Was Phillip Agee a Traitor?

Was Daniel Ellsberg? I read on this forum in the last couple of days someone talking about Agee as being a traitor. I liken him and his actions to what Ellsberg did, and I certainly don't consider him to be a traitor. Ellsberg is credited with the beginning of the end of both the Vietnam war and the Nixon Imperial Presidency.

What do you think?

Here is an interview with Agee:

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=03/10/02/159258

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.

CIA detractors have long said it was founded to protect the economic interests of the elite, rather than the overall interests of the people of the USA.

I can well see why Agee would have become disillusioned if he went ito the CIA assuming (a) and then found it was (b).

For four years FTW has been teaching that the CIA's primary role, it's raison d'etre, was to serve the interests of Wall Street and the major banks. In our recent three-country lecture tour, our documentation of the close links between CIA and Wall Street has taken many by surprise. Thirty years ago Professor Peter Dale Scott of Berkeley disclosed that six out of the first seven deputy directors of intelligence (CIA's number two position) had gone directly from Wall Street into service at the Agency. Since Sept. 11, FTW's disclosure that the CIA's current executive director, A.B. "Buzzy" Krongard, is a former investment banker has caused deeper rumbles. The firm he once headed, AlexBrown/Deutschebank, has been connected to insider trading on United Air Lines stock just before the Sept. 11 attacks. The NYSE's current executive vice president for enforcement, David Doherty, is a retired CIA general counsel.

http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/070302_CIA_U.html

Philip Agee (KGB code name: Pont), former CIA operations officer was the CIA's first
ideological defector.

He had been forced to resign from CIA in 1968 after complaints at his heavy drinking, poor
financial management and attempts to proposition wives of American diplomats.

He remained in the West.

In 1973 he approached the KGB residency in Mexico City and offered information about CIA
operations. The suspicious KGB resident, however, found Agee's offer too good to be true,
concluded that he was part of a CIA plot and turned him away.

Agee then went to the Cubans, who welcomed him with open arms.Agee himself
acknowledged: "Representatives of the Communist Party of Cuba gave important
encouragement at a time when I doubted that I would be able to find the additional information
I needed."

In his book "Inside the Company: CIA Diary," published in 1975 he identified approximately
250 CIA officers and agents.

While Agee was writing his book in Britain he maintained contact with the KGB.

On November 16, 1976 Agee was served a deportation order that required him to leave
England.

KGB and the Left tried to stop the deportation but Agee was eventually forced to leave
England for Holland on June 3, 1977. He later moved to Germany.

In 1978 Agee and a small group of supporters began publishing the Covert Action Information
Bulletin in order to promote what Agee called "a worldwide campaign to destabilize the CIA
through exposure of its operations and personnel."

During the Iran hostage crisis in 1979, Agee offered to exchange CIA documents about Iran
for the Americans held at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. Soon after, the State Department
revoked his passport on national security grounds.

He traveled on passports issued by, successively, Maurice Bishop's Marxist-Leninist regime
in Grenada, the Sandinista government in Nicaragua and an official German identification
document normally given to war refugees.

After years of living in Hamburg, Germany Agee has decided to make Cuba his home and
the seat of his new business.

Agee resurfaced in Havana in 2000, where he started what he says is the island's first
independent travel business in 40 years.

http://www.videofact.com/english/agee.html

:shrug:

It's pretty cut and dry information. Do you refute it?

Here's from the LA Times which I would classify as centrist paper of record.

Los Angeles Times
NATION & WORLD
Tuesday, October 14, 1997

By JAMES RISEN, Times Staff Writer

Espionage: An effort to get secrets for Cuba was foiled, but
he got away before case against him could be made, officials say.
He denies charges.


WASHINGTON -- It was an aggressive, even reckless bit of
espionage, allegedly committed by a man too well known for his
own good.

CIA officials and other U.S. government sources charged that
Philip Agee, a former CIA officer, author and CIA critic, went
undercover as a spy for Cuba in late 1989 to try to pry secrets
out of a female staff member in the agency's Mexico City station.

U.S. officials alleged that Agee was acting on behalf of
Cuba's intelligence service, which has long staked out Mexico as
a central espionage battleground with the CIA. Agee has denied
the charges.

