Terrorism and Civil Society as
Instruments of U.S. Policy in Cuba
Philip Agee
Condemnation of Cuba was immediate, strong and practically global last month for the imprisonment of 75 political dissidents and for the summary execution of 3 ferry hijackers. Prominent among the critics were past friends of Cuba of recognized international stature.
As I read the hundreds of denunciations that came through my mail, it was easy to see how enemies of the revolution seized on those issues to condemn Cuba for violations of human rights. They had a field day. Deliberate or careless confusion between the political dissidents and the hijackers, two entirely unrelated matters, was also easy because the events happened at the same time. A Vatican publication went so far as to describe the hijackers as dissidents when in fact they were terrorists. But others of usual good faith toward Cuba also jumped on the bandwagon of condemnation treating the two issues as one. The remarks that follow address the human rights issues in both cases.
Both the terrorism and the “civil society” activism must be seen in context of the continuing U.S. effort to overthrow the Cuban govern- ment and destroy the work of the revolution. Programs to achieve this goal have included propaganda to denigrate the revolution, diplomatic and commercial isolation, trade embargo, terrorism and military sup- port to counter-revolutionaries, the Bay of Pigs invasion, assassination plots against Fidel Castro and other leaders, biological and chemical warfare, and, more recently, efforts to foment an internal political op- position masquerading as an independent civil society.
Terrorism
Warren Hinckle and William Turner, in The Fish Is Red, easily the best book on the CIA’s war against Cuba during the first 20 years of the revolution, tell the story of the CIA’s efforts to save the life of one of their Batista Cubans. It was March 1959, less than three months after the revolutionary movement triumphed. The Deputy Chief of the CIA’s main Batista secret police force had been captured, tried and condemned to a firing squad. The Agency had set up the unit in 1956 and called it the Bureau for the Repression of Communist Activities or BRAC for its initials in Spanish. With CIA training, equipment and money it became arguably the worst of Batista’s torture and murder organizations, spreading its terror across the whole of the political opposition, not just the communists.
The Deputy Chief of BRAC, one José Casta?o Quevedo, had been trained in the United States and was the BRAC liaison man with the CIA Station in the U.S. Embassy. On learning of his sentence, the Agency Chief of Station sent a journalist collaborator named Andrew St. George to Che Guevara, then in charge of the revolutionary tribunals, to plead for Casta?o’s life. After hearing out St. George for much of a day, Che told him to tell the CIA chief that Casta?o was going to die, if not because he was an executioner of Batista, then because he was an agent of the CIA. St. George headed from Che’s headquarters in the Caba?a fortress to the seaside U.S. Embassy on the Malecon to deliver the message. On hearing Che’s words the CIA Chief responded solemnly, “This is a declaration of war.” Indeed, the CIA lost many more of its Cuban agents during those early days and in the unconventional war years that followed.
Today when I drive out 31st Avenue on the way to the airport, just before turning left at the Marianao military hospital, I pass on the left a large, multi-storey white police station that occupies an entire city block. The style looks like 1920s fake castle, resulting in a kind of giant White Castle hamburger joint. High walls surround the building on the side streets, and on top of the walls at the cor- ners are guard posts, now unoccupied, like those overlooking workout yards in prisons. Next door, separated from the castle by 110th Street, is a fairly large two-story green house with barred windows and other security protection. I don’t know its use today, but it used to be the dreaded BRAC Headquarters, one of the CIA’s more infamous legacies in Cuba.
The same month as the BRAC Deputy was executed, President Eisenhower, on March 10, 1959, presided over a meeting of his National Security Council at which they discussed how to replace the government in Cuba. It was the beginning of a continuous policy of regime change that every administration since Eisenhower has continued.
As I read of the arrests of the 75 dissidents, 44 years to the month after the BRAC Deputy’s execution, and saw the U.S. government’s outrage over their trials and sentences, one phrase from Washington came to mind that united American reactions in 1959 with events in 2003: “Hey! Those are our guys the bastards are screwing!” A year later I was in training at a secret CIA base in Virginia when, in March 1960, Eisenhower signed off on the project that would become the Bay of Pigs invasion. We were learning the tricks of the spy trade including telephone tapping, bugging, weapons handling, martial arts, explosives, and sabotage. That same month the CIA, in its efforts to deny arms to Cuba prior to the coming exile invasion, blew up a French freighter, Le Coubre, as it was unloading a shipment of weapons from Belgium at a Havana wharf. More than 100 died in the blast and in fighting the fire afterwards. I see the rudder and other scrap from Le Coubre, now a monument to those who died, every time I drive along the port avenue passing Havana’s main railway station.
In April the following year, two days before the Bay of Pigs invasion started, a CIA sabotage operation burned down El Encanto, Havana’s largest department store where I had shopped on my first visit here in 1957. It was never rebuilt. Now each time I drive up Galiano in Centro Habana on my way for a meal in Chinatown, I pass Fe del Valle Park, the block where El Encanto stood, named for a woman killed in the blaze.
Some who signed statements condemning Cuba for the dissi- dents’ trials and the executions of the hijackers know perfectly well the history of U.S. aggression against Cuba since 1959: the murder, terrorism, sabotage and destruction that has cost nearly 3500 lives and left more than 2000 disabled. Those who don’t know can find it in Jane Franklin’s classic historical chronology The Cuban Revolution and the United States.
One of the best sum-ups of the U.S. terrorist war against Cuba in the 1960s came from Richard Helms, the former CIA Director, when testifying in 1975 before the Senate Committee investigating the CIA’s attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro. In admitting to “invasions of Cuba which we were constantly running under government aegis,” he added:
We had task forces that that were striking at Cuba constantly. We were attempting to blow up power plants. We were attempting to ruin sugar mills. We were attempting to do all kinds of things in this period. This was a matter of American government policy.
During the same hearing Senator Christopher Dodd commented to Helms:
It is likely that at the very moment that President Kennedy was shot, a CIA officer was meeting with a Cuban agent in Paris and giving him an assassination device to use against Castro. [Note: the officer worked for Desmond Fitzgerald, a friend of Robert Kennedy and at the time overall chief of the CIA’s operations against Cuba, and the agent was Rolando Cubela, a Cuban army Comandante codenamed AMLASH who had regular access to Fidel Castro.]
Helms responded:
I believe it was a hypodermic syringe they had given him. It was something called Blackleaf Number 40 and this was in response to AMLASH’s request that he be provided with some sort of a device providing he could kill Castro….I’m sorry that he didn’t give him a pistol. It would have made the whole thing a whole lot simpler and less exotic.
Review the history and you will find that no U.S. administration since Eisenhower has renounced the use of state terrorism against Cuba, and terrorism against Cuba has never stopped. True, Kennedy undertook to Khrushchev that the U.S. would not invade Cuba, which ended the 1962 missile crisis, and his commitment was ratified by succeeding administrations. But the Soviet Union disap- peared in 1991 and the commitment with it. Cuban exile terrorist groups, mostly based in Miami and owing their skills to the CIA, have continued attacks through the years. Whether they have been operating on their own or under CIA direction, U.S. authorities have tolerated them.
As recently as April 2003 the Sun-Sentinel of Ft. Lauderdale reported, with accompanying photographs, exile guerrilla training outside Miami by the F-4 Commandos, one of several terrorist groups currently based there, along with remarks by the FBI spokeswoman that Cuban exile activities in Miami are not an FBI priority. Abundant details on exile terrorist activities can be found with a web search including their connections with the paramilitary arm of the Cuban American National Foundation (CANF).
Reports abound of the arrest in Panama in November 2000 of a group of four exile terrorists led by Luis Posada Carriles, a man with impeccable CIA credentials. They were planning to assassinate Fidel Castro, who was there for a conference. Posada’s résumé includes planning the Cubana airliner bombing in 1976 that killed all 73 people aboard; employment by the CIA in El Salvador in 1980s re-supply operations for the contra terrorists in Nicaragua; and organizing in 1997 ten bombings of hotels and other tourist sites in Havana, one of which killed an Italian tourist. A year later he admitted to the New York Times that CANF directors in Miami had financed the hotel bombings. Through the years Posada freely traveled in and out of the United States.
Another of the CIA’s untouchable terrorists is Orlando Bosch, a pediatrician turned terrorist. As mastermind along with Carriles of the 1976 Cubana airliner bombing, Bosch was arrested with Carriles a week after the bombing and spent 11 years in a Venezuelan jail undergoing three trials for the crime. He was acquitted in each trial, released in August 1987, and arrested on his return to Miami in February 1988 for parole violation after a previous conviction for terrorist acts. In 1989 the Justice Department ordered his deportation as a terrorist citing FBI and CIA reports that Bosch had carried out 30 acts of sabotage from 1961 to 1968 and was involved in a plot to kill the Cuban Ambassador to Argentina in 1975. After lobbying on Bosch’s behalf by Miami Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a Cuban American with close ties to CANF, and by Jeb Bush (Ros-Lehtinen’s campaign manager prior to his election as governor), the elder President Bush, who was CIA Director at the time of the Cubana airliner bombing, ordered the Justice Department in 1990 to rescind the deportation order. Bosch was released from custody and has freely walked the streets of Miami ever since.
Seeing the obvious, that the U.S. government was not taking action to stop Miami-based terrorism, the Cubans opted in the 1990s to send their own intelligence officers to Florida, under cover as exiles, to provide warnings on coming terrorist actions. There they infiltrated some of the exile groups and were reporting back to Havana, including information on planned illegal over-flights of Cuba by Brothers to the Rescue.
Still, the Cuban government hoped that the U.S. could be con- vinced to take action against Miami-based terrorists. So in 1998 Cuba delivered to the FBI voluminous information they had collected on U.S.-based terrorist activities against Cuba. But instead of taking action against the terrorists, the FBI then arrested 10 members of a Cuban intelligence network whose job was to infiltrate the terrorist organizations. Later the 5 Cuban intelligence officers running the network were tried in Miami, where conviction was guaranteed, for conspiracy to commit espionage and for not having registered as agents of a foreign power. They had never asked for nor received a classified government document or classified information of any kind, yet they were given draconian sentences, one of them two life terms. The inhuman treatment of these unbending prisoners ordered by Washington, designed to destroy them mentally and physically and turn them against Cuba, sets world records for sordid, deranged punishment. Demand for their freedom is the main political topic in Cuba today.
Most recently, in declaring an unending war against terrorism following the September 2001 attacks by Al Qaeda and prior to the war against Iraq, President Bush declared that no weapons in U.S. possession are banned from use, presumably including terrorism. But rather than starting his anti-terrorist war in Miami, where his theft of the White House was assured and his election to a second term may depend, he started the series of pre-emptive wars we have watched on television, first Afghanistan and then Iraq, and now threatening Syria, Iran and others on his list of nations that supposedly promote terrorism. Cuba, of course, is wrongfully on that list, but people here take this seriously as a preliminary pretext for U.S. military action against this country.
Civil Society and the Dissidents
Going back to the Reagan administration of the early1980s, the decision was taken that more than terrorist operations was needed to impose regime change in Cuba. Terrorism hadn’t worked, nor had the Bay of Pigs invasion, nor had Cuba’s diplomatic isolation which gradually ended, nor had the economic embargo. Now Cuba would be included in a new worldwide program to finance and develop non-governmental and voluntary organizations, what was to become known as civil society, within the context of U.S. global neoliberal policies. The CIA and the Agency for International Development (AID) would have key roles in this program as well as a new organization christened in 1983 The National Endowment for Democracy (NED).
Actually the new program was not really new. Since its founding in 1947, the CIA had been deeply involved in secretly funding and manipulating foreign non-governmental voluntary organizations. These vast operations circled the globe and were targeted at political parties, trade unions and businessmen’s associations, youth and student organizations, women’s groups, civic organizations, religious communities, professional, intellectual and cultural societies, and the public information media. The network functioned at local, national, regional and global levels. Media operations, for example, were underway continuously in practically every country, wherein the CIA would pay journalists to publish its materials as if they were the journalists’ own. In the Directorate of Operations at CIA head- quarters, these operations were coordinated with the regional opera- tions divisions by the International Organizations Division (IOD), since many of the operations were regional or continental in scope, and some were even worldwide.
Over the years the CIA exerted phenomenal influence behind the scenes in country after country, using these powerful elements of civil society to penetrate, divide, weaken and destroy corresponding enemy organizations on the left, and indeed to impose regime change by toppling unwanted governments. Such was the case, among many others, in Guyana where in 1964, culminating ten years of efforts, the Cheddi Jagan government was overthrown through strikes, terrorism, violence and arson perpetrated by CIA international trade union agents. About the same time, while I was assigned in Ecuador, our agents in civil society, through mass demonstrations and civil unrest, provoked two military coups in three years against elected, civilian governments. And in Brazil in the early 1960s, the same CIA trade union operations were brought together with other operations in civil society in opposition to the government, and these mass actions over time provoked the 1964 military coup against President Jo?o Goulart, ushering in 20 years of unspeakably brutal political repression.
But on February 26, 1967, the sky crashed on IOD and its global civil society networks. At the time I was on a visit to Headquarters in Langley, Virginia, between assignments in Ecuador and Uruguay. That day the Washington Post published an extensive report re- vealing a grand stable of foundations, some bogus, some real, that the CIA was using to fund its global non-governmental networks. These financial arrangements were known as “funding conduits.” Along with the foundations scores of recipient organizations were identified, including well-known intellectual journals, trade unions, and political think tanks. Soon journalists around the world completed the picture with reports on the names and operations of organizations in their countries affiliated with the network. They were the CIA’s darkest days since the Bay of Pigs fiasco.
President Johnson ordered an investigation and said such CIA operations would end, but in fact they never did. The proof is in the CIA’s successful operations in Chile to provoke the 1973 Pinochet coup against the elected government of Salvador Allende. Here they combined the forces of opposition political parties, trade unions, businessmen’s groups, civic organizations, housewife’s associations and the information media to create chaos and disorder, knowing that sooner or later the Chilean military, faithful to traditional fascist military doctrine in Latin America, would use such unrest to justify usurping governmental power to restore order and to stamp out the left. The operations were almost a carbon copy of the Brazilian destabilization and coup program ten years earlier. We all remember the horror that followed for years afterwards in Chile.
Fast forward to now. Anyone who has watched the civil society opposition to the Hugo Ch?vez government in Venezuela develop can be certain that U.S. government agencies, the CIA included, along with the Agency for International Development (AID) and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), are coordinating the destabilization and were behind the failed coup in April 2002 as well as the failed “civic strike” of last December-January. The International Republican Institute (IRI) of the Republican Party even opened an office in Caracas. See below for more on NED, AID and IRI in civil society operations.
