January 31 2008
On January 7 Philip Agee died in Cuba at the age of 72.(1) He was a CIA employee who quit to go on a crusade against CIA operations violating other countries' national sovereignty. Through Agee we learned the facts on how Uncle $am controls other governments in the world.
Agee's activities resulted in the creation of a law against the naming of covert operatives in public--the "Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982." It is the same law that caught up Cheney and Libby with regard to exposing Valerie Plame. Agee named hundreds, maybe 4000 CIA operatives and his exposures of CIA work provided people with an element of truth in politics to digest. The anti-Agee law creates a catch-22 situation in exposing U.$. government wrongdoing.
Much material on MIM's web page derives from Agee. We point to the video "Inside the CIA" where Agee and others from the CIA explain what they did to assassinate politicians and subvert governments. It is by knowing the facts of how imperialism views other governments that one pierces illusions about democracy and liberty and finally becomes an adherent of Lenin's theory of the imperialist state.
Agee was also behind the publication CounterSpy before the Covert Action Information Bulletin.
Although Agee provided much information validating the Leninist theory of the imperialist state, MIM disagreed with the politics of his Covert Action Information Bulletin. In issue 42 in 1992, Agee's publication was neutral about the PCP--"Sendero Luminoso" in Peru. It took the position of supporting neither the government nor the rebels and called the situation "dismal," when in fact Peru was the closest country to having a social revolution in the 1980s and 1990s.
For people well informed on geopolitics, Covert Action Information Bulletin did not cover much new ground. It fell for Soviet-oriented politics of the capitalist-roaders Brezhnev and Gorbachev. What we found useful about Agee's publication was the discussions of CIA methods and tit-for- tats.
At this very moment, an August-September 1980 article from the CIA that CAIB republished is still relevant. The CIA's C.D. Edbrook wrote the "Principles of Deep Cover." The basic point was how to handle people who had business excuses to be abroad. If one could get a job in a Bechtel or migrant smuggling business--whatever--one would appear to have a legitimate reason to be in a country. Then one could provide information to the CIA without doing the "light cover" diplomatic routine. It worked best where people already had a hobby, "an interest in the occupation he ostensibly has chosen as a career."
To this day, despite the publication of CAIB already in 1980, we have people in denial on how the CIA functions. The CIA would love to egg on MIM to have an international operation like the RIM (that stole our name) was, so that CIA could penetrate it. Here is what the CIA said verbatim as published by CAIB about what agents working "perhaps through the full career" might be doing: "For a Western service, penetration into an Orbit installation or the leadership of a Communist party are types of missions for which deep cover of indefinite durability may be required." Just how stupid or bought off does one have to be then to at exactly that time set up a U.$./England-based Comintern? Again we ask these crypto-Trotskyist morons, when Stalin and Mao both favored abolishing the Comintern, what was the real reason you brought it back? Why do you continue to resist the truth printed in black-and- white? What did you have going for you that Stalin and Mao did not with their state power? Why did you take this up in the ebb of the Reagan years, just when the intelligence community had suddenly outnumbered the remaining radicals from the 1960s?
Issues 12 and 13 talked about mail surveillance and how it is done. All these things Agee and company were talking about are done on a more modern and larger scale today.
Agee had a "'privileged upbringing in a big white house bordering an exclusive golf club,' as he later described in his 1987 memoir 'On the Run.' An altar boy, he attended a Jesuit high school and graduated from Notre Dame in 1956, joining the CIA the next year after briefly attending law school."(1) So much for identity politics. Agee left his identity behind.
The KGB said it originally considered Agee a plant. The routine is called a "dangle," where one pretends opposition to the imperialist state in order to ensnare people attracted to it. In the end, it seems that the KGB concluded that Agee was for real.
The CIA spied on Agee and kept him on the run and he ended up in Cuba. Among other things, Agee had a typewriter wired up to monitor him.(2) Today, the intelligence agencies can take over one's computer from afar. Internet is a great tool but also enables new means of surveillance. So tricks just become more modern with more budget and employees spent on them.
Note:
1. http://www.ajc.com/news/content/news/stories/2008/01/10/OBIT_AGEE.html
2. http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/09/the-motivations-of-philip-agee/?hp
http://www.covertactionquarterly.org/ has a little relevant material.