Philip Agee dies in Cuba, at 72

[streeb]

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22571961/

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.

... 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.

[Project Willow]

Thank you for posting this. I highly recommend "Inside the Company".

[Byrne]

An article on the Irish/Cuban film about Philip Agee.

Does anyone know of any on-line copies of this film 'One Man’s Story'?

Wednesday, December 13, 2006
Philip Agee Documentary at Cuba Film Fest

By Circles Robinson*

The Cuba-Irish connection of directors Roberto Ruiz and Bernie Dwyer has once again teamed up on a documentary: “One Man’s Story: Philip Agee, Cuba and the CIA”, which focuses on the dark side of United States foreign policy.

The 33-minute film had its premiere screening at the Havana Film Festival taking place through December 15th in the Cuban capital. It will now become a valuable teaching tool on US attempts to destroy the Cuban Revolution using mercenaries and US taxpayer’s money.

Filmed in Havana with excellent archive material of numerous US covert and direct involvements in Latin America, One Man’s Story allows Agee, who betrayed big brother and paid the price, to tell his captivating story.

Agee, like several repentant Vietnam Veterans, is obsessed with getting the record straight for a country, the United States, where recent history is barely taught and what is comes through a fine sieve.

“I entered the CIA as a patriotic conformist from a comfortable family,” explains Agee, now 71, in the documentary.

“I was only 22 and had romantic views towards things and it wasn’t until I got down to Ecuador and had been working there for a year or two that I began to get a political education.”

In all, Agee worked for 12 years in the Company (CIA) joining in 1957 and working in Washington, Ecuador, Uruguay, and Mexico until he resigned in 1968.

He has since become one of the most important whistle blowers about US support for the installation and maintaining of brutal dictatorships throughout the Western Hemisphere and beyond.

His first book, “Inside the Company” published in 1975, and the Covert Action Information Bulletin, betrayed many heinous secrets of US Intelligence and his passport was taken away in 1979, “to protect national security.”

Agee has lived in Europe and the Cuban capital of Havana, where the interviews for One Man’s Story were made by directors Bernie Dwyer and Roberto Ruiz.

One Man’s Story gives us first hand testimony that should send up smoke signals to people questioning the motives and actions of current US policy in Iraq and Afghanistan, Cuba, Venezuela and Bolivia, to name a few.

For years Agee has also been an outspoken critic of the US Blockade on Cuba, encouraging US citizens to find a way to continue doing business with the island and traveling there.

Part of the Big Picture

In their last co-production, Ruiz and Dwyer screened “Mission against Terror;” the story of how the Cuban Five followed the trail of US-based terrorism against their country, and were cruelly imprisoned while the Cuban-American terrorists they monitored enjoy freedom on the streets of Miami, Florida.

After outlining different terrorist acts perpetrated by the CIA against Cuba since its 1959 revolution, in One Man’s Story, Agee justifies Cuba’s need to send agents, like the Cuban Five, to Florida in order to protect the island.

For Cubans, both documentaries contain much information that is well known and rehashed often in the media and education centers and might seem redundant to some people in a country where political history is a constant.

However, for North American and European viewers, the film feeds curiosity about the sinister role the super power has played in the world and may serve as a way to reach young people still unsure with what being patriotic means.

The terrifying events at Abu Ghraib, the US Naval Base and offshore prison at Guantanamo Bay, and other clandestine cites, can be put into context with a better understanding of the CIA operations as told by Agee.

Hats off to Dwyer and Ruiz for telling a story that needs to be told again and again. The man they chose to tell it clearly knows his stuff.

Dwyer is an Irish filmmaker and journalist who lives and works in Havana as a radio reporter for Radio Havana Cuba. Ruiz hails from the far eastern Cuban province of Guantanamo and is a graduate in English and Spanish literature. He works extensively making documentaries for Cuban TV.

