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The Education Forum > Controversial Issues in History > Political Conspiracies
Peter Lemkin
CIA Whistleblower Philip Agee Dies at 72

And the former CIA agent turned outspoken whistleblower Philip Agee has died. Agee authored the 1975 book “Inside the Company: CIA Diary”, which detailed several clandestine CIA operations around the world. Former President and CIA chief George H.W. Bush would later call him a “traitor.” I spoke to Agee about his book in October 2003.

Democracy Now!’s full interview

Philip Agee: “We were right to do it then, because the U.S. policy at the time, executed by the C.I.A., was to support murderous dictatorships around the world, as in Vietnam, as in Greece, as in Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil. And that’s only to name a few. We opposed that use of the U.S. intelligence service for those dirty operations. And I’m talking about regimes now that tortured and disappeared people by the thousands.”

Agee died last night in Cuba at the age of 72.
John Geraghty
This is a very sad day. Agee did so much to expose the security state and renegade intelligence agencies and operatives, a champion of democracy.I don't think the CIA will be shedding any tears.

Renegade CIA agent Agee dies


Fred Attewill and agencies
Wednesday January 9, 2008
Guardian Unlimited


Philip Agee, photographed in Hamburg, Germany, in 2006. Photograph: Martin Argles

Philip Agee, a former CIA agent who became a bitter critic of Washington's Cuba policy, has died aged 72, Cuban state media reported today.
Agee quit the CIA in 1969 after 12 years in which he mainly worked in Latin America. He was later denounced as a traitor by George Bush Sr and was threatened with death by his former colleagues.

His famous 1975 book, Inside the Company: CIA Diary, cited alleged CIA misdeeds against leftwingers in the region and included a 22-page list of people he claimed were agency operatives.


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Granma, Cuba's communist party newspaper, said Agee died on Monday night and described him as "a loyal friend of Cuba and fervent defender of the peoples' fight for a better world".
Bernie Dwyer, a journalist with state-run Radio Havana, said Agee had been in hospital since last month, where he died following several operations for perforated ulcers. Dwyer said friends planned a remembrance ceremony for him on Sunday at his Havana apartment.

In comments published last year, Agee defended his decision to expose the CIA: "It was a time in the 70s when the worst imaginable horrors were going on in Latin America.

"Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Guatemala, El Salvador - they were military dictatorships with death squads, all with the backing of the CIA and the US government. That was what motivated me to name all the names and work with journalists who were interested in knowing just who the CIA were in their countries."

His intent to destabilise the organisation by revealing the identities of CIA agents infuriated his former employers. In Britain, he worked with journalists to list the names of the agents, leading to many of them being sent back to Washington with their cover blown.

Agee wanted to settle in Cambridge with his partner, Angela, a leftwing Brazilian who had been jailed and tortured in her own country, and his two young sons by his estranged wife.

He planned to continue exposing the CIA but his plans were ruined when he was deported in 1978 as a threat to the security of the state.

He believes the US secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, urged the prime minister, Jim Callaghan, to act because of a belief that Agee had disrupted the Jamaican elections in favour of leftwinger Michael Manley by exposing CIA activities there.

He settled in Germany with his new lover, a ballet dancer called Giselle Roberge, and later split his time between Hamburg and Havana. In 1979, his US passport was finally revoked and was never returned.

However, Agee had no regrets about his decision to blow the whistle on the CIA. He said: "There was a price to pay. It disrupted the education of my children [Phil and Chris, then teenagers] and I don't think it was a happy period for them. It also cost me all my money. Everything I made from the book, I had to spend.

"But it made me a stronger person in many ways and it ensured I would never lose interest or go back in the other direction politically. The more they did these dirty things, the more they made me realise what I was doing was important."

Under the US Freedom of Information Act, Agee was able to discover the CIA had accumulated 18,000 pages of information on him.

Agee was repeatedly blamed for the death of Richard Welch, the CIA station chief in Athens who was assassinated in 1975.

"George Bush's father [George Bush Sr] came in as CIA director in the month after the assassination and he intensified the campaign, spreading the lie that I was the cause of the assassination. His wife, Barbara, published her memoirs and she repeated the same lie, and this time I sued and won, in the sense that she was required to send me a letter in which she apologised and recognised what she wrote about me was false.

