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Philip Agee: Let Us Now Praise an Infamous Man
Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit
[A very nice tribute by Al Burke to Philip Agee. The title refers to
a book by the US writer (and relative) James Agee, who is probably
actually most famous in the US for his novel "A Death in the Family."
Burke included excerpts from Agee's Sept 24, 2001 presentation, in
Stockholm (just post-9/11) entitled "The USA and International
Terrorism." We will be distributing the entire text from our archives
separately so we're not including it here. Also below is the obit from
The New York Times -- mediocre, but much less awful than one might
expect. The Guardian obit distributed yesterday is about the best
published by the mainstream media. -NYTransfer]
sent by Jane Franklin
Nordic News Network - Jan 10, 2008
http://www.nnn.se
Let Us Now Praise an (In)famous Man:
Philip Agee (1935-2008)
by Al Burke
[Accompanying photo:
Philip Agee, as he appeared when he was "on the run" from the CIA]
10 January 2008 (NNN) -- Philip Agee, former agent of the CIA, died in
Havana, Cuba, on 8 January 2008 at the age of 72. He was the first
agent to leave "The Company" and reveal its dirty secrets, having become
disillusioned with its appalling practices in Latin America.
I had the pleasure and privilege of meeting Philip on three occasions in
Stockholm, and he once confided that he was a distant relation of author
James Agee,whose best-known work is probably Let Us Now Praise Famous
Men-- a book-length reportage on the desperately grim lives of
dirt-poor farmers in the U.S. South during the 1930s' Great Depression.
It is an apt reference, as it was Philip's eye-opening encounter with
the desperate conditions of South America's impoverished masses-- and
his growing insight into the central role played by U.S. foreign policy
in perpetuating their misery-- which led to his resignation from the
CIA and the disclosure of its criminal activities in the political and
literary bombshell, Inside the Company: CIA Diary.
That process and the very high price it entailed, including the
inevitable cries of "traitor!" and the CIA snapping at his heels as he
sought refuge in several European countries, are recounted in Philip's
memoir, On the Run.
Inside the Company, though published in 1975, remains a basic reference
on the methods and procedures by which the United States pursues and
maintains its interests in the countries it seeks to control. In fact,
I happened to be re-reading it a few years ago as Venezuela was being
subjected to a classic destabilization campaign whose evident purpose
was to soften up the country for the coup against President Hugo Ch!vez
which in due course took place a few months later.
The basic procedure was all laid out in Philip's book: One could read
his detailed account of how he and his colleagues had organized the
downfall of Ecuador's President Velasco in 1961, and in the daily news
follow the same tactics and procedures as they were being applied in
Venezuela forty years later. Then as now, the mainstream media played a
central role in creating the necessary pre-coup atmosphere of diffuse
anxiety, widespread malaise, and seething rebellion against a
"dictator" who happened to be democratically elected.
Now as then-- despite the numerous subsequent revelations of Philip and
others who have followed his example-- the same media have divulged
little or nothing about the shadowy figures and agencies that
orchestrate such processes. For the most part, the CIA and other
instruments of U.S. domination continue to operate behind a media
smokescreen of willful neglect and obfuscation.
These and related matters were the focus of a speech by Philip in
Stockholm on 24 September 2001, just thirteen days after the revenge
attacks against symbols of U.S. economic and military might. A
soft-spoken and unfailingly courteous man, he was also a captivating
speaker who held the rapt attention of a large audience as he outlined
the history and methods of the CIA, its long involvement in
international terrorism, and with characteristic foresight analysed the
likely consequences of the terror attacks in New York and Washington.
For the complete text of Philip's Stockholm speech, see "Appendix E" at:
http://www.nnn.se/abf/abf.htm
***
The New York Times - Jan 10, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/10/obituaries/10agee.html
[Accompanying Photo: Philip Agee on ABC in 1987]
Philip Agee, 72, Is Dead; Exposed Other C.I.A. Officers
By SCOTT SHANE
Philip Agee, the former Central Intelligence Agency officer who turned
against the agency and spent years exposing undercover American spies
overseas, died Monday in Havana. He was 72.
The cause was peritonitis, said Louis Wolf, a friend.
Mr. Agee, whose disillusionment with his work at the agency led him to
embrace leftist views, had spent nearly four decades as an avowed enemy
of American foreign policy and particularly of the covert intelligence
work that supported it. Deprived of his American passport and expelled
from several countries at the request of the United States, he had
lived for the most part in Germany and Cuba, where he operated a travel
Web site, cubalinda.com.
His 1975 book, Inside the Company: CIA Diary, infuriated American
officials by identifying about 250 officers, front companies and
foreign agents working for the United States. His example inspired
several more books and magazines, including Covert Action Information
Bulletin, written by close associates and sometimes with Mr. Agees
help, which published the names and often the addresses of hundreds
more agency officers working under cover around the world.
