Philip Agee was for 12 years an officer of the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States. When he broke with the Agency in 1969 his rank was that of a colonel. His credentials are impeccable and that is what makes his book, Inside the Company: CIA Diary (Penguin Books) the most detailed and impressive account of a clandestine and worldwide coun ter-revolutionary agency at work.
In contrast to another ex-CIA man, Marchetti, who remains a liberal, Agee has broken from what he calls Wilsonianism' -a reference to the liberal American President Woodrow Wilson's supposedly non-imperialist enlightened view of the world. Agee speaks today as a man who has been won over to socialism.
He decided to publish and expose the agency to the whole world. A simple defection to the KGB or Peking or Havana would not have had the same impact. Agee is a defector to the world revolutionary socialist movement, and his expose has already caused the withdrawal of CIA officers in Mexico.
It would, however, be naive to imagine that the CIA is an exception compared to other imperialist intelligence agencies. It is certainly more powerful and resourceful than any other, but its methods are today universally applied. And it is in that light that readers should study this interview. The 'black propaganda operations, penetration, and political disruption which Agee describes are only too well-known in Ireland, and increasingly in Britain, where the perpetrators are British intelligence organisations. This interview with Philip Agee is therefore intended as a service to the revolutionary movement as a whole.
Tariq Ali
Left to right: former CIA directors Allen Dulles, William Colby, and James Schlesinger; and John Downey, CIA spy captured in China.
Could you tell us exactly what you did in the CIA?
I was recruited originally in 1956, and my career ran until early 1969.
1 was in training until 1960, then I went to Ecuador where I served under cover of being a diplomat until the end of 1963. From carly 1964 to late 1966 1 was in Uruguay, and from 1967 till early 1969 I was with the CIA in Mexico City.
During that period 1 handled, directed and initiated most of the different types of operations that the CIA undertakes in the third world.
including both "collection operations"
[information gathering] and 'action operations which involve propaganda, trade union work, youth and students etc. This meant I was responsible for directing the work of dozens of agents in each country where 1 was stationed.
Why did you decide to leave the Agency in 1969?
When 1 first went into the CIA, I really believed what I'd been taught, from a very young age onwards: that there is a 'third way' between the traditional imperialism of the 19th century and earlier. and revolutionary socialism. This is Wilsonian foreign policy (ie, the liberal" foreign policy pioneered by US President Woodrow Wilson at the end of World War 1l. the search for a third way in which Iberal capitalist nations would seck their self-interests and serve the greatest good of the greatest number.
Little by little as I worked for CIA, I began to question whether we were really promoting the reforms which we preached about. I began to find that the more successful our operations were the further away the reforms got. As a result I began to question the possibillty of this so-called third way' and finally came to the conclusion that there really wasn't one and that what we were promoting around the world was simply a new version of the classic imperialism of the 19th century. When did these doubts begin?
A series of factors coincided in mid-1965. The invasion of Santo Domingo was one. There a reformist President - whom the CIA had helped to promote in the early 1960g- was not allowed to come back and play his rightful role in leading his country. I concluded from this that it must have been cconomic powers in the United States, principally the sugar interests, who wanted to keep him out, as he had developed a programune of agrarian reforms which would have affected their interests adversely.
Also there was this incident of torture, which had more of an emotional effect on me than anything eise. That happened several months after the Santo Domingo intervention. What happened was that we were in a 'state of'siege' in Uriguay and the head of station [top CIA official in a particular country wanted to help the police look a little better because they hadn't been able to arrest any of the labour leaders, They had been searching for these trade union leaders and couldn't find them. Two of ou the Communist Party of Uruguay and we had, of course, the names of the leaders of these squads, The chief Fled Weekly 1 January 1975 Page 6 of station asked me to give to the police the name of the leader of one of these squads - Oscar Bonaudi, 1 gave the name for preventive detention, not thinking that anything else would happen.
About four days later, on a Sunday morning, the chief of station (at that time John Horton) and I were sitting in the office of the chief of police, an army general named Venturo Rodrigues, Also at this meeting was a colonel named Roberto Raminez. He was the chief of the Metropolitan Guard, an anti-riot shock force. to power with the help of the CIA We in the CIA had just written a false document in the station that weekend "provine" that cortain named officers of the Soviet embassy were directing the trade unions in their struggles in this period of the state of siego. This document was to allow the government to justify the expulston of those falsely accused Soviet embassy officials. We were showing them the document on the Sunday morning betore giving it to the military intelligence people who were going to give it to the President.