In order to understand how these civil society operations are run, let’s take a look at the bureaucratic side. When I entered the CIA’s training course, the first two words I learned were discipline and control. The U.S. government was not a charitable institution, they said, and all money must be spent for its exact, designated purpose. The CIA operations officer that I would become is responsible for ensuring this discipline through tight control of the money and of the agents down the line who spend it. Orders to the agents on their duties and obligations are to be clear and unambiguous, and the officer must prevent personal embezzlement of money by an agent, beyond the agent’s agreed salary, by requiring receipts for all expenses and for all payments to others. Exceptions to this rule needed special approvals.
In the CIA, activities to penetrate and manipulate civil society are known as Covert Action operations, and they are governed by detailed regulations for their use. They require a request for money in a document known as a Project Outline, if the activity is new, or a Request for Project Renewal, if an on-going activity is to be continued. The document originates either in a field station or in Headquarters, and it describes a current situation; the activities to be undertaken to improve or change the situation vis-à-vis U.S. interests; a time-line for achieving intermediary and final goals; risks and the flap potential (damages if revealed); and a detailed budget with information on all participating organizations and individuals and the amounts of money to go to each. The document also contains a summary of the status of all agent personnel to be involved with references to their operational security clearance procedures and the history of their service to the Agency. All people involved are included, from the ostensible funding agencies like officers of a foundation, down to every intermediate and end recipient of the money.
In addition to these budget specifics, a certain amount of money without designated recipients is included under the rubric D&TO, standing for Developmental and Targets of Opportunity. Money from this fund is used to finance new activities that come up during the project approval period, but of course detailed information and security clearances on all individuals who would receive such funding is always required. A statement is also required on the intelligence information by-product to be collected through the proposed operation. Thus financial support for a political party is expected to produce intelligence information on the internal politics of the host country.
Project Outlines and Renewals go through an approval process by various offices such as the International Organizations Division, and depending on their sensitivity and cost, they may require approval outside the CIA at the Departments of State, Defense, or Labor, or by the National Security Council or the President himself. When finally approved the CIA’s Finance Division allocates the money and the operation begins, or continues if being renewed. The period of approvals and renewals is usually one year.
Both the Agency for International Development and the National Endowment for Democracy without doubt have documentation requirements and approval processes similar to the CIA’s for project funding in the civil societies of other countries. All the people in- volved must receive prior approval through an investigative process, and each person has clearly defined tasks. An inter-agency commis- sion determines which of the three agencies, the CIA, AID or NED, or a combination of them, are to carry out specific tasks in the civil so- cieties of specific countries and how much money each should give. All three have obviously been working to develop an opposition civil society in Cuba.
One should note that the high-sounding National Endowment for Democracy has its origins in the CIA’s covert action operations and was first conceived in the wake of the disastrous revelations noted above that began on February 26, 1967. Two months later in April that year, Dante Fascell, member of the House of Repre- sentatives from Miami and a close friend of the CIA and Miami Cubans, together with other Representatives, introduced legislation that would create an “open” foundation to carry on what had been secret CIA funding of the foreign civil society programs of U.S. orgaizations (e.g., the National Students Association) or of foreign organizations directly (e.g., the Congress for Cultural Freedom based in Paris).
The Fascell idea failed to prosper, however, because of the breakdown of the bipartisan approach to foreign policy that had prevailed since the administration of Harry Truman after World War II. Differences since the late 1960s within and between the two parties over the war in Southeast Asia, then in the 70s over Watergate and the loss of the Vietnam war, and finally over revelations of assassination plots and other operations of the CIA by Senate and House investigating committees, prevented agreement and resulted in several years of isolationism. Only the successes of revolutionary movements in Ethiopia, Angola, Namibia, Zimbabwe, Grenada, Nicaragua and elsewhere brought “cold warrior” Demo- crats and “internationalist” Republicans together to establish in 1979 the American Political Foundation (APF). The foundation’s task was to study the feasibility of establishing through legislation a govern- ment-financed foundation to subsidize foreign operations in civil society through U.S. non-governmental organizations.
Within APF four task forces were set up to conduct the study, one for the Democrats, one for the Republicans, one for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and one for the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO). Together their work became known as the Democracy Program. They consulted a vast array of domestic and foreign organizations, and what they found most interesting were the government-financed foundations of the main West German political parties: the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung of the Social Democrats and the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung of the Christian Democrats. When these foundations were first set up in the 1950’s, their task was to build a new German democratic order, a civil society based on the Western parliamentary model while lending their weight to repression of communist and other left political movements.
From early on the CIA channeled money through these foundations for non-government organizations and groups in Germany. Then in the 1960s the foundations began supporting fraternal political parties and other organizations abroad, and they channeled CIA money for these purposes as well. By the 1980s the two foundations had programs going in some 60 countries and were spending about $150 million per year. And what was most interesting, they operated in near-total secrecy.
One operation of the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung shows how effec- tive they could be. In 1974, when the fifty-year-old fascist regime was overthrown in Portugal (a NATO member), communists and left-wing military officers took charge of the government. At that time the Portuguese social democrats, known as the Socialist Party, could hardly have numbered enough for a poker game, and they all lived in Paris and had no following in Portugal. Thanks to at least $10 million from the Ebert Stiftung plus funds from the CIA, the social democrats came back to Portugal, built a party overnight, saw it mushroom, and within a few years the Socialist Party became the governing party of Portugal. The left was relegated to the sidelines in disarray.
Ronald Reagan was an early and enthusiastic supporter of the Democracy Program, describing his plans in a speech before the British Parliament in June 1982. This new program, he said, would build an “infrastructure of democracy” around the world following the European example of “open” support, furthering “the march of freedom and democracy…” Of course the German programs were anything but “open,” nor would the American programs be “open” once they began. In fact even before Congress established the NED, Reagan set up what was called Project Democracy in the U.S. Information Agency under direction of the State Department. A secret Executive Order at the time, soon leaked to the press, provided for secret CIA participation in the program. An early grant was $170,000 for training media officials in El Salvador and other right-wing authoritarian regimes on how to deal with the U.S. press—the Salvadoran program to be carried out through the Washington public relations firm that had represented the Somoza dictatorship.
In November 1983 Dante Fascell’s dream finally came true. Con- gress created the National Endowment for Democracy and gave it an initial $18.8 million for building civil society abroad during the fiscal year ending September 30, 1984. Fascell became a member of NED’s first Board of Directors. Whereas the CIA had previously funneled money through a complex network of “conduits,” the NED would now become a “mega-conduit” for getting U.S. government money to the same array of non-governmental organizations that the CIA had been funding secretly.
The Cuban American National Foundation was, predictably, one of the first beneficiaries of NED funding. From 1983 to 1988 CANF received $390,000 for anti-Castro activities. During the same period the separate political action committee (PAC) run by CANF directors to fund political campaigns, gave a nearly identical amount for the campaigns of Dante Fascell and other friendly politicians, a clear trade-off based on funds received from NED.
Legally the NED is a private, non-profit foundation, an NGO, and it receives a yearly appropriation from Congress. The money is channeled through four “core foundations” established along the lines of the four original task forces of the Democracy Program. These are the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (Democratic Party); the International Republican Institute (Republican Party); the American Center for International Labor Solidarity (AFL-CIO); and the Center for International Private Enterprise (U.S. Chamber of Commerce). The NED also gives money directly to “groups abroad who are working for human rights, independent media, the rule of law, and a wide range of civil society initiatives.” [Quote from NED website May 2003.]
The NED’s non-governmental status provides the fiction that recipients of NED money are getting “private” rather than U.S. government money. This is important because so many countries, including both the U.S. and Cuba, have laws relating to their citizens’ being paid to carry out activities for foreign governments. The U.S. requires an individual or organization “subject to foreign control,” i.e., who receives money and instructions from a foreign government, to register with the Attorney General and to file detailed activities reports, including finances, every six months. The five Cuban intelligence officers were convicted for failing to register under this law.
Cuba has its own laws criminalizing actions intended to jeopardize its sovereignty or territorial integrity as well as any actions supporting the goals of the U.S. Helms-Burton Act of 1996, i.e., by collecting information to support the embargo or to subvert the government, or for disseminating U.S. government information to undermine the Cuban government.
Reagan’s new programs in civil society started out with a huge success in Poland. During the 1980s the NED and the CIA, in joint operations with the Vatican, kept the Solidarity trade union alive and growing when it was outlawed during the martial law period beginning in 1981. The program was agreed between Reagan and Pope John Paul II when Reagan visited the Vatican in June 1982. They did it with intelligence information, cash, fax machines, computers, printing and document copying equipment, recorders, TVs and VCRs, supplies and equipment of all kinds, even radio and television transmitters. The trade union transformed itself into a political party, and in 1989, with encouragement from Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, Solidarity took control of the government. Years later, in May 2001, Senator Jesse Helms introduced legislation to provide $100 million to duplicate in Cuba, he said, the successes of the CIA, NED and Vatican in Poland.
Such efforts to develop an opposition civil society in Cuba had already begun in 1985 with the early NED grants to CANF. These efforts received a significant boost with passage in 1992 of the Cuban Democracy Act, better known as the Torricelli Act, that promoted support through U.S. NGOs to individuals and organizations for programs to bring “non-violent democratic change in Cuba.” A still greater intensification came with passage in 1996 of the Cuban Liberty and Solidarity Act, better known as the Helms-Burton Act. As a result of these laws the NED, AID and the CIA¾the latter not mentioned publicly but undoubtedly included¾intensified their coordinated programs targeted at Cuban civil society.
One may wonder why the CIA would be needed in these programs. There were several reasons. One reason from the beginning was the CIA’s long experience and huge stable of agents and contacts in the civil societies of countries around the world. By joining with the CIA, NED and AID would come on board an on-going complex of operations whose funding they could take over while leaving the secret day-to-day direction on the ground to CIA officers. In addition someone had to monitor and report the effectiveness of the local recipients’ activities. NED would not have people in the field to do this, nor would their core foundations in normal conditions. And since NED money was ostensibly private, only the CIA had the people and techniques to carry out discreet control in order to avoid compromising the civil society recipients, especially if they were in opposition to their governments. Finally, the CIA had ample funds of its own to pass quietly when conditions required. In Cuba participation by CIA officers under cover in the U.S. Interests Section would be particularly useful, since NED and AID funding would go to U.S. NGOs that would have to find discreet ways, if possible, to get equipment and cash to recipients inside Cuba. The CIA could help with this quite well.
Evidence of the amount of money these agencies have been spending on their Cuba projects is fragmentary. Nothing is publicly available about the CIA’s spending, but what is easily found about the other two is interesting. The AID website cites $12 million spent for Cuba programs during 1996-2001 (average per year $2 million), but for 2002 the budget jumped to $5 million plus unobligated funds of $3 million from 2001 to total $8 million. Their 2003 budget for Cuba is $6 million showing a tripling of funds since the Bush junta seized power. No surprise given the number of Miami Cubans Bush has appointed to high office in his adminis- tration.
The money, according to AID, was spent “to promote a peaceful transition to democracy in Cuba.” From 1996 to 2001 they disbursed the $12 million to 22 NGOs, all apparently based in the U.S., mostly in Miami. By 2002 the number of front line NGOs had shrunk to 12: The University of Miami, Center for a Free Cuba, Pan-American Develop- ment Foundation, Florida International University, Freedom House, Grupo de Apoyo a la Disidencia, Cuba On-Line, CubaNet, National Policy Association, Acci?n Democr?tica Cubana, and Carta de Cuba. In addition, the International Republican Institute of the Republican Party received AID money for a sub-grantee, the Directorio Revo- lucionario Democr?tico Cubano, also based in Miami.
These NGOs have a double purpose, one directed to their counterpart groups in Cuba and one directed to the world, mainly through websites. Whereas on the one hand they channel funds and equipment into Cuba, on the other they disseminate to the world the activities and production of the groups in Cuba. Cubanet in Miami, for example, publishes the writings of the “independent journalists” of the Independent Press Association of Cuba based in Havana and channels money to the writers.
Interestingly, AID claims on its website that its “grantees are not authorized to use grant funds to provide cash assistance to any person or organization in Cuba.” It’s hard to believe that claim, but if it’s true, all those millions are only going to support the U.S.-based NGO infrastructure, a subsidized anti-Castro cottage industry of a sort, except for what can be delivered in Cuba in kind: computers, faxes, copy machines, cell phones, radios, TVs and VCRs, books, magazines and the like. AID lists 7 purposes for the money: solidarity with human rights activists, dissemination of the work of independent journalists, development of independent NGOs, promoting workers’ rights, outreach to the Cuban people, planning for future assistance to a transition government, and evaluation of the program. Anyone who wants to see which NGOs are getting how much of the millions under each of these programs can check out http://www.usaid.gov/regions/lac/cu/upd-cub.htm.
AID’s claim that its NGO grantees can’t provide cash to Cubans in Cuba, makes one wonder about the more than $100,000 in cash that Cuban investigators found in possession of the 75 mostly unemployed dissidents who went on trial. A clue may be found in the AID statement that “U.S. policy encourages U.S. NGOs and individuals to undertake humanitarian, informational and civil society-building activities in Cuba with private funds…” Could such “private funds” be money from the National Endowment for Democracy?
Recall the fiction that the NED is a “private” foundation, an NGO. It has no restrictions on its funds going for cash payments abroad, and it just happens to fund some of the same NGOs as AID. Be assured that this is not the result of rivalry or lack of coordination in Washington. The reason probably is that NED funds can go for salaries and other personal compensation to people on the ground in Cuba. There is, after all, the rung of organizations below the U.S. NGOs in the command and money chain, and these are the individuals and groups in Cuba that correspond in purpose with the U.S. NGOs. They number nearly 100 and have names [translated from Spanish] like Independent Libraries of Cuba, All United, Society of Journalists Marquez Sterling, Independent Press Association of Cuba, Assembly to Promote Civil Society, and the Human Rights Party of Cuba.
Each of the Cubans in these organizations will be fully identified with assigned tasks in the AID, NED or CIA project documentation covering the activity, probably in a classified annex, whether they are categorized as human rights activists, independent journalists, independent librarians, or distributors of information materials. The money, after all, does not go to phantoms or ghosts even on the lowest level. Nor are the U.S. NGOs given discretion to pass out money to whatever malcontents they can find to take it. End users (final recipients) are designated in writing, as are the core foundations and intermediary U.S. NGOs.
NED’s website is conveniently out of date, showing its Cuba program only for 2001. But it is instructive. Its funds for Cuban activities in 2001 totaled only $765,000 if one is to believe what they say. The money they gave to eight NGOs in 2001 averaged about $52,000, while a ninth NGO, the International Republican Institute (IRI) of the Republican Party, received $350,000 for the Directorio Revolucionario Democr?tico Cubano, based in Miami as previously noted, for “strengthening civil society and human rights” in Cuba. In contrast, this NGO is to receive $2,174,462 in 2003 from AID through the same IRI. Why would the NED be granting the lower amounts and AID such huge amounts, both channeled through IRI? The answer, apart from IRI’s skim-off, probably is that the NED money is destined for the pockets of people in Cuba while the AID money supports the U.S. NGO infrastructures. Switching target countries, recall that the IRI, as mentioned above, has an office in Caracas that one can assume has an equally benign mission relating to the Hugo Ch?vez government.