"They've tried to make this story stick for years. I never know what government hand or neocon hand is behind the allegations, and I don't pay too much attention, but I know I haven't been forgotten."

Agee was a great supporter of what he regarded as Cuba's progressive policies providing universal healthcare and education, and he regarded the current US president as the "antithesis" of those achievements.

Writing in the Guardian last year, he said: "All Cuba's achievements have been in defiance of US efforts to isolate Cuba. Every dirty method has been used, including infiltration, sabotage, terrorism, assassination, economic and biological warfare and incessant lies in the media of many countries."

Agee denied claims from a former Cuban intelligence officer he had received $1m from Cuban intelligence.

Despite the long-running bitterness between him and the US authorities, Agee was allowed to return to the US many times without being arrested and was allowed back into Britain under John Major's government.

In the 1990s, he set up a company to bring visitors to Cuba. Many travellers came from the US, even though Americans are forbidden by law from visiting the country and can be fined heavily if caught.

Until his death, Agee remained committed to exposing the CIA. Last year, he was working on a book about the CIA's activities in Venezuela.






















John Simkin
I was in contact with Phillip. I tried to persuade him to join the forum but he felt it was too dangerous to do so. A great American hero.
Peter Lemkin
QUOTE(John Simkin @ Jan 9 2008, 09:01 PM) *
I was in contact with Phillip. I tried to persuade him to join the forum but he felt it was too dangerous to do so. A great American hero.



That says a lot about the state of 'free speech' in and out of America today.....
I could make quite a list of person who would have much to offer on a forum such as this..or others....or speak publicly...but they feel it is too dangerous.....[the truth is, that is!]! Phil wore his Bush I 'verdict' of him as a 'traitor' as a badge of honor...as he should have. Bush I and Bush II and Bush -1 [Prescott] - and all of their ilk - are the traitors...and all their minions of little 'spiders' behind the curtains of power. Phil was a hero and a true patriot. Those on the side of truth and truthtelling always are - no matter what the penalty.
Phil Agee Presente!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7179798.stm
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKagee.htm
http://www.amazon.com/INSIDE-COMPANY-DIARY...e/dp/055326012X
Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit

Circles Robinson Online - Dec 20, 2006
http://circlesonline.blogspot.com/2006/12/...-cuba-film.html

Philip Agee Documentary at Cuba Film Fest

By Circles Robinson

The Cuba-Irish connection of directors Roberto Ruiz and Bernie Dwyer has
once again teamed up on a documentary: "One Man's Story: Philip Agee, Cuba
and the CIA", which focuses on the dark side of United States foreign
policy.

The 33-minute film had its premiere screening at the Havana Film Festival
taking place through December 15th in the Cuban capital. It will now become
a valuable teaching tool on US attempts to destroy the Cuban Revolution
using mercenaries and US taxpayer's money.

Filmed in Havana with excellent archive material of numerous US covert and
direct involvements in Latin America, One Man's Story allows Agee, who
betrayed big brother and paid the price, to tell his captivating story.
Agee, like several repentant Vietnam Veterans, is obsessed with getting the
record straight for a country, the United States, where recent history is
barely taught and what is comes through a fine sieve.

"I entered the CIA as a patriotic conformist from a comfortable family,"
explains Agee, now 71, in the documentary.

"I was only 22 and had romantic views towards things and it wasn't until I
got down to Ecuador and had been working there for a year or two that I
began to get a political education."

In all, Agee worked for 12 years in the Company (CIA) joining in 1957 and
working in Washington, Ecuador, Uruguay, and Mexico until he resigned in
1968.

He has since become one of the most important whistle blowers about US
support for the installation and maintaining of brutal dictatorships
throughout the Western Hemisphere and beyond.

His first book, "Inside the Company" published in 1975, and the Covert
Action Information Bulletin, betrayed many heinous secrets of US
Intelligence and his passport was taken away in 1979, "to protect national
security."

Agee has lived in Europe and the Cuban capital of Havana, where the
interviews for One Man's Story were made by directors Bernie Dwyer and
Roberto Ruiz.

One Man's Story gives us first hand testimony that should send up smoke
signals to people questioning the motives and actions of current US policy
in Iraq and Afghanistan, Cuba, Venezuela and Bolivia, to name a few.
For years Agee has also been an outspoken critic of the US Blockade on
Cuba, encouraging US citizens to find a way to continue doing business with
the island and traveling there.