The duo has now made 5 documentaries. 1998: Che, the Irish legacy (traces Che Guevara’s Irish links); 2001: Che in Ireland (Che Guevara’s visit to Dublin in 1964); 2002: The Footprints of Cecilia McPartland (Irish mother of Cuban revolutionary martyr Julio Anotonio Mella); 2004: Mission Against Terror (Case of the Cuban Five) and now One Man’s Story: Philip Agee, Cuba and the CIA.

In their next project, Ruiz and Dwyer hope to document events relating to the Barbados Sabotage, when a Cuban commercial airliner was blown out of the sky in 1976 killing all 73 persons on board.

[Byrne]

October 02, 2003

Former CIA Agent Phillip Agee On the Wilson Affair, the Iraq Invasion and Why Bush Sr. Calls Him A Traitor

Whoever in the White House burned Wilson’s wife could be charged under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act which imposes strict penalties on the outting of agents. We speak with former CIA agent Phillip Agee, for whom, many believe, the Act was written. [Includes transcript]

Real Audio Stream

MP3 Download

Former acting ambassador to Iraq Joseph Wilson says that the outing of his wife other attempts to discredit him “are clearly intended to intimidate others from coming forward.” But it’s not just intimidation; it’s a felony. Until now, a crime the Bush family has taken very seriously.

Many believe the law was passed in direct response to former CIA agent Philip Agee’s blowing the whistle on CIA dirty tricks in his book Inside the Company: CIA Diary George H.W. Bush, who was vice-president when the law was passed, said some of the criticism of the Agency ruined secret U.S. clandestine operations in foreign countries.

So seriously did the Bushes take the crime of exposing CIA operatives that Barbara Bush, in her memoirs, accused Agee of blowing the cover of the CIA Station Chief in Greece, Richard Welch, who was assassinated outside his Athens residence in 1975. Agee sued the former first lady and Mrs. Bush withdrew the statement from additional printings of her book. Still, at a celebration marking the fiftieth anniversary of the CIA, the elder Bush again singled out Agee in his remarks, calling him “a traitor to our country.”

* Phillip Agee, former CIA agent. In 1975 Agee wrote Inside the Company: CIA Diary about his experiences with the agency from 1957 to 1968. Many believe the Intelligence Identities Protection Act was passed in direct response to Agee’s blowing the whistle on CIA dirty tricks. He speaks to us from Cuba.

TRANSCRIPT

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Phillip Agee joins us now from Cuba. Welcome to Democracy Now!

PHILLIP AGEE: Good morning Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: Good to have you with us. Why don’t we start off with Larry Johnson’s comment with what the Bush’s alleged, and your response to this whole scandal that is brewing in Washington.

PHILLIP AGEE: Well, Mr. Johnson is repeating a story put about by the C.I.A. beginning with the Welch assassination in Athens in 1975.

From the moment of that event the C.I.A. tried to put the blame on me because at that time I was involved with quite a lot of other people in a guerrilla journalism campaign to expose the C.I.A.’s operations and its people, especially in western Europe at that time.

George Bush’s father came in as C.I.A. director the month following the Welch assassination. As director he presided over the agency as they mounted a campaign throughout western Europe trying to make me appear to be a security threat, a traitor, a Soviet agent, a Cuban agent. All those sorts of things which led to my expulsion from five different NATO countries in the late 1970’s.

In fact it was in all based on lies, and to think that I was responsible for the death of any C.I.A. people for their exposures is absolutely false. No one as far as I know of all those people who were exposed as C.I.A. people along with their operations was ever even harassed or threatened. What happened was, their operations were disrupted and that was the purpose of what we were doing.

We were right to do it then, because the U.S. policy at the time executed by the C.I.A. was to support murderous dictatorships around the world, in Greece, Chile, Uruguay, Brazil. That’s only to name a few, and we oppose that use of the U.S. intelligence service for those dirty operations.

I’m talking about regimes now that tortured and disappeared people by the thousands.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the process you went through, Phillip Agee, in the C.I.A., when you decided to expose what was going on?

PHILLIP AGEE: To begin with I was a typical young man of the 1950’s. I was always taught to accept the government as honest and as virtuous. I went into the C.I.A. because I wanted to serve my country.

