Philip Agee
Philip Burnett Franklin Agee, born on July 19, 1935, in Tacoma Park, Florida, was an American former CIA officer and later a notable critic of the agency. After graduating from the University of Notre Dame in 1956, Agee joined the CIA, completing his military obligation through the agency's training program. His assignments included posts in Ecuador, Uruguay, and Mexico City. In 1969, he resigned from the CIA to expose its operations in Latin America and elsewhere, prompting a controversial career shift that saw him publish *Inside the Company: CIA Diary* in 1975. This book, which revealed the identities of numerous CIA operatives, generated significant backlash and danger for those named. Agee's actions led to his expulsion from several countries and the revocation of his U.S. passport, ultimately leading him to settle in Cuba where he continued to engage in activities critical of U.S. intelligence practices. His legacy is complex, with some viewing him as a whistleblower and others as a traitor, illustrating the divisive nature of intelligence work and its repercussions.
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Philip Agee
Writer
- Born: July 19, 1935
- Birthplace: Tacoma Park, Florida
- Died: January 7, 2008
- Place of death: Cuba
Biography
Philip Burnett Franklin Agee was born on July 19, 1935, in Tacoma Park, Florida, the son of a well-to-do businessman. Agee was educated at the University of Notre Dame, graduating in 1956. At that time, he intended to go to law school. In January, 1957, Agee went to Havana, Cuba, to celebrate his twenty-second birthday. During his visit, he developed a strong sympathy for Fidel Castro, who a month before had launched his revolution.
In 1957, Agee learned he was about to be drafted and decided to accept a tempting offer from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Once accepted to the CIA’s career officer training program, he could fulfill his military obligation by serving three years in the air force, the first year on active duty and the latter two completing his CIA training. Agee was commissioned as a second lieutenant in 1958. In 1960, he was assigned to Quito, Ecuador, and four years later he was sent to Montevideo, Uruguay. In 1966, he returned to CIA headquarters in Washington, D.C.
In 1967, Agee was sent to Mexico City, but in 1969 he resigned from the CIA and enrolled in a Latin American studies program at the University of Mexico. However, because he felt impelled to write a book exposing the CIA’s activities in Latin America and, on a larger scale, in Vietnam, Agee left the university and went to Cuba to conduct research, presumably aided by Cuban and Russian agents. Agee later moved to Paris, France, and then to London, England, where he published Inside the Company: CIA Diary (1975).
Reviewers of Inside the Company were impressed by the wealth of detail it contained but pointed out that the author had ended the usefulness and endangered the lives of the 250 CIA operatives whose names and addresses he listed in the book. In December, 1975, after his name, address, and title were published in the magazine Counterspy, Richard S. Welch, chief of the CIA’s bureau in Athens, Greece, was gunned down on his doorstep. Some of Agee’s comments published in the Counterspy article could be read as encouraging assassination. The identities of nearly eight hundred employees of the CIA and the National Security Agency were revealed in a book Agee coedited, Dirty Work: The CIA in Western Europe (1978).
After being expelled from the United Kingdom and four other European countries and having his American passport revoked, Agee settled down in Cuba. His memoir On the Run appeared in 1987. In 2000, Agee went into partnership with Fidel Castro in an Internet-based travel business that aimed to persuade Americans to vacation in Cuba.
Agee’s achievements were summed up by the U.S. Intelligence Committee in 1980. The committee said Agee destroyed links that the intelligence community had taken decades to develop, ended the careers of many American agents, and imperiled thousands of foreign nationals and fellow Americans, some of whom paid with their lives. As for Agee himself, he would be remembered as a child of privilege who became a turncoat and who, as a result of the choices he made, would end his days as a man without a country.