Part of the Big Picture

In their last co-production, Ruiz and Dwyer screened "Mission against
Terror;" the story of how the Cuban Five followed the trail of US-based
terrorism against their country, and were cruelly imprisoned while the
Cuban-American terrorists they monitored enjoy freedom on the streets of
Miami, Florida.

After outlining different terrorist acts perpetrated by the CIA against
Cuba since its 1959 revolution, in One Man's Story, Agee justifies Cuba's
need to send agents, like the Cuban Five, to Florida in order to protect
the island.

For Cubans, both documentaries contain much information that is well known
and rehashed often in the media and education centers and might seem
redundant to some people in a country where political history is a
constant.

However, for North American and European viewers, the film feeds curiosity
about the sinister role the super power has played in the world and may
serve as a way to reach young people still unsure with what being patriotic
means.

The terrifying events at Abu Ghraib, the US Naval Base and offshore prison
at Guantanamo Bay, and other clandestine cites, can be put into context
with a better understanding of the CIA operations as told by Agee.

Hats off to Dwyer and Ruiz for telling a story that needs to be told again
and again. The man they chose to tell it clearly knows his stuff.

Dwyer is an Irish filmmaker and journalist who lives and works in Havana as
a radio reporter for Radio Havana Cuba. Ruiz hails from the far eastern
Cuban province of Guantanamo and is a graduate in English and Spanish
literature. He works extensively making documentaries for Cuban TV.

The duo has now made 5 documentaries. 1998: Che, the Irish legacy (traces
Che Guevara's Irish links); 2001: Che in Ireland (Che Guevara's visit to
Dublin in 1964); 2002: The Footprints of Cecilia McPartland (Irish mother
of Cuban revolutionary martyr Julio Anotonio Mella); 2004: Mission Against
Terror (Case of the Cuban Five) and now One Man's Story: Philip Agee, Cuba
and the CIA.

In their next project, Ruiz and Dwyer hope to document events relating to
the Barbados Sabotage, when a Cuban commercial airliner was blown out of
the sky in 1976 killing all 73 persons on board.

AGEE PHILIP BURNETT FRANKLIN
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Charles Drago
Rest in peace, my brother in arms.
Peter Lemkin
Former acting ambassador to Iraq Joseph Wilson says that the outing of his wife other attempts to discredit him “are clearly intended to intimidate others from coming forward.” But it’s not just intimidation; it’s a felony. Until now, a crime the Bush family has taken very seriously.

Many believe the law was passed in direct response to former CIA agent Philip Agee’s blowing the whistle on CIA dirty tricks in his book Inside the Company: CIA Diary George H.W. Bush, who was vice-president when the law was passed, said some of the criticism of the Agency ruined secret U.S. clandestine operations in foreign countries.

So seriously did the Bushes take the crime of exposing CIA operatives that Barbara Bush, in her memoirs, accused Agee of blowing the cover of the CIA Station Chief in Greece, Richard Welch, who was assassinated outside his Athens residence in 1975. Agee sued the former first lady and Mrs. Bush withdrew the statement from additional printings of her book. Still, at a celebration marking the fiftieth anniversary of the CIA, the elder Bush again singled out Agee in his remarks, calling him “a traitor to our country.”
Phillip Agee, former CIA agent. In 1975 Agee wrote Inside the Company: CIA Diary about his experiences with the agency from 1957 to 1968. Many believe the Intelligence Identities Protection Act was passed in direct response to Agee’s blowing the whistle on CIA dirty tricks. He speaks to us from Cuba.

TRANSCRIPT

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Phillip Agee joins us now from Cuba. Welcome to Democracy Now!

PHILLIP AGEE: Good morning Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: Good to have you with us. Why don’t we start off with Larry Johnson’s comment with what the Bush’s alleged, and your response to this whole scandal that is brewing in Washington.

PHILLIP AGEE: Well, Mr. Johnson is repeating a story put about by the C.I.A. beginning with the Welch assassination in Athens in 1975.

From the moment of that event the C.I.A. tried to put the blame on me because at that time I was involved with quite a lot of other people in a guerrilla journalism campaign to expose the C.I.A.’s operations and its people, especially in western Europe at that time.