According to Cuban Foreign Minister Felipe Pérez Roque (in an April 7 press conference) and to Cuban security agents working inside the dissident groups that he showed on film, the U.S. money came to recipients in Cuba 1) disguised as wired family remittances, 2) in cash mixed with the many remittances brought by couriers known as “mules,” and 3) by payments to the Transcard debit card system in Canada for credit to cards held by dissidents in Cuba (the cards are good for cash withdrawals from Cuban banks). Although the Foreign Minister said that the Cuban Central Bank has followed carefully the flow of money to the dissidents, he did not reveal the total amount for any given period or specific amounts to recipient groups or individuals.
Whatever the amounts of money reaching Cuba may have been, everyone in Cuba working in the various dissident projects knows of U.S. government sponsorship and funding and of the purpose: regime change. Far from being “independent” journalists, “idealistic” human rights activists, “legitimate” advocates for change, or “Marian librarians from River City,” every one of the 75 arrested and convicted was knowingly a participant in U.S. government operations to overthrow the government and install a different, U.S.-favored, political, economic and social order. They knew what they were doing was illegal, they got caught, and they are paying the price. Anyone who thinks they are prisoners of conscience, persecuted for their ideas or speech, or victims of repression, simply fails to see them properly as instruments of a U.S. government that has declared revolutionary Cuba its enemy. They were not convicted for ideas but for paid actions on behalf of a foreign power that has waged a 44-year war of varying degrees of intensity against this country.
To think that the dissidents were creating an independent, free civil society is absurd, for they were funded and controlled by a hostile foreign power and to that degree, which was total, they were not free or independent in the least. The civil society they wished to create was not just your normal, garden variety civil society of Harley freaks and Boxer breeders, but a political opposition movement fomented openly by the U.S. government. What government in the world would be so self-destructive as to sit by and just watch this happen?*
Foreign Minister Pérez Roque in his press conference gave an example of how several operations worked. He showed a film clip from the trial of Oswaldo Alfonso Valdés, President of the Liberal Democratic Party of Cuba, in which Alfonso described a meeting he had with an AID official and Vickie Huddleston (until mid-2002 the chief of the U.S. Interests Section in Havana), in which they discussed how to improve the way that he was getting “resources” in order to better conceal the U.S. government as the source. In the clip Alfonso also acknowledged receiving money and material resources from the U.S. government via organizations based in Miami.
Under Cuban law, being paid to execute U.S. policy toward Cuba is illegal and in itself sufficient to convict. The largest group within the 75, the 37 “independent journalists,” were writing commentaries on Cuba for publication outside the country, using the internet for communications. One of their organizations in Cuba was the Independent Press Association of which the President, Néstor Baguer, was a Cuban government security agent who testified in court. Members of his group, he said, wrote for the website Cubanet, based in Miami, and were paid via the Transcard debit card system in Canada except for large amounts that were brought by courier. (Cubanet by the way received $35,000 from NED in 2001 and is to receive $833,000 from AID in 2003.) Baguer also testified that on visits to the U.S. Interests Section, he and his colleagues received instructions on topics to cover in their writings such as the shortage of medicines, the treatment of patients in hospitals, and the treatment of inmates in prisons. Generally speaking the “independent journalists” were to place Cuba in a bad light abroad and to justify continuation of the trade embargo.
The Foreign Minister also showed three letters dated in January and March 2001 to Oswaldo Alfonso, the Liberal Party leader, from Carlos Alberto Montaner, an exile journalist who lives in Madrid and is President of the Cuban Liberal Union (member of the Liberal International). Montaner is also a founding member of the Hispanic-Cuban Foundation, a project of Spain’s ruling conservative party, and is closely associated with the exile cultural/political quarterly Encuentro de la Cultura Cubana which is based in Madrid and financed in part by NED ($80,000 in 2001).
Reading from the letters, Pérez Roque revealed that each of the three letters mentioned money enclosed: 200 dollars, 30,000 pesetas and 200 dollars, the latter two apparently from people Montaner and Alfonso know mutually. In the letter with the pesetas, Montaner wrote: “Very soon two high level Spanish friends will call you to talk about Project Varela. I suggested five names for the founding of that new idea: Pay?, Alfonso, Arcos, Ra?l Rivero and Tania Quintero.”
Readers can draw their own conclusions on the possible foreign influence in Project Varela. Oswaldo Pay?, of course, is the dissident honored by the European Union with the Sakharov Human Rights Prize for his leadership of Project Varela.
Prominent in the outrage at Cuba’s action against the dissidents were commentaries of shock over how nice things had been getting in recent years with Fidel’s mellowing and tolerance of the dissident community, and suddenly now THIS! In actual fact May 20, 2002 was the turning point when, in speeches in Washington and Miami, Bush announced his “Initiative for a New Cuba.” Central to this “new” plan, citing Poland as a past success, he announced increased and direct assistance to “help build Cuban civil society,” leading to a “new government” in Cuba. I wonder. Would it be overreach to say Bush was advocating regime change through the dissidents? The Cubans made no secret of their interpretation.
The knell for “our guys” came with the arrival in September 2002 of a new Chief of the U.S. Interests Section in Havana, the equivalent of Ambassador were Cuba and the U.S. to have full diplomatic relations. James Cason is a career State Department diplomat in his late fifties who has served mostly in Latin American countries—not menacing to the eye, just a bit overstuffed in the face, with wide round glasses in front of half-closed eyes. Otto Reich, Cuban-American fanatic and one of the un-indicted criminals of Iran-Contra, who was serving a limited recess appointment (read no chance for Senate confirmation) as Bush’s Assistant Secretary of State for Latin America, gave Cason the job and apparently put an ample load of hot sauce on his appointee’s backside.
Cason swooped down on Havana like a Fed from Gangbusters’ central casting with an “in your face” attitude big time. But give the guy credit. He ran all over this island burning his dissident friends, “our guys,” and sealing their fate as he went along. His blatant support for Washington’s civil society in Cuba looked for all the world like he was bent on getting himself PNG’d, expelled as persona non grata in diplomatic parlance. He made a show of unity with groups in the provinces as well as Havana; gave 24-hour passes to the Interests Section to favorites, including Cuban penetration agents, for free internet access and other facilities; attended meet- ings in dissidents’ homes where he gave the equivalent of press conferences to foreign journalists; personally launched the youth wing of the Liberal Party; entertained dissidents in his official residence, even hosting an independent journalists’ workshop there one Saturday. His conduct went so far beyond accepted diplomatic protocol that you might say he was the mother of all provocations.
But expelling Cason would have led to a new crisis with the U.S., and the Cubans didn’t take the bait. For six months they waited and watched through their highly placed penetrations of Cason’s dissident community. Then they decided to act. They had the evidence of criminal activities in support of Helms-Burton and in violation of other legislation on sedition, so they finally decided to sweep away Cason’s constituency in a stroke. And there he stood in March, appropriately like the Emperor who wore no cool. Indeed, there’s been not a peep from the man since his acolytes were picked up.
One can imagine the bitterness from prison with 75 of “our guys” reflecting on how stupid they were to fall for Cason’s grandstanding. So now Cason and his staff, CIA and AID officers included, have to start all over, pretty much from scratch. But hey, buddy, careful whom you all recruit. You may be salivating tomorrow over another of Fidel’s finest. Never know, do you? Think about that when you file for security clearances on your next generation of dissidents.
Without a doubt the Cubans weighed the price they would have to pay with friends and foes before taking the decision to act. And they knew they had a lot to lose. The movement in the U.S. to end the embargo and travel ban, in Congress and on the street, would peel rubber in reverse with all the media distortions. Cuban entrance into the Cotonou Agreement for preferential trade and aid with the EU would likely go back into the deep freeze, which it did. Moreover, the U.N. Human Rights Commission was then meeting in Geneva, and the U.S. was trying as hard as possible, with threats and bribes, to get a motion approved condemning Cuba for human rights violations. In the end they didn’t get it, but the Cuban government was willing to take this risk as well.
With so much at stake, the timing of the decision triggered intense speculation. In truth the dissident community, including those imprisoned, has never been a threat to the revolution, and Cuba could have gone on indefinitely tolerating, penetrating and monitoring their U.S. government-ordered activities. But the U.S. might have seen that as weakness, and that’s the last thing you want a Grendel to think.
Moreover there was an important internal political dimension to tolerating Cason’s insulting provocations because they were so widely known here. He had gone so far beyond the pale that people in general wondered about the government’s tolerance. This too could be seen as weakness by supporters of the revolution. So they decided to stop him once and for all and to send a message to his remaining protégés, to stretch the protective connotation just a bit in the Cuban context. In 1996 the government had stopped the highly visible Brothers to the Rescue overflights by the shootdowns, largely for internal political reasons, knowing full well the price they would pay internationally. So also in 2003 they decided to firmly use the hook on Cason’s Top Gun stage act regardless of international opinion. As in the shootdowns, internal Cuban politics, not inter- national reactions, more than likely determined the timing.
The Three Executions
The hijacking of the Havana harbor ferry, the Baragu?, couldn’t have come at a worse time. It was the seventh hijacking in 7 months and came on April 2, a day before the trials of the dissidents were to start, making it easy for Cuba’s enemies, and not a few of its friends, to lump the two disparate events into one “wave of repression.”
The ferry was no more than a flat-bottomed self-propelled barge with a cabin, safe only for calm harbor waters, and that night there were 50-odd people on board including children and foreign tourists. The armed hijackers took it to sea in a highly dangerous Force 4 wind, ran it out of fuel, and threatened by radio to start throwing hostages overboard if they were not given enough fuel to reach Florida. The amazing part is how the Cuban coast guard convinced the hijackers to allow a tow of the drifting ferry to the port of Mariel where special forces set up a trap and divers prepared for the rescue. After many hours of standoff, it all ended in less than a minute when a French woman suddenly dove overboard and was followed en masse by the other hostages and the hijackers as well. The hostages were all rescued, and the hijackers quickly arrested.
In the trial the state asked for, and received, the death penalty for the three ringleaders of the hijacking, an action upheld by an appeals court because it was a terrorist act of extreme gravity even though no one was injured. Then the Council of State had to ratify or commute. Should Cuba end their nearly three-year moratorium on executions? Should they stir up condemnation from the world movement against the death penalty? Should they delay their decision and let those guys wait on death row for a while—not 15-20 years like in the States but at least a few weeks so as not to show undue haste? Or should they commute to life and show mercy.
Frankly, being against the death penalty, I thought a combination of the last two would be best: wait and commute. But I didn’t know that at the time the Cuban security forces were investigating another 29 hijacking plots. From the Council of State’s point of view it surely looked like the beginning of a wave of hijackings encouraged as always by the 1966 Cuban Adjustment Act and the wet-foot, dry-foot policy that discriminates against all non-Cuban illegal immigrants.* Particularly galling to Cuba is the hero treatment hijackers have gotten in Florida and the fact that if a pilot flies a plane over there willingly, he’s not considered a hijacker and is guilty of no more than misappropriation of property.
If there is one principle that Cuba has always followed, at least since the missile crisis of 1962, it is never to give the U.S. a pretext for military action. Another Mariel exodus or rafters crisis, or indeed a wave of hijackings, would be just such a pretext, as Fidel later reasoned, for imposing a U.S. naval blockade, an all-out bombing campaign, and an outright invasion. They could avoid another Mariel or rafters episode, but they had to stop the hijackings immediately. And he was right. On April 25, the chief of the Cuba Bureau of the State Department told the Chief of Cuba’s Interests Section in Washington that the United States considers any more hijackings to be a serious threat to U.S. national security. Understanding “one more and we take military action” would not be paranoia.
But the Council of State didn’t have to wait for that news. They knew it already. They ratified the sentences on April 10, and they were carried out the next morning. You can fault Cuba on the principle of “no death penalty under any circumstances,” but the fact is that Cuba is one of more than 100 countries that have it on the books. They had just seen what U.S. bombs and missiles had done to Baghdad, saw the painstaking work of two generations at risk, including their centers of science and technology, educational institutions, hospitals and clinics, their historic cultural heritage, but most important their people who would be killed and maimed. And they didn’t confuse the hijackers with dissidents. They were delinquents turned terrorists who had threatened vastly more than their 50 hostages.
It came as no surprise to Cuba when, with the executions and the sentencing of the dissidents at nearly the same time, the howling around the world began. They seemed to be ready for it to a degree, but you could sense a certain shock when long-time friends of the revolution like Eduardo Galeano and Jose Saramago joined the chorus of condemnation. They were joined by Chomsky, Zinn, Albert, Davis, Dorfman and others, whose works are treasures in my library, who signed the superficial statement of the Campaign for Peace and Democracy: “We the undersigned strongly protest the current wave of repression in Cuba…[against dissidents]…for their non-violent political activities…”—as if the dissidents were not crucial instruments, along with terrorism, embargo, and psychological warfare, in Washington’s unending campaign to convert Cuba into another American vassal. Fair enough if that’s what they want for Cuba. Pitiful if they signed without thinking.
A few weeks after the executions and dissident trials, at the May Day rally of more than a million people in Havana’s Revolution Square, the Rev. Lucius Walker, one of the most effective and committed U.S. Cuba solidarity activists, made an elegant plea for Cuba to abolish the death penalty. Fidel responded with appreciation, saying only that such an action was under study. Yet less than 3 weeks later another group of 8 armed hijackers, arrested before taking over a flight on April 10, were tried and sentenced. Despite convictions for terrorism and violence, the ringleaders were sentenced to life imprisonment and the others to terms of 20 to 30 years.
Readers will note that the important legal and human rights issue of due process has not been addressed in these pages. Among the criticisms of both the dissidents’ and the hijackers’ cases were alle- gations that the defendants were railroaded without an opportunity for adequate legal defense. The problem in addressing this issue has not been helped by the lack of published information on the trials. For example, I have found no public chronology in any of the 75 cases from the moment of arrest to the opening of the trial that would include dates and times for events such as the arrest, the presentation of charges, and sessions spent by the defendant with a defence lawyer in preparation for the trial. Nor have the written charges nor the defendants’ responses and pleas nor the judges’ decisions been published with the exception of the sentences. This lack of infor- mation prevents assessment of due process.
Nevertheless the Foreign Minister went to pains to address these criticisms in his three-hour-plus press conference of April 7, pointing out the Spanish colonial origins of summary trial procedures and their wide use around the world today. He also said that in the 29 trials (some trials had more than one defendant) 54 lawyers participated of whom 44 were chosen by the defendants and 10 appointed as public defenders by the courts, adding that several lawyers served more than one defendant. Perhaps most important, he said that defendants were allowed to testify before the court answering the charges and submitting to cross-examination. He emphasized the number of people allowed to attend the trials, mostly family members and averaging about 100 observers per trial. Still, the lack of full information on the prosecution and trial procedures has left the door open for charges of lack of due process, charges that cannot be resolved until the courts provide more details.