When I went down to Latin America in 1960 I had had no political education in the sense that people were politically educated in the 1960’s, a generation later or practically a generation later. I got my political education when I was in Latin America seeing the realities around me day after day.

It happened at that time that U.S. policy was to isolate the Cuban Revolution in Latin America, and we were pretty successful in doing it in the early 1960’s.

At the same time we were doing it through our support to the traditional political forces in those countries, what are known as the Oligarchies. These are the people who have possessed the wealth and income and the land and so forth through many generations going back to colonial times.

Little by little I turned against the people that we were supporting because of their greed and because of the political repression that was required to keep this system of injustice glued together.

Eventually, I simply decided to leave the C.I.A. in 1968, and at the end of that year I left with no intention of writing a book or doing—taking any action.

I was going to start a new life, and, among other things, I reenrolled in university studies in a doctoral program at the University of Mexico in Latin American studies.

It was then that I began to think what until then had been unthinkable. A book on what I and my colleagues have been doing in the C.I.A. and Latin America. I had to choose between the university work and the book and I chose the book not knowing if I would ever get it done. But five years from the time I decided to do it I had it finished.

It was published eventually in 30 languages, it was a best seller in many different countries. I went on to write many articles, five more books, and for 30 years now I’ve been working in various activities in solidarity with the Cuban Revolution.

AMY GOODMAN: Phillip Agee, were there people inside the agency who quietly supported what you were doing?

PHILLIP AGEE: I have a feeling that there were, because you’ve just heard Larry Johnson speaking out against the misuse of the national intelligence service, the C.I.A., for, in this case, supporting a pack of lies concocted to justify converting ‘a war of choice’ into ‘a war of necessity’.

This is of course wrong, and it is an abuse of the national intelligence service to do that. In my days there were certainly people who were opposed to the C.I.A.’s support, that is to the use of the policy—by the policy makers of the C.I.A. as an instrument to impose a criminal policy leading to the crimes against humanity.

I’m sure there were people in there, they didn’t get in touch with me. Years later I have had contact with former C.I.A. people who told me that inside the agency there were people who were very quietly approving what I was doing.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Phillip Agee, he’s in Cuba.

What are you doing in Cuba?

PHILLIP AGEE: I have started a business here and online travel services at www.cubalinda.com.

We have a website which presents a very wide range of practically everything a person can do in Cuba. It’s a continuation of solidarity that I was doing all through the 1970’s and 1980’s and 1990’s in the sense that it’s trying to put the truth about Cuba out there; encouraging people to come to this country to see the Cuban Revolution for themselves, because over these 44 years, there have been so many lies and distortions, put about in the public information media. I’ve always felt that it was important that people know the truth about this country.

AMY GOODMAN: Phillip Agee, I would like to actually have you on another time to have an extended discussion about Cuba. But sticking with the schedule here, I want to ask you finally, what you think about what’s happening with Joseph Wilson and the outing of his wife, Valerie Plame as an undercover C.I.A. operative.

PHILLIP AGEE: Well, first you have to realize that this law, the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, under which someone in the White House may be indicted, is his father’s law.

This is the—this is a law sought by George Bush senior, when he was C.I.A. director and later as Vice President, he worked hard to get that law passed.

It is the irony of ironies that the law is violated, I believe for the first time in a serious way, by someone working in the office of his own son. This is simply dirty politics, I believe. The ambassador, that is ambassador Wilson, poked a hole in this whole pack of lies that have been concocted to justify the war; and in retaliation, they try to ruin his wife’s career and get even with him, you could say that it’s dirty politics as usual. But also one has to wonder what Poppa Bush is thinking about the fact that it’s his own son’s office that has violated the law that he works so hard to get passed.

AMY GOODMAN: What do you think of people saying, it’s similar to what you did?

PHILLIP AGEE: …but for different reasons. My reason were very clear and we stated many times. As I mentioned earlier I was not alone in that campaign. I was working with a lot of people from a lot of different countries, and it was a spontaneous campaign because people were opposed to the horrible political repression that the United States through the C.I.A. was supporting in the 1970’s.