George Bush’s father came in as C.I.A. director the month following the Welch assassination. As director he presided over the agency as they mounted a campaign throughout western Europe trying to make me appear to be a security threat, a traitor, a Soviet agent, a Cuban agent. All those sorts of things which led to my expulsion from five different NATO countries in the late 1970’s.

In fact it was in all based on lies, and to think that I was responsible for the death of any C.I.A. people for their exposures is absolutely false. No one as far as I know of all those people who were exposed as C.I.A. people along with their operations was ever even harassed or threatened. What happened was, their operations were disrupted and that was the purpose of what we were doing.

We were right to do it then, because the U.S. policy at the time executed by the C.I.A. was to support murderous dictatorships around the world, in Greece, Chile, Uruguay, Brazil. That’s only to name a few, and we oppose that use of the U.S. intelligence service for those dirty operations.

I’m talking about regimes now that tortured and disappeared people by the thousands.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the process you went through, Phillip Agee, in the C.I.A., when you decided to expose what was going on?

PHILLIP AGEE: To begin with I was a typical young man of the 1950’s. I was always taught to accept the government as honest and as virtuous. I went into the C.I.A. because I wanted to serve my country.

When I went down to Latin America in 1960 I had had no political education in the sense that people were politically educated in the 1960’s, a generation later or practically a generation later. I got my political education when I was in Latin America seeing the realities around me day after day.

It happened at that time that U.S. policy was to isolate the Cuban Revolution in Latin America, and we were pretty successful in doing it in the early 1960’s.

At the same time we were doing it through our support to the traditional political forces in those countries, what are known as the Oligarchies. These are the people who have possessed the wealth and income and the land and so forth through many generations going back to colonial times.

Little by little I turned against the people that we were supporting because of their greed and because of the political repression that was required to keep this system of injustice glued together.

Eventually, I simply decided to leave the C.I.A. in 1968, and at the end of that year I left with no intention of writing a book or doing—taking any action.

I was going to start a new life, and, among other things, I reenrolled in university studies in a doctoral program at the University of Mexico in Latin American studies.

It was then that I began to think what until then had been unthinkable. A book on what I and my colleagues have been doing in the C.I.A. and Latin America. I had to choose between the university work and the book and I chose the book not knowing if I would ever get it done. But five years from the time I decided to do it I had it finished.

It was published eventually in 30 languages, it was a best seller in many different countries. I went on to write many articles, five more books, and for 30 years now I’ve been working in various activities in solidarity with the Cuban Revolution.

AMY GOODMAN: Phillip Agee, were there people inside the agency who quietly supported what you were doing?

PHILLIP AGEE: I have a feeling that there were, because you’ve just heard Larry Johnson speaking out against the misuse of the national intelligence service, the C.I.A., for, in this case, supporting a pack of lies concocted to justify converting ‘a war of choice’ into ‘a war of necessity’.

This is of course wrong, and it is an abuse of the national intelligence service to do that. In my days there were certainly people who were opposed to the C.I.A.’s support, that is to the use of the policy—by the policy makers of the C.I.A. as an instrument to impose a criminal policy leading to the crimes against humanity.

I’m sure there were people in there, they didn’t get in touch with me. Years later I have had contact with former C.I.A. people who told me that inside the agency there were people who were very quietly approving what I was doing.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Phillip Agee, he’s in Cuba.

What are you doing in Cuba?

PHILLIP AGEE: I have started a business here and online travel services at www.cubalinda.com.

We have a website which presents a very wide range of practically everything a person can do in Cuba. It’s a continuation of solidarity that I was doing all through the 1970’s and 1980’s and 1990’s in the sense that it’s trying to put the truth about Cuba out there; encouraging people to come to this country to see the Cuban Revolution for themselves, because over these 44 years, there have been so many lies and distortions, put about in the public information media. I’ve always felt that it was important that people know the truth about this country.

AMY GOODMAN: Phillip Agee, I would like to actually have you on another time to have an extended discussion about Cuba. But sticking with the schedule here, I want to ask you finally, what you think about what’s happening with Joseph Wilson and the outing of his wife, Valerie Plame as an undercover C.I.A. operative.