Epilogue
In Washington, despite the black eye that Cuba is seen to have self-inflicted, Congressional supporters of legislation to end or ease the embargo and to abolish the travel ban are again moving ahead with the introduction of new legislation for that purpose. While most condemned the April events, they are sticking with their principles, mostly in the belief that Americans who come to Cuba will change the Cubans. Over the years I’ve seen just the opposite happen, but ending the travel ban is certainly worthy, reasons aside.
The Bush administration, peopled as it is with hard line Cuban- Americans, continues to ratchet up the pressure with the expulsion of 14 Cuban diplomats in Washington and New York on vague espionage charges. Clearly a political, not a national security decision, someone in the FBI leaked the news that the White House had apparently told the State Department to expel Cubans, and State asked the FBI for some names. The FBI source added that none of the Cubans was the subject of an on-going espionage investigation. Con- versely the Cuban-American congressional representatives from Miami, Ros Lehtinen and D?az Balart, whine openly that Bush won’t take their calls demanding a swift end to the Cuba problem once and for all.
In Miami all those NGOs sucking at the teats of AID and NED to keep their anti-Castro industry going, along with their comfortable life-styles, will have to go back to their computers and draw up new plans for civil society in Cuba. They’ll have to look for ways to salvage their counterpart fronts across the straits and for more Cubans with few enough scruples and just enough self-destructive instincts to take their money.
Over here in Havana, James Cason would do well to slip away on consultations back at the State Department and quietly retire. He did, after all, get 75 of “our guys” put away, some for quite a while, and all the anti-Cuban propaganda dividend flowing from his service to Reich in no way compensates. He’s finished in the Foreign Service even though he was carrying out Reich’s orders, for Cason, not Reich, is the one who’ll take the fall. Then again he might just find a fat new anti-Cuba career with one of the Miami NGOs.
At the U.S. Interests Section, State, AID and CIA officers will now have to start beating the bushes for new blood, sending names and background information for security clearances on people willing to work with the Miami NGOs following in the footsteps of the 75, and the Cuban security service will surely oblige with promising candidates as they always have in the past.
And the rest of us?
The threat of war in Cuba from Bush and his coterie of crusaders, all of them crazed with hubris after Iraq, is real. A military campaign against Cuba, coinciding with the already-underway 2004 electoral campaign, may be the only way he can hope to finally get himself elected, even if only for his second term. And every day the economy is working against him with no signs of improving for 2004. He knows the economy in ‘92 did his father in, and he may conclude that fulfilling his divine mission to extend U.S. military control of the world will need a crisis very close to home.
The time to mobilize against that war is now, and not a day can be lost.
CIA
Philip Agee: The Playboy Interview
PLAYBOY: Are you in danger here?
AGEE: Probably not. If they tried any rough stuff, it would have
to look like an accident, and if anybody slipped up, there would
be a very big flap.
PLAYBOY: Is the room bugged?
AGEE: I doubt it. Too much trouble for a short visit. But the
phone may be tapped. The hell with them. Let's talk.
PLAYBOY: How do you like having the Central Intelligence Agency
breathing down your neck?
AGEE: Not much. That's a dangerous bunch of people to tangle with.
I don't want to sound as if I think I'm a hero. I'm not. I just
think something's got to be done about the CIA. Remember, I'm not
the first ex-CIA man to come out against the agency. Victor
Marchetti was the first. But while he was fighting to get his book
published, I was working fast and furiously on mine in secret.
PLAYBOY: Why did you decide to blow the whistle on the CIA?
AGEE: I finally understood, after 12 years with the agency, how
much suffering it was causing, that millions of people all over
the world had been killed or at least had had their lives
destroyed by the CIA and the institutions it supports. I just
couldn't sit by and do nothing.
PLAYBOY: Millions of people? Aren't you overstating the case?
AGEE: I wish I were. Even after the revelations we've had so far,
people still don't understand what a huge, powerful and sinister
organization the CIA is.
PLAYBOY: How big is it?
AGEE: In my opinion, it's the biggest and most powerful secret
service that has ever existed. I don't know how big the K.G.B. is
inside the Soviet Union, but its international operation is small
compared with the CIA's. It's known now that the CIA has 16,500
employees and an annual budget of $750,000,000. But that's not
counting its mercenary armies, its commercial subsidiaries. Add
them all together, the agency employs or subsidizes hundreds of
thousands of people and spends more like billions every year. Even
its official budget is secret; it's concealed in those of other
Federal agencies. Nobody tells the Congress what the CIA spends.
By law, the CIA isn't accountable to Congress. Not for anything.
PLAYBOY: To whom is it accountable?
AGEE: To the National Security Council, which is composed of the
President and officials chosen by him. So it's really an
instrument of the President to use in any way he pleases. If there
are legal restraints on this, I don't know of them. It's
frightening, but it's a fact: The CIA is the President's secret
army.
PLAYBOY: What does this army do?
AGEE: To understand that, you have to understand why the CIA was
set up. There are two reasons: the official reason, as set forth
in the National Security Act of 1947, which authorized the CIA to
collect and analyze foreign intelligence, and the real reason,
which was carefully hidden. There was a sleeper clause in the
National Security Act, allowing the CIA to "perform such other
functions and duties related to intelligence affecting the
national security as the NSC may from time to time direct." Right
from the start, it was those "other functions" that occupied most
of the CIA's time. And money.
PLAYBOY: Just what are those other functions?
AGEE: Covert action. The dagger inside the cloak. It's a form of
intervention somewhere between correct, polite diplomacy and
outright military invasion. Covert action is the real reason for
the CIA's existence, and it was born out of political and economic
necessity.
PLAYBOY: What does covert action have to do with economics?
AGEE: Think back to the end of World War Two. The United States
faced a really alarming economic crisis. In 1945, 11,000,000 men
were still under arms--and out of the work force. Even so,
production was more than double what it had been in the best
prewar year. But then something scary happened. In the first six
months after the war ended, production was cut in half and
unemployment shot up from 830,000 to 2,700,000. In six months! It
looked as if the U.S. might have won the war only to fall back
into a depression. And the people who were running the country,
politicians and those who later became known as the
military-industrial complex, were badly frightened. Somehow they
had to create 11,000,000 new jobs or face catastrophe. So they
decided to reconstruct the European and Japanese economies, thus
providing new markets for the U.S., and adopted the "containment"
policies of such military alliances as NATO that brought on the
Cold War.
PLAYBOY: Wait a minute. Are you saying that we started the Cold
War? Didn't the Russians have something to do with it?
AGEE: I'm saying that when World War Two ended, U.S. policy toward
the Soviet Union came to be dominated by the anti-Soviet school in
the State Department led by George Kennan and Chip Bohlen, who
were convinced that the Soviets wanted to conquer the world. Such
a foreign policy meant that revolutionary socialism must be
opposed, with arms if necessary, wherever it appeared, because the
Soviets were supposed to be behind it all. Sure, the Soviets also
helped start the Cold War; they were aggressive and they reneged
on agreements. Militarily, though, they were much weaker in those
days than the U.S. public was led to believe. But the scenario of
an innocent and defensive America struggling to save the world
from Communist dictatorship provided the rationalization for the
dominance of foreign economies by American companies. This was the
CIA's main mission, to guarantee a favorable foreign-investment
climate for U.S. industry. You see, the U.S. market isn't big
enough to support the kind of production we need to keep
unemployment down to so-called acceptable levels. We've got to
export--finance capital as well as products--or die. But where
were our markets when the CIA was established? Europe was in
ruins. Japan was flat on its back. Reconstruction of those
economies would re-create those markets.
PLAYBOY: Do you discount America's humanitarian motives in
rebuilding Europe and Japan?
AGEE: No. Most Americans, I think, felt a generous, really
unselfish obligation to help the people whose countries had been
devastated by the war. But European Communists opposed the
Marshall Plan because they understood that U.S. economic
domination would accompany it. So the CIA's covert-action
operations began as secret political warfare against those people
who opposed the Marshall Plan. For example, the CIA broke dock
strikes against Marshall Plan aid, got non-Communist labor unions
to withdraw from the World Confederation of Trade Unions and
establish the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions.
All this, of course, with the help of George Meany, who----
PLAYBOY: You're saying that the president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. is
a CIA collaborator?
AGEE: One of the most effective. For almost 30 years, he has
helped the CIA pour money and agents into the "free world" labor
movement. By the Fifties, unions supported by the CIA had become a
pretty effective counterweight to the ones controlled by
Communists in western Europe. This meant 20 years of relative
labor peace during which U.S. companies and their local
counterparts could consolidate investments. But those labor-union
penetrations were only the beginning of The Company's covert
actions.
PLAYBOY: The Company?
AGEE: To the people who work for it, the CIA is known as The
Company. The Big Business mentality pervades everything. Agents,
for instance, are called assets. The man in charge of the United
Kingdom desk is said to have the "U.K. account." But, as I was
going to say, The Company has conducted covert actions all over
the world. In the Forties and early Fifties, it operated mainly in
Europe. In the late Fifties and Sixties, emphasis shifted to the
Third World: Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Middle East. These
operations are carried out at different levels of intensity, of
course. Not all of them are violent. Sometimes The Company forges
documents or spreads false rumors and untrue news stories--what it
calls disinformation. The Company sends hecklers to public
meetings, pays strikebreakers and industrial spies, organizes
propaganda services like Radio Free Europe, launders millions of
dollars' worth of dirty cash each year. It has also spent huge
amounts to buy elections and overthrow liberal or socialist or
nationalist governments--or to prop up repressive regimes. But The
Company gets into a lot of violence, too. It trains and equips
saboteurs and bomb squads. The police and military-intelligence
services of many countries are trained, financed and controlled by
the CIA. Worse than that, The Company has assassinated thousands
of people, some of them famous, most of them unknown. If it has
to, it will conduct paramilitary campaigns and even full-scale
wars. You name it, the CIA does it.
PLAYBOY: Those are sensational but very general accusations. Can
you give specific examples of such actions?
AGEE: Sure. In the past 25 years, the CIA has been involved in
plots to overthrow governments in Iran, the Sudan, Syria,
Guatemala, Ecuador, Guyana, Za‹re and Ghana. Will that do for
starters? In Greece, the CIA participated in bringing in the
repressive and stupid regime of the colonels. In Brazil, the CIA
worked to install a regime that tortures children to make their
parents confess their political activities. In Chile, The Company
spent millions to "destabilize"--that's the Company word--the
Allende government and set up the military junta, which has since
massacred tens of thousands of workers, students, liberals and
leftists. And there is a very strong probability that the CIA
station in Chile helped supply the assassination lists. 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--you want more?--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. And in Cuba, of course, The Company paid
for and directed the invasion that failed at the Bay of Pigs. Some
time later, the CIA had a go at assassinating Fidel Castro. That
one was close, but no cigar.
PLAYBOY: What you are saying is that the CIA can overthrow
governments practically at its pleasure. How is that possible?
AGEE: It's not a question of snapping fingers and telling some
generals, "Now's the time, boys." What the CIA does is to work
carefully, usually over several years' time, to undermine those
governments whose policies are unfavorable to U. S. interests.
Through propaganda, political action and the fomenting of
trade-union unrest, often carried out through many different front
organizations, the CIA cuts away popular support from the
undesired government or political leader. Major emphasis is placed
on influencing reactionary military officers. Once this process
gets started, it will acquire its own momentum and eventually lead
to the desired coup. The CIA can sometimes speed things up by
providing a catalyst: let's say preparing a forged document such
as a list of military officers allegedly due for assassination,
then seeing that the list gets publicized.
PLAYBOY: You mentioned the CIA's role in Indonesia. What about
Indochina?
AGEE: I figure everybody knows the war there began as a CIA war,
as far as direct U. S. intervention was concerned. This is
documented in the Pentagon papers. CIA officers were in Indochina
before the French left. They organized the Montagnards into a
paramilitary force to fight the Viet Cong. CIA agents helped put
Ngo Dinh Diem in power and CIA agents at the very least cooperated
in his assassination. It was the failure of the CIA's secret
operations in the Fifties that led to the overt military
intervention of the Sixties.
PLAYBOY: Speaking of the Diem assassination, are the rumors we
hear true--that the CIA was involved in Diem's killing without
President Kennedy's approval and that when Kennedy found out he
was furious with the agency?
AGEE: I don't know, but I've heard that from people who should
know.
PLAYBOY: If the CIA were to admit to all your allegations, what
justification would it give for such actions?
AGEE: The same old emotional appeal: that we have to prop up our
so-called friends--usually the tiny minority that has cornered
most of the wealth in poor countries--or they'll fall victim to
the Soviets and lose their freedom. Kissinger and people like him
keep reviving that argument, but the truth is--and the CIA knows
it better than anybody else--that for many years there has been no
worldwide Communist conspiracy! The socialist bloc has just as
many cracks in it as the capitalist bloc. I think most
revolutionary socialists--call them Communists, if you like--want
the advantages of socialism without the disadvantages of some
Soviet-style police state.
PLAYBOY: You don't believe in Marxist conspiracies, but you do
admit there's repression in Russia?
AGEE: Don't put me on. Sure there's repression in Russia--and it
goes back for centuries, not just to 1917. But I think it'll take
another generation of Soviet leaders to relax things there;
today's leaders can't answer very well the question of what they
were doing during Stalin's reign of terror.
PLAYBOY: But if the CIA knows, as you claim it does, that there is
no worldwide Communist conspiracy, why does it act as if there
were?
AGEE: Remember, the CIA is an instrument of the President; it only
carries out policy. And, like everyone else, the President has to
respond to forces in the society he's trying to lead, right? In
America, the most powerful force is Big Business, and American Big
Business has a vested interest in the Cold War.
PLAYBOY: Hold on. This is beginning to sound like Marxist jargon
about the big bad imperialists on Wall Street.
AGEE: That's because, in my opinion, the Marxists are right about
American economic imperialism. American multinational corporations
have built up colossal interests all over the world, and you can
bet your ass that wherever you find U. S. business interests, you
also find the CIA. Why? Because the foreign operations of American
companies are the key to our domestic prosperity. The
multinational corporations want a peaceful status quo in countries
where they have investments, because that gives them undisturbed
access to cheap raw materials, cheap labor and stable markets for
their finished goods. The status quo suits bankers, because their
money remains secure and multiplies. And, of course, the status
quo suits the small ruling groups the CIA supports abroad, because
all they want is to keep themselves on top of the socioeconomic
pyramid and the majority of their people on the bottom. But do you
realize what being on the bottom means in most parts of the world?
Ignorance, poverty, often early death by starvation or disease.
PLAYBOY: You paint a bleak picture. Hasn't the CIA accomplished
anything positive, at least for the U. S.?
