The Family Jewels (33 page)

Phil Agee eventually decided that both Ferrera and the woman were CIA plants. Other friends agreed. But Agee dallied with them at length, perhaps desperate for money, even making plans for them to help him in London during the final stage of his research. There were repeated instances of surveillance by CIA teams, including one, Agee recounts, when the watchers were caught right outside his apartment. Meanwhile, in the United States, Agee's father was confronted by an agency lawyer who said he came on behalf of Director Helms. The lawyer, John Greaney of OGC, left behind copies of Agee's signed secrecy agreement and the court decision in
United States v. Marchetti
. After that, the father's tax returns were audited by the Internal Revenue Service. Greaney next saw Agee's estranged wife, encouraging her to refuse him visits with their children.

Apart from the heavy-handed aspects of all this stands the fact that the agency, in effect, supported and financed the very book it feared so much. By these means Langley even obtained a copy of an early draft. Naturally, Philip Agee discovered the CIA's maneuvers—and a decade later he obtained a modicum of proof in the form of documents released under the Freedom of Information Act. To the degree that these antics outraged the former spook, the CIA helped create its own bogeyman.

That Langley actually had Agee's book can be confirmed.
In May 1972 the Western Hemisphere Division was taken over by Theodore Shackley, who had once led operations against Cuba and had more recently been a secret warrior in Laos and Vietnam. Shackley initiated a wholesale shakeout of the division, a program that had its own cryptonym and cost untold millions. The purpose was to realign operations and terminate anything that Philip Agee knew about. At the Mexico City station, officer Joseph B. Smith spent his final year pensioning off agents and shutting down projects as part of this effort. Smith objected to its enormous destructiveness and recounts actually using the Agee manuscript to check whether given CIA officers or spies were mentioned. His objections proved futile. Another who objected was Tom Gilligan, an officer assigned to Portugal, where spies were also being discharged. Gilligan took his concerns to his station chief, but protests were to no avail.

By the fall of 1972 Phil Agee had completed two-thirds of the manuscript and shortly made the connection with the British publisher Penguin, which would ultimately bring out his book. He completed the draft in January 1974. Richard Helms had left Langley, ultimately succeeded by Bill Colby. Despite Helms's departure, the effort to counter Agee continued unabated. The FOIA documents released later revealed that CIA planned a dual-track strategy, one being propaganda to neutralize the book—as had been done with works on the Kennedy assassination,
The Politics of Heroin
, and
The Invisible Government
. The second track was to attempt to discredit Agee by painting him as a lousy spy and an enemy agent. The propaganda strategy would be mooted by the depth of Agee's revelations, but the collusion charges were rather more successful.

Depicting Philip Agee as a turncoat and a Cuban or Soviet agent was an incendiary charge. Nothing could have been more calculated to redouble his determination to strike back. But the CIA might have been right. The importance of this
demands some attention. By 1974 Agee had been in Cuba at least three times, had met with Cuban officials in London, and had left queries in Havana that apparently were subsequently investigated and answered for him. Agee's account is vague enough on his research in various places to leave the door open for the Cuban agent charge. Yet the former spook had always been frank about his goal of exposing the bankruptcy of CIA methods and classist basis of American foreign policy. The Cubans were sophisticated enough to understand any connection with their service would taint Agee's critique of the CIA.

On the other hand, former Soviet intelligence officer Oleg D. Kalugin has written and said that Agee
was
a Cuban agent, and that the KGB was chagrined because Agee had gone to the Soviet embassy in Mexico City in 1973 to offer his services and had been turned down, only then going to the Cubans. In a 1974 interview with an American journalist, CIA Director Bill Colby offered that identical date and embassy visit to substantiate the same charge. These claims are problematic. First, Agee had been assigned to Mexico and saw the surveillance of the Soviet and Cuban embassies there. When he initially went to Havana, Agee had avoided both and instead got his Cuban visa in Montreal. Second, Agee was gone from Mexico by 1973. Third, there is no evidence of a Cuban effort—an operation—to support this alleged agent. Had Agee had Cuban support, he would not have needed CIA money to write his book. Most important, Agee's crucial connections with the Cubans, his “research,” took place earlier. It is more likely the Cubans regarded Philip Agee as a friend working along parallel lines, not a Havana agent. Finally, Oleg Kalugin and Bill Colby became friends and, later, business associates, collaborating on the design of a computer game. It is entirely possible that Kalugin was simply rehashing what he had read in the British press, which was based on an interview Colby
had given to plant this story. Once they knew each other, Colby would have repeated his original allegations.