PHILLIP AGEE: Well, first you have to realize that this law, the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, under which someone in the White House may be indicted, is his father’s law.

This is the—this is a law sought by George Bush senior, when he was C.I.A. director and later as Vice President, he worked hard to get that law passed.

It is the irony of ironies that the law is violated, I believe for the first time in a serious way, by someone working in the office of his own son. This is simply dirty politics, I believe. The ambassador, that is ambassador Wilson, poked a hole in this whole pack of lies that have been concocted to justify the war; and in retaliation, they try to ruin his wife’s career and get even with him, you could say that it’s dirty politics as usual. But also one has to wonder what Poppa Bush is thinking about the fact that it’s his own son’s office that has violated the law that he works so hard to get passed.

AMY GOODMAN: What do you think of people saying, it’s similar to what you did?

PHILLIP AGEE: …but for different reasons. My reason were very clear and we stated many times. As I mentioned earlier I was not alone in that campaign. I was working with a lot of people from a lot of different countries, and it was a spontaneous campaign because people were opposed to the horrible political repression that the United States through the C.I.A. was supporting in the 1970’s.

This current case is totally different, it’s simply a dirty low shot to—out of revenge essentially I believe.

AMY GOODMAN: Did you have any dealings with, for example, some of the players we’re talking about today: Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, George Bush?

PHILLIP AGEE: I have not had dealings with them, but I followed the political positions of these people since the early 1990’s when Wolfowitz first came out with this policy document on a new United States foreign policy based on what would best be called I think neo-imperialism—and then later in the Project for a New American Century.

The major players in this Bush administration were all signers of that policy statement back in the 1990’s. It called for preemptive wars; it called for the control of the United States of the world essentially; and in this case it’s a question of control of Middle East oil among several other reasons. These lies that were used to justify it have all now been exposed. The world knows that they were all false, justifications that is. So the United States has been left alone: Germany is not going to participate; France is not going to participate; Russia is not participating. The United States has been left totally isolated in its intervention in Iraq. Deservedly so.

AMY GOODMAN: Do you condemn the blowing of Valerie plain’s cover?

PHILLIP AGEE: I don’t have any feelings whether it’s the right thing to do or the wrong thing to do. What is wrong is that it’s simply dirty politics.Whether it was the blowing of her cover or some other action.

It’s small potatoes compared to the whole scenario of lies that was used to justify the invasion of Iraq and the continuing occupation of that country.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you for being with us, former C.I.A. operative Phillip Agee who wrote the book “Inside the Company: C.I.A. diary”. We’re speaking to him in Cuba.

Thanks for being with us. You are listening to Democracy Now!
http://www.democracynow.org/2003/10/2/form...phillip_agee_on
John Geraghty
Here is the statement released by Agee's sons,


It is with great sadness that we the sons of Philip Agee—noted author and activist for peace and social justice—inform the American public and international community that our father passed away due to natural causes Monday evening, January 7, 2008, at 10:45 pm in Havana. He was 72. We would especially like to extend our sincerest thanks and gratitude to all the doctors, nurses, and healthcare workers who lovingly and graciously cared for him during the last days of his life. We would also like to offer our most heartfelt appreciation to all those who over the course of more than 40 years have in so many ways demonstrated unwavering support and admiration for his life long struggle for peace, social and economic justice, and a better world.



Philip Agee, Jr.

Chris Agee

Peter Lemkin
Thanks for that from the sons John. He really was fighting for Peace, Truth, Justice. He made a moral decsion [as have others] and those who called him a traitor [such as GHWB I defy anyone to site one damn thing that man has done to further Peace, Truth or Justice]. I met Phil in the USA when he was making a speaking tour. At that time he lived in Germany...but the USA 'leaned' on all countries and made it difficult for him to live or travel in most places in Europe...so he moved between Cuba and Germany and only travelled occassionally. He is a person who made a difference and his courage caused others to consider 'coming out of the cold' or secretly leaking information. He didn't hurt 'national security', he helped to re-establish it. It must be built on truth and democracy, openness and sunshine...not nasty secret events illegally and immorally run in the dark corners of the closets of the intelligence and military, MIC, and behind the Oligarchy's secret curtains and in their closets et al. 
His family certainly can be proud - as can all of us. We all have moral choices to
make in life. He certainly took the high road that those who defame him are not on.
Peter Lemkin
The spy who stayed out in the cold


