Philip Agee, former agent who exposed CIA crimes, dies in Cuba

[Joanne98]

Philip Agee, the former CIA operative who broke with the agency and devoted his life to exposing its role in political subversion, assassination, torture and support for military dictatorships, died January 7 in Cuba. Cuban sources said that he died of peritonitis after ulcer surgery. He was 72.

Agee joined the CIA in 1957, at the age of 22, soon after graduating from the University of Notre Dame. He worked for the agency for 12 years, with three tours of duty in Latin America, in Ecuador, Uruguay and Mexico. He resigned in 1969, after witnessing the US-backed bloodbath against student protesters on the eve of the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City.

After a six-year effort to write an exposé, find a publisher and evade CIA efforts to suppress his revelations, Agee saw his book Inside the Company: CIA Diary published by Penguin Books in London. It gave a meticulous account of CIA activities in the three Latin American countries, including the recruitment of officials in each country as CIA informants, the sponsoring of right-wing media and political parties, and close collaboration with local repressive forces, both police and military, in the arrest, torture and murder of leftist students, workers and political activists.

The book was filled with details of CIA tradecraft, including the codenames and descriptions of numerous operations, and concluding with a list of nearly 250 CIA operatives, local agents and informants, whom Agee identified under their real names as well as their pseudonyms.

Inside the Company was a political bombshell, coming amid widespread revelations of CIA assassination plots, involvement in military coups such as the 1973 bloodbath in Chile, and illegal surveillance against the American people, particularly those opposed to the Vietnam War. The book became a bestseller despite efforts by the US government to block its publication and distribution, and it sparked additional efforts by left-wing political activists to expose CIA operations
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2008/jan2008/agee-j14.shtml