This current case is totally different, it’s simply a dirty low shot to—out of revenge essentially I believe.

AMY GOODMAN: Did you have any dealings with, for example, some of the players we’re talking about today: Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, George Bush?

PHILLIP AGEE: I have not had dealings with them, but I followed the political positions of these people since the early 1990’s when Wolfowitz first came out with this policy document on a new United States foreign policy based on what would best be called I think neo-imperialism—and then later in the Project for a New American Century.

The major players in this Bush administration were all signers of that policy statement back in the 1990’s. It called for preemptive wars; it called for the control of the United States of the world essentially; and in this case it’s a question of control of Middle East oil among several other reasons. These lies that were used to justify it have all now been exposed. The world knows that they were all false, justifications that is. So the United States has been left alone: Germany is not going to participate; France is not going to participate; Russia is not participating. The United States has been left totally isolated in its intervention in Iraq. Deservedly so.

AMY GOODMAN: Do you condemn the blowing of Valerie plain’s cover?

PHILLIP AGEE: I don’t have any feelings whether it’s the right thing to do or the wrong thing to do. What is wrong is that it’s simply dirty politics.Whether it was the blowing of her cover or some other action.

It’s small potatoes compared to the whole scenario of lies that was used to justify the invasion of Iraq and the continuing occupation of that country.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you for being with us, former C.I.A. operative Phillip Agee who wrote the book “Inside the Company: C.I.A. diary”. We’re speaking to him in Cuba.

Thanks for being with us. You are listening to Democracy Now!

[judasdisney]

That "Mp3 download" link didn't work for me. Here's the same page where you can find the mp3:

http://www.archive.org/details/dn2005-0727

[Byrne]

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

Wednesday January 10, 2007
The Guardian

Thirty years ago, Philip Agee, then a 41-year-old former CIA officer living in Cambridge, was told that he was to be deported 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 portrayed 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 dictatorships 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 Washington, 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 deportation 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 exposé 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 relationship with Angela, already strained by the pressures of deportation 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 passport 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 passport was one of them."

Since 1990, he has had a German passport. 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 passport 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 important."

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 support 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".

[Hugh Manatee Wins]

R.I.P., Philip Agee, a hero for taking on the American Gestapo and trying to stop its atrocities at great risk to himself. He did The Right Thing.

"The more they did these dirty things, the more they made me realise what I was doing was important."

Working on a book about Venezuela....hmmm....

Read his writing to learn American 20th century history as you would learn your alphabet.

[Hugh Manatee Wins]

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article4332.htm

Coups

The CIA and the Agency for International Development (AID) would have key roles in this program as well as a new organisation christened in 1983 — the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).

Actually, the new program was not really new. Since its founding in 1947, the CIA had been deeply involved in secretly funding and manipulating foreign non-governmental voluntary organisations.

These vast operations circled the globe and targeted political parties, trade unions and business associations, youth and student organisations, women's groups, civic organisations, religious communities, professional, intellectual and cultural societies, and the public information media. The network functioned at local, national, regional and global levels.

Over the years, the CIA exerted phenomenal influence behind the scenes in country after country, using these powerful elements of civil society to penetrate, divide, weaken and destroy organisations on the left, and indeed to impose regime change by toppling governments.

Such was the case, among many others, in Guyana, where in 1964, culminating 10 years of efforts, the Cheddi Jagan government was overthrown through strikes, terrorism, violence and arson perpetrated by CIA agents in the trade unions.

About the same time, while I was a CIA agent assigned to Ecuador, our agents in civil society, through mass demonstrations and civil unrest, provoked two military coups in three years against elected, civilian governments.

Anyone who has watched the opposition to President Hugo Chavez's government in Venezuela develop can be certain that the CIA, AID and the NED are coordinating the destabilisation and were behind the failed coup in April 2002 as well as the failed ”civic strike” of last December-January.

http://www.serendipity.li/cia/agee_1.html
Producing the Proper Crisis
A Talk by Philip Agee
from Z Magazine, November 1990
.....
When George Bush attacks Saddam Hussein for "naked aggression," he must think the world has no knowledge of United States history no memory at all. One thing we should never forget is that a nation's foreign policy is a product of its domestic system. We should look to our domestic system for the reasons why Bush and his entourage need this crisis to prevent dismantling the national security state.

