleton gave Philby the precise coordinates for the drop zones for every agent the CIA parachuted into Albania. Though failure followed failure, death upon death, the flights went on almost four years. Roughly two hundred of the CIA's foreign agents died. Almost no one in the American government knew. It was a most secret thing.

Angleton was promoted to chief of counterintelligence when it was over. He held the job for twenty years. Drunk after lunch, his mind an impenetrable maze, his inbox a black hole, he passed judgment on every operation and every officer that the CIA aimed against the Soviets. He came to believe that a Soviet master plot controlled American perceptions of the world, and that he and he alone understood the depths of the deception. He took the CIA's missions against Moscow down a dark labyrinth.