Philip Agee's Inside the Company: CIA Diary
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INSIDE THE COMPANY: CIA DIARY Inside Cover: Excerpted from a page-one pre-publication review in the Washington Post "Book World" When Victor Marchetti's The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence was published it contained intriguing blanks where material deemed too sensitive by the CIA had been. There are no blanks in Philip Agee's Inside the Company: CIA Diary. This densely detailed expose names every CIA officer, every agent, every operation that Agee encountered during 12 years with "The Company" in Ecuador, Uruguay, Mexico and Washington. Among CIA agents or [contacts] Agee lists high ranking political leaders of several Latin American countries, U.S. and Latin American labor leaders, ranking Community Party members, and scores of other politicians, high military and police officials and journalists. After a stint as an Air Force officer (for cover) and CIA training, Agee arrived in Quito, Ecuador in late 1960. During the glory years of the Alliance for Progress and the New Frontier, he fought the holy war against communism by bribing politicians and journalists, forging documents, tapping telephones, and reading other people's mail. But it was a faraway event which seems to have disturbed him more. Lyndon Johnson's invasion of the Dominican Republic in 1965 was an overreaction Agee couldn't accept. In 1968, he resigned with the conviction that he had become a "servant of the capitalism I rejected" as a university student—"one of its secret policemen." Agee decided to write this reconstructed diary to tell everything he knew. He spent four years writing the book in Europe, making research trips and dodging the CIA. At one point he lived on money advanced by a woman he believes was working for the CIA and trying to gain his confidence. Until recently, former CIA Director Richard Helm's plea that "You've just got to trust us. We are honorable men" was enough. With the revelations of domestic spying, it no longer is. In this book Agee has provided the most complete description yet of what the CIA does abroad. In entry after numbing entry, U.S. foreign policy in Latin America is pictured as a web of deceit, hypocrisy and corruption. Now that we can no longer plead ignorance of the webs our spiders spin, will be continue to tolerate CIA activities abroad?—Patrick Breslin © The Washington Post Cover photograph by Dennis Rolfe shows a typewriter and bugged case planted on the author presumably by the CIA. Stonehill Publishing Company Distributed by George Braziller, Inc. Philip Agee, who was a CIA operations officer for twelve years, now lives in England. "More than an expose, a unique chronicle ... the most complete description yet of what the CIA does abroad. In entry after numbing entry, U.S. foreign policy is pictured as a web of deceit, hypocrisy and corruption."—The Washington Post "Unlike Victor Marchetti, who was so high in the CIA that many of his notions of what goes on at the operations level are downright absurd, Philip Agee was there. He has first-hand experience as a spy-handler ... as complete an account of spy work as is likely to be published anywhere ... presented with deadly accuracy."—Miles Copeland, former CIA agent, in The London Observer "The workings of the world's most powerful secret police force—the CIA— comes across as a frightening picture of corruption, pressure, assassination and conspiracy."—Evening News (London) Introduction This is a story of the twelve-year career of a CIA secret operations officer that ended in early 1969. It is an attempt to open another small window to the kinds of secret activities that the US government undertakes through the CIA in Third World countries in the name of US national security. It includes the actual people and organizations involved, placed within the political, economic and social context in which the activities occurred. An attempt is also made to include my personal interpretation of what I was doing. and to show the effect of this work on my family life. My reasons for revealing these activities will be found in the text. No one, of course, can remember in detail all the events of a twelve-year period of his life. In order to write this book, I have spent most of the last four years in intensive research to reinforce my own recollections. The officers of a CIA station abroad work as a team, often in quite different activities and with a considerable number of indigenous agents and collaborators. I have tried to describe the overall team effort, not just my own role, because all the station's efforts relate td the same goals. The variety of operations that are undertaken simultaneously by a single officer and by the station team made an ordinary narrative presentation cumbersome. I have chosen a diary format (written, to be sure, in 1973 and 1974) in order to show the progressive development of different activities and to convey a sense of actuality. This method also has defects, requiring the reader to follow many different strands from one entry in the diary to another, but I believe it is the most effective method for showing what we did. In order to ease the problem of remembering who all the characters are, I have included a special appendix, Appendix 1, which has descriptions of individuals and organizations involved or connected with the Agency or its operations (see note to Appendix 1). The reader is directed to this appendix by the use of a double dagger, ‡ in the text. It will be noted that many agents' names have been forgotten and that only cryptonyms (code names) can be given. Some of the original cryptonyms have also been forgotten, and in these cases I have composed new ones in order to refer to a real person by some name at least. Appendix 2 gives an alphabetical listing of all abbreviations used and an asterisk indicates those entries which appear in Appendix 1. INSIDE THE COMPANY: CIA DIARY Several of the operational activities that I describe could not be placed at the exact date they really happened, for lack of research materials, but they are placed as close as possible to the date they occurred with no loss or distortion of meaning. Similarly, several events have been shifted a day or two so that they could be included in diary entries just before or just after they actually occurred. In these cases the changes make no difference. When I joined the CIA I believed in the need for its existence. After twelve years with the agency I finally understood how much suffering it was causing, that millions of people all over the world had been killed or had had their lives destroyed by the CIA and the institutions it supports. I couldn't sit by and do nothing and so began work on this book. Even after recent revelations about the CIA it is still difficult for people to understand what a huge and sinister organization the CIA is. It is the biggest and most powerful secret service that has ever existed. I don't know how big the KGB is inside the Soviet Union, but its international operation is small compared with the CIA's. The CIA has 16,500 employees and an annual budget of $750,000,000. That does not include its mercenary armies or its commercial subsidiaries. Add them all together, the agency employs or subsidizes hundreds of thousands of people and spends billions every year. Its official budget is secret; it's concealed in those of other Federal agencies. Nobody tells the Congress what the CIA spends. By Jaw, the CIA is not accountable to Congress. In the past 25 years, the CIA has been involved in plots to overthrow governments in Iran, the Sudan, Syria, Guatemala, Ecuador, Guyana, Zaire and Ghana. In Greece, the CIA participated in bringing in the repressive regime of the colonels. In Chile, The Company spent millions to "destabilize" the Allende government and set up the military junta, which has since massacred tens of thousands of workers, students, liberals and leftists. In Indonesia in 1965, The Company was behind an even bloodier coup, the one that got rid of Sukarno and led to the slaughter of at least 500,000 and possibly 1,000,000 people. In the Dominican Republic the CIA arranged the assassination of the dictator Rafael Trujillo and later participated in the invasion that prevented the return to power of the liberal ex-president Juan Bosch. In Cuba, The Company paid for and directed the invasion that failed at the Bay of Pigs. Some time later the CIA was involved in attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro. It is difficult to believe, or comprehend, that the CIA could be involved in all these subversive activities all over the world. 2 INSIDE THE COMPANY: CIA DIARY The life of a CIA operations officer can be exciting, romantic. You belong to a special club: The Company. For most of my career with the CIA I felt that I was doing something worthwhile. There is not much time to think about the results of your actions and, if you try to do it well, the job of operations officer calls for dedication to the point of obsession. But it's a schizophrenic sort of situation. You have too many secrets, you can't relax with outsiders. Sometimes an operative uses several identities at once. If somebody asks you a simple question, "What did you do over the weekend?" your mind goes Click! Who does he think I am? What would the guy he thinks I am be doing over the weekend? You get so used to lying that after a while it's hard to remember what the truth is.