First we know that the domestic system in this country is in crisis, and that throughout history foreign crises have been manufactured, provoked, and used to divert attention from domestic troubles a way of rallying people around the flag in support of the government of the day. How convenient now for deflecting attention from the S&L scandal, for example, to be paid for not by the crooks but by ordinary, honest people.

Second, we know that the system is not fair, that about one in three people are economically deprived, either in absolute poverty or so close that they have no relief from want. We also know that one-in-three Americans are illiterate, either totally or to the degree that they cannot function in a society based on the written word. We also know that one-in-three Americans does not register to vote, and of those who register 2/3rds don't vote. This means we elect a president with about 25% or slightly less of the potential votes. The reason why people don't vote are complex, but not the least of them is that people know their vote doesn't count.

Third, we know that during the past ten years these domestic problems have gotten even worse thanks to the Reagan-Bush policy of transferring wealth from the middle and poor classes to the wealthy, while cutting back on social programs. Add to this the usual litany of crises: education, health care, environment, racism, women's rights, homophobia, the infrastructure, productivity, research, and inability to compete in the international marketplace, and you get a nation not only in crisis, but in decline as well. In a certain sense that might not be so bad, if it stimulates, as in the Soviet Union, public debate on the reasons. But the picture suggests that continuation of foreign threats and crises is a good way to avoid fundamental reappraisal of the domestic system, starting where such a debate ought to start, with the rules of the game as laid down in the constitution.

What can we do? Lots. On the Gulf Crisis, it's getting out the information on what's behind it, and organizing people to act against this intervention and possible war. Through many existing organizations, such as Pledge of Resistance, there must be a way to develop opposition that will make itself heard and seen on the streets of cities across the country. We should pressure Congress and the media for answers to the old question: During that week between Ambassador Glaspie's meeting with Hussein, "What did George know and when did he know it, and why didn't he act publicly and privately to stop the invasion before it happened?" In getting the answer to this question, we should show how the mainstream media, in failing to so do, have performed their usual cheerleading role as the government's information ministry.

The point on the information side is to show the truth, reject the hypocrisy, and raise the domestic political cost to Bush and every political robot who has gone along with him. At every point along the way we must not be intimidated by those voices that will surely say: "You are helping that brute Saddam Hussein." We are not helping Hussein, although some may be. Rather, we are fighting against a senseless, destructive war based on greed and racism. We are for a peaceful, negotiated, diplomatic solution that could include resolution of other territorial disputes in the region.

We are against militarist intervention and against a crisis that will allow continuing militarism in the United States. We are for conversion of the U.S. and indeed the world economy to peaceful, people-oriented purposes. In the long run, we reject one-party elitist government, and we demand a new constitution, real democracy, with popular participation in decision-making. In short, we want our own glasnost and restructuring here in the United States. If popular movements can bring it to the Soviet Union, that monolithic tyranny, why can't we here in the United States?

http://www.bigmagic.com/pages/blackj/column66k8.html

The Uses of Journalists

The third important factor affecting the news is, of course, the slant or bias. It reflects the moral, social and political values of the person doing the writing, or at least the editor. This is where the CIA played a very fundamental role in years past, and I cannot imagine that it suddenly stopped when the Cold War came to an end.

In fact, like many others, I believe that the Cold War never really ended.

It did so along the east-west axis. But the Cold War always had a north-south dimension---the war against forces of liberation in Third World countries. That never ended, and it continues today.

I also believe that the CIA's media operations have continued. They involve the recruitment and payment of editors and reporters who take the CIA's material and publish it as if it were their own. Taken all together---the sources and selection of material, and the point of view or slant---the result is essentially what is known as propaganda, but which passes for "unbiased news".

