14 January 2008

The Man Without a Country


Philip Agee, 1936-2008

There is so much going on that it is understandable some things are slipping off the table. The last really qualified candidate left the presidential race and no one has noticed. A man without a country died, and no one cared.

I am not talking about Kurt Vonnegut, since he left last year. But one of his last books- a compilation, really- was called "A Man Without a Country."   He was playing his Billy Pilgrim character to the end, with all the post-modern acid Mark Twain-style razor:

"If I die-God forbid-I would like to go to heaven to ask somebody in charge up there, Hey, what was the good news and what was the bad news?'"

Bless you, Mr. Vonnegut; you made us laugh at the worst of things within us, and you held a truth that was a surreal flame against injustice. But another writer died this week, and he did not make anyone laugh when he had his fifteen minutes of fame. His prose was hardly deathless, but Philip Agee left a legacy that is quite remarkable.

Twain said: “While history does not repeat, it does rhyme a lot.”

You can ask Scooter Libbey about that. Agee was a former DO operative who quit the Agency after service in Mexico, Uruguay and Uruguay. He went public with his opposition to the way it operated all around the world, but particularly in Latin America.

He produced a book that made him a darling of the Left. Agee claimed the CIA was interested only in propping up corrupt despots and preventing progressive reform. He did not coordinate the manuscript of “Inside the Company” with the folks at Langley, who would certainly have said “no.” The reviewers might even have gone on to say that the foreign policy of the United States was actually driven by the people in the White House.

In fact, several Presidents had asked Langley to do things for them that would not look good in the light of day. Operations which might be construed as “outside the legislative charter” were compiled in a 1973 dossier by Director Jim Schlesinger. It was so sensitive it was called “The Family Jewels,” and it was a bomshell when the contents were finally leaked.

Agee published his first book in 1975, the year of Saigon's fall, and it went along with the revelations of the Jewels that resulted in the Pike and Church Commissions in Congress, and the subsequent muzzling of the intelligence community that we are still trying to un-screw.

The capper to Agee's otherwise pedestrian expose was the 22-page appendix that provided the true names of hundreds of agency employees. One of them was Richard Welch, the Chief of Station in Athens, who was gunned down by Greek terrorists the year the book came out.

Agee claimed his lists were acts of civil disobedience. Living in London, he continued to publish them. "Dirty Work: The CIA in Western Europe" came along in 1978. There was nothing that Washington could do about stemming the leak. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance stripped Agee of his US passport in 1979; Agee relocated to Hamburg, Germany, and continued to work on his project of unmasking as many Agency people as he could.

That is when he became The Man Without a Country, rhyming equivalent of He lived in Grenada and Nicaragua before moving back to Hamburg. He published "On the Run" in 1987, the same year he was again denied a US passport.

In the book “The Man Without a County,” Edward Everett Hale told the story of a young Army officer named Philip Nolan, who bitterly denounced his country after being tried for treason. He angrily shouts “Damn the United States!” and the judge sentences him to life, imprisoned on a series of Navy Ships, never to set foot in his country again.

The fable is actually about the Civil War, and it is an affirmation of unity. Philip Nolan is contrite at the end of his life, and in his little cabin constructs a shrine to the nation he renounced. It is a great story, and I understand there will be another movie treatment out this year. I am equally   confident that there will be something filmed about Phil Agee, if the writer's strike ever ends.

Agee was anything but contrite at the end, and even wrote an OpEd for the LA Times about the outing of Valerie Plame, again contending he was doing something noble when he was outing CIA people.

There is no way to tell how much damage Agee did. Beyond Welch's murder, dozens of DO folks had to make abrupt changes in assignment, agent networks were compromised, and other honorable analysts who had nothing to do with covert operations were harassed.

The Soviets loved it. Their Main Enemy had a running sore that continued to fester in the public eye. During the tensions that went along with the deployment of medium-range missiles in Europe, Agee was an active agent of influence for the KGB.

Eventually Congress took action in 1982, passing the “Intelligence Identities Protection Act” which made it a criminal offense to knowingly divulge the identities of CIA clandestine service officers.

Agee shut down his operation, though he continued to rail against the injustice perpetrated by the country that had disowned him.

He was welcome in Cuba, of course, He founded an on-line travel agency encouraging other Americans to ignore the embargo on the island, and split his time between Havana and Hamburg. I wish I had the chance to visit Cuba legally; I have done so many times, but only to the Naval Station at Guantanamo.

We had a trip set up to Havana through the Senate intelligence Committee back in 1996, since the Congress can travel wherever it wants, but the visit to the US Interests section fell through at the last moment. With all the bad publicity, the Naval Station may not last as long as Fidel, which will probably mark the end of the sanctions.

Agee died Monday in Havana, at the ripe young age of 72. His wife Giselle said he had undergone surgery for perforated ulcers in December, and got a related infection. He did not make it.

Funeral arrangements are incomplete; I don't know where they are going to bury the traitor, though his kids might well want him planted in the United States.

Pity about the ulcers. I guess something was eating him all along.

Copyright 2008 Vic Socotra
www.vicsoctra.com

Close Window