By JAMES RISEN 
 

WASHINGTON, Aug. 16 -- David Henry Blee, a legendary American spymaster who played a critical role in dispelling the climate of paranoia that paralyzed the Central Intelligence Agency's espionage operations against the Soviet Union in the 1960's, died on Aug. 4 at his home in Bethesda, Md. He was 83. 
 

Placed in charge of the C.I.A.'s Soviet Division in 1971, Mr. Blee made a historic break with the agency's eccentric chief of counterintelligence, James Jesus Angleton, effectively ending Mr. Angleton's broad and destructive influence over the agency's operations against Moscow. 
 

Because of Mr. Angleton's belief that virtually every Soviet citizen who tried to defect was actually a double agent sent to dupe the Americans, the agency's operations against Moscow had been tied in knots for years. Mr. Angleton's theories had prompted the intelligence agency to rebuff many Soviets who tried to offer their spy services, and ultimately led to the secret imprisonment under brutal conditions of one K.G.B. officer who defected to the United States. 
 

Although as chief of counterintelligence Mr. Angleton was not in the agency's Soviet Division, his long tenure as chief spy hunter gave him enormous influence. 
 

Mr. Angleton's belief that the C.I.A. was falling prey to a K.G.B. "monster plot" of deception led to a witch hunt for Soviet moles within the agency. Careers were destroyed as one longtime agency officer after another came under suspicion. 
 

But Mr. Blee, a longtime Middle East hand, rejected Mr. Angleton's theories and threw open the doors to defectors and potential Soviet spies, an approach that younger intelligence officers eagerly embraced. 
 

Mr. Blee, a Harvard-eeucated lawyer, avoided an open confrontation with Mr. Angleton as he ordered the 180-degree shift. 
 

With the backing of agency's director, William E. Colby, Mr. Blee brought in lieutenants he had worked with in the Middle East and South Asia who had not been tainted by the Angletonian mole hunt. They reinvestigated long-neglected espionage leads. 
 

"He was the architect of the program that turned the clandestine service back on target against the Soviets after all the years of Angleton," said Haviland Smith, a former C.I.A. officer. 
 

Mr. Blee's policy shift quickly bore fruit; in the 1970's the number of well-placed spies working behind the Iron Curtain increased sharply. 
 

Mr. Blee's success can be indirectly measured by the number of Soviet spies working for the United States who were betrayed by Aldrich Ames, a C.I.A. officer in the Soviet Division. In 1985, when Mr. Ames began to spy for the K.G.B., he turned over the names of at least 10 Soviet intelligence officers working for the agency. The K.G.B. was shocked by how deeply it had been penetrated. 
 

"He had a greater intellectual command of overseas operational activity than any officer I ever knew," said Clair George, a former agency deputy director of operations. 
 

David Henry Blee was born in San Francisco on Nov. 20, 1916, and graduated from Stanford University in 1938. After graduating from Harvard Law School in 1942, he enlisted in the Army in 1943. After a brief assignment with the Army Corps of Engineers, Mr. Blee was transferred to the Office of Strategic Services, the wartime predecessor to the C.I.A. He joined a small team that was landed by submarine on the islands off the coast of Thailand to monitor the Japanese fleet. 
 

The excitement of wartime clandestine operations got into his blood, and he joined the nation's new peacetime spy service when it was founded soon after World War II. He stayed until his retirement in 1985. 
 

One of Mr. Blee's biggest early triumphs came in 1965, when he was the C.I.A. station chief in India. Svetlana Stalin, the daughter of the Soviet dictator, showed up at the American Embassy and asked for political asylum. In an interview this year, Mr. Blee recalled that while Washington dithered about how to respond, he put her on an airplane and spirited her out of the country to safety. 
 

He soon became chief of the agency's Near East Division, which handled espionage in the Middle East, before taking over the Soviet Division in 1971. 
 

Mr. Blee ended his career in the same job that Mr. Angleton had occupied for so many years, running the agency's counterintelligence operations. 
 

He retired just as the C.I.A. was coming to grips with the most serious betrayal by one of its own officers up to that time, the defection of Edward Lee Howard, a C.I.A. case officer who had been fired just before his scheduled assignment to Moscow. 
 

Before his dismissal, Mr. Howard had already been briefed on many of the agency's most sensitive operations in the Soviet Union, including the case of Adolf Tolkachev, a Soviet aviation design expert who had given the C.I.A. a trove of secret information on Soviet military aircraft. What was not known at the time of Mr. Blee's retirement, however, was that another intelligence officer, Mr. Ames, had volunteered to the Soviets just as Mr. Howard was being exposed. Mr. Blee is survived by his wife, Margaret Gauer Blee; four sons, John David and Robert Henry, both of Bethesda, David Cooper, of Alexandria, Va., and Richard Earl, of Washington; a daughter, Elizabeth Blee Fritsch of Washington; and four grandchildren.