After blowing the whistle on the dirty tactics of his CIA bosses in the 70s, Philip Agee was forced into exile. Thirty years on he has found a safe haven, but, he tells Duncan Campbell, the fight goes on

Wednesday January 10, 2007
The Guardian

Thirty years ago, Philip Agee, then a 41-year-old former CIA officer living in Cambridge, was told that he was to be deported from Britain as a threat to the security of the state. After a high-profile but unsuccessful attempt to fight the order, he and his young family left Britain for ever. But what happened to the man denounced as a traitor by George Bush Sr, threatened with death by his former colleagues and portrayed as a communist stooge by the British government?

A small fish restaurant off the Winterhude marketplace in Hamburg, on a grey afternoon, seems as good a place as any to meet a former CIA man who has spent much of his life looking over his shoulder. He is 71 now, grey-haired and a little battered around the face from recent surgery on a tumour, but still recognisable as the intense and clean-cut agent who took on the CIA all those years ago. It was his book, Inside the Company, published in 1975, that first revealed in detail many of the dirty tricks that his colleagues had been involved in across the world. Agee, a former philosphy and law student from a comfortable Florida family, had been in the CIA for more than a decade, working mainly in Latin America, before making his momentous decision to quit and tell.

"It was a time in the 70s when the worst imaginable horrors were going on in Latin America," he says. "Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Guatemala, El Salvador - they were military dictatorships with death squads, all with the backing of the CIA and the US government. That was what motivated me to name all the names and work with journalists who were interested in knowing just who the CIA were in their countries."

His intent to destabilise the organisation by revealing the identities of CIA agents infuriated his former employers. In Britain, he worked with publications such as Time Out, which in those days had a lengthy news section, to list the names of the agents, leading to many of them being sent back to Washington, their cover blown. The US government was livid.

Agee had made it clear he was going to settle in Cambridge with his partner, Angela, a leftwing Brazilian who had been jailed and tortured in her own country, and his two young sons by his estranged wife, and carry on exposing the CIA. But before he could unpack his bags, he was facing expulsion. He believes the US secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, urged the prime minister at the time, Jim Callaghan, to act because of a belief that Agee had disrupted the Jamaican elections in favour of leftwinger Michael Manley by exposing CIA activities there.

The home secretary, Merlyn Rees, issued the deportation order, informing colleagues - falsely and maliciously, according to Agee - that Agee was behind the deaths of two British agents. "Rees lied," he says. On the same day, a young American journalist, Mark Hosenball, who had just left Time Out where he had co-authored an exposé of GCHQ in Cheltenham, was also told to leave. The two became a cause celebre.

There were no safe havens for Agee. France refused to allow him to stay. The Netherlands, which had initially granted him admission, changed its mind, and he had no desire to risk a return to the US and probable prosecution and jail. Events in his personal life took over. His relationship with Angela, already strained by the pressures of deportation and his own frequent absences campaigning, ended. He met and fell in love with a ballet dancer called Giselle Roberge. At her suggestion, they married, which gave him the right to stay in Germany.

Agee currently splits his life between Hamburg and Havana. His US passport was revoked in 1979, but he was given a Grenadian one after helping that country's radical government. Then the Nicaraguans, under the Sandinista government, gave him one, which he was able to use until 1990 when his past caught up with him once more. "When Violetta Chamorro [a centrist candidate] was elected president," he explains, "she was desperate to have the Bush administration release the hundreds of millions of dollars they had promised in aid for relief and reconstruction. In order to release the aid, Bush made a series of demands and the revocation of my passport was one of them."

Since 1990, he has had a German passport. He did apply to get his US one back and duly visited the American interests section in Havana. "It was a spooky experience. The head of the section invited me to lunch - he was extremely friendly - but there was no way I would have lunch, much less a conversation about Cuba, with him. I did tell him I thought the US was getting a black eye over Iraq and Afghanistan, particularly over the torture." His bid to get the passport back was unsuccessful. "They wanted to have all the details of the Americans I was dealing with in the travel business [Agee started a company in the 90s to brings visitors to Cuba]. They expected me to rat on all the Americans who come to the country illegally. And I wasn't about to do that."