Agee, posing as a member of the CIA's inspector general's
staff, tried to convince the staff member that he needed
information about the Mexico City station as part of a secret
investigation, the officials charged. CIA sources said that Cuban
intelligence traditionally has targeted women staffers in their
espionage operations.

EDITED BY ADMIN: COPYRIGHT

There are many links on this website. Americans can learn a lot about Cuba by spending a little time checking out info provided by someone who lives there.

http://www.cubalinda.com/

In early 1992, a Russian man walked into the British embassy in a newly independent Baltic republic
and asked to "speak to someone in authority." As he sipped his first cup of proper English tea, he
handed over a small file of notes. Eight months later, the man, his family, and his enormous archive
had been safely exfiltrated to Britain. When news that a KGB officer had defected with the names of
hundreds of undercover agents leaked out in 1996, a spokesperson for the SVR (Russia's foreign
intelligence service, heir of the KGB) said, "Hundreds of people! That just doesn't happen! Any
defector could get the name of one, two, perhaps three agents--but not hundreds!"

Vasili Nikitich Mitrokhin worked as chief archivist for the FCD, the foreign-intelligence arm of the
KGB. Mitrokhin was responsible for checking and sealing approximately 300,000 files, allowing
him unrestricted access to one of the world's most closely guarded archives. He had lost faith in the
Soviet system over the years, and was especially disturbed by the KGB's systematic silencing of
dissidents at home and abroad. Faced with tough choices--stay silent, resign, or undermine the
system from within--Mitrokhin decided to compile a record of the foreign operations of the KGB.
Every day for 12 years, he smuggled notes out of the archive. He started by hiding scraps of paper
covered with miniscule handwriting in his shoes, but later wrote notes on ordinary office paper,
which he took home in his pockets. He hid the notes under his mattress, and on weekends took
them to his dacha, where he typed them and hid them in containers buried under the floor. When he
escaped to Britain, his archive contained tens of thousands of pages of notes.
From Amazon.com about the book wherein Agee is exposed as a KGB spy:


In 1995, Mitrokhin, by then a British citizen, contacted Christopher Andrew (For the President's
Eyes Only), head of the faculty of history at Cambridge University and one of the world's foremost
historians of international intelligence. Andrew was allowed to examine the archive Mitrokhin
created "to ensure that the truth was not forgotten, that posterity might some day come to know of
it." The Sword and the Shield is the earthshaking result. The book details the KGB's
foreign-intelligence operations, most notably those aimed at Great Britain and the "Main
Adversary"--the United States. In the 700-page book, Andrew reveals operations aimed at
discrediting high-profile Americans, from Martin Luther King to Ronald Reagan; secret arms caches
still hidden--and boobytrapped--throughout the West; disinformation efforts, including forging a
letter from Lee Harvey Oswald in an attempt to implicate the CIA in the assassination of JFK;
attempts to stir up racial tensions in the U.S. by sending hate mail and even bombs; and the
existence of deep-cover agents in North America and Europe--some of whom were effectively
"outed" when the book was published.

Mitrokhin's detailed notes are well served by Andrew, who writes forcefully and clearly. The Sword
and the Shield represents a remarkable intelligence coup--one that will have serious repercussions
for years to come. As Andrew notes, "No one who spied for the Soviet Union at any period
between the October Revolution and the eve of the Gorbachev era can now be confident that his or
her secrets are still secure." --Sunny Delaney

when it touts Coulters books as proof of the left being on i.e. 'the other side"?

yes

I've read several articles from the Nathan Hale Institute. They are not an unbiased bunch, CS.

There were many egregious abuses done by the CIA that were and are at odds with what we consider to be American ideals.

I haven't read enough on Agee probably to comment, other than saying there were other ways to bring attention to CIA abuses. The way in which he went about it makes me doubt its altruistic nature. It would no doubt help if I read more on the subject, but on the outset, his contacts with Russians and his recklessness in outing agents certainly looks treasonous to me.

so that people can form their own opinion.

The Sword and the Shield exposes Agee as working for the KGB

I saw a quote "is this "propaganda" ", and then at the bottom of the article I saw a paragraph that used Coulter's books to make a point of the left being on " i.e. "the other side". :shrug: