Communist Propagandist Philip Agee Dies in Cuban Hospital

In 1973 [Philip Agee] approached the KGB residency in Mexico City and offered what the head of the FCD's Counter-intelligence Directorate, Oleg Kalugin, called "reams of information about CIA operations."--Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin

Philip Agee, a former CIA officer who publicized the names of CIA agents, who cooperated with the KGB and Cuban DGI, and who published a forged document that purported to be a classified appendix to a U.S. Army Field Manual, died in a Cuban hospital while undergoing surgery on Monday, January 7, 2008.

According to the Washington Post (1-9-08), in 1987 the former Secretary of State George Shultz "cited CIA reports that Mr. Agee was a paid adviser to Cuban intelligence, had trained Nicaraguan security officials and had tried to thwart the U.S. invasion of Grenada."

According to The Guardian (1-9-08), a former Cuban intelligence officer claimed that Agee received one million dollars from the Cuban intelligence service. Agee denied this.

Philip Agee complained that America didn't support elections in Central America, but then he sold his services to the Cuban government, which does not have real elections. Agee claimed he was a patriotic whistleblower who became disillusioned with the CIA because of his Catholic religious upbringing, but author John Barron, writes that Agee was forced to resign from the CIA "for a variety of reasons, including his irresponsible drinking, continuous and vulgar propositioning of embassy wives, and inability to manage his finances". [KGB Today: The Hidden Hand. (1983). pp. 227-230. As cited from Agee's Wikipedia]

In 2003, Agee denigrated pro-democracy Cuban dissidents who opposed Castro's dictatorship as American stooges. Newsweek (1-9-08) reports that after the Cuban government had a crackdown on dissidents Agee wrote:

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."

Agee's Wikipedia states:

Agee told Swiss journalist Peter Studer that “The CIA is plainly on the wrong side, that is, the capitalistic side. I approve KGB activities, communist activities in general. Between the overdone activities that the CIA initiates and the more modest activities of the KGB, there is absolutely no comparison.”

Although Philip Agee depicted himself as a patriot---a Catholic, a dissident, and a whistleblower---the KGB defector Vasili Mitrokhin provided the British government with notes about Agee's collaboration with the KGB and DGI, communist secret police organizations that persecute religion and crush dissent in their own countries.

According to Professor Christopher Andrew and Mitrokhin, the authors of The Sword and Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB (1999):

In 1973 [Agee] approached the KGB residency in Mexico City and offered what the head of the FCD's Counter-intelligence Directorate, Oleg Kalugin, called "reams of 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. According to Kalugin:

"Agee then went to the Cubans, who welcomed him with open arms . . . The Cubans shared Agee's information with us. But as I sat in my office in Moscow reading reports about the growing list of revelations coming from Agee, I cursed our officers for turning away such a prize."

In January 1975 Agee published an uncompromisingly hostile memoir of his career in the CIA entitled Inside the Company: CIA Diary, which identified approximately 250 Agency officers and agents and claimed that "millions of people all over the world had been killed or had their lives destroyed by the CIA and the institutions it supports." The self-congratulatory KGB file on the book claims, doubtless with some exaggeration, that it was "prepared by Service A, together with the Cubans." [For a description of the KGB's Service A (short for Active Measures), which organizes "Black" or covert active measures operations, forgeries, the publication of KGB-influenced news reports, films, books, and etc. see here and here.]

Mitrokhin's notes do not indicate exactly what the KGB and its Cuban ally, the DGI, contributed to Agee's text. As Agee himself acknowledged, however: "Representatives of the Communist Party of Cuba [the DGI] . . . gave important encouragement at a time when I doubted that I would be able to find the additional information I needed."

While Agee was writing his book in Britain, the KGB maintained contact with him through its co-optee, Edgar Anatolyevich Cheporov, London correspondent of the Novosti news agency and the Literaturnaya Gazeta." [Sword and Shield pp. 230-231]

...On November 16, 1976 a deportation order served on Agee requiring him to leave England turned his case, much to the delight of the Centre, into a cause cause célèbre. According to one of the files noted by Mitrokhin:

The KGB employed firm and purposeful measures to force the Home Office to cancel their decision . . . The London residency was used to direct action by a number of members of the Labor Party Executive, union leaders, leading parliamentarians, leaders of the National Union of Journalists to take a stand against the Home Office decision. [Sword and Shield 231]

...After Agee's well-publicized expulsion from Britain, the KGB continued to use him and some of his supporters in active measures [defined here] against the CIA. Among the documents received by Agee from what he described as "an anonymous sender" was an authentic copy of a classified State Department circular, signed by Kissinger, which contained the CIA's "key intelligence questions" for fiscal year 1975 on economic, financial and commercial reporting. KGB files identify the source of the document as Service A. In the summer of 1977 the circular was published in a pamphlet entitled "What Uncle Sam Wants to Know about You," with an introduction by Agee. While acknowledging that it was "not the most gripping document in the world," Agee claimed that it demonstrated the unfair assistance secretly given to US companies abroad by the American intelligence community.