AGEE: Over the short run, quite a bit. The CIA certainly helped
goose up the American economic boom of the past 25 years. What
many Americans don't seem to have noticed, though, is that
American prosperity over those years was to some degree a false
one. Have you noticed that as the political and economic
independence of the Third World has increased, American prosperity
has begun to sputter? In the long run, I'm betting that the CIA
will be seen to have done a lot of damage to the United States,
because, along with its business allies, it has caused us to be
hated by millions of people as the last of the great colonial
exploiters. That hatred is going to haunt us for a long, long
time, and it has got to be focused on the few people who deserve
it and not on the American people as a whole.
PLAYBOY: Your own experience in the CIA has been mostly with its
overseas operations. What do you know about alleged CIA activities
inside the U.S.?
AGEE: Very little--but enough to suspect strongly that they're
much more extensive than anybody outside the CIA or the National
Security Council realizes. I think a lot of sinister things will
come out in the investigations that are under way in Washington. I
think the American people may be in for some severe shocks.
PLAYBOY: What are you hinting at?
AGEE: I can only hint, because I have no direct knowledge. But I
can tell you what I was told by Marchetti. I told him I thought
that most of the 10,000 cases the CIA admits to having
investigated inside the U. S. would turn out to be connected, no
matter how tenuously, with some sort of foreign-intelligence
effort. "You're wrong," he said. "You just don't know. You haven't
been here. There are going to be some revelations that will chill
your spine, really grisly things. And some of them," he said, "may
be connected with the assassinations of President Kennedy, Senator
Kennedy, Martin Luther King and other well-known individuals both
at home and abroad."
PLAYBOY: Connected how? What are you trying to say?
AGEE: Just what I said. That's all I know. But by the time this
interview appears, a lot of these things may have come out. I hope
so. That's really all I know. I can give you an opinion, though,
for what it's worth. Knowing the CIA as I do, I can tell you that
everything I have read about the assassination of President
Kennedy--Lee Harvey Oswald's background, Jack Ruby's background,
the photograph that seems to place E. Howard Hunt at the scene of
the crime, the mysterious deaths of so many people
involved--everything makes me very suspicious of the Warren
Commission's version of what happened. And remember: Allen
Dulles, the former head of the CIA, was a member of the Warren
Commission. If the agency had anything to cover up, Dulles was in
a very good position to do so. But I don't have any proof that the
CIA was involved. Remember, I wasn't working in Washington then.
What I can tell you about best is the normal, everyday dirty
tricks a CIA man is up to.
PLAYBOY: All right. Let's go into that. Beginning at the
beginning, how did you get into the CIA?
AGEE: Through my college placement bureau. No kidding. Just before
I was graduated from Notre Dame, I was interviewed by a CIA man.
He made his pitch like any other company recruiter: interesting
work, good pay, opportunity for advancement, foreign travel. He
also mentioned patriotism and public service. I said no at first,
but a year later, when the draft began to catch up with me, I
changed my mind. The CIA training program allowed me to do my
compulsory military service as an agency man. So I went away for
two years with the Air Force--always in the special CIA
program--and in 1959 I returned to Washington to begin formal
training as a CIA officer. After about three months of classes at
headquarters in Langley, Virginia, learning the structure and
functions of the CIA, most of us went to The Farm for operational
training.
PLAYBOY: The Farm?
AGEE: Camp Peary, Virginia. A secret CIA training center. So
secret at the time that some of the foreign trainees weren't even
told they were in the United States. We worked hard, I can tell
you, for more than six months. There was a physical-conditioning
program, plenty of practice in the martial arts. How to disarm or
cripple, if necessary kill an opponent. We had classes in
propaganda, infiltration-exfiltration, youth and student
operations, labor operations, targeting and penetration of enemy
organizations. How to run liaison projects with friendly
intelligence services so as to give as little and get as much
information as possible. Anti-Soviet operations--that subject got
special attention. We had classes in how to frame a Russian
official and try to get him to defect. The major subject, though,
was how to run agents--single agents, networks of agents.
PLAYBOY: How does a CIA officer set up and operate a network of
spies?
AGEE: The first stage of the process is targeting prospects. Say
your objective is to penetrate a leftist political party. The
first thing to do is to probe for a weak spot in the organization.
Maybe you bug the phone of a leading party member and find out
he's playing around with the party's funds. In that case, perhaps
he can be blackmailed. Or one of your agents plays on the same
soccer team as a party member, or goes out with his sister, and
gets to know something about him that seems to make him a good
prospect. Then you make him an offer.
PLAYBOY: You mean money?
AGEE: Usually, but not necessarily. In rich countries, a man might
become a spy for ideological reasons, but in poor countries, it's
usually because he's short of cash. A hungry man with a family to
support will do almost anything for money, and there are a lot of
hungry people in most of the countries in the world. So you make
an offer. Maybe you make it yourself, but maybe you have someone
else do it, because you don't want the prospective agent to know
who he's working for. Not all CIA agents are what The Company
calls witting.
PLAYBOY: How could a person be a CIA agent without knowing it?
AGEE: Thousands of policemen all over the world, for instance, are
shadowing people for the CIA without knowing it. They think
they're working for their own police departments, when, in fact,
their chief may be a CIA agent who's sending them out on CIA jobs
and turning their information over to his CIA control. There's
also a lot of "false flag" recruiting, when one agent will recruit
another one by telling him he'll actually be working for his own
government, or even for Peking or Havana. You don't let the
recruit know he'll be working for the United States, because if he
knew that, he might not consent to do it.
PLAYBOY: How much do you pay a spy?
AGEE: It depends on local conditions. In a poor country, $100 a
month will get you an ordinary agent. In my day, about $700 a
month would buy a Latin-American cabinet minister.
PLAYBOY: After you've recruited your agent, what then?
AGEE: Then you've got to run him, and that's an exacting
job--mainly because of the secrecy. You both have to be very
careful what you put on paper or say on the phone. You communicate
mostly by signals agreed upon in advance. For example, you can
make a chalk or pencil mark or place a strip of colored tape in a
certain telephone booth or on a fence, wall or utility pole.
Different marks or colors signify different instructions. Since
you usually can't be seen together, you have to meet in what the
CIA calls "a safe house." Sometimes, even that's too risky, so you
arrange for your agent to leave his information at a "dead drop,"
like a hollow place in a cement block or a magnetized container
you can fasten under the shelf in a telephone booth--anyplace a
message or a roll of microfilm or a reel of tape would be safe
until it could be picked up.
PLAYBOY: What if you suspect that an agent's information is false?
AGEE: You can put him through a polygraph test or cut off his
money--fire him. Or, if necessary, and headquarters approves, you
can "burn" him. In Companyese, that means to reveal his connection
with the agency, or frame him. I remember, for instance, the case
of Joaquin Ordoqui, who was an old-time leader of the Communist
movement in Cuba. I don't know if he was ever a CIA agent, but a
decision was made to burn him in order to create dissension in
Cuba. So a series of letters implicating him as a CIA agent was
sent to the Cuban embassy in Mexico City. In 1964, Ordoqui was
placed under house arrest in Cuba and the case caused a lot of
friction there. Just before he died in 1974, though, he was
exonerated. In 1966, Stan Archenhold, the CIA officer who dreamed
up this burning operation, got the Intelligence Medal--the CIA's
biggest merit badge--for it. Then there's the really extreme
situation in which someone who has worked for the CIA has to be
physically eliminated for some reason or other. I don't know of
any of these cases, but I've heard that has happened, especially
in Indochina during the Sixties.
So the stick is a big element in keeping control of agents. But
the carrot, usually money, is at least as important.
PLAYBOY: How does a CIA officer make payments to his agents?
AGEE: In cash. Let's face it, you can't pay spies by check. The
minute you go into the bank, the operation goes public. No, toward
the end of every month. I'd go out with my pockets stuffed full of
little pay envelopes and run all over town to meet my agents in
cars or safe houses and pay them off. I had so many envelopes that
once in a while I got mixed up and gave an agent the wrong one. I
always made them count the cash in front of me, though, so I was
able to correct those mistakes on the spot.
PLAYBOY: Besides cash, what were you supplied with? Were you given
James Bond gadgets and trained to use them?
AGEE: Bond never had it so good. In CIA jargon, tradecraft covers
the tricky side of espionage; it includes all the techniques that
keep a secret operation secret. We learned how to write secret
messages--there's a carbon system, a microdot system and various
wet methods; we also learned how to open and then reseal a letter.
Very simple when you have the flat steam table.
PLAYBOY: What's that?
AGEE: It's a rectangular platform, about one foot by two feet,
with a heating element built into it and foam rubber all around
the outside. You plug the unit into a wall socket, let it heat up
and put a wet blotter on top of it. Right away, the steam begins
to rise from the blotter. By experience, you know just how wet to
get it. Then you place the envelope on top of the blotter, with
the flap side down. In a matter of seconds, any envelope will come
right open. Later you reseal it--the CIA makes a very effective
clear glue. If it's done right, there's no trace that the envelope
has been tampered with.
We were also taught how to bug a room and how to restore a wall or
a ceiling to its original appearance afterward. The CIA puts out a
handy-dandy plaster-patching and paint-matching kit, by the way,
that is better than anything the public can buy. They give you
about 150 chips on a chain, practically every color you can think
of. You just match the chips to the wall paint until you get the
right color. Then you look on the back of the chip, which gives
you the formula for mixing the paint. It really works. I took the
kit home one weekend when I was renovating my apartment. It's
superquick-drying, odorless paint.
They trained us in the use of disguises, too--wigs, mustaches,
body pads--and taught us to work with hidden cameras. Some of them
had lenses that looked like tie-clasp ornaments or locks on
briefcases. The Company had other cameras with telescopic lenses
that could photograph documents inside a room, right through a
curtain. There was also a machine through which we could overhear
a conversation inside a room across the street; it bounced an
infrared beam off a window, using the windowpane to pick up the
vibrations of the voices inside the room. The reflected infrared
beam would carry the vibrations to a receiving set.
PLAYBOY: All that, we suppose, comes under the heading of
gathering information. What about the dirty tricks we hear the CIA
pulls? Did you have special gadgets for those, too?
AGEE: The CIA has a department called the Technical Services
Division, TSD, and its laboratories have produced all sorts of
things. Some of them are pretty unpleasant. For instance, TSD has
developed an invisible itching powder--I think it's made of
asbestos fibers, actually--that drives its victims wild for about
three days. My agents used a lot of it. They went to leftist
meetings and sprinkled it on the seats of toilets. TSD has also
produced an invisible powder that will just lie harmlessly on the
floor--at a meeting hall, say--until people arrive and start
walking around, so the powder gets stirred up. Within about five
minutes, everybody in the room is gasping and watering at the
eyes, and the meeting has to break up.
I remember another chemical we had. If you dropped it into
somebody's drink, it would give him a horrible body odor. We also
had a drug that would make people say whatever they were thinking,
just babble on. We had a powder that, mixed with pipe tobacco or
sifted into a cigarette, would give the smoker an annoying
respiratory ailment. We even had an ointment that came in a little
container that looked like a ring. On the underside was a little
compartment filled with ointment that, when you smeared it
unobtrusively on the door handle of a car, would give the person
who opened the door terrible burns on his hand. Ordinary stink
bombs were effective, too--small glass vials with the
vilest-smelling liquid on earth. One time at the Mexico City
station, some clown poured a bunch of that liquid down the drain.
It was going bad. I guess. At that time, the station occupied the
upper floors of the embassy, in a high-rise building. Somehow the
liquid didn't run out into the sewer system; it got caught in the
basement area, and the smell began to seep back upstairs. They had
to evacuate the whole building for a while. I heard that when the
Ambassador asked the station chief if he knew anything about it,
the chief replied that somebody must have had a worse case of
Montezuma's revenge than usual.
PLAYBOY: But all those things--itching powder, stink bombs--are
incredibly petty, the kinds of things nasty little kids might
think of.
AGEE: The CIA isn't always petty. For instance, we had a whole
inventory of sabotage devices. Chemicals to gum up printing
presses, foul bearings, contaminate wheat or rice or sugar sacks.
There were limpets to sink ships. Also some frightening stuff
called thermite powder. Add a little water and you could mold it
like clay--into an ashtray or a book end or a doll. It looked
harmless, but when the time pencil up the doll's behind ignited,
there was a shuddering ball of violent white heat that ate through
concrete or even steel in a few seconds. There was no way you
could put it out. I heard it was a CIA thermite doll that burned
down El Encanto, the big department store in Havana. You could
also combine thermite with tear-gas rods and create a cloud that
would clear an area for blocks around.
PLAYBOY: Did you learn these techniques during your CIA training
in the States?
AGEE: Yes.
PLAYBOY: Where was your first assignment outside the country?
AGEE: Quito, Ecuador. I went there in December 1960 under cover as
a State Department political officer, but using my own name. My
secret Company name was Jeremy S. HODAPP. I fell in love with
Ecuador. The mountains are spectacular, and high; Quito is 9000
feet above sea level. On the coastal plain, there are endless palm
forests and banana plantations. But the country is appallingly
poor. When I was there, the average income was $18 a month. A
conservative upper class, about one percent of the population,
held most of the wealth. However, for about 12 years before I went
there, Ecuador had been politically stable and some economic
progress was being made. But from 1961 to 1963, we really
subverted that country.
PLAYBOY: What was the point of that?
AGEE: Cuba was the point. The Cuban Revolution had swung to the
far left and the State Department was terrified. So were I.T.T.
and United Fruit and the big U.S. banks with Latin-American
interests; they feared that Cuba would export revolution to other
countries in the hemisphere, and then those countries might
nationalize their holdings. So the top priority of U.S. policy in
Latin America became to seal off Cuba from the continent. In
Quito, our orders were to do everything possible to force Ecuador
to break diplomatic and economic relations with Cuba and to weaken
the Communist Party there whatever it cost?
PLAYBOY: What did it cost?
AGEE: About $2,000,000. We bought everybody willing to sell
himself to get our jobs done. The vice-president of the
country--his name was Reinaldo Varea--was a CIA agent. We paid him
$1000 a month and kept a suite for him in Quito's best hotel,
where he could take his girlfriends. The president's personal
physician, Felipe Ovalle, was on the CIA's payroll, too. So were
the president of the Chamber of Deputies, the minister of the
treasury, the minister of labor and the chief of police
intelligence. So were the leaders of several right-wing political
parties and some key members of the Communist Party, too. Several
ministers of government and the director of immigration also
worked closely with us. It was like a covert occupation of the
country. But, at the time, I didn't see anything wrong in what we
were doing. I believed what the CIA told me, that we were buying
time for liberal reforms by checking the spread of communism. So I
went out and worked like a demon to make that policy effective. We
ran over Ecuador like a steam roller. It was like living a fantasy
of absolute power. That's one of the insidious things about the
CIA. If you get exciting assignments, you can get hooked on your
own adrenaline.
PLAYBOY: Let's get into some of those assignments.