While they were reading the false report 1 began to hear a moaning sound, which sounded like a street vendor outside trying to sell something. Gradually it became louder and louder, and pretty soon I realised that someone was being tortured, (l found out later that the torture room was just above the chief of police's office, on the next floor up.) The screams of this tortured man became louder and louder. The chief of police heard it too, of course, and he kept telling Ramirez to tum up the radio. (Ramirez had a tony transistor radio and he was listening to the Sunday morning soccer game, while we were having this meeling.) Eventually Rodrigies said the report was good and would do the job and Horton and I left to get the report over to the President.
I haven't forgotten those screams to this very day. It was a case which was never publicised, but Bonaudi would remember it -if he is still alive.
The torture case, the Santa Domagents were in the seif-defence squads ingo invasion and the growing realis ation that we were really reinforcing all the corruption and injustices in Uruguay brought me to reconsider more and more this activity that 1 was engaged in, What would you say is the political where it operates?
ectives are virtually identical —the retention of these countries within the capitalist camp, In other words, to ensure that the goods that these particular countries produce are available to the US for the cheapest concerned provide a market for the (Tanks roll through Atbens in 1909 in a show of strength by the Greuk junta, which came ain its goods, Essentially it comes down to that. The way the CIA fits into the picture is that it works to the system to continue, and to beat down the people who stand for change on the left. That is what the CIA is doing in most of the third What sort of activities would you be engaged in as a CIA officer?
I was engaged in operations of running spies into the left wing parties in Latin American countries, taking over old cases and developing now cases. For example, recruitment of members of Communist Parties capabilities and intentions of these orgunisations.
Also worked very closely with local police intellipence services, in Ecuador and in Uruguay, in order to extend the capability of the CIA station beyond what its limited manpower would allow. We used the forcign intelligence service, cither military or police, as if it were our own to tap telephones, monitor the conings and goings of certain travellers. check hotels and maritime hostels, oblain files and photographs from the government in order to develop surveillance teams. The most important thing was that these local seryices would engage in repressive actions when we requested it.
anion operations in which we tried to establish and buikf up the so-called 'free" trade union movement. This was done through the ICFID (International Confederation of Free Trade Unions) and the ClA-controlled trade objective of the CIA in the countries The political and economic objpossible price and that the countries export of American capital and obtenemics.
organisations? prop up local governments that allow the left in the country. these different squads. in order to obtain intelligence on the of the Church In addition, I worked in the trade union organisations in the third world, ORIT [the Inter-American Regional Labor Organisation - a wing of ICFTU] anda and political action efforts, and the ITS's [International Trade Secretariats -international organisations of trade unions within particular ind ustries; most are connected with ICF. TU and used by the CIAl.
What the ClA does specifically in the trade union field, is to promote, along with the rest of the US government progranume in this field, trade unions in the third world which fall into the Gompers-style economuc trade unionism. They try and keep the trade union movement co-opted so that they exclude political cons iderations from their programme and are quite happy to gain inch-by-inch rather than calling into question the whole capitalist system, which is certainly within their power.