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." Files noted by Mitrokhin claim that the Bulletin was founded "on the initiative of the KGB" and that the group running it (collectively codenamed RUPOR), which held its first meeting in Jamaica early in 1978, was "put together" by FCD Directorate K (counterintelligence). The Bulletin was edited in Washington by Bill Schaap, a radical lawyer codenamed RUBY by the KGB, his wife, the journalist Ellen Ray, and another journalist, Louis Wolf, codenamed ARSENIO. Agee and two other disaffected former members of the CIA, Jim and Elsie Wilcott (previously employed by the Agency as, respectively, finance officer and secretary), contributed articles and information. There is no evidence in Mitrokhin's notes that any member of the RUPOR group, apart from Agee, was conscious of the role of the DGI or KGB.

The first issue of the Covert Action Information Bulletin was launched by Agee and the RUPOR group at a Cuban press conference on the eve of the Eleventh World Festival of Youth and Students, held to coincide with the Havana carnival in the summer of 1978. Agee also produced advance copies of another book, Dirty Work: The CIA in Western Europe, coauthored by himself and Wolf, which contained the names and biographical details of 700 CIA personnel who were, or had been, stationed in western Europe. "Press reaction," wrote Agee, "was not disappointing. In the next few days we learned by telephone from friends in the States and elsewhere that most of the major publications carried stories about the Bulletin and Dirty Work. Perfect."

The Centre assembled a task force of personnel from Service A and Directorate K, headed by V. N. Kosterin, assistant to the chief of Service A, to keep the Covert Action Information Bulletin supplied with material designed to compromise the CIA. Among the material which the task force supplied for publication in 1979 was an eighteen-page CIA document entitled "Director of Central Intelligence: Perspectives for Intelligence, 1976-1981." The document had originally been delivered anonymously to the apartment of the Washington resident, Dmitri Ivanovich Yakushkin, and at the time had been wrongly assessed by both the residency and the Centre as a "dangle" by US intelligence. Agee's commentary on the document highlighted the complaint by DCI William Colby that recent revelations of its operations were among the most serious problems the CIA had to face. Kosterin's task force, however, became increasingly concerned about the difficulty of finding enough secret material for the Bulletin, and recommended that it look harder for open-source material, ranging from readers' letters to crises around the world which could be blamed on the CIA--among them the Jonestown massacre in Guyana, when 900 members of the American religious cult the "People's Temple" had been persuaded to commit mass suicide or had been murdered. [Sword and Shield 232-233]

According to Agee's Wikipedia, the January 1979 #3 issue of Agee's Covert Action Information Bulletin published the FM 30-31B forgery. A patriotic whistleblower does not publish forgeries!

The Wikipedia entry for the US Army Field Manual 30-31B explains:

The US Army Field Manual 30-31B is a forgery purporting to be a classified appendix to a US Army Field Manual describing top-secret counter insurgency tactics. In particular, the need for a strategy of tension involving violent attacks blamed on radical left-wing groups in order to convince allied governments of the need for counter-action. It has been called the Westmoreland Field Manual because it had a faked signature from General William Westmoreland. It was labeled supplement B (hence "30-31B"), but FM 30-31 only had one appendix, Supplement A, during the 1970s.

The U.S. House Intelligence Committee determined it to be a forgery in 1979. Testimony of a defector before the U.S. Congress later confirmed the Soviet origin of the forgery. The Danish Defense Intelligence Service (DDIS) concluded in 1976 that the forgery was part of a disinformation campaign waged by the KGB. In 2006, the US State Department again had to deny its authenticity after the document was cited by researchers who were unaware of its falseness.

The forgery first appeared in Turkey in the 1970s, before being circulated to other countries. It was also used at the end of the 1970s to implicate the CIA in the Red Brigades' murder of former Italian prime minister Aldo Moro.

As previously noted, the former University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill has contributed a number of articles to the Covert Action Information Bulletin. Ward Churchill's anti-FBI diatribe, "The Covert War Against Native Americans", was originally published in the Covert Action Information Bulletin. [Summer 1985 issue., Number 24 pp. 16-21.---See Churchill's CV where the article is called "The Covert War Against American Indians" and republished in January 1996 in Arm the Spirit.]

Philip Agee's Covert Action Information Bulletin published propaganda, lies, and forgeries. He served communist regimes that terrorized their own people. Philip Agee published lies about the CIA, the FBI, and the American Army.

Philip Agee published ex-Professor Ward Churchill's mendacious 1985 article "The Covert War Against Native Americans" and destroyed the trust between the FBI and America's poorest, most vulnerable citizens---the Indians of Pine Ridge. Ward Churchill followed in Philip Agee's footsteps and became a professor who perfected the BIG LIE about our history instead of searching for the truth.

Philip Agee was not a good Catholic, a patriotic dissident, or a high minded whistleblower. He was a communist, a purveyor of forgeries, a liar, and a traitor who served terrorist regimes.

Oliver Kamm, a British Blogger, also wrote an article about Philip Agee called "Their Man in Havana"and closed with this excellent observation:

"I regard Agee's service on behalf of totalitarianism with unalloyed hostility. His was an ignoble life, and I do not mourn his passing."