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Phil Agee: The Spy Who Stayed Out in the Cold (2007)
Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit
Much of this article is quoted in Duncan Campbell's obit in the
Guardian of Jan 9, 2008 distributed earlier.
Taken from NY Transfer's news archive of Jan 10, 2007 here:
http://blythe-systems.com/pipermail/nytr/Week-of-Mon-20070108/056055.html
sent by Simon McGuinness
The Guardian - January 10, 2007
http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,1986660,00.html
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
Thirty years ago, Philip Agee, then a 41-year-old former CIA officer
living in Cambridge, was told that he was to be de****ted 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
****trayed 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 dictator****ps 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 Wa****ngton, 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 de****tation 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 expos(c) 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
relation****p with Angela, already strained by the pressures of
de****tation 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
pass****t 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 pass****t was one of them."
Since 1990, he has had a German pass****t. 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 pass****t 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
im****tant."
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 sup****t 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".
*
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