Philip Agee, the former CIA officer who turned against the agency and spent years exposing undercover U.S. spies overseas, died Monday in Havana. He was 72.
"Phil Agee was really the first person to do whistle-blowing on the CIA on the grand scale," said William H. Schaap, a New York lawyer and old friend who worked with him on anti-CIA projects. "He blew the whistle on hundreds and hundreds of undercover operations."
At a ceremony in 1997 to mark the 50th anniversary of the CIA, the elder George Bush, the former U.S. president and director of Central Intelligence, invoked Agee as a symbol of treachery. "Remember Philip Agee, who I consider a traitor to our country?" Bush asked.
Agee was sometimes accused — wrongly, according to him and his friends — of bearing some responsibility for the death of Richard Welch, the agency's Athens station chief, who was assassinated in 1975 by the Greek terrorist group November 17.
Barbara Bush, the former first lady, included such an accusation in her autobiography. Agee sued, and Barbara Bush omitted the reference to him from later printings.
"He really, truly did not want to see anyone hurt," said Wolf, the friend and co-author who carried on Agee's work of exposing agents. "He wanted to neutralize what they were doing — the whole gamut, from fixing elections and hiring local journalists to plant stories all the way up to creating foreign intelligence services that became agencies of oppression."
"When I joined the CIA I believed in the need for its existence," he wrote in "CIA Diary." "After 12 years with the agency I finally understood how much suffering it was causing, that millions of people all over the world had been killed or had their lives destroyed by the CIA and the institutions it supports."
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