Agee's 'On the Run' details CIA harassment campaign

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The Run, by Philip Agee, Lyle Inc., Secaucus, N.J., 400 pp.

George Bush thinks this man belongs behind bars. Five NATO nations have seen fit to expel him. The U.S. government has revoked his passport. The mainstream media has denounced him as a "gutless, traitorous rat," a "swine," even a "soiled bit of flotsam from the 1960s."

The man is Philip Agee, and there are few people the CIA loves to hate more.

Agee's 1975 book, "Inside the Company: CIA Diary," exposed the method behind the madness of myriad CIA covert actions. A former operations officer, Agee spent 12 years with the agency (he left in 1969) and was privy to voluminous inside knowledge of CIA dirty work. It made him an expert at covert operations. It also made him indignant—and eventually he quit.

With the nation smoldering in the heat of the Watergate scandal and the Vietnam War, BOOK REVIEW Agee's revelations were fuel on a fire of public disillusionment with Washington politics. There was more than a little heat at CIA headquarters, too, as "Inside the Company" climbed the bestseller list. What had the CIA fuming, however, had little to do with literary criticism.

Agee had broken the oath of silence demanded of every CIA employee. He had revealed secrets. He had named names. He had with methodical precision documented a litany of crimes that stood as a powerful indictment of U.S. foreign policy.

The CIA responded to Agee's indictment in words with a threat of indictment in court. CIA Director William Colby, and his successor George Bush, both pressed the Department of Justice to prosecute Agee for revealing classified information. The CIA, however, was persuaded to drop the case. Why? The agency had committed major illegal acts against Agee, and it feared these crimes would be made public in the course of a criminal case.

Still, the CIA has hardly lacked for imagination in hounding and harassing Agee. It has, in effect, kept him "On the Run," which is not surprisingly the title of Agee's autobiographical account of his post-CIA days.

"The North American way"

Agee went to work for the CIA in the late 1950s, full of naive enthusiasm for the cloak-and-dagger world of spies in the service of truth, justice, and—most important—the (North) American way. It was a time of U.S. concern toward the growing influence of the Cuban Revolution in Latin America, and in response President Kennedy had initiated the Alliance for Progress in 1961.

The United States had discovered the virtues of "freedom" and "democracy," and a chorus of propaganda began trumpeting the promise of U.S. support for liberal reform and economic development in Latin America.

Agee believed that promise then. But rhetoric and reality were playing their tune on two different keys. Reform " Americanstyle," as Agee began to learn, rang true only in its utter hypocrisy.

In Ecuador and Uruguay, where Agee was stationed, the CIA's noble defense of the "free world" was maintained by the most ignoble means of covert subversion: instigating riots, torturing leftists, bombing churches, bribing politicians, buying journalists, infiltrating political organizations, setting up phony political fronts.

The CIA's critical role in the military coup in Brazil in 1964, and the U.S. invasion a year later of the Dominican Republic were further confirmation that Washington would resort to the most brutal Philip Agee repression to preserve the imperialist status quo.

Agee finally left the CIA in 1969, disillusioned but with no great plan to expose the agency. Gradually, his maturing political views led him to a closer identification with progressive and revolutionary movements, and he decided to reveal what he knew.

Undercover agents in Paris The CIA, as expected, went on full paranoid red alert when it learned of his intentions. Agee later learned that the CIA, during a six-year period in the 1970s, accumulated an average of 18 pages a day of information on him.

But the CIA did far more than just engage in the passive collection of information. The Department of Justice, in fact, while reviewing the CIA's request that it indict Agee, gave serious consideration to prosecuting certain CIA officials for their crimes against him.

"On The Run" provides some clue to what fate the CIA may have had in mind for Agee. While writing "Inside The Company" in Paris, Agee was befriended 1 months for $8. 6 months for $4.

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Name Address City Zip by two undercover agents. One was "Sal Ferrera," a writer for " underground" publications, and the other was "Leslie Donegan," a rich American student.

They helped Agee prepare his manuscript, transcribed tapes, loaned him a "bugged" typewriter, and even gave him money to live on.

The two kept the CIA informed of Agee's activity and, he believes, were probably setting him up for disaster. Agee discovered the "bug" in the typewriter and soon left Paris for London. Sal and Leslie then tried on some pretext to lure him to Spain.

The CIA had tight relations with the Franco security forces, and the extraordinary diligence with which Sal and Leslie sought to persuade him to travel there led Agee to suspect that something nasty—a drug bust, kidnapping, or assassination—may have awaited him.

"On The Run" recounts Agee's humorous run-in with Leslie Donegan a few years later. Somewhat coincidentally, Agee leams that Leslie-her real name is Janet Strickland-is working at the International Labor Organization in Geneva, Switzerland. Armed with his most sinister smile, and Send me more information about Socialist Action. [] I'd like to join Socialist Action stat Tel. two photographers, he surprises her in her office. She runs shrieking from the room, her cover blown.

A charge of "murder"

Janet Strickland is actually only one of some 2000 agents Agee has publicly exposed. CIA apologists have, naturally, responded to Agee's efforts to pierce the CIA's veil of secrecy with cries of treason—and in one casemurder. The case involved Richard Welch, the CIA station chief in Athens, Greece, who was assassinated in 1975 by an obscure leftwing group.

Welch's name had previously appeared in CounterSpy, an anti-CIA journal started by Norman Mailer, Agee, and others. President Ford blamed Welch's death on "CIA defectors" who had named names.

The big-business media also took its cue. A "Sixty Minutes" report blamed Welch's death directly on Agee, falsely claiming that Agee had worked with him in Latin America. The CBS news program refused to air Agee's rebuttal, instead featuring a still photo of Agee while host Morley Safer indulged in ominous speculation that perhaps Agee had worked for the KGB all along.

As hysteria over the case died down, and as the media lost interest, key facts later emerged in a Congressional investigation. The group that killed Welch had been trailing him and his predecessor for months. CIA headquarters had warned Welch not to move into his predecessor's house because it was well known as a CIA residence. Welch had ignored the warning because it would lengthen his commute to work.

Welch's killers knew his every movement, and that knowledge had nothing to do with his name appearing in CounterSpy, or the Athens News for that matter, which had also published his name prior to his death.

The "anti-Agee bill"

Agee, of course, was not attempting to get CIA agents killed, only to neutralize their effectiveness. And his efforts have not been without success, a fact Congress acknowledged when it enacted the Intelligence Identities Protection Law in 1982.

This law, also known as the "anti-Agee bill," makes it a crime to identify a covert agent-even if the information was unclassified, lawfully obtained, and the agent exposed was engaged in illegal activity.

"On The Run" is worthwhile reading. Agee rejects the notion that the "excesses" of the CIA are aberrations of an intelligence community out of control. Rather, he argues with conviction that the CIA's illegal covert operations are a natural outgrowth of a foreign policy that champions any corrupt oligarchy, military dictatorship, or police state that fosters a "friendly climate for investment" by U.S. business.

He states frankly that those who oppose his actions are simply following in the tradition of John Jay, the nation's first chief justice, who held that "the people who own the country ought to govern it."

"CIA employees hardly own the country," Agee concludes, "but as a secret political police they certainly help those who do."

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