AGEE: Don't think it was all excitement. A CIA officer spends at
least half of his day on paperwork. Then he spends hours in musty
little basement rooms, waiting for agents to show up and make
their reports. Then he spends more hours listening to agents'
problems--how their girlfriends are pregnant, how their cars need
new transmissions, how their brothers-in-law would make good
spies. When he isn't mothering agents, a CIA officer is at a
cocktail party or a diplomatic reception or trudging around some
golf course, sucking up to a corrupt politician in hopes of
corrupting him still further. But some wild things did happen. I
would say maybe our most successful operation in Ecuador was the
framing of Antonio Flores Benitez, a key member of a Communist
revolutionary movement.
PLAYBOY: Tell us about that one.
AGEE: By bugging Flores' telephone, we found out a lot of what he
was doing. His wife was a blabbermouth. He made a secret trip to
Havana and we decided to do a job on him when he landed back in
Ecuador. With another officer, I worked all one weekend to compose
a "report" from Flores to the Cubans. It was a masterpiece. The
report implied that Flores' group had already received funds from
Cuba and was now asking for more money in order to launch
guerrilla operations in Ecuador. My Quito station chief, Warren
Dean, approved the report--in fact, he loved it so much he just
had to get into the act. So he dropped the report on the floor and
walked on it awhile to make it look pocket-worn. Then he folded it
and stuffed it into a toothpaste tube--from which he had spent
three hours carefully squeezing out all the tooth paste. He was
like a kid with a new toy. So then I took the tube out to the
minister of the treasury, who gave it to his customs inspector.
When Flores came through customs, the inspector pretended to go
rummaging through one of his suitcases. What he really did, of
course, was slip the tooth-paste tube into the bag and then
pretend to find it there. When he opened the tube, he of course
"discovered" the report. Flores was arrested and there was a
tremendous scandal. This was one of a series of sensational events
that we had a hand in during the first six months of 1963. By July
of that year, the climate of anti-Communist fear was so great that
the military seized a pretext and took over the government, jailed
all the Communists it could find and outlawed the Communist Party.
PLAYBOY: Is forgery often resorted to by the CIA?
AGEE: It's a standard technique. The catalyst for the coup in
Chile was almost exactly like the Flores incident. A document
describing a leftist plot to seize absolute power and start a
reign of terror was "discovered" by the enemies of Allende. Plan
Z, it was called. It made big headlines and the military used it
as an excuse to take over the country and start a real reign of
terror. I can't prove it, but I strongly suspect that Plan Z was
written by a CIA officer, or by the coup makers at the CIA's
suggestion.
PLAYBOY: You mentioned that the Communist Party was outlawed in
Ecuador. Did you succeed in your other objective, getting the
Ecuadorian government to break off relationships with Cuba?
AGEE: Yes. The government of Jos? Maria Velasco Ibarra, who was a
moderate liberal, had resisted breaking with Cuba. He was followed
in 1961 by a moderate leftist, Carlos Julio Arosemena, who also
tried at first to resist U.S. policy. Finally, though, he caved in
and broke with Cuba after about six months in office. When I left
Ecuador, with the military junta in power, the short-run security
situation had been improved from our viewpoint, but there hadn't
been much improvement for most of the people there. Practically
none of the reforms everyone agreed were needed--redistribution of
income, agrarian reform, and so forth--had been installed. Do you
know that today the Ecuadorian government is still talking about
those reforms without really acting on them? But, at that time, I
didn't realize how reactionary the effects of our CIA operations
really were.
PLAYBOY: Why not?
AGEE: For one thing, I suppose, I barely had time to stop and turn
around. The job of an operations officer calls for dedication to
the point of obsession, if you try to do it well. You have too
many secrets; you can't relax with outsiders. It's a very
unnatural life, hard on the people who live it. There's a lot of
alcoholism and a lot of emotional breakdowns in the CIA.
PLAYBOY: What sort of breakdowns?
AGEE: I'm not an expert on this, but it's a schizophrenic sort of
situation. Sometimes a CIA officer is using several identities at
once, and when you wake up in the morning, your mind goes click!
OK, who am I today? All day long, there's the same problem.
Somebody asks you a simple question: "What did you do over the
weekend?" Click! Who does he think I am? What would the guy he
thinks I am do over the weekend? You get so used to lying that
after a while it's hard to know when you're telling the truth.
PLAYBOY: How did that sort of stress affect CIA marriages?
AGEE: It didn't do mine any good. I had married Janet the year
before I went to Ecuador, but after we got there, we began to have
difficulty. I was gone all day and half the night and when we did
see each other, I couldn't tell her what I was doing. On top of
that, she had trouble learning Spanish, so she was somewhat cut
off from the Ecuadorians. More and more, she spent her time
playing bridge with embassy wives.
PLAYBOY: What did you do when you weren't working?
AGEE: I had some pretty wild friends, and some close calls; barely
missed a scandal several times. One time--God, was I lucky! I
went to Guayaquil for the weekend. It's a steamy, tropical town
and I spent Saturday night with a convivial agent, making the
rounds of the sleazier dives. About 15 minutes after we left one
of them, a place called Cuatro y Media, President Arosemena and
some of his cronies came in. The waiters in that joint were all
homosexual and Arosemena and his friends began to taunt them.
Arosemena would get wild when he drank, and after a while he
ordered one of the waiters to put a lamp shade on his head. Then
he took out his pistol, but instead of shooting the lamp shade
off, he shot the waiter in the head. The whole affair was hushed
up, so I still don't know if the man was killed or just wounded.
But if I'd been in the Cuatro y Media when the shot was fired and
the Ambassador had found out, I'd have had to leave the country.
PLAYBOY: Which, of course, you eventually did--though not under a
cloud. What was your next station?
AGEE: Montevideo, and I think Uruguay had something to do with
turning me around in my attitudes toward the CIA. For years,
Uruguay had been one of the most prosperous and progressive
countries on the continent. It had a $700-a-year per-capita income
and a 90 percent literacy rate, an eight-hour day, a minimum wage,
workmen's compensation, free, secular, state-supported education,
free elections. The country was showcase of liberal reform, but in
the Fifties some deep cracks showed up in the window. The reforms
hadn't touched land tenure--a few rich men owned most of the
countryside. Uruguay had a sheep-and-cattle economy, and a
collapse in the prices of wool, hides and meat after the Korean
War sent the country into a tail spin of inflation, deficits,
unemployment, stagnation, strikes and corruption. The left was
getting stronger, and the CIA reinforced its station in
Montevideo.
PLAYBOY: When did you arrive in Uruguay, and what did you do
there?
AGEE: I got there in March 1964 and stayed about two and a half
years. We pretty well ran the military and the police intelligence
services, gave them information from our penetration agents in the
Communist Party and used the police to tap telephones. I ran an
operation to bug the United Arab Republic's embassy, which enabled
us to break the U.A.R.'s diplomatic codes. My main responsibility,
though, was for operations against the Cubans. We had an agent in
the Cuban embassy, the chauffeur, and we thought at one point that
we'd recruited the Cuban code clerk. We offered him $50,000 for a
look at the code pads and $3000 a month if he'd continue working
at the embassy, but at the last minute he backed out. I'm glad now
that we lost him, but I was really disappointed then.
PLAYBOY: What about the Russians? Did you run any operations
against them?
AGEE: Another officer was in charge of anti-Soviet operations, but
after we finally got the Uruguayans to break with Cuba, I began
working against the Soviets. In fact, I really made trouble for
the Russians in Uruguay. It all began when I met a K.G.B. officer
from the Soviet embassy named Sergei Borisov. We met at the
Montevideo Diplomatic Club and struck up a kind of unreal
friendship. He knew what I was, I knew what he was. We both knew
we were spying on each other, but we went ahead and did it anyway,
because it was part of the game we were playing. It was like
chess. In fact, we sometimes played chess and he beat my ass off
every time, but I liked to think I beat him at the spy game.
PLAYBOY: How?
AGEE: Well, it started by my inviting Sergei and his wife, Nina,
to dinner at our house. Then we began to see them every month or
so. Go to the beach, have dinner, drink a little vodka and play
some chess while the wives talked girl talk. Then one day our
telephone tap on the Soviet embassy gave us a sensational piece of
information about infidelity in the Borisov m?nage.
PLAYBOY: You mean Sergei was sneaking out for a quick one now and
then?
AGEE: No. Nina was! Sergei had a new boss, a K.G.B. station chief
named Khalturin, and one of Khalturin's first unofficial acts
after arriving in the country, even before he had a permanent
place to live, was to jump into bed with Nina. Then I found out
that Khalturin was interested in an apartment owned by a friend of
mine, a Philip Morris distributor named Carlos Salguero. Salguero
agreed to make sure Khalturin took the apartment--but to give us
access before the Russian moved in. We bugged the sofa and the
bed, and we got another apartment on the floor above and just off
to one side. My secretary moved into the other apartment until we
could find an agent to cover it. To operate the bugs, we used one
of the CIA's less amazing technological achievements, a
transmitter-receiver that was fitted into a gray, two-suiter
Samsonite suitcase and gave us nothing but trouble.
PLAYBOY: What went wrong?
AGEE: Well, for one thing, the damned thing put out so much
radiation that you had to wear a lead apron so the radiation
wouldn't homogenize your balls. And for another, you had to tilt
the suitcase to just the right angle so that the beam was aimed
directly at the switches in Khalturin's apartment. Otherwise, the
switches would get stuck in the On or Off position and somebody
would have to sneak into his apartment to move them.
PLAYBOY: What did you learn from Nina and Khalturin's
conversations?
AGEE: It's funny, I don't know. None of us could understand
Russian, so we sent the tapes to headquarters to be transcribed,
and I was so busy with other operations that I never bothered to
read the English transcriptions that came back. But that situation
served as the basis for one of the weirdest operational ideas I
ever had. I suggested to Washington that I should arrange to find
myself alone with Sergei and tell him how sorry I was to hear that
his wife was having an affair with his boss. That would have put
Sergei and Khalturin into a tricky situation on two levels,
personal and political.
PLAYBOY: We can see the personal problem, but how would it affect
them politically?
AGEE: Well, if a Russian told Sergei his wife was having an affair
with his boss, he would not be obliged to report it to Moscow.
Extramarital affairs in a Soviet colony abroad are, in fact,
rather common. Sergei might even have known about the affair and
was allowing it to continue. But if a CIA man told Sergei about
the affair, that would be another matter altogether. All CIA
contacts must be reported. Not to report what I said would be to
take a first step toward treason. If he did report it, he'd create
an uncomfortable situation for himself and for Khalturin. What I
hoped, of course, was that he wouldn't. Then we might have gotten
him into a position for blackmail. If he told his wife what I'd
said, we'd have her, too. And if Nina told Khalturin and we got
their conversation on tape, we could make big trouble for all of
them. We might even find ourselves with some very valuable new
assets inside the K.G.B.
PLAYBOY: So what happened?
AGEE: Washington killed the idea. They were afraid Sergei might
throw a punch at me and cause a flap. I think they were wrong.
PLAYBOY: So that was that?
AGEE: Far from it. We kept right on after Khalturin. I helped
forge a document pretty much like the Flores report, this time
seeming to involve the Soviet embassy in Uruguay with the damaging
strikes the country had been having. By using some of our
well-placed agents in the Uruguayan government, we had six
officers in the Russian embassy expelled, most of them from
Khalturin's department. That left him terribly shorthanded, so he
had to work day and night. From our observation posts at the
Soviet embassy, we could see him coming and going, and he looked
really run-down. We hoped he might crack. But I left Uruguay
before Khalturin and the Borisovs did, so I don't know what
finally happened with them.
PLAYBOY: But something happened to you? You were saying that in
Uruguay you began to have a change of heart about the CIA.
AGEE: Yes. Part of the trouble was the atmosphere in the
Montevideo station. Ned Holman, the chief, was a really
unpleasant, middle-aged ex-FBI man. And God, was he lazy! He was
only four years from retirement and all he wanted to do was serve
out his time. When anything went wrong, he wrote scurrilous
letters about his officers to our superiors in Washington. I found
the combination to his file and read them. He gave me good
reports, because I was a bear for work, but he really hurt most of
the others. There was a foul atmosphere there.
PLAYBOY: What about the atmosphere in your home?
AGEE: That kept getting worse, too. And so did the atmosphere in
the country. While I was in Uruguay, inflation soared from 33.5
percent a year to more than 100 percent. For months on end, one
sector of the economy or another was paralyzed by strikes. The
more I got to know about the corrupt government we were backing,
the less I liked my work. I began to see that the landowners,
ranchers, bankers and professionals--a small minority--were using
the government for their own selfish purposes. Why were we
supporting such people? Then came the invasion of the Dominican
Republic by U.S. Marines. That really got to me. It was done under
the pretext that the Dominican Republic might become another Cuba,
which was so absurd I had to wonder what the real reason was. For
the first time, I had to consider that the CIA might not really be
serving the cause of liberal reform. And then one day I got a
shock that's still painful to talk about.
PLAYBOY: What was it?
AGEE: I overheard a man being tortured by the police--a man I'd
fingered for them. You know, at that time, the police in
Latin-American countries didn't use torture as some of them do
now. For years I'd been having people arrested, but I don't think
I'd ever actually seen what happened to them afterward. Then, in
December 1965, during a state of siege, I told the Uruguayan
police to pick up a Communist named Oscar Bonaudi for preventive
detention, because he was quite active in street demonstrations.
About five days later, the new chief of station, John Horton, and
I were visiting police headquarters to show the police chief a
forged document we'd prepared, and I began to hear moans coming
from somewhere above the police chief's office. The chief was
embarrassed and told one of his assistants to turn up the radio. I
remember there was a soccer game on. Well, the moans got louder
and the assistant kept turning up the radio. Finally, the moans
turned to screams and the radio was blaring so loudly we couldn't
hear ourselves talk. I had this strange feeling--terror and
helplessness. Two days later, I found out that the man they had
been torturing was Bonaudi.
PLAYBOY: What was your reaction?
AGEE: I can't describe it. I just know that after that, I began to
notice certain things and think about them. For instance, I began
to observe what happened to Company men as they got older. Unless
they made it to a high-level job, a lot of them turned into
pale-faced paper pushers who believed in nothing but their
pensions. Burned-out cases. Was I going to be like that in 15
years? It worried me.
PLAYBOY: When did you decide to quit The Company?
AGEE: Before I left Uruguay. But I decided not to leave until I
found another job. When I was transferred back to Washington in
the fall of 1966, Janet and I separated, so my expenses were
pretty high. We had two children, Christopher, who was then two,
and Philip, who was five. Then I had a piece of luck. I was sent
to Mexico City--assigned, along with another man who was
legitimate, not CIA, as one of the U.S Ambassador's attach?s for
the 1968 Olympic games. I spent a very pleasant year and a half
working on that assignment. The CIA's purpose in sending me was to
use the Olympic milieu to recruit new agents. I met a lot of
people, didn't recruit any, and meanwhile learned quite a bit
about the CIA's operation in Mexico.
PLAYBOY: Is it a sizable one?
