The British Government Puts the Heat on a Spy Who Came in from the Cold
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
INTERNATIONAL SPYING The British government puts the heat on a spy who came in from the cold by Jon Steinberg In earlier work as a freelance journal- Forum director, journalist Brian Cro- Convicting people without telling ist, Hosenball co-authored a 1975 article zier, denied knowledge of the CIA con- them what the charge is raises large in Time Out, a London entertainment nections, but Hosenball kept on Cro- questions—especially when the subject and muckraking weekly, which named zier's trail when he moved to the is covert operations by the CIA and the what he claimed was the entire CIA Institute for the Stud of Conflict, a prosecutor is the British government. station staff in London. He followed undon t'antr, a mg the "They just sit there at a table across this up with an expose of CIA subsidies Forum files with him. The largest donor form me and my lawyers and it's pretty for Forum World Features, a London- to the Institute is a Quentin B. Satz- k 4e much like talking to a sponge," com- based syndication agency which was _man of the Enreicru_Affairs Research mented Philip Agee during the London forced to cease operations abruptly. The Group in Washington. Others wlo appeal hearing before three retired civil 1,77o7.0 like to receive funds from this servants which confirmed the order for source may have difficulty, since nei- his deportation on February 16. "They ther appears to exist. seem to look down at their table and These exposures may have embarras- their papers and doodle, but we paid Learning from sed the British government, and when very careful attention to their reactions. experience Hosenball published an article in the They weren't interested in any trip to pilot edition of a new magazine, The Cuba or the Soviet Union, or anything Philip Agee's move from a newly Leveller, tentatively naming two mem- else relating to the communist coun- acquired house in Cambridge will be bers of the British intelligence service tries. They wanted to know about a painful one for him, his two sons (MIB), they had grounds for accusing Jamaica, Angola, joint operations be- (now 12 and 15 years old), and him of publishing "information prejudi- tween the CIA and British intelligence. Angela Agee, the woman he now cial to the safety of the servants of the and my second book." lives with. Angela Agee, who is not Crown." Agee first landed on the Central his wife although she uses his name, Philip Agee regards England as an Intelligence Agency's enemies list by ii has endured worse. A Brazilian, she ideal base for research on his second writing Inside the Company: CIA was active in the student movement book, and he has carefully avoided any Diary. The book was about his nine in Rio de Janeiro after the CIA- involvement with exposes of his host years as a CIA operative, including supported coup in 1964. She joined government. Nonetheless, he admits, assignments in Ecuador. Uruguay, and the Revolutionary Communist Party "it may well be that some of the things I Mexico. He believes that the basic and was forced to go underground have done might unknowingly have reason for the expulsion order is a de- when she was 19 years old. A few concerned joint operations with British cision by the CIA and perhaps other weeks later she was wounded and Intelligence." levels of the U.S. government "that I captured. The police tortured her The British intelligence service have got to be dealt with, and that my with electric shocks and other tech- worked closely with the OSS, prede- work somehow has got to be stopped or niques, brought her to a hospital for cessor to the CIA, during World War II, impeded and disrupted." an operation on her wounds, and and the ties have remained intimate Replying to similar accusations by then tortured her again. Weak and since. Known CIA operations in Britain members of his own Labor Party in exhausted, she confirmed her identi- include subsidies for Encounter, a cold- Parliament, Home Secretary Merlyn ty—a capitulation which still dis- war journal which published numerous Rees told the House of Commons, "I tresses her even though she gave articles by right-wing leaders of the reached my decision after the most care- them no other information. Labor Party, and for the European ful consideration. I must emphasize After two and a half years in prison Movement, a group which participated that it was taken solely in the interests she was released and went to Paris, in the successful campaign to bring of the security of this country." Rees where she met Philip Agee a few Britain into the Common Market. shrewdly bolstered his case by simul- months later. Some day she hopes to Earlier this year a published list of CIA taneously ordering the deportation of return to Brazil to rejoin the revolu- agents in London included a Mark S. Mark Hosenball, a 25-year-old Ameri- tionary struggle. "We had a lot of Boerner, who was said to haveiTSITEear can reporter for the London Evening petit-bourgeois ideas then," she said Euir7 secretary inside the British Standard. in an interview with the London Ministry of Defense. Guardian, "but now we know there When Philip Agee wrote an article Sources for this article include the will have to be an armed struggle. with Steven Weissman for the January Agee/Hosenball Defense Committee in This has happened in every country issue of Oui magazine which said that London, Rodney Larsen, and an inter- where there has been a revolu- the CIA had spent up to $500,000 in view with Philip Agee by Howard tion." ❑ Britain recruiting mercenaries to fight Dratch. in Angola, he was clearly treading on 10 Mirth 28, 1977 Sayan Days vgAtititAtOMW4igit,,, a”,m-$.1,*z\a\:,,, sensitive ground as far as the Labor ganda to turn people away from the Mervyn Rees told him that Agee had government was concerned. The appeal government. The order of intention to been responsible for the death of two board members "seemed to perk up" deport came just a few weeks after that. British agents "behind the Iron Cur- when this topic came up in the hearing. As we know, the good guys won in tain." Agee says, as they did also when the Jamaica by a huge majority, and maybe The story first appeared in a report hearing turned to Jamaica, a member of the British government just doesn't from Murray Segar, the Los Angeles the British Commonwealth. "Certainly want to see that again." Times correspondent in Bonn. Segar's the timing of the whole thing relates Another element in Agee's Kafka- report claimed that as part of his work directly to my trip to Jamaica in esque expulsion is the "Polish case." with the CIA at the 1968 Olympics in September," Agee declares. He went When David Steel, head of Britain's Mexico City, Agee had met with Colonel there to speak publicly on the CIA's Liberal Party. visited the Home Secre- Pawlawsky, a member of the Polish efforts "through violence and propo- tary to protest the deportation order, fencing team who was a spy for the West. After leaving the CIA, the story went, Agee revealed this information to East European intelligence operatives, resulting in the well publicized arrest of 120 persons in Poland in 1975. There are so many holes in the story that Agee urged the appeals board to look into the evidence. Since his cover in Mexico City was an American Embassy post, he was too well known to be dealing with an East European like Pawlawsky. In addition, if he had met Pawlawsky, the CIA would have noted this fact in what is known in Agency parlance as a "damage report" done on Agee after he began publishing the names of Latin American agents. Fur- thermore, the Polish fencing team trav- elled to the West many times in the early 1970s, offering ample opportun- ities for Pawlawsky to defect if the CIA thought he was in danger. Whether persuaded by the evi- dence— including information to which Agee and Hosenball could not respond because their request to know the charges against them was denied—or by pressure from the American govern- ment, the appeals hoard affirmed the expulsion on what the National Union of Journalists term "a black day, both for justice and for press freedom." Addi- tional protests have come from other trade unions, most of the British press, and more than 80 members of par- liament. "This shouldn't interfere in the long run, but in the interim it's a major dis- ruption," said Agee when he heard the ruling. Although the order requires both Hosenball and Agee to leave Great Britain by March 1. the ex-CIA opera- tive and his lawyers have developed a new strategy to allow him to remain by moving to Scotland. Although it is part of the same country, Scotland retains its own legal system, and Agee will con- tend that the Home Secretary's writ does not apply there. He has been invited to run for rector of the University of Dundee, which follows the Scottish tradition of student elections for the post. His opponent will be the incumbent, Clement Freud, a leader of the Liberal Party and a grand- son of Sigmund Freud. Students will therefore have a clear choice as to what kind of analysis they prefer— if the legal Philip, Angela, Philip Jr., and Christopher Agee at their Cambridge, England home.