Looking back over the 30 years since he made his decision to step out into the cold, Agee says: "There was a price to pay. It disrupted the education of my children [Phil and Chris, teenagers then], and I don't think it was a happy period for them. It also cost me all my money. Everything I made from the book, I had to spend. But it made me a stronger person in many ways, and it ensured I would never lose interest or go back in the other direction politically. The more they did these dirty things, the more they made me realise what I was doing was important."

Under the US Freedom of Information Act, Agee has been able to see the scope of the operation mounted against him by an unforgiving CIA. "They admitted to having 18,000 pages on me. I figured out there were 120 pages a day for seven or eight years. That can only be things like telephone transcripts and letter intercepts. Some person from the Pentagon was talking about me and saying they had two or three people working on me full time. I thought it was so foolish, such a waste of money, because I don't do anything that's not public. I don't pay much attention to them any more, but now and then something will come up."

What comes up most often is the name of Richard Welch, the CIA station chief in Athens who was assassinated in 1975. Although Welch was named not by Agee but in other publications, Agee has often been blamed for his death. "George Bush's father came in as CIA director in the month after the assassination and he intensified the campaign, spreading the lie that I was the cause of the assassination. His wife, Barbara, published her memoirs and she repeated the same lie, and this time I sued and won, in the sense that she was required to send me a letter in which she apologised and recognised what she wrote about me was false. They've tried to make this story stick for years. I never know what government hand or neocon hand is behind the allegations, and I don't pay too much attention, but I know I haven't been forgotten."

Agee may not be on the run any more - he has been back to the US many times without being arrested and was allowed back into Britain under the Major government - but life is lived at least at a trot. He has just arrived from Spain, where he has addressed a rally in support of the Miami Five, the Cubans jailed for up to 25 years on espionage charges for infiltrating anti-Castro groups in Florida. Soon he will return from Hamburg to his other home, Havana, and his travel business. Initially, his customers came from the US, but Americans are forbidden by law from visiting Cuba and can be fined heavily if caught, so his clients now come mainly from Europe.

Would it be possible for someone in the CIA today to do what Agee did? "I think it would be much harder," he says. "I can think of plenty of people in the CIA who would be horrified by what the CIA has been doing in terms of the torture of suspected terrorists, but a person who tried to do what I did would face kidnapping and possibly being put on ice in a secret prison for many years to come."

Although the cases of Agee and Hosenball were inextricably linked, the two men have not met since their expulsions. Hosenball has had a successful journalistic career, first with the Sunday Times and now with Newsweek, a publication that has, coincidentally, always been hostile to Agee. "Newsweek is not about to be favourable to me or even neutral," says Agee. "It has been on my case from the very beginning."

If the CIA were hoping that age would mellow Agee, they were wrong. I had last seen him nearly 30 years ago at his farewell party in London as he said his reluctant goodbyes to what had become a large and vocal defence campaign. He wept on the ferry that took him away from Britain as he contemplated what the future might hold for him and his family, and you wondered how he would survive. But he remains as committed as ever, and busy working on another book, this time about the CIA's activitives in Venezuela over the years. "I never stopped what I started in London," he says, "and I don't expect to stop till I'm dead".
John Simkin
I have updated my page on Philip Agee:

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKagee.htm

It is ranked second to Wikipedia at Google if you type in "Philip Agee". However, it is first at Ask.

Please let me have any information that you want added to this page.
Dawn Meredith
QUOTE(John Simkin @ Jan 10 2008, 12:00 PM) *
I have updated my page on Philip Agee:

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKagee.htm

It is ranked second to Wikipedia at Google if you type in "Philip Agee". However, it is first at Ask.

Please let me have any information that you want added to this page.



He also wrote the introduction to Government By Gunplay (Harvey Yazijian and Sid Blumenthal eds. ) This was not noted in the list of books, articles where he is mentioned.

Rip- true American hero.

Dawn
Charles Drago
If they live long enough, do ALL retired CIA officers end up looking like the Antonio Veciana-directed police sketch of "Maurice Bishop"?

(Why do I feel obliged to add: KIDDING!)
J. Raymond Carroll
Symposium on "Agee As Traitor" from a conservative online magazine

http://frontpagemagazine.com/Articles/Read...57-A537115C3656
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