Philip Agee

Philip Burnett Franklin Agee (US /ˈeɪdʒi/; July 19, 1935 – January 7, 2008) was a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) case officer and writer, best known as author of the 1975 book, Inside the Company: CIA Diary, detailing his experiences in the CIA. Agee joined the CIA in 1957, and over the following decade had postings in Washington, D.C., Ecuador, Uruguay and Mexico. After resigning from the Agency in 1968, he became a leading opponent of CIA practices. A co-founder of CovertAction Quarterly, he died in Cuba in January 2008.

Agee was born in Tampa, Florida. He graduated cum laude from the University of Notre Dame in 1956, and attended the University of Florida College of Law.

Agee stated that his Roman Catholic social conscience had made him increasingly uncomfortable with his work by the late 1960s leading to his disillusionment with the CIA and its support for authoritarian governments across Latin America. In the book Agee condemned the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre in Mexico City and wrote that this was the immediate event precipitating his leaving the agency. Agee claimed that the CIA was "very pleased with his work", had offered him "another promotion", and that his superior "was startled" when Agee told him about his plans to resign.

In contrast, Sovietologist John Barron maintained in his book The KGB Today that Agee's resignation was forced "for a variety of reasons, including his irresponsible drinking, continuous and vulgar propositioning of embassy wives, and inability to manage his finances". Agee denied these claims as merely ad hominem attacks meant to discredit him.

Russian exile Oleg Kalugin, former head of the KGB’s Counterintelligence Directorate, claimed that in 1973 Agee approached the KGB's resident in Mexico City and offered a "treasure trove of information." According to Kalugin, the KGB was too suspicious to accept his offer.

Kalugin states that:

For his part, Agee claimed in his later work On the Run that he never had any intention of working for the KGB or Cuban intelligence. He was merely following his conscience in revealing the CIA's subversion and sabotage of democratically elected governments and genuine movements for social justice.

While Agee was writing Inside the Company, the KGB kept in contact with him through Edgar Anatolyevich Cheporov, a London correspondent of the Novosti News Agency.

Agee was accused of receiving up to US$1 million in payments from the Cuban intelligence service. He denied the accusations, which were first made by a high-ranking Cuban intelligence officer and 'defector' in a 1992 Los Angeles Times report.

A later Los Angeles Times article claimed that Agee posed as a CIA Inspector General in order to target a member of the CIA's Mexico City station on behalf of Cuban intelligence. According to this story, Agee was identified during a meeting by a CIA case officer.

To the end of his, life Philip Agee consistently and categorically denied ever having worked for any intelligence service after leaving the CIA. He maintained that his motives were genuinely altruistic. In support of this he adduces the relentless persecution he endured from the CIA, as it and the U.S. State department revoked his passport and succeeded in having him deported from several Western European countries, one after the other, until he finally found refuge in Cuba.

Because of legal problems in the United States, Inside the Company was first published in 1975 in Britain, while Agee was living in London. Playboy Magazine (August 1975) published excerpts from his book in the article titled "What You Still Don't Know About The CIA! Ex-Company Man Philip Agee Tells All".

Agee acknowledged that "Representatives of the Communist Party of Cuba also gave important encouragement at a time when I doubted that I would be able to find the additional information I needed."

The London Evening News called Inside the Company: CIA Diary "a frightening picture of corruption, pressure, assassination and conspiracy". The Economist called the book "inescapable reading". Miles Copeland, Jr., a former CIA station chief in Cairo, said the book was "as complete an account of spy work as is likely to be published anywhere" and it is "an authentic account of how an ordinary American or British 'case officer' operates...All of it...is presented with deadly accuracy."

The book was delayed for six months before being published in the United States; it became an immediate best seller.

Inside the Company identified 250 alleged CIA officers and agents. The list of officers and agents, all personally known to Agee, appears in an appendix to the book. While written as a diary, the book actually reconstructs events based on Agee's memory and his subsequent research.

Agee describes his first overseas assignment in 1960 to Ecuador, where his primary mission had the aim of forcing a diplomatic break between Ecuador and Cuba. He writes that the technique he used included bribery, intimidation, bugging, and forgery. Agee spent four years in Ecuador penetrating Ecuadorian politics. He states that his actions subverted and destroyed the political fabric of Ecuador.

Agee helped bug the United Arab Republic code-room in Montevideo, Uruguay, with two contact microphones placed on the ceiling of the room below.

On December 12, 1965 Agee visited senior Uruguayan military and police officers at a Montevideo police headquarters. He realized that the screaming he heard from a nearby cell was the torturing of a Uruguayan, whose name he had given to the police as someone to watch. The Uruguayan senior officers simply turned up a radio report of a soccer game to drown out the screams.

