Outside the Company...

JANUARY 10, 2008 TAGS: POLITICS, CIA, BOOKS ADD A COMMENT

In the year 2000 much was made over Philip Agee's plea to U.S. citizens to ignore the decades long embargo on trade with Cuba and visit the communist island on vacation through his travel company. For Agee, the push for rebellious tourism was yet another jab at the U.S. government, an entity he had long come to despise. The U.S. government had come to loathe Agee too, and not for nothing.

In 1975 Agee, a former C.I.A. agent, did the unthinkable. He wrote a tell all book about the operations of perhaps the most secretive and insular organization in the world and, in the process, identified over 250 active agents. Agee, author of Inside the Company: CIA Diary, died on Monday January 7, in Havana, Cuba. He was 72.

Agee's turn from C.I.A. operative to C.I.A. whistle-blower was inspired by a crisis of conscience. For eight years, during the heart of the Cold War, Agee was stationed in Ecuador, Uruguay and Mexico, and witnessed or facilitated the back end string-pulling and arm-bending that propped up puppet regimes, paid off journalists and squashed popular uprisings in order to maintain American hegemony in Central and South America.

These actions by the C.I.A. were, of course, intended to ensure American security in the face of emerging Soviet sympathies in the region. After seeing numerous people tortured, he wrote, "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."

Critics of his exposé noted that by naming names, he was putting those operatives and any foreigners associating with them at mortal risk as well. He was also jeopardizing the clandestine services necessary to protect populations of Americans from Soviet agents operating in the same manner. After all, this was war. President George H. W. Bush, formerly a director of the C.I.A., called Agee "a traitor to this country" in his address at the 50th anniversary of the C.I.A.

In no small part to Agee, Congress passed the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982, which made the intentional disclosure of the identity of a covert operative a federal crime. That law was the basis for the Valerie Plame scandal last year.

Suffice it to say, Agee was a divisive figure. He either valiantly exposed the operations of a secretive and murderous organization or sold out his country to a sworn enemy. Agee wrote two other books about the C.I.A., Dirty Work: The CIA in Western Europe (1978) and On the Run (1987). He died as a Cuban resident, trying to sell vacation packages to adventurous Americans.