literally drank himself to death.
"A visit to his second-floor office was said to be unforgettable. You would find the cadaverous spy master sitting behind a mountain of documents in his darkened office, the blinds tightly drawn, chain-smoking Virginia Slims, hunched over a file, his pallor ghostly, hinting in a low whisper of enormous, frightful conspiracies of which only he had an inkling.
Insomniac, private and eventually alcoholic, often estranged from his wife and children, he was also brilliant, a scholar of poetic sensibility, a friend of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. Graced with a gentle temperament and charm, he was a man who inspired fierce loyalty and devotion among his staff and friends. During wartime he achieved renown for his work in counterintelligence in the Office of Strategic Services (the predecessor of the C.I.A.) in London and then Italy, and shortly after his return he was named the first head of the counterintelligence staff for the newborn C.I.A."
http://www.nytimes.com/1991/06/30/books/the-life-and-strange-career-of-a-mole-hunter.html?pagewanted=all
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