As for whether the Cubans contributed identifications of CIA officers for Agee to use, that was possible no matter what his status was. But Cuban data were not crucial for Agee's crusade to expose the CIA. Having been with the agency in Latin America for a decade, he knew hordes of these people. Moreover, there was a kind of secret code—for want of a better term—in those days, based on standard State Department publications that listed persons assigned to U.S. embassies and profiled the backgrounds of diplomatic personnel. Since most agency officers served in posts under diplomatic cover, their job titles fell within a narrow range, and their ranks were commensurate with their CIA standings. They were not hard to identify. Agency officers on post looked each other up all the time. My guess (and it is only a guess) is that if the Cubans were helpful, it was in discovering for Agee the office numbers and spaces within Latin American embassies (that the CIA man had never been in) that served as agency premises. The offices and diplomatic lists, taken together, would have permitted assembly of a profile of station chiefs, their deputies, and other senior officers with fair accuracy.

In any case there was precedent—on both sides—for exactly this kind of exposure. The Russians had assisted East German writer Julius Mader in assembling the book
Who's Who in the CIA
. Mader, to judge from the job titles he gave American officers, utilized precisely the method Agee would rely upon. The CIA struck back with John Barron, mentioned earlier (
Chapter 7
). A former naval intelligence officer turned
Reader's Digest
editor, Barron was given identities of KGB and GRU personnel for a fifty-page list of them included in his book
KGB: The Secret Work of Soviet Secret Agents
. Joseph Smith writes, “I am certain Barron's book and Philip Agee's are related. When Agee contacted the Cubans, it is a
small wonder the abused Soviet intelligence service through their Cuban surrogates returned the compliment.”
⁶

The CIA's back-alley campaign against Philip Agee escalated in the summer of 1974, when articles began appearing in the U.S. press depicting him as a drunkard and womanizer who had hooked up with the KGB somewhere in South America to spill his guts. The stories were clearly based on CIA information, but they lacked crucial details that would have been required for a spin of “truthiness.” Agee looked at one story and saw that it corresponded exactly to one of his talks with CIA agent Sal Ferrera—right down to the date of the alleged exchange—except that the real conversation took place in Paris, and with a CIA operative. Ironically, one of the beneficiaries of this agency disinformation was John Crewdson, who then wrote for the
New York Times
and had previously been tabbed at Helms's staff meetings as among the objectionable reporters. Langley now went to Crewdson to retail its allegations against Agee. Another story that enraged Agee came from the
Manchester Guardian
, which picked up a piece that Murray Seeger wrote for the
Los Angeles Times
. This actually never appeared in the newspaper to which it was attributed. Seeger later explained that his editor had killed the story—he was convinced, at the agency's request. The height of the absurd came when an old comrade visited Victor Marchetti, in exactly the same “coincidental” way as the CIA had first approached Agee directly, and tried to induce Marchetti to steal a copy of Agee's manuscript in its current form. Langley must have been desperate.

