Agee dies

[Lanya]

Last updated January 9, 2008 8:04 a.m. PT
Ex-CIA agent Philip Agee dead in Cuba

By WILL WEISSERT
ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER
    
    Former United States CIA agent Philip Agee gestures as he presents his travel agency "Cuba Linda," or "Beautiful Cuba" at a news conference in Havana in this Thursday, June 22, 2000 file photo. Agee, who became an outspoken critic of the agency and opened a travel site to bring Americans to Cuba in defiance of U.S. law, has died following ulcer surgeries, Cuban state media reported Wednesday. He was 72. (AP Photo/Jose Goita)

HAVANA -- Former CIA agent Philip Agee, a critic of U.S. foreign policy who infuriated American intelligence officials by naming purported agency operatives in a 1975 book, has died, state media reported Wednesday. He was 72.

Agee quit the CIA in 1969 after 12 years working mostly in Latin America at a time when leftist movements were gaining prominence and sympathizers. His 1975 book "Inside the Company: CIA Diary," cited alleged CIA misdeeds against leftists in the region and included a 22-page list of purported agency operatives.

Granma, Cuba's Communist Party newspaper, said Agee died 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 in a Tuesday message posted to a Cuba e-mail group that Agee's wife called him to say he had died after ulcer surgery in a hospital where he has he been since Dec. 15.

"He had several operations for perforated ulcers and didn't survive all the surgery," Dwyer wrote, adding that Agee was cremated Tuesday and that friends planned a memorial ceremony for him Sunday at his Havana apartment.

Agee's U.S. passport was revoked in 1979. U.S. officials said he had threatened national security. After years of living in Hamburg, Germany - occasionally underground, fearing CIA retribution - Agee moved to Havana to open a travel Web site.

The site, cubalinda.com, is designed to bring U.S. tourists to Cuba, offering package tours and other help that is largely off-limits to Americans because of the U.S. trade embargo. Agee opened the site in 2000 with European investors and a state-run travel agent as his partners.

There was no mention of Agee's death on the site Wednesday.

The author of several other books besides "Inside the Company," one of Agee's last essays was published in Granma International newspaper in 2003 and came shortly after a Cuban government crackdown led to the arrest of 75 leading dissidents and political activists.

"To think that the dissidents were creating an independent, free civil society is absurd, for they were funded and controlled by a hostile foreign power and to that degree, which was total, they were not free or independent in the least," he wrote.

Agee has been accused of receiving up to $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 report.

Barbara Bush, the wife of former President George H.W. Bush - himself a one-time CIA chief - in her autobiography accused Agee's book of exposing a CIA station chief, Richard S. Welch, who was later killed by leftist terrorists in Athens in 1975. Agee, who denied any involvement in the killing, sued her for $4 million for defamation, and she revised the book to settle the case.

Agee's actions in the 1970s inspired a law criminalizing the exposure of covert U.S. operatives.

But in 2003, he drew a distinction between what he did and the exposure of CIA officer Valerie Plame, the wife of former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, a prominent critic of President Bush's Iraq policy.

"This is entirely different than what I was doing in the 1970s," Agee said. "This is purely dirty politics in my opinion."

Agee said that in his case, he disclosed the identities of his former CIA colleagues to "weaken the instrument for carrying out the policy of supporting military dictatorships" in Greece, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil.

Those regimes "were supported by the CIA and the human cost was immense: torture, executions, death squads," he said.

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/1102ap_obit_agee.html

[hnumpah]

"This is entirely different than what I was doing in the 1970s," Agee said. "This is purely dirty politics in my opinion."

The only difference I see is that Plame was not in the field when she was outed (though she might have returned to field work later on if she hadn't been), and thus there was less chance she would be assassinated, as Welch was.

[Xavier_Onassis]

Agee outed agents so that either they would be forced to leave the premises or die.

If Plame was deliberately outed, it was to punish her husband for telling the truth about the absence of Saddam's alleged seeking of yellowcake in Niger, and wrecking Juniorbush's and Cheney's deceitful attempts to provoke a war with Iraq.

[_JS]

Agee said that in his case, he disclosed the identities of his former CIA colleagues to "weaken the instrument for carrying out the policy of supporting military dictatorships" in Greece, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil.

Those regimes "were supported by the CIA and the human cost was immense: torture, executions, death squads," he said.

Some of the most brutal and disgusting regimes that have ever marred the surface of the Earth.

In the case of Greece there wasn't even a Communist threat. We overthrew a centrist, elected government to install a fascist military dictatorship.

But yes, they all made wonderful laboratories for torture, economic experiments, and right-wing death squads.

[Lanya]

What really caught my eye in all this:

Barbara Bush, the wife of former President George H.W. Bush - himself a one-time CIA chief - in her autobiography accused Agee's book of exposing a CIA station chief, Richard S. Welch, who was later killed by leftist terrorists in Athens in 1975. Agee, who denied any involvement in the killing, sued her for $4 million for defamation, and she revised the book to settle the case.

I mean, that just gobsmacked me. She changed her book?  She wanted to publish a book so badly, she couldn't wait to prove it...or was there any proof? 

[Amianthus]

I mean, that just gobsmacked me. She changed her book?  She wanted to publish a book so badly, she couldn't wait to prove it...or was there any proof? 

Or was the proof classified?

[Xavier_Onassis]

So Barbara Bush is told to put up or shut up, and she shuts up. I suggest that if she has classified information that would prove that Agee's outing got this clown killed, then said information wasn't classified enough.

It's not like she was a secret agent with a need to know, is it?

She's just an old bat who writes books in which the narrator is the White House dog, isn't she? How does she have a need to know?

I fund it droll that Agee made her eat her own words.

[Amianthus]

It's not like she was a secret agent with a need to know, is it?

I doubt she was a secret agent, but that's not the only reason why someone would be "read in" on classified information. Especially someone who has regular contacts with various diplomats.

[yellow_crane]

The most defining remark Barbara Bush ever made was, in assessing Katrina,  how Blacks would be better on in Houston anyhow.

It is the closest line we Americans have for "Let them eat cake."

Every time I talk about her, I am forced by dint of heroin-like influence on my inner cuckles to repeat a description that still makes me smile:   " . . . she looks like the Quaker Oats man on speed."

LOL

LOL

[Lanya]

 Crane:
That works.
I'd add a little chunk of chocolate, purely for medicinal purposes.