In James Angleton's Domain

A Shakespearean actor grills his CIA father about a career in the shadow of a superspook

John Hadden, actor and author. (Credit: Mark Kitaoka)

In his 2016 memoir, Conversations with a Masked Man, My Father, the CIA, and Me, the playwright, actor and writer John Hadden published long, verbatim transcripts of his hours-long, often unsettling, conversations with his father, who joined the CIA at the dawn of the Cold War and, among other fraught missions, later played a key role in uncovering how Israel secretly obtained U.S. uranium for its clandestine nuclear bomb program.

I relied on Conversations in writing The Ghost, my 2017 biography of James Angleton, the sinister counterintelligence chief of the CIA who was John Hadden Sr.’s boss for many years. In his book, the son, a Shakespearean actor in Vermont, elicits harsh truths from the old man.