Phillip Agee - Publishing Rogue
Agee in 1977 - Bert Verhoeff / Anefo, CC BY-SA 3.0 NL <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/nl/deed.en>, via Wikimedia Commons
Introduction
Philip Burnett Franklin Agee (January 19, 1935 – January 7, 2008) was a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) case officer and writer 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 the CounterSpy and CovertAction series of periodicals, he died in Cuba in January 2008.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Agee
Agee’s Book Introduction
This is a story of the twelve-year career of a CIA secret operations officer that ended in early 1969. It is an attempt to open another small window to the kinds of secret activities that the US government undertakes through the CIA in Third World countries in the name of US national security.
It includes the actual people and organizations involved, placed within the political, economic and social context in which the activities occurred. An attempt is also made to include my personal interpretation of what I was doing, and to show the effect of this work on my family life.
My reasons for revealing these activities will be found in the text.
No one, of course, can remember in detail all the events of a twelve-year period of his life. In order to write this book, I have spent most of the last four years in intensive research to reinforce my own recollections. The officers of a CIA station abroad work as a team, often in quite different activities and with a considerable number of indigenous agents and collaborators. I have tried to describe the overall team effort, not just my own role, because all the station's efforts relate to the same goals. The variety of operations that are undertaken simultaneously by a single officer and by the station team made an ordinary narrative presentation cumbersome. I have chosen a diary format (written, to be sure, in 1973 and 1974) in order to show the progressive development of different activities and to convey a sense of actuality.
This method also has defects, requiring the reader to follow many strands from one entry in the diary to another, but I believe it is the most effective method for showing what we did. In order to ease the problem of remembering who all the characters are, I have included a special appendix, Appendix 1, which has descriptions of individuals and organizations involved or connected with the Agency or its operations (see note to Appendix 1). The reader is directed to this appendix by the use of a double dagger, ‡ in the text. It will be noted that many agents' names have been forgotten and that only cryptonyms (code names) can be given. Some original cryptonyms have also been forgotten, and in these cases I have composed new ones in order to refer to a real person by some name at least. Appendix 2 gives an alphabetical listing of all abbreviations used, and an asterisk indicates those entries which appear in Appendix 1. Several of the operational activities that I describe could not be placed at the exact date they really happened, for lack of research materials, but they are placed as close as possible to the date they occurred with no loss or distortion of meaning. Similarly, several events have been shifted a day or two so that they could be included in diary entries just before or just after they actually occurred. In these cases, the changes make no difference.
When I joined the CIA, I believed in the need for its existence. After twelve 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 CIA and the institutions it supports. I couldn't sit by and do nothing, and so began work on this book. Even after recent revelations about the CIA, it is still difficult for people to understand what a huge and sinister organization the CIA is. It is the biggest and most powerful Secret Service that has ever existed. I don't know how big the KGB is inside the Soviet Union, but its international operation is small compared with the CIA's.
The CIA has 16,500 employees and an annual budget of $750,000,000. That does not include its mercenary armies or its commercial subsidiaries. Add them all together, the agency employs or subsidizes hundreds of thousands of people and spends billions every year. Its official budget is secret; it's concealed in those of other Federal agencies. Nobody tells the Congress what the CIA spends. By law, the CIA is not accountable to Congress. In the past 25 years, the CIA has been involved in plots to overthrow governments in Iran, the Sudan, Syria, Guatemala, Ecuador, Guyana, Zaire and Ghana.
In Greece, the CIA participated in bringing in the repressive regime of the colonels. In Chile, The Company spent millions to "destabilize" the Allende government and set up the military junta, which has since massacred tens of thousands of workers, students, liberals and leftists. In Indonesia in 1965, The Company was behind an even bloodier coup, the one that got rid of Sukarno and led to the slaughter of at least 500,000 and possibly 1,000,000 people. In the Dominican Republic, the CIA arranged the assassination of the dictator Rafael Trujillo and later participated in the invasion that prevented the return to power of the liberal ex-president Juan Bosch. In Cuba, The Company paid for and directed the invasion that failed at the Bay of Pigs. Some time later, the CIA was involved in attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro. It is difficult to believe, or comprehend, that the CIA could be involved in all these subversive activities all over the world.
The life of a CIA operations officer can be exciting, romantic. You belong to a special club: The Company. For most of my career with the CIA, I felt that I was doing something worthwhile. There is not much time to think about the results of your actions and, if you try to do it well, the job of operations officers calls for dedication to the point of obsession. But it's a schizophrenic sort of situation. You have too many secrets, you can't relax with outsiders. Sometimes an operative uses several identities at once. If somebody asks you a simple question, "What did you do over the weekend?" your mind goes Click! Who does he think I am? What would the guy he thinks I am be doing over the weekend? You get so used to lying that after a while it's hard to remember what the truth is.
When I joined the CIA, I signed the secrecy agreement. With this book, articles, exposure on radio and television, I may have violated that agreement. I believe it is worse to stay silent, that the agreement itself was immoral.
My experience with the CIA has mostly been with its overseas operations. I trust investigations now going on in Washington into CIA activities will also expose CIA internal involvement which is, I suspect, much greater than anybody outside the CIA knows or the National Security Council realizes. I believe a lot of sinister things will come out, and that Americans may be in for some very severe shocks. In the New York Review of Books of 30 December 1971, Richard Helms, then CIA Director, was quoted from a rare address to the National Press Club. In justifying the CIA'S secret operations, he said: 'You've just got to trust us. We are honorable men.' I ask that these words be remembered while reading this book, together with the fact that CIA operations are undertaken on instructions from the President himself and are approved in very detailed form at various levels within the CIA, and often at the Under-Secretary level or higher outside the Agency.
