"After such knowledge what forgiveness? Think now/History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors/And issues, deceives us with whispering ambitions,/Guides us by vanities."

In all honesty, I was too lenient on Angleton; he was an evil man. But the connection between his modernist, New-Critical literary training and the way he shaped the practice of intelligence in the 20th Century remains under-analyzed. As a gesture to this end, I read T.S. Eliot's poem "Gerontion" and compared some of its lines to Angleton's life and career.  

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