In Honor of Philip Agee

1935-2008

On January 7, Philip Agee died from peritonitis in a Havana hospital after surgical attempts failed to correct his perforated ulcers. Agee, who is perhaps unknown to many of our younger readers, was an ex-CIA agent who resigned from that agency in 1969. He spent the rest of his life meticulously documenting and exposing the spies, non-governmental agencies and State Department operatives that prosecuted U.S. imperialism’s myriad efforts to subvert and overturn such foreign governments as displeased the U.S. imperialist rulers, especially in those countries (such as Chile in the early 1970s and Nicaragua in the 1980s) where the threat of revolutionary overturns was posed.

A onetime altar boy and the son of a prosperous Florida businessman, Agee was recruited to the CIA in 1957 after his graduation from Notre Dame, spending his time in the agency in a variety of assignments in Latin America. He was posted to Mexico City in 1968, the year in which the Institutional Revolutionary Party regime of Gustavo Díaz Ordaz slaughtered hundreds of protesting students on the eve of the Olympics, an event that precipitated Agee’s resignation in early 1969. Agee, perhaps whimsically, said he left the CIA because “I fell in love with a woman who thought Che Guevara was the most wonderful man in the world.”

In 1975 Agee published Inside the Company: CIA Diary in which he named 250 agency officers, NGOs and foreign agents—an activity he continued in the pages of Covert Action Information Bulletin (later Covert Action Quarterly) that he helped initiate in 1978 (it ceased publication in 2005). Agee later described his motivation: “It was a time in the 70s when the worst imaginable horrors were going on in Latin America. 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” (London Guardian, 10 January 2007).

His activities did not go unnoticed by his ex-employer. In 1982, Congress passed the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, which was specifically aimed at Agee’s actions. It criminalized outing covert agents—a non-crime from the standpoint of the proletariat that is, in fact, a service to humanity. After the debut of Covert Action Agee became a “man without a country,” expelled from Britain in 1977 at the behest of then Secretary of State Henry Kissinger by the obliging Labour Party government of James Callaghan. He was subsequently refused entry by France and the Netherlands. Agee did not obtain secure residency until he achieved a German passport in 1990 after marrying Giselle Roberge, a German ballerina. Until his death, Agee sojourned between his home in Hamburg and an apartment in Havana.

The “death of communism” triumphalism in the aftermath of the 1991-92 capitalist counterrevolution in the Soviet degenerated workers state has transformed many onetime critics of American imperialism into its sniveling and lying sycophants who religiously retail the lie that the “socialist experiment” has failed. Not so Agee, who, until his death, remained a staunch defender of the Cuban Revolution and an opponent of U.S. efforts toward a counterrevolutionary overturn of the Castro regime. While not a few of the obituaries detailing Agee’s death describe him as a “turncoat,” “renegade” and “traitor,” none call him a liar nor do any attempt to refute his revelations.

A man of considerable intellect and principle, Philip Agee saw deeply into the heart of the monster he chose to oppose. Just two weeks after the September 11 attacks, he gave a talk in Stockholm describing Osama bin Laden as “a creature of the CIA” in its efforts to mobilize Islamic reactionaries in opposition to the Soviet Union’s intervention in Afghanistan. He went on to assert that the “war on terror” was of service to the U.S. imperialist rulers precisely because it is “an ongoing war, for which there will be no quick resolution” and “no great battles.” He pointed out that it would be used to effect restraints on civil liberties and political dissent. In all this he was spot-on.

Agee was not an advocate of proletarian revolution. Although he described himself as a socialist, it seems clear that his contempt was directed rather specifically at the bloody predations of American imperialism. Nor did Agee perceive that the nationalist Castro-led bureaucracy that holds sway in Cuba itself endangers the Cuban deformed workers state, not least through its Stalinist dogma of “socialism in one country,” which stands in opposition to the struggle for international socialist revolution, including in the U.S.

Philip Agee was an intransigent opponent of the would-be world-conquering, bloodsoaked American bourgeoisie and, indeed, a traitor to his class. For that we honor him. As Granma, the paper of the Cuban Communist Party, said upon his death, Agee was “a loyal friend of Cuba and fervent defender of the peoples’ fight for a better world.” His contributions to that end will be sorely missed.