I also engaged in quite a number of propaganda operations. We falsified lots of documents and attributed them to revolutionary organisations in order to bring discredit upon thes organisations and the revolutionary the Cubans, the Soviets, and all our As well as penetrating left-wing org anisations, does the Agency also seek to stimulate und create right-wing AL one stage in Ecuador we were trying to force the President -Arosemena — to take certain policy decastons in relation to the repression of the left, and to break relations with Cuba. What we did was to create a mass hysteria relating to the imminent communist takeover of the coun try. We acted together with a section of the Catholic Church and through the right-wing political parties to en courage mass demonstrations acainst any relations with Cuba and against At one point in our caroprim, u bonh was thrown by the Social Christian bob squad into the Cardinal's house as a provocation. We were promoting the right-wing Social Christian movement in all their activilies, In fact we eventually brought onto the station payroll the retired arony captain who was the leader of We formed what was called the National Defence Front, which grouped in it lots of individuals and the most important political organisations of the Centre and the Right, They were powerful enough to get tens and even bundreds of thousands onto the streets, with the assistance The simple bombing of the Cardinal's bouse - with him, by prior arrangement, conveniently in the Basalica down town so that he wouldn't be hurt- resulted, a week later, in the largest mass demonstiation in the history of Quite to protest this 'outrage. The Cardinal, 90 years old, gets up on the platforni at this demonstration and gives the principal address in which he says that following the teachings of Christ he is going to forgive the terrorists who tried to kill him. Ail this despite the fact that the bombers bad been caught on the night by the police and had admitted that they were social Christians! It didn't matter. Ehe tact that the bysteria had alrepdy been generated meant that even though the bombing had been found out it still worked, Finally through a military ultimatum, which wus the culmination of our propag Arosemena was forced to break with Cuba.
Months later, when we felt that his government had been penetrated by leftists and communists, we started up the whole operation all over again. That led to his overtlinow The important lesson to leurn is that the recent revelations of the CIA's efforts to "destabilise" the Allende government in Chile was no isolated case. These activities are taking place day in and day out, all over the world, and sometimes over a period of many years, In Indonesia it took the CIA ten years to bring about the overthrow of Sukarno in 1965. Destabilisation operations against him were begun at the time of the Bandung Conference in 1955. It was the same in Ghana to overthrow Nkrumah, and the same in Brazil although it was a shorter perlod of time (1961-64). But don't imagine that any of these opcrations are isolated. They are happening cvery single day.
The CIA has workod hand-in-glove of Ongania in Argentina (below or
change on the left' -in this case, the Tupamaros. Why do you think it is that the CIA seems able to overthrow people like Sukarno, Nkrumah, Arosemena, even Allende, but is not able to overthrow Mao Tse-tung, Fidel Castro and leaders of revolutionary movements?
Well, certainly they tried, Not only Fidel Castro, but the Soviet Union itself. Even up until the early 1960s CIA were sending saboteurs into the Soviet Union with folding bicycles, or dropping different devices by parachute. This was called the "Ked Socks Programme'. Whenever an emigre with suicidal tendencies could be found he would be sent in, but they failed miserably tin American military dictatorships like that rent regime in Brazil (bottom). ConTo To near down.
because they were all picked up and shot.
In the case of Cuba the CIA didn't spare any efforts to try and overthrow the Cuban revolution in its early years. But the difference between Cuba and China which have had socialist revolutions and these others is that they have the people on their side and you can't defeat them.
The reason that Sukarno was overthrown, the reason that Allende was overthrown, is related to the fact that the class struggle wasn't countries. It was delayed, delayed and delayed and eventually there was a lurch to the right instead of the left. In addition the army and the police which exist to defend capitalism still existed and were used by the CIA as a base of operation. The security and military forces are primary targets for a large proportion of CIA propaganda, which uses fear by frightening the security and military forces that in The event of a socialist revolution they would all be shot, which is, of course, not true. In the Cuban and Chinese revolutions a not unimportant section of these forces came over to the side of the revolWhat is the relationship betweeu the intelligence gathering operations of the CIA and the clandestine countcr-revolutionary operations which it carries out?
There is not much point in collecting intelligence unless you are going to use it. Information is no good in a vacuum. It cries out to be used. It can't be left alone. That's way the collection operations of the CIA, which are called forcign intellgence operations", can't be separated trom its covert action operations, which is the use of that information.
It is for this reason that 1 believe that any attempts to reform the CIA are doomed to fsilure. There's no possible way in which information is going to be collected and not used. Oue of the central and most unportant type of operations of the CIA are liaison operations, which are those operations undertaken through or with Local intelligence services. The CIA trains these services, equips them and then guides them, ie. gives them the information requirements that the CIA needs to complete CIA programmes, These operations tend to strenerhen the local service and thereby to prop up the minority capiralist regimes and repress the left. They are in themselves action oporations: collection and action are inseparable.
You were responsible for overthowing the Velasco government in Ec undor and "destabilising" its successor, How much money do you think it cost the Agency to carry out these operations?
Not very much actually. Our involved propaganda, was running Velasco government.