Agee also ran CIA operations within the 1968 Mexico City Olympic Games and he witnessed the events of the Tlatelolco massacre.

Agee identified President José Figueres Ferrer of Costa Rica, President Luis Echeverría Álvarez (1970–1976) of Mexico and President Alfonso López Michelsen (1974–1978) of Colombia as CIA collaborators or agents.

Following this he details how he resigned from the CIA and began writing the book, conducting research in Cuba, London and Paris. During this time he alleges that the CIA spied on him. The cover of the book actually featured an image of the bugged typewriter given to Agee by a CIA agent as part of their surveillance and attempts to stop publication of the book.

In 1982, the United States Congress passed the Intelligence Identities Protection Act (IIPA), legislation that seemed directly aimed at Agee's works. The law would later figure in the investigation into the Valerie Plame scandal into whether Bush administration officials leaked a case officer's name to the media as an act of retaliation against her husband.

Agee became something of a minor celebrity in the United Kingdom after the publication of Inside the Company. He revealed the identities of dozens of CIA agents in the CIA London station. After numerous requests from the American government as well as an MI6 report that blamed Agee's work for the execution of two MI6 agents in Poland, a request was put in to deport Agee from the UK. Although Agee fought this and was supported by dozens of left wing MPs, journalists, and private citizens, he eventually departed from the UK on June 3, 1977, and traveled to the Netherlands. Agee was also eventually expelled from the Netherlands, France, West Germany and Italy.

On January 12, 1975, Agee testified before the second Bertrand Russell Tribunal in Brussels that in 1960 he had conducted personal name-checks of Venezuelan employees for a Venezuelan subsidiary of what is now Exxon. Exxon was "letting the CIA assist in employment decisions, and my guess is that those name checks...are continuing to this day". Agee stated that the CIA customarily performed this service for subsidiaries of large U.S. corporations throughout Latin America. An Exxon spokesman denied Agee's accusations.

In 1978 Agee and a small group of his supporters began publishing the Covert Action Information Bulletin, which promoted "a worldwide campaign to destabilize the CIA through exposure of its operations and personnel". Mitrokhin states that the bulletin had help from both the KGB and the Cuban DGI. The January 1979 issue of Agee's Bulletin published the infamous FM 30-31B, which was in fact a hoax produced by the Soviet intelligence services. In 1978 and 1979, Agee published the two volumes of Dirty Work: The CIA in Western Europe and Dirty Work: The CIA in Africa which contained information on 2,000 CIA personnel.

Agee told Swiss journalist Peter Studer (de): "The CIA is plainly on the wrong side, that is, the capitalistic side. I approve KGB activities, communist activities in general. Between the overdone activities that the CIA initiates and the more modest activities of the KGB, there is absolutely no comparison."

Agee's US passport was revoked by the US government in 1979. The State Department offered him an administrative hearing to challenge the passport revocation, but Agee instead sued in federal court. The case reached the Supreme Court, which ruled against Agee in 1981.

In 1980 Maurice Bishop's government conferred citizenship of Grenada on Agee, and he took up residence in that island. The collapse of the Grenada Revolution removed that safe haven, and Agee then received a passport from the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. After a change of government there, this passport was revoked in 1990, and he was given a German passport, the nationality of his wife, ballet dancer Giselle Roberge. They later lived in Germany and Cuba. Agee was later readmitted to both the U.S. and United Kingdom. Agee's own description of his odyssey was published in his autobiography, On the Run, in 1987.

Until his death, Agee ran a website in Havana, Cubalinda.com which uses loopholes in American law to arrange holidays to Cuba for American citizens, who are generally prohibited by the Trading with the Enemy Act statute of US law from spending money in Cuba. In the 1980s NameBase founder Daniel Brandt had taught Agee how to use computers and computer databases for his research. According to an author's biography attached to an essay by Agee in March 2007 in the Alexander Cockburn-edited magazine CounterPunch, Agee "has lived since 1978 with his wife in Hamburg, Germany. He travels frequently to Cuba and South America for solidarity and business activities." The Cubalinda travel service was begun in 2000.

Agee was accused by U.S. President George H. W. Bush of being responsible for the death of Richard Welch, a Harvard-educated classicist who was murdered by the Revolutionary Organization 17 November while heading the CIA Station in Athens. Bush had directed the CIA from 1976 to 1977. This accusation was included in Barbara Bush's 1994 memoir, but was removed from its paperback edition after Agee sued her for libel.

On December 16, 2007, Agee was admitted to a hospital in Havana, and surgery was performed on him due to perforated ulcers. His wife said on January 9, 2008 that he had died in Cuba on January 7 and had been cremated.