AGEE: Huge. The station's annual budget even then was $5,500,000.
And the Mexicans were very cooperative. With Mexican security's
help, the station was able to tap as many as 40 telephone lines at
once. The president of the country at the time, Gustavo Diaz
Ordaz, was a very close CIA collaborator. So was his predecessor,
Adolfo Lopez Mateos. The current Mexican president, Luis
Echeverr?a, also was a station contact--when he was Diaz Ordaz'
minister for internal security. But I'm pretty sure Echeverr?a has
broken with the CIA; in fact, he's now denouncing it and accusing
it of fomenting demonstrations by what he calls "young fascists"
against his administration.
PLAYBOY: Did you learn about any interesting operations in Mexico?
AGEE: Two. One was a defection operation, the other involved the
use of a woman as bait. In the defection business, I learned how
much the CIA would pay to get what it wanted. We had access
through one of our agents to a senior K.G.B. officer named Pavel
Yatskov, who happened to be a fanatic about fishing. Well, cool as
you please, the Soviet Bloc Division in headquarters proposed to
induce Yatskov to defect by offering him $500,000! Not only that,
but the CIA was willing to set him up with an elaborate cover as
the owner of an income-producing fishing lodge in Canada. The
reason this plan wasn't adopted was that we feared that our own
man may have been a double agent, secretly recruited by Yatskov.
PLAYBOY: And the case in which a woman was used as bait?
AGEE: Straight out of Ian Fleming. She was a young Mexican girl,
recruited through a local businessman. She was used as bait to
lure the administrative officer of the Soviet embassy, a man named
Silnikov. He used to spend a lot of time horsing around with the
owner of a tiny grocery store near the Soviet embassy--who just
happened to be a CIA agent. The Soviets bought a lot of Coca-Cola
there and at one time the CIA was working on ways to bug the Coke
bottles that went into their embassy. Anyway, it became obvious
that Silnikov rose to the bait, shall we say. After some hot
necking sessions in the back of the store, they went to the girl's
pad, where, unbeknownst to her, a bug and a hidden camera had been
installed. I don't know how much information Silnikov spilled, if
any, but his virility was beyond belief.
PLAYBOY: When you left the CIA, did you let The Company know how
you felt about what it was doing?
AGEE: Hell, no! I wanted them to think I was still a loyal agency
supporter--that there were no political reasons for my
resigning--so I told them I was leaving for personal reasons. This
was true as far as it went, because the CIA knew I was planning to
marry a woman I'd met through the Olympics and to live permanently
in Mexico. If The Company had known how I really felt, it could
have made it impossible, through its Mexican government friends,
for me to remain in Mexico. As it was, the CIA urged me to stay in
The Company and offered me another promotion. But I refused. In
fact, I did something you have to be pretty damn careful not to do
in the CIA. I refused to obey an order.
PLAYBOY: Is that like refusing to obey an order in the military?
AGEE: Almost as bad. It happened like this: Janet was resentful
because of the breakup and other things, so when I took a trip to
Washington, she refused to let me take the children back to Mexico
for a visit. I took them anyway and Janet was furious. She said if
I didn't send them back, she'd expose me as a CIA officer. I knew
she was bluffing, but The Company didn't. So Win Scott, the
station chief, called me in and said, "Send them back." I said,
"No. If you want to fire me right now, OK, I quit." They couldn't
fire me, because the Ambassador needed me; it would have been too
awkward for him to fire one of his Olympic attach?s on the eve of
the games. But they were really in a lather.
PLAYBOY: The CIA felt that you were disloyal?
AGEE: To put it mildly. But, in fact, I wasn't really disloyal to
the CIA even then. When I resigned, I had no intention of writing
a book, of doing the CIA any harm. I was still a prisoner of
middle-class respectability and of that pervasive CIA security
consciousness. I went to work for a friend in Mexico City who was
marketing a new product, and I figured I'd just forget I'd ever
worked for the CIA.
PLAYBOY: But you couldn't forget?
AGEE: I couldn't forget. The memories kept coming back like things
I'd swallowed but couldn't digest. Then my marriage plans fell
through and I had plenty of time to think. The feeling began to
grow inside me that I had some message to give--that I should tell
the American people what their Government was doing in their name.
I found myself making notes. First I thought of writing sort of a
scholarly treatise on the CIA. I wrote an outline and took it to
New York. Five publishers turned it down. But I'm stubborn, you
know. I'm a Capricorn, if that means anything. Headstrong. So back
in Mexico, a friend who knew Franc‡ois Maspero, a radical
publisher in Paris, put me in touch with him. And, well, Maspero
agreed to give me a small advance and help me get the book
written. But I couldn't find the research material I needed in
Mexico. You see, I had no notes from my CIA days; I had to find
contemporary sources to refresh my memory, so I could reconstruct
events. I could have continued in Paris or maybe London, someplace
outside the jurisdiction of U.S. courts, so they couldn't enjoin
my work as they had Marchetti's. Another possibility was Havana,
and with Maspero's help, arrangements were made for me to go
there.
PLAYBOY: Why Havana?
AGEE: We found that there were newspapers and magazines and other
reference works at the National Library and the Casa de las
Americas. But, besides, I really wanted to see for myself what the
Cuban Revolution was all about.
PLAYBOY: How much were you allowed to see in Cuba?
AGEE: They let me go anywhere except onto military reservations.
In 1971, I traveled all over the island, and I was impressed. The
Cubans were quite enthusiastic about the Revolution, in spite of
the many hardships caused by the U.S. economic blockade--and by
their own mistakes, too. They supported their government; they
were convinced it was giving them a fair deal. So was I. Cuba had
done what the other Latin-American countries had pledged to do in
the early Sixties: It had redistributed income and integrated its
society.
PLAYBOY: Did the CIA discover in 1971 that you were inside Cuba?
AGEE: Surprisingly, I don't think they did. I knew The Company
checks passenger manifests on all planes and ships that make stops
in Cuba. Somehow they missed me. I guess good luck made me
reckless, because before leaving Havana to continue research in
Paris, I did something really foolish. I wrote a long, signed
letter to a Montevideo political journal, describing some of the
CIA's covert-action operations in Uruguay. There was an electoral
campaign on there and I thought I could help the left-wing
coalition--which was similar to the Popular Unity coalition that
had elected Allende in Chile the year before--by suggesting that
the CIA would be helping the corrupt traditional parties. It was
as if I had forgotten everything I had learned about the CIA and
how dangerous it can be. I was damn soon reminded, though.
PLAYBOY: What happened?
AGEE: I was visited in Paris by a CIA officer named Keith
Gardiner, a Harvard type, a guy I'd known a long time, who told me
that Richard Helms, who was director of the CIA then, wanted to
know what the hell I thought I was doing by writing that letter to
the Montevideo publication. It was a scary moment. I decided I'd
better bluff. I figured that if The Company knew how little work
I'd actually done on the book--less than a third of the
research--they might figure it was safe to get rough. So I told
them it was already written and I was cutting it to a publishable
length. I promised to submit the final draft to the CIA before
publication.
PLAYBOY: But you didn't?
AGEE: I never intended to. At that time, I was just trying to calm
them down. I hoped that would stall them for a while, but I
couldn't be certain, and from that moment on, I lived under a big
strain.
PLAYBOY: Were you afraid you might be assassinated?
AGEE: I was too busy to think about that. But I was jumpy. For one
thing, I wasn't sure to what lengths the French secret service
might go to please The Company. At the very least, I was afraid I
might be deported and put on some plane that made its first stop
in New York.
PLAYBOY: Did you see any indication that your fears were
justified?
AGEE: A few months after Gardiner's visit, I noticed I was being
followed on the street. I couldn't be sure if it was CIA people or
a French liaison operation working at the CIA's request. And I had
no idea what they might be setting me up for. For all I knew, they
might have been a bunch of killers. Anyway, about the same time,
my advance from the publisher ran out. The situation was pretty
grim. The CIA was after me and sometimes I literally didn't have a
franc for cigarettes. I felt pretty damn small and alone. Friends
helped out with food and some small cash donations, and to avoid
the surveillance, I went to live in the room of a friend who's an
artist. In the daytime, I worked as usual at the library doing my
research, but I kept the place where I was living a secret.
PLAYBOY: How did you duck the people who were tailing you?
AGEE: It wasn't too hard. I'd take the M?tro, for example, the
Paris subway, and when the train arrived, I'd just stand by the
door and let it go off again and see if anybody had stayed in the
station with me when all the other people were gone. Or when I got
off the train, I'd stay there on the platform and let everybody
leave and then see if anybody else had remained on the platform.
Usually, there was a group of three or four of them. Once
identified, they'd be easy to lose. One time, when I had a little
cash, I took a cab. My retinue took a cab, too. I told my driver
to stop at the Arc de Triomphe. When he did, I pretended to be
fumbling for my money, but I was really watching my surveillance
team in the rearview mirror. They got out of their cab fast, all
set to keep following me on foot. But the minute their cab drove
off, I told my driver I'd decided to ride a little farther. So we
pulled away and left them standing there. I couldn't resist--I
turned around slowly, held my hand up and gave them the finger.
PLAYBOY: Besides following you, did The Company make any other
moves?
AGEE: Some surprisingly obvious ones. A CIA man visited my father
in Florida and tried to scare him about what might happen to me.
Another CIA man called on Janet and got her to write me a letter
of concern. He also told her they'd pay me to stop and not
publish. She didn't tell me this, but my older son did--he was
listening secretly. God, I hope spying isn't congenital!
In the spring of 1972, The Company moved against me more directly.
A young man who said his name was Sal Ferrera showed up in a caf?
I liked and introduced himself as an underground journalist. I
told him who I was and what I was doing. He offered me a small
loan and suggested that he might do an interview with me. I was
desperate for money, so I took the loan and let him have the
interview. He bought me a dinner one night and afterward we met a
woman named Leslie Donegan, who said she was a Venezuelan heiress.
At Sal's urging, I saw Leslie again and soon she offered to
support me while I finished the book--provided I let her read the
manuscript. I needed money so badly I let her have a copy for a
few days.
PLAYBOY: Did Leslie come through with the money?
AGEE: In dribs and drabs, enough to keep me going. It's ironic to
think that the book may have got finished partly because the CIA,
through Leslie, supported me through my darkest hour. But the
situation had its risks. I was just plain foolish to keep seeing
Sal and Leslie. The bugged typewriter was the last straw.
PLAYBOY: The CIA bugged your typewriter?
AGEE: Sal lent me a portable that Leslie eventually switched for a
different one. I took it to my secret living place. One afternoon
I went out to get a bottle of beer and when I went back to the
room, I saw a man and a woman in the hall outside my door. When
they saw me, they began kissing. I thought right away they might
be surveillance agents--but how had they found out where I lived?
The friend whose room I was staying in went out to see what they
were doing in the hall. When they saw her, they hurried down the
back stairs but couldn't get out the back door, because it was
locked. When she followed them down, they started embracing and
whispering again and then ran up to the main floor and escaped by
the front door. They had something bulky under their
coats--probably the receiving set for monitoring the bug in the
typewriter.
PLAYBOY: The typewriter had led them to you?
AGEE: This typewriter--the one you see right here on the table.
The one that's photographed on the cover of my book. After
catching the monitors, I began to examine the typewriter Leslie
had given me. I noticed that when it was facing a certain way, I
heard a beeping sound on my FM radio. So I tore off the lining on
the inside roof of the case and there it was--a complicated system
of miniaturized transistors, batteries, circuits, antennas, even a
tiny switch glued flat against the roof of the case.
PLAYBOY: Have you ever been accused of rigging this yourself to
discredit the CIA?
AGEE: I wouldn't know how to make one of these. My editor in
London had a technical study made and the thing is
legitimate--made in TSD.
PLAYBOY: So they'd found out where you lived--what did they do
then?
AGEE: I didn't give them a chance to do anything. I left that room
the same day and slept in a different hotel every night until I
took off for London.
PLAYBOY: Why did you go to London?
AGEE: Partly to get information, partly to look for a new
publisher. I found one almost overnight. An editor of Penguin
Books, Neil Middleton, believed in the book and gave me an
advance. I also found the information I still needed. I'd been
looking desperately for Latin-American newspapers that covered the
years when I was there. John Gerassi, who has written extensively
on Latin America and was teaching at the University of Paris when
I was in France, had told me the British Museum had completed
files and he was right. They were just what I needed. I decided to
stay in London and rewrite the book. With all the new material
available, I saw I could reconstruct a diary of the whole period.
I finished the research in eight months, then in the next six
months I wrote over 600 pages in a terrific burst of work.
PLAYBOY: Did the new material inspire you?
AGEE: Well, it wasn't only the material. I had met a young woman
just before I left Paris. Angela's a Brazilian in her early 20s.
We fell in love before she knew I had worked for the CIA and
before I knew she had been in prison and been tortured by the
CIA-supported military regime in Brazil. Strange, isn't it, that
two people with such opposite experiences should have come
together? It was from Angela that I learned the full horror of
what I had been doing in supporting repression. When I was in
Montevideo, I was actually in charge of spying on Brazilian exiles
who opposed the military regime and had fled to Uruguay. I
reported on their activities to our CIA station in Rio. Anyway,
Angela came over to London a few months after I did and we've been
together ever since. She was a tremendous help with the book,
reading and discussing every sentence with me, helping with the
typing and the Xeroxing. I was so scared that the CIA might try to
steal the manuscript that every time I got 20 or 30 pages done,
we'd Xerox copies and hide them all over London.
PLAYBOY: You say Angela was tortured by the Brazilian government?
AGEE: In early 1970; she was 19, a student at Catholic University
in Rio. She had gotten involved in radical politics and had to go
underground, and was wounded in an ambush by the military police.
They left her for dead and she had almost escaped when they
spotted her and hauled her off to an interrogation center, where
they began to torture her.
PLAYBOY: What kinds of torture did they use?
AGEE: Clubs, truncheons, fists. They hung her upside down from a
bar and beat her. They would stand behind her and clap her ears as
hard as they could with both hands. She says her head felt as if
it were exploding, blood spurted out of her ears and she passed
out. But most of the torture was done with a field telephone. They
attached electrodes to sensitive parts of the body, the nipples or
the lips, and then cranked the telephone as hard as they could.
Sometimes they poured water on her before they turned the crank;
because water is a conductor of electricity, the pain was even
more excruciating. One of her torturers got the bright idea of
putting the electrodes on her gunshot wound and then cranking the
generator. The electricity forced the wound open again. Somehow
Angela held out. All she admitted under torture, which went on
over a period of maybe four months, was her membership in an
underground party--and she was ashamed of admitting that. A year
and a half after she was arrested, she went to trial. A year after
that, she finally got out. Her closest relative, an aunt who is a
lawyer, shipped her out of the country.
PLAYBOY: Is torture still going on in Brazil?