President on our payroll, He was being paid $ 700 a month before we increased his salary to $ 1,000 a month a man is being paid. It's what he actually does that's importam, In many cases very high government officinis will be exceedingly effectwe without receiving a salary from exploitation, So they don't have to be paid.
When the Agency recruits someone what is the main factor there?
portionately higher, In many cases -countries the agent towards the leadership of the party. For instance, he might feel that his talents have not been properly utilised and that he should have been promoted. He builds up this resentment over a number of years and at some stage might offer ris services voluntarily. But by that teally entered into in earnest in those time he has gone through a hardening process against the revolutionary movement. ample, one agent I worked with did not want to break ideologically with socialism, but he was in such tum. All we paid him was the equevalent of something like 75 dollars a month, which kept him alive but not in an ostentatious fashion What often happens with CIA agents is that a holding account is opened within the Agency, and within that account. The agent will get a certain percentage of his salary to spend and all the rest will go time in the future will be used, This obviously serves as a control fuctor because the agent realises that if he doesn't have a proper attitude the final settlement then he's signing quit that.
On reading your book we can see that there are good grounds for believing that any serious left-wing organisation is vulnerable to penetration. Do you think revolutionary organisations can develop a method to safeguard themselves and identIfy these people?
ated, that shouldn't be allowed to create any type of hysteria. After all, the job is to get the word out to more and more people and attract more people to the side of the revoTution and that can even be done by an agent from the other side if there is proper party discipline. That is why any organisation must try and maintain as consistent and disciplined a record of activity on the part of its mustants as possible.
If anyone is unusually curious about certain aspects of party work then he could be a potential agent. But that is why consistent propag anda and agitational activity by every militant is the best way of minimising the effects of penetration. In other words, turn the work of the traitor against capitalism. principal political operation, which at 550,000 a year and through this operation we promoted lots of demonstrations and propaganda against relations with Cuba and against the At one stage we had the Viceho became Vice-President, and after But it doesn't matter how much of the CIA, the US government and from the Communist Party or other left groups or from the trade unions, In the countries which are the puorest the mercenary factor is prothere is a resentment on the part of There are other cases, For exwho was a fairly high level member of the Communist Party of Ecuador, La bit too much?
dire financial straits that he couldn't get along without the salary we paid money will be set aside cach month into this account which fills up over the years, and at some undetermined with the CIA claims on all Even if organisations are penetrhoot in torture at a CIA-ai Did you ever experience occusions when you thought that an agent was perhaps helping the movement Well, there's sometimes a time when a decision has to be taken about how far an agent should go in developing his own position within the party. For example, it's very important for ClA stations to penetrate the militant action wings of left-wing orgunisations, so that they can know in advance of any violence that might be planned, If a CIA agent has been able to penotrate one of these organisations, then the decision has to be made as to how far he goes. Whether he should, for example, be allowed to parlicipate in violence which might coat a life, such as the execution of a hated police torturer. The local situation would determine whether he should be allowed to go that far or not. In a serious insurgency situation as in Vietnam, or even in Argentina today, he might be allowed to go through TO CLOTHURCHO NEE SOONEr with it despite the costs.
To turn to some wider aspects of the problems we've been disessing would you agree that there is some connection between the activities of the CLA and the faets which were thrown up by the Watergate affair?
I don't think there can be any doubt that Watergate represents the application within the United States of the methods that the CIA has been using abroad for the last 2530 years. The penetration operations, ie. the bugging, the political disruption, the black propaganda operations (eg. attributing to somcone a false document), were all applied in the United States.
Most of the Watergate operations were right out of the ClA textbook. And now we're beginning to see that the FBI had this COINTEL Prograname which was their way of penetrating and disrupting everything to the left of the liberal Republicans
ind Democrats from 1956 onwards. The recent official reports released by the Justice Department show that in that period the FBI engaged in no fewer than 2,300 different operations against the left. This is an average of one new one every other day -not counting Sundayfor the last fifteen years.
These were not one-shot operatsons that just occurred and then ended. They had a tremendous camulative effect over the years. They might begin one year and not end till ten years later. They wete still in operation in 1971 when in a leftist raid on the Medina, Pennsylvania FBI office, the rocords were stolen and the existence of the programme revraled.