Journalists are also very important to the CIA for non-journalistic activities. They serve as very convenient agents of access for the Agency.

Particularly since they come from a country with a neutral tradition, Swedes in general have always been of great interest to the CIA. This is because they do not carry a lot of political baggage, as do people from most other countries. I am aware of the ongoing debate here concerning just how neutral Sweden has or has not been. But in the rest of the world, the neutrality of Sweden has created a special attraction for U.S. intelligence agencies, because Swedes have readier access to certain target individuals than, say, an American or a German would.

The fact is that journalists are used for non-journalistic purposes---as collection agents for intelligence, and for making contacts, because a journalist can approach practically anyone and ask for an interview or develop some type of relationship. Of the hundreds of journalists who have come to me over the years, I have no idea how many have been sent by the CIA. I get some idea when I read what they write. But I learned to be cautious, early on.

Education in Injustice

The covert action operations to which I referred earlier were carried out all over the world, and certainly in Latin America where I was posted. I spent three years in Ecuador, then three more in Uruguay. In both cases, my cover was as a political attaché in the U.S. embassy.

I then returned to Washington, pretty disillusioned with the work. I was a product of the U.S. education system of the 1950s, which provided me with a very good liberal education, but no political education at all. I was simply brought up to believe that whatever the government did was good, and that it was doing these good things in the name of us all.

It was not until I got down to Latin America that I began to get a political education. Whatever my ideas when I went down there, I saw things around me every day that influenced me. I saw the terrible economic and social conditions, and the injustices that could not be ignored.

The two most fundamental, interrelated problems were the grossly unequal distribution of land and the unequal distribution of wealth. In the early years of the Kennedy administration---I had gone down to Latin American toward the end of the Eisenhower period---there was much talk about land reform as a way of dealing with those problems.

But with the success of the Cuban revolution, and its success in surviving U.S. attempts at invasion and other hostilities, land reform in the rest of Latin America was put aside. "Stability" was the order of the day. The view in Washington was that, if reform programmes were pushed, it could lead to instability and create openings for liberation forces all over Latin America that were inspired by the Cuban revolution.

So, the aim of our programmes was to support the status quo, to support the oligarchies of Latin America. These are the power structures that date back centuries, based on ownership of the land, of the financial resources, of the export-import system, and excluding the vast majority of the population.

With all of our programmes, we were supporting these traditional power structures. What first caused me to turn against these people were the corruption and the greed that they exhibited in all areas of society. My ideas and attitudes began to change, and eventually I decided to resign from the CIA.

http://mediafilter.org/MFF/CovOps.html

Tracking Covert Actions into the Future
From Issue No. 42, Fall, 1992

by Philip Agee
.....
THE CONTINUITY OF OPPRESSION
One could go on, but the point is made. Worldwide opportunities and needs for covert operations will remain as long as stability, control, and hegemony form the cornerstone of a U.S. policy that permits no rotten apples or bad examples. And the Pentagon budget is not the only indicator of continuity. In late 1991, Congress passed the National Security Education Act providing $150 million in "start-up" money for development and expansion of university programs in area and language studies, and for scholarships, including foreign studies, for the next generation of national security state bureaucrats. Notable is the fact that this program is not to be administered by the Department of Education but by the Pentagon, the CIA, and other security agencies. Alternatives to continuing militarism abroad and social decay at home exist, as any reader of the alternative press knows quite well. The House Black Caucus/Progressive Caucus budget, providing for 50 percent reduction in military spending over four years, got a full day's debate last March on the House floor and won 77 votes, far more than Bush's budget-stirring no mainstream reporting, non-news as it had to be. Steps toward formation of new political parties, the green movement, and community organizing are also encouraging.