AGEE: Every day. There's one difference. At first, the torturers
wore name plates and didn't bother to hide their faces. Later,
after several were executed by revolutionaries, the torturers got
nervous and began to hood their victims. But many names were
already known. They turned up in Chile, too, and were recognized
there. After Allende fell, the Brazilian military lent the Chilean
military some of its most successful torture teams as a gesture of
good will.
PLAYBOY: How is Angela now?
AGEE: Solid. No emotional scars that I can see. A very gentle and
spiritual woman. She's with me and my children, who are living
with us permanently now, in England. The book is for her and for
all the people who have suffered torture because of the CIA. You
know, when and if the history of the CIA's support to torturers
gets written--not just in Brazil but in Chile, Uruguay, Portugal,
Greece, Iran, Indonesia, above all in Vietnam--my God, it'll be
the all-time horror story.
PLAYBOY: Has The Company kept after you in England the way it did
in France?
AGEE: I've been shadowed and my phone was tapped.
PLAYBOY: People are always saying their phones are tapped. How do
you know your phone was tapped?
AGEE: How about this? Just last week, at home, the telephone went
dead for a couple of hours. Then it rang and a guy on the line
asked, "Is this a WB 400 number?" or some letters like that and
then a number. And I said, "What's that?" And he said, "Oh, this
is the telephone-company engineer, and we've just installed a new
cable up the hill toward your house, and I'm in here in the
exchange right now, connecting it." And I said, "What do you
mean, a WB 400 number?" And he said, "Oh, you know, it's one of
those observation lines." And I said, "Observing what?" He said,
"Well, they don't tell you very much about it. I'm new; this is my
first job. But there's this little black box on the frame here
where your pair is." And I said, "Well, I don't know." And he
said, "Well, now tell me, are you . . . is this a private line?"
And I said, "Yes." And he said, "Oh, excuse me. Yes, yes,
yes--everything's all right. Thanks. Bye." I checked later with
some people who know about phone tapping in Britain, and they have
a system there for monitoring lines where they have obscene or
threatening calls, and they use that as a cover for political line
tapping.
PLAYBOY: Have there been any obvious attempts to harass you?
AGEE: Nothing overt until Angela and I and the boys went on a
two-week trip to Portugal over Christmas and New Year's. We went
with the car by ferry from Southampton to San Sebasti‚n, Spain,
and when we were rolling off the ferry, Christopher said, "Hey,
Dad, I just saw that policeman looking at our license plate and
now he's making a phone call." Sure enough, when we pulled out of
the docking area, five cars pulled out after us! We looked like a
funeral procession. It was obvious what had happened: The CIA had
known of our trip from the telephone tap and had asked the Spanish
service to shadow us--I hoped that was all. But it occurred to me,
for instance, that they could have planted some drugs in my car.
If they stopped us and "found" drugs, I could be put away for 20
years! Anyway, with that army on our tail, I figured they had
something major in mind, but I knew I couldn't outrun them. They
were all in big cars and I was driving a little VW. So I just
moseyed along steadily for an hour or so. Occasionally, one of
them would pass me, then drop back. Once I pulled into a rest area
just as one of the drivers was changing his license plates--the
CIA makes an all-purpose quick-change license-plate bracket that
fits different sizes of plates from different countries. When we
reached the caves at Altamira, two of our shadows went down into
the caves with us to see the pre-historic paintings. When we came
out, I saw another agent holding in a curious way what looked like
a TSD briefcase. So I drifted in his direction and when I passed
him, I heard the camera inside the briefcase go zing!
It was getting scary, but suddenly I had a real bit of luck. We
came to a city named Torrelavega. It was about six, the rush hour,
and the streets were crowded with cars. Up ahead there was a big
intersection, maybe seven streets coming together and one traffic
cop in the middle, trying to keep all the lines moving. OK, I
thought, this is my chance. I stopped the car against the cop's
signal and pretended I was stalled. He got hysterical. There were
horns blowing, mass confusion. The cop forced all the cars behind
me, including, of course, all the surveillance cars, to go around
me and keep moving. I watched which streets they turned into, then
took a different street and made a couple of quick turns. Pretty
soon I was on the back road to Burgos and we never saw them again.
But that was lucky. They were asleep.
PLAYBOY: Do you think The Company is behind the leaks that have
been made to the press about you in the past year?
AGEE: Sure it is. During the Watergate hearings, while Senator
Howard Baker was investigating the CIA's involvement, he came
across a veiled mention of a "WH Flap." He assumed the phrase
meant White House Flap. Actually, it meant Western Hemisphere Flap
and referred to me and my book. This had to be explained to
Senator Baker. The CIA figured that someone would talk and the cat
would soon be out of the bag. So an attempt was made to discredit
me in advance. A story was leaked to The New York Times, A.P., The
Washington Post and Newsweek about a "drunk and despondent former
CIA officer" who was talking to the K.G.B., telling them all about
the CIA.
PLAYBOY: And were you drunk and despondent?
AGEE: Why should I be? I'd finally finished my book.
PLAYBOY: Were you talking to the K.G.B.?
AGEE: No way. And they knew I wasn't. In the CIA's so-called news
leak, the CIA officer wasn't identified, the K.G.B. people weren't
identified, the time and place and substance of the supposed
conversations weren't given. Nevertheless, the Times and Newsweek
fell for the story and printed it as fact. The Washington Post
printed an item but said it was unconfirmed.
PLAYBOY: Nobody bothered to check the story out?
AGEE: That's right. Where the CIA is concerned, very few
journalists have learned to tell information from disinformation.
But that time, the smear wound up on the CIA's face, and I owe
that to Victor Marchetti. By the way, the CIA tried to get
Marchetti to spy on me. When The Company heard that he was going
to England, they asked him to steal my manuscript so they could
read it. We think they already had a copy of the book and were
just trying to use him so they could discredit him with his
friends as an informer. Of course, he turned them down.... But
getting back to the smear story. Marchetti told Larry Stern of The
Washington Post what the CIA was trying to do to me, and Larry
flew over to England to see me and got the facts and printed them.
The Times sent Dick Eder to see me and then printed an item saying
its source had retracted the story. It's a small victory, I guess,
but to me it's not a trivial one. If the press can start to expose
some of the CIA's little lies, maybe someday it'll get around to
exposing some of the big ones.
The big victory for me right now, of course, is the publication of
the book and the fact that it's a success. But I've been lucky to
get this far, when you think of the odds. My father thinks what
I'm doing is some kind of personal vendetta against the
agency--not so, of course, but the agency sure trashed me in an
effort to complicate my negotiations for U.S. publication of my
book. There was, for example, a series of leaks to Jack Anderson
that he obligingly printed, to the effect that I'm under some kind
of Cuban-government control. Too bad about Anderson. You'd think
he'd have wanted to help get my book published in the U.S., since
his so-called CIA sources confirmed its accuracy to him. But it
finally is getting published there. The CIA can't hide its crimes
from the American public forever, and I'll bet other books will
follow Marchetti's and mine.
PLAYBOY: But doesn't the CIA have a legitimate bone to pick with
you? For instance, like Daniel Ellsberg, you've been accused of
violating a secrecy agreement. What do you say to that?
AGEE: I did violate the secrecy agreement. But I think it was
worse to stay silent than to violate the agreement. The agreement
itself was plain immoral--like criminals' swearing secrecy.
PLAYBOY: Do you plan to go back to the U.S. and risk indictment?
AGEE: I don't know if I'm subject to indictment and neither do my
lawyers. If it turns out I am subject to indictment, I may go back
and fight it as a test case. I may not.
PLAYBOY: Even if you don't go back to the U.S., you're going to
publish your book there. Other than indirectly, as through the
leaks to Anderson, do you think the CIA has tried to block it?
AGEE: The CIA let prospective publishers know that if they tried
to publish it, they would face expensive litigation. But a lot has
happened since Marchetti's book was published. If as much comes
out as I expect, the CIA may look pretty silly if it tries to
assume a posture of civic virtue in front of a magistrate. That's
why I published the book first in England. I figured the CIA
couldn't so easily stop publication there and I figured that once
the truth was out somewhere in the world, it would be much harder
to keep from the American people. And that's what I really care
about. I wanted the book to be published in the United States
because I wanted the American people to know what I know about the
CIA, what the CIA has been doing all these years, all over the
world, in their name.
PLAYBOY: Many people agree with your aims but disagree strongly
with your methods. They say that by revealing the names of CIA
agents and exposing CIA procedures your book jeopardizes U.S.
security. What is your answer to that?
AGEE: I think it's a little late in the day to pretend that what
I've written puts the country in any danger. What I've written
puts the CIA in danger. The CIA claims that secrecy is necessary
to hide what it is doing from the enemies of the United States. I
claim that the real reason for secrecy is to hide what the CIA is
doing from the American people and from the people victimized by
the CIA.
PLAYBOY: But many people who dislike the CIA as much as you do
have charged that by revealing the names and functions of
individual officers and agents of the CIA, you have endangered the
lives of your former colleagues, many of whom you yourself induced
to become employees of The Company. Your accusers ask: Wasn't it
unnecessary, wasn't it immoral, wasn't it, in fact, a crime to
reveal those names?
AGEE: Absolutely not. Those people talk about the CIA as if it
were an international charity of some sort and about me as if I'd
done something horrible to a lot of decent, well-meaning Y.M.C.A.
leaders. In fact, the CIA, in my opinion, is a criminal
organization at least as nefarious as the Mafia and much, much
more powerful. Even more than the Vietnam war, the CIA represents
the destruction of our national ideals on the pretext of saving
them. What you've got to understand is that in revealing the names
of CIA operatives, I am revealing the names of people engaged in
criminal activities. These people live by breaking the law. Every
day of the week, CIA men break the laws of the countries they're
stationed in. I don't know any country in which bugging or
intercepting mail or bribing public officials is legal.
At the same time, it's nonsense to say that by exposing the CIA
officers and agents I knew, I have endangered their lives. I have
exposed some to problems, but The Company can solve those problems
for the indigenous agents in Latin America. As for the Company
officers I've named, well, they can stay in Langley if they want
to be safe.
PLAYBOY: Do you think your book has disrupted CIA operations in
Latin America?
AGEE: I hope so, and I think the disruptions I've caused will be
followed by many more around the world. I think the fact that
Marchetti and I have broken ranks and somehow survived is going to
encourage a lot of other CIA men to come out of that poisonous fog
of secrecy they've been living in and tell their stories. There's
a lot of soul-searching going on in the CIA now and I'm going to
do all I can to help the people who decide to get out. If my book
is a commercial success, I'll be able to support CIA men who want
to talk.
PLAYBOY: In your opinion, what will be the result of the CIA
investigations in Washington?
AGEE: The Rockefeller Commission was never a real danger to the
CIA. President Ford set it up to whitewash The Company. The House
committee shows real promise and so does the one in the Senate.
These committees have the chance right now to correct the mistake
the Congress made almost 30 years ago in not making sure the CIA
was closely controlled. I sure hope they do, and I would applaud
anything they could do to restrict CIA-promoted repression, even
though I think the CIA should be abolished.
PLAYBOY: Do you think that's a serious possibility?
AGEE: I think that for the time being, we will have some kind of
intelligence collection for early warning and monitoring of
agreements with the Soviets. But this can be preserved under the
military services. Perhaps also the analytical work done by the
nonclandestine part of the CIA will be continued. But it could be
continued in a wholly different kind of organization, with a
different name and without any of the kinds of overseas operations
that I engaged in. Imagine the fear and suspicion and resentment
that would be eliminated on the part of other governments if the
CIA were abolished or at least if its overseas operations were.
And we might avoid those future Vietnams that are germinating
wherever The Company is supporting repressive governments.
PLAYBOY: In your book, you support socialist revolution. Don't you
think that will turn a lot of people off to what you have to say?
AGEE: It's just the opposite: I couldn't answer all the letters
of support I'd gotten--even before the book had come out in the
U.S.
PLAYBOY: Couching the world picture in your terms, those of class
warfare, is the CIA winning or losing?
AGEE: The question should be whether people, not the CIA, are
winning or losing. In the Third World, the poor are beginning to
win, in my opinion. In an era of expensive energy, the U.S. no
longer has the money to protect its foreign investments at all
costs and to repress every socialist movement. More and more,
we're going to have to learn to live within our own resources. The
CIA can still do a lot of harm, but its palmy days are
over--unless we really go fascist, and with a depression coming
on, that's a live possibility. In the United States, though, it
seems to me the poor are not yet winning. The system that's been
exploiting the rest of the world is also exploiting Americans. The
difference is that other people are more aware of it.
PLAYBOY: Aren't you being doctrinaire? The American worker you
consider exploited is said to have the world's highest standard of
living.
AGEE: Poverty and prosperity are relative as well as absolute
measurements. Have you read the 1974 Report of the Senate Select
Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs? This report, written
before unemployment soared, stated that 40,000,000 Americans, 20
percent of the population, are living in poverty--in fact, are
sinking deeper into poverty every year. On the average, they were
hungrier and needier in 1974 than they had been five years
earlier. The report also pointed out that in the last 45
years--all through the New Deal, the Fair Deal and the biggest
economic boom in U.S. history--the proportion of the national
income received by the 20 percent at the bottom of the income
scale had not changed one iota. And get this: The Senate
committee discovered that the richest one percent of the U.S.
population not only has more wealth than the poorest 50 percent of
the population--it has eight times more! And we've supposedly had
40 years of liberal reform.
If we want social and economic justice, we're going to have to
scrap capitalism as we know it. Already in the space of three
short generations, a third of the world's population has done
this. Are we going to be the last? We should realize that
socialist societies are built on national traditions--for better
or for worse--and that we can build socialism and at the same time
preserve our special tradition of civil liberties and right to
dissent. But right now, unless someone's really rich, he's
demoralized by the fear that there won't be enough to go around
unless he screws the other guy. We're so goddamn alone, everybody
guarding his own pile, however small. Property separates people
from one another. But we're so tranquilized by sex and beer and
football and the chance to play a small hand in the game of
success that we don't even know we're being exploited. I suggest
it's time we noticed how badly we've been had and began to stand
up for ourselves. I suggest that if we want to, we can make sure
that whatever there is to go around goes around fairly. But that's
socialism. And remember: New systems can develop only when people
are ready for them and want them--if imposed by foreign peoples or
brute force, they fail.
PLAYBOY: We all agree that the free-enterprise system has faults.
But no socialist system that has been set up so far provides the
sort of idealistic paradise you envision, with everything fairly
distributed. The point at issue here is the CIA--whether it does
more good than harm, whether the world would be better served by
its existence as is, by its reform or by its destruction.
AGEE: I leave it to you to decide. I promise you that the CIA now
knows who you are and is undoubtedly at this moment running you
through its computers. Have you ever been arrested? Are your tax
returns up to date? Did you ever fail to pay a bill? Have you ever
been to an analyst? Did you ever knock a girl up? Are you strictly
heterosexual? Do you sometimes blow a little grass? And, by the
way, when you leave the hotel, glance over your shoulder. Somebody
may be following you.