Philip Agee's book finally appeared in the summer of 1975, published in the United Kingdom.
Inside the Company: CIA Diary
was an instant best seller, though not initially in the United States, where long-standing law precluded importing English-language books written by American authors. Bill Colby threatened lawsuits to prevent the book's attracting an American publisher, but eventually lost out to the
marketplace. The Agee FOIA documents reveal that in 1975 the CIA went to the Justice Department to ask for a criminal indictment against him. But when Justice looked into the matter it was stymied—by the CIA. Agee could not be indicted without disclosing Langley's illegal actions against its former employee. The agency was not willing to expose its own crimes. The inquiry closed at the end of 1976. In fact, during 1977–1978, the Department of Justice considered whether to indict CIA officers for their actions. It was a Mexican standoff. The CIA stalemated itself.

Publication of Agee's book marked the onset of a long period of much more open struggle. The former CIA man denounced agency actions and revealed more names. He worked closely with the journal
Covert Action Information Bulletin
(an intellectual successor to
Counterspy
), which became a bête noire to the spy community. Agee collaborated on two edited books that focused on CIA activities in Europe and Africa and revealed more names. The agency sued to enjoin his income from those projects and obtained a general decision that Agee's writings were subject to CIA review, though the courts refused to award Langley any proceeds. Philip Agee began submitting his writings for review, but at the same time sued to obtain records of his case under the FOIA. In the new reality, Agee stopped writing much, but he traveled from country to country giving talks that exposed CIA agents and misdeeds.

Yet Langley was
still
not out of tricks. The 1975 murder of Athens CIA station chief Welch was laid at Agee's door, as well as that of the
Counterspy
people. The next ploy was to challenge Agee's domicile and agitate for revocation of his American passport. As the Ford administration gave way to that of Jimmy Carter, the United States pressured Great Britain to expel Philip Agee. The British issued such an order in January 1977, and Agee failed in all efforts to nullify it. He was then denied admission to France, and expelled from Holland
after a brief stay. Agee's name was on a list to be denied admission to Germany at the same time as his application for residence in Hamburg was in the hopper. A suspicious shooting at the home of the CIA station chief in Jamaica—which may actually have been a CIA provocation—was blamed on Agee. At the end of 1979 the United States went ahead and canceled his passport. No American had
ever
had a passport canceled over a political matter, even where attempts were made to punish citizens who visited North Vietnam at the height of the Southeast Asian war, and there were several strong legal precedents against revocation. Agee sued for restoration of his passport and won in both the district court and on appeal, but the Supreme Court went against precedent and found against him. Philip Agee ended up carrying a passport from the nation of Grenada.

In the meantime, Langley used the Agee case to argue that the simple naming of undercover officers endangered them, as well as national security. This position gained the support of the Carter administration. The CIA proposed legislation that would make it illegal to reveal the name of a clandestine services officer on mission. That bill ultimately passed early in the Reagan administration, resulting in the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982. Despite the fact that the law specifies it is for protection of
covert
officers, Langley now uses that authority quite frequently to shield the identity of
any
CIA officer, including senior officials whose identities have always been a matter of public record, even ones subject to Senate confirmation. For example, during the second Bush administration, the identity of Jose Rodriguez as chief of the National Clandestine Service was kept secret for longer than the law provides. This pillar of secrecy has become a double-edged sword. While it performs a good function in protecting officers under cover, it can be used as a tool against whistleblowers.

A new exemplar became the key in laying the final pillar for the foundation of the agency's fortress of secrecy. Agee's erstwhile CIA colleague Frank Snepp was also used by the secrecy mavens, who built their edifice on the foundation of the Marchetti case. Having established a role for prepublication review, what happened to Snepp gave the agency leave to use breach of contract legal grounds to overcome First Amendment rights. Here, Langley zeroed in on CIA officers' earnings from writing about their experiences. Frank Snepp was an agency analyst, one of the best and brightest on Vietnam, on his second tour at the Saigon station toward the end of the war. Snepp stayed on past the Paris ceasefire agreement and until the fall of Saigon in April 1975. During that time he became the leading analyst in situ. What Snepp saw during those last months and weeks of the Vietnam war scandalized him. Snepp's targets centered not on the CIA—which would receive his deep attention nonetheless—but the American ambassador and his superior, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.