Opinion

The leaked documents on the Ukraine war are chilling

James J. Angleton, the CIA counterintelligence chief who was a walking definition of the word “eccentric,” once confided to me that it didn’t matter whether a spy was a double agent or a triple agent, as long as you knew the difference.

I was 29 years old at the time, recently assigned to cover intelligence for the Wall Street Journal, and frankly, I had no idea what Angleton was talking about. But his meaning becomes slightly clearer as we consider the recent leaks of U.S. military intelligence regarding the Ukraine war.