Finally, I ask that it be kept in mind that the kinds of operations I describe, which occurred for the most part in Latin America, were typical of those undertaken in countries of the Far East, Near East and Africa. I would also suggest that they are continuing today. Revelations during the past year of the CIA'S "destabilization" program against the Allende government in Chile, its illegal domestic operations and its complicity in political assassinations or assassination attempts have finally precipitated a long-overdue debate. I hope this book will contribute to it.
--London, May 1975
Left the CIA
In 1968 Agee retired from the CIA.
Involvement in Soviet and Cuban Intelligence
Agee wrote in his later work On the Run that he had no 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.
But Agee did live in Cuba for a while, and it was alleged that he contacted the KGB first in Mexico City, years earlier.
Memoir
Agee started secretly writing this book, Inside the Company: CIA Diary. He never planned on getting the book cleared by the Agency, so eventually he had to get a publisher in England to publish it.
Prepublication Classification Review Board (PCRB)
He had to write while traveling the world to non-extraditable countries. Furthermore, he also did side hustles to make money for his living expenses.
The Agency found out that he needed money, so they introduced to a third party that would give Agee money in small trickles and loaned him a manual nonelectric portable typewriter.
The typewriter was bugged by TSD using hidden batteries to retain the keystrokes pressed, later to have that data uploaded to the CIA.
Today, on computers that you want to monitor, you install a secret keystroke recording program. This recorder can then contact home base and upload the data periodically.
Book Impact
Excerpted from a page-one pre-publication review in the Washington Post "Book World"
When Victor Marchetti's The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence was published, it contained intriguing blanks where material deemed too sensitive by the CIA had been.
There are no blanks in Philip Agee's Inside the Company: CIA Diary.
This densely detailed expose names every CIA officer, every agent, every operation that Agee encountered during 12 years with "The Company" in Ecuador,
Uruguay, Mexico and Washington.
Among CIA agents or [contacts] Agee lists high ranking political leaders of several Latin American countries, U.S. and Latin American labor leaders, ranking Community Party members, and scores of other politicians, high military and police officials and journalists.
After a stint as an Air Force officer (for cover) and CIA training, Agee arrived in Quito, Ecuador in late 1960. During the glory years of the Alliance for Progress and the New Frontier, he fought the holy war against communism by bribing politicians and journalists, forging documents, tapping telephones, and reading other people's mail.
But it was a faraway event which seems to have disturbed him more. Lyndon Johnson's invasion of the Dominican Republic in 1965 was an overreaction, Agee couldn't accept. In 1968, he resigned with the conviction that he had become a "servant of the capitalism I rejected" as a university student—"one of its secret policemen."
Agee decided to write this reconstructed diary to tell everything he knew. He spent four years writing the book in Europe, making research trips and dodging the CIA.
At one point, he lived on money advanced by a woman he believes was working for the CIA and trying to gain his confidence.
Until recently, former CIA Director Richard Helm's plea that "You've just got to trust us. We are honorable men" was enough. With the revelations of domestic spying, it no longer is.
In this book, Agee has provided the most complete description yet of what the CIA does abroad. In entry after numbing entry, U.S. foreign policy in Latin America is pictured as a web of deceit, hypocrisy and corruption.
Now that we can no longer plead ignorance of the webs our spiders spin, will be to continue to tolerate CIA activities abroad?
—Patrick Breslin © The Washington Post
Agee wrote this about TSD
The CIA Technical Services Division (TSD) provides support to operations in all area divisions through experts in listening devices, photography, lock-picking, invisible writing, clandestine opening and closing of correspondence, disguise, containers with hidden compartments, handwriting analysis, identification of persons through saliva analysis from objects such as cigarette butts, and many other technical services. Specialists are available for training agents as well as to perform tasks themselves. Several TSD support bases exist in foreign countries for regional support. The TSD also has a continuing research program for improving its capabilities and for developing protective measures against the devices of foreign services, especially the KGB.
Key Sections of the Book
A chronological journey of how he got recruited, trained, and about field operations that he was involved with.
Training at the “Farm”
Tradecraft
CIA Technical Services Division (TSD)
Checklists of how to manufacture a revolution
How to primer on creating and disseminating propaganda
How to recruit organizations and people to “help” with your objectives, willingly and unwillingly
A how-to on how to overthrow a government
Lastly, was the index at the end of the book that revealed:
Code names (cryptonyms) of people, i.e. not their real names
Descriptions of what these people did
True Names of people, as in their real name
Names of CIA operations
Tools, tactics and procedures (TTPs) used by the Agency
This index was the most devastating to the Agency.
My father got the paper back book as soon as it was available, and he read it cover to cover, several times.
When my father saw something he recognized, either person, place, or thing, he would use a yellow higher to emphasize that text.
He showed me the marked up book, and it was yellow everywhere, 200+ facts.
My father was stunned about the damage this would do.
Turns out my father went on a lot of CIA operations in Latin America too, so this all hit home for him.
Expulsion
Agee's US passport was revoked by the US government in 1979.
Many countries banned him from traveling to their country, and he was made persona non grata.
Agency tracks Agee
The Agency assigned Ted Shackley CIA Technical Services Division (TSD) to monitor, track, and manage Agee.
I am sure Ted had something to do with the bugged typewriter.
Summary
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.
I am sure that all those Agents mentioned had to be moved, retired, etc.
I wonder what the total cost of this cleanup operation was.
Other Links
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
Background Information on my CIA Father