The expos(c)s of Mr. Agee and others led Congress to pass the
Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982, which made it a crime
to intentionally reveal the identity of a covert intelligence officer.
An investigation of the possible violation of that law in 2003 after
Valerie Wilson was named as a C.I.A. officer led to the perjury
conviction last year of I. Lewis Libby, Vice President Dick Cheneys
former chief of staff.
Phil Agee was really the first person to do whistle-blowing on the
C.I.A. on the grand scale, said William H. Schaap, a New York lawyer
and old friend who worked with him on anti-C.I.A. projects. He blew
the whistle on hundreds and hundreds of undercover operations.
What Mr. Agee and his political allies saw as a moral imperative, his
former colleagues at the intelligence agency saw as reckless and venal
betrayal. He was accused of working with the Soviet K.G.B. and Cuban
intelligence against the agency, though as a fellow traveler rather
than as a formal agent.
You can package it any way you want " the simple reality is he
defected to the enemy during the cold war, said Frank R. Anderson, 65,
who worked as a clandestine officer for the C.I.A. abroad from 1968 to
1995. He did everything he could to endanger his colleagues and fellow
American citizens.
Mr. Agees efforts and those of his associates, Mr. Anderson said,
placed in danger not only Americans doing covert work but also all the
foreign citizens who had associated with them, whether as spies or in
daily life. Even when it did not result in physical threats, the
exposure of spies disguised as diplomats or businesspeople forced the
agency to withdraw them and caused costly disruptions of intelligence
efforts, Mr. Anderson said.
At a ceremony in 1997 to mark the 50th anniversary of the C.I.A.,
George Bush, the former president and C.I.A. director, invoked Mr. Agee
as a symbol of treachery. Remember Philip Agee, who I consider a
traitor to our country? Mr. Bush asked.
Mr. Agee was sometimes accused " wrongly, according to him and his
friends " of bearing some responsibility for the death of Richard
Welch, the agencys Athens station chief, who was assassinated in 1975
by the Greek terrorist group November 17.
Barbara Bush, the former first lady, included such an accusation in her
autobiography. Mr. Agee sued, and Mrs. Bush omitted the reference to
him from later printings.
He really, truly did not want to see anyone hurt, said Mr. Wolf, the
friend and co-author who carried on Mr. Agees work of exposing agents.
He wanted to neutralize what they were doing " the whole gamut, from
fixing elections and hiring local journalists to plant stories all the
way up to creating foreign intelligence services that became agencies
of oppression.
Philip Burnett Franklin Agee was born July 19, 1935, into a prosperous
family in Tacoma Park, Fla., and had a privileged upbringing in a big
white house bordering an exclusive golf club, as he later described in
his 1987 memoir On the Run. An altar boy, he attended a Jesuit high
school and graduated from Notre Dame in 1956, joining the C.I.A. the
next year after briefly attending law school.
After three years of military training at the direction of the agency,
Mr. Agee worked under cover for eight years in Ecuador, Uruguay and
Mexico. His change of heart was influenced by Angela Camargo Seixas, a
Brazilian leftist, who Mr. Agee wrote, had been arrested and tortured
by Brazilian security forces; she later became Mr. Agees lover.
When I joined the C.I.A. I believed in the need for its existence, he
wrote in CIA Diary. After 12 years with the agency I finally
understood how much suffering it was causing, that millions of people
all over the world had been killed or had their lives destroyed by the
C.I.A. and the institutions it supports.
The book chronicles his growing disillusionment. An entry for Dec. 12,
1965, describes a meeting with top police officials in Montevideo,
Uruguay, during which he heard moans from an adjacent room.
The moaning grew in intensity, turning to screams, Mr. Agee wrote.
By then I knew we were listening to someone being tortured.
Because he feared that the torture victims were people whose names he
had given to the Uruguayan authorities, Mr. Agee was racked with guilt.
Im going to be hearing that voice for a long time, he wrote.
Mr. Agee is survived by his wife, Giselle Roberge Agee, a former ballet
dancer from Germany, and two sons from his first marriage, Philip and
Christopher, both of New York. His first marriage, to Janet Agee, ended
in divorce.
Despite its political viewpoint, CIA Diary is considered by some
agency veterans to offer an accurate account of the work of a case
officer. In a talk at Harvard last year, Michael Sulick, now head of
the C.I.A.s clandestine service, recommended Mr. Agees book as an
excellent reflection of the day-to-day life of an officer, until he
starts going bad, and then of course its totally untrue.
Oleg D. Kalugin, a former K.G.B. general who now lives outside
Washington, said Mr. Agee approached Soviet intelligence in Mexico in
the early 1970s but was rejected by an officer who thought he was a
plant. He then approached Cuban intelligence, supplying details of
C.I.A. operations in Latin America that were passed on to the K.G.B.
He was a valuable source, Mr. Kalugin said.
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