Yet militarism and world domination continue to be the main national priority, with covert operations playing an integral role. Everyone knows that as long as this continues, there will be no solutions to domestic troubles, and the U.S. will continue to decline while growing more separate and unequal. Can anyone doubt that the events of Los Angeles will recur? Those struggling in the 1990s for change would do well to remember the repression visited on progressive movements following both World Wars and during the Vietnam War. The government has no more Red Menace to whip up hysteria, but the "war on drugs" seems to be quite adequate for justifying law enforcement practices that have political applications as well. The hunt for aliens and their deportation, and the use of sophisticated methods of repression following the Los Angeles uprising, reveal what has been quietly continuing below the surface for years. We should be on notice that in the current political climate, with clamor for change everywhere, the guardians of traditional power will not give up without a fight. They will find their "threats" and "enemies" in Black youths, undocumented immigrants, environmentalists, feminists, gays and lesbians, and go on to more "mainstream" opponents in attempts, including do- mestic covert operations, to divide and discredit the larger movement for reform.

[professorpan]

A true hero. Thanks for posting this.

[Code Unknown]

In his book, he arrived at a typically New Left solution: the institution must not be reformed, for “reform” is the very myth by which the Leviathan nourishes itself. It must be destroyed. This root-and-branch determination turned what might have been a noble, if controversial, vehicle for intelligence reform into something destructive.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/28/magaz ... gee-t.html

[anothershamus]

Goddamn Spooks anyway!

[Hugh Manatee Wins]

.....
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/28/magaz ... gee-t.html

OMG. That CIA-NYTimes link is bizarre.

I've never seen Philip Agee's name printed as a massive feminine curly "Philip" and underneath it a tiny tiny tiny "Agee."
Spooks have their fun with their enemies.

Philip Agee was a moral icon and very brave, too.

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/CIA/C ... _Agee.html

PP [psychological and paramilitary] programmes are to be found in almost every CIA station and emphasis on the kinds of PP operations will depend very much on local conditions. Psychological warfare includes propaganda (also known simply as 'media'), work in youth and student organizations, work in labour organizations (trade unions, etc.), work in professional and cultural groups and in political parties.
.....
The vehicles for grey and black propaganda may be unaware of their CIA or US government sponsorship. This is partly so that it can be more effective and partly to keep down the number of people who know what is going on and thus to reduce the danger of exposing true sponsorship. Thus editorialists, politicians, businessmen and others may produce propaganda, even for money, without necessarily knowing who their masters in the case are. Some among them obviously will and so, in agency terminology, there is a distinction between 'witting' and 'unwitting' agents.

[Code Unknown]

.....
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/28/magaz ... gee-t.html

OMG. That CIA-NYTimes link is bizarre.

I've never seen Philip Agee's name printed as a massive feminine curly "Philip" and underneath it a tiny tiny tiny "Agee."
Spooks have their fun with their enemies.

Well... they actually did that for everyone in the current issue of the Times Magazine called "The Lives They Lived" about people who died in 2008 (note that that hero of truth Tim Russert's name just happens to be the first name listed at the top of the cover; the oh-so-subtle headline he receives in a necrofelatious eulogy by his similarly vigilant colleague Tom Brokaw: "Role Model"[1]).



One more quote from the Agee piece, its closing sendoff:

Philip Agee was never part of any solution, just another facet of the shadow world’s ever proliferating strangeness.

[1] For those of us who might not yet be aware of what a pathetic pipehole of the Wurlitzer that Role Model Russert was:
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2008/09/0082168
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/ ... bramowitz/

There are many revealing episodes during the Bush presidency illustrating how the media functions, but there is none more revealing than the disclosures from the Lewis Libby criminal trial. Documents prepared by former Cheney Communications Director Catherine Martin (wife of FCC Chairman Kevin Martin) boasted that Tim Russert's Meet the Press was the best venue for Cheney to answer questions because he was able to "control message." Martin also testified at trial that she "suggested we put the vice president on 'Meet the Press,' which was a tactic we often used. It's our best format" (Dana Milbank: "Memo to Tim Russert: Dick Cheney thinks he controls you"). Russert himself subsequently testified that "when any senior government official calls him, they are presumptively off the record" (Dan Froomkin: "That's not reporting, that's enabling. That's how you treat your friends when you're having an innocent chat, not the people you're supposed to be holding accountable").