So we not only had military surveillance throughout the Sixties, but also the FBI, the Watergate op crations and Nixon's own illegal intelligence plans.
Then there are the unhappy "plumbers group, most of whose operations we don't even know of yet. The break-in at the Watergate was only one of many. It is, of course, not a coincidence that most of the Watergate plumbers were trained by the ClA. It just goes to show that these CIA techsiques and methods, which no-one thought would ever be applied at home because they thought that morality changed once we crossed out own national frontiers, were finally brought home and applied in the United States. This is very significant, quite apart from the fact that it led to the enforced mugsation of Nixon. declining standard of living, because in the Fifties Uruguay had attained a standard of living which was on a par with some West European coun tries. The militancy of the trade unions increased accordingly, because they weren't going to stand by and WELL LEET BE CARENTUS BELLmET ate while a small handful of ownors were able to live like they always had, in a very privileged way with beautiful homes, big cars and shopping trips to Europe all the time. So the trade unions had to fight simply in order to keep up with inflation, but of course this wasn't enough to prevent a military takeOne got the impression that when there was a big general strike in Uruguay, at one time bringing the whole economy to a halt and really confronting the government with the power of the workers, it seemed as though the Agency didn't have too many things it could really do, despite all its penetration.
Yes. The march of events in Uruguay shows us just what the Agency could and couldn't do. It couldn't break the trade unions. The only alternative eventually was a fascist-type dictatorship. That's what they have right now the most terrible, unspeakable repression that anyone could ever imagine. So all the penetration of the CiA in the left-wing organisutions, the trade unions and the studution has on the oppressed in the Once relations are established there are going to he thousands and thousands of people going to Cuba, and coming back having seen what the revolution has done for the Cuban people. Many of them will see what a socialist revolution can do for the United States, You've been to Cuba a number of times since you left the CIA. What was your impression of Cuba compared with those other Latin Amer ican countries where you'd been Id also been there before the revolution, so I knew something about Cuba under Batista and I was able to make a comparison. My impressions of revolutionary Cuba were very favourable because I saw many of the problems which existed in other Latin American countries beginning to be resolved there, They hadn't solved all the problems by any means, and they were the first to admit that and to discuss their failings. But they were grappling with the very basic things: the elimination of illiteracy, the extension of a free medical service to the entire population, the establishment of day care centres for children, the eradioation of prostitution, the tremeninvolved, They realise the tremendous influence that the Cuban revolUnited States, such as the blacks and the Chicanos and the Puerto Ricans.
sands of deaths] the impact of these operations In their own countries Another purpose is to encourage former and current officers in the CIA who may he working in the kind of job that 1 had to do the very sante thing that I did. They could make publie the documents they have access to and write their own diaries because there are many more CIA books to be written. There's one to be written on Brazil, on Chile, on Iran, on Indonesia, on the Phoenix programme in Vietnam [a CIAinitiated programme involving the systematic murder of all suspected supporters of the National Liberation Front; resulted in tens of thou-I want to encourane all former and current employees of the Agency to tell the world the truth. I's not difficult. For instance when I was working on this book 1 was going through back files of newspapers of the countries where l'd been workine and it was like looking through CIA files themselves, Because practically everything the CIA does has a visible effect. The trouble is that most people don't realise that the hand of the CIA Is behind many incidents.
Last summer Agency sources put out a story alleging that you'd defected to the KGB. There have been also a number of attempts to stop you publishing the book What really worries them do you think?
What's worried them the most is the fact that I've exposed a whole series of their operations and agents in my book. In a way it's much more worrying that I've done this than if I had become another defector to the KGB. It's been much more important making this information available to the people of the third world and to the revolutionary moverent.
There's no doubt that the scene in the United States is very mixed right now with regard to the CIA. They are very nuch on the defen sive. Colby, its boss, is travelling around the country right now mak ing public appearances and trying to convince the American people how much they need the CIA.
This is Colby, a man who has the blood of tens of thousands of Vietnamese on his hands through a Phoenix programme that he ran in Vietnam. So any public exposure and attack is extremely worrying to the Agency. However we should not get the impression that the
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the CIA, They understand that the interests of the class they belong to are identical with the interests US companies. They live from that