Philip Agee, 72, Renegade CIA Agent
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Philip Agee, whose naming of CIA operatives helped prompt a U.S. law against exposing government spies, died Monday in Havana of complications following ulcer surgery. 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 misdeeds against leftists in the region and included a 22-page list of purported agency operatives.
The list created an uproar around the world and helped prompt Congress to pass a law against naming clandestine U.S. agents abroad. It also led the State Department to strip Agee of his U.S. passport.
Vince Cannistraro, a former CIA counterterrorism chief, said Agee’s book “was considered a very serious blow to CIA’s clandestine operations.”
Former CIA colleagues and some U.S. officials called Agee a traitor and alleged he was linked to Cuban and Soviet intelligence agencies. Agee denied the allegations and said he thought of himself as part of the American tradition of dissent and as “a critic of hypocrisy, a critic of crime in high places.”
In recent years, he had lived in Hamburg, Germany, but kept an apartment in Havana’s Vedado district and ran a business bringing Americans to the island despite Washington’s decades-old embargo.
Soviet and Cuban defectors alleged Agee had received money or aid from communist intelligence services.
In denying Agee a new passport in 1987, Secretary of State George Shultz cited CIA reports that said he was a paid adviser to Cuban intelligence, had trained Nicaraguan security officials and had instructed security officials in Grenada before a U.S. invasion toppled a communist government there. Through his attorney, Agee denied such allegations.
Agee was never prosecuted in the United States. Mr. Cannistraro said that was because officials feared a trial would expose Soviet defectors living in America under new identities.
In 1989, Vice President George H.W. Bush — a former CIA director — said he had “nothing but disdain” for Agee: “Those who go around publicizing the names of CIA people abroad are despicable.”
One of Agee’s last essays was a defense of the Cuban government’s arrest of 75 leading dissidents. Agee insisted that they were paid American agents.
