In a new CovertAction webinar famed Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg slams the author of new book alleging that Agee was a traitor when, ironically, everything in the book virtually screams out the opposite.

U.S. Colonel Ann Wright—outspoken opponent of the Iraq War, and recipient of the State Department Award for Heroism in 1997 for helping to rescue thousands from death during the Sierra Leone civil war—notes that the CIA ‘Dirty Tricks’ exposed by Agee in Inside the Company (1975), are now being dusted off and reused to overthrow progressive governments in countries like Venezuela and Nicaragua.

Famed Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg praised CIA whistleblower Philip Agee as a man of moral courage at a CovertAction Magazine (CAM) webinar on Monday, stating that Agee “tried to put a spoke in the wheel of the U.S. imperial project.”

The webinar was convened as a response to a book on Agee by former National Security Council staffer Jonathan Stevenson entitled A Drop of Treason.

While it accuses Agee of treason, readers of the book have been coming away saying, “Huh? It proves exactly the opposite! It portrays Agree as a true patriot, loyal to the very bedrock of American democratic principles.”

Agee quit the CIA in 1969 out of disgust for its conduct and, in 1975, published Inside the Company: CIA Diary, which outed CIA officers who were involved in criminal activity.

Agee subsequently helped found CovertAction Information Bulletin in 1978 to carry on his work exposing the CIA.

Ellsberg specified that he had gotten to know Agee reasonably well in the 1980s when both were part of an association of ex-national security alumni and found Agee to be “extremely intelligent” and “in a very conventional sense a patriot.”

“[Agee] wanted what was best for this country but not at the expense of other countries and civil rights … He had a universal outlook that was consistent with the best values of America which put him at odds with the national security bureaucracy.”

Ellsberg added that he was impressed by the “tenacity of Agee’s work and loyalty to the U.S. Constitution and human project. Agee and I both worked for the [national security complex] when we were young. We believed what we were told about the American purpose in the world [in the Cold War]—that the United States was an altruistic power that supported democracy and self-determination in the Third World.”

But this notion, Ellsberg said, was “flatly false.”

“It took a while for me and Agee to see this. Initially we considered Vietnam an aberration, but it took a while to realize that it was characteristic of U.S. policy in the Third World.

“We were part of a covert empire in which regime change, bribery, coups and assassinations were routinely carried out—that’s who we worked for. Agee and I both woke up around the same time to realize that the family business was really the mafia—like the Sopranos.”

Ellsberg continued: “As a society [generally] we are in denial about this empire and give false explanations and stories to deceive people about it. We make like we are better than others, even though we [have] routinely undertaken efforts to suppress democracy in countries around the world; to suppress unions and peasant organizations—anything that supported the welfare of the local people against multi-national corporations. Agee brought this up and went further in trying to sabotage these operations and to name the people [involved].”

As to Stevenson’s book, Ellsberg said that “you can read the book and come out an admirer of Agee.” Stevenson even refuted the notion that “Phil led to the death of Richard Welch [CIA Station Chief in Athens] or anyone else.”

But Stevenson got it wrong about Agee being a traitor.

This conclusion stemmed from his background as a professor at the Naval War College and National Security Council director for political-military affairs, Middle East, and North Africa; he “had to distance himself from Agee to stay employed.”

“The Same Dirty Tricks”

Besides responding to Stevenson’s book, the webinar was set up to commemorate whistle-blowers on the eve of the sentencing of Daniel Hale, a former drone operator who leaked classified documents exposing the inhumanity of the drone warfare program.

The event also coincides with National Whistleblower Day—which is on Friday, July 30^th.

One of the keynote speakers was retired Army Colonel Ann Wright, who resigned from her position in the State Department in protest of the impending Iraq War.

Beginning her career with the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War, Wright served as a diplomat in Nicaragua, Grenada, Sierra Leone, Micronesia, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Mongolia.

Wright said that the message that she took from her 35 years in government was to be “very suspicious of what the government is doing” and “not to trust it.”

Wright said she read Philip Agee’s book and that very little has changed today as to how the government and its covert agencies operate.

“Oh yes, the same dirty tricks are being used in Venezuela and Nicaragua [among other countries].”

Philip Agee Speaks

The webinar opened with clips of an interview Philip Agee gave during the late 1970s for a documentary called On Company Business. Agee pointed out that the CIA’s support for repressive security services in Iran, South Korea, Chile and Indonesia was incompatible with Jimmy Carter’s “human rights” policy, and said that U.S. foreign policy since World War II was driven by the need to create foreign markets for the over-production of U.S. products.

According to Agee, the CIA was set up to combat efforts by left-wing parties in Europe to impede the success of the Marshall Plan, whose purpose was to create new investment outlets and contain the spread of socialism/communism.

The CIA, according to Agee, achieved its ends by penetrating and manipulating the institutions of power and propping up friendly forces that were in alignment with political reactionaries.

It worked to penetrate, divide, weaken and destroy left-wing parties, in part by infiltrating trade unions, youth and student movements and creating front organizations.

The same tactics were adopted in Latin American countries that Agee worked, such as Ecuador, where the CIA created a pseudo-leftist political party, disseminated propaganda, and created conditions of fear and hysteria about the spread of the Cuban revolution and communism, which were exploited by right-wing forces that orchestrated a military coup in 1963.

A decade later in Chile, the CIA applied a financial squeeze in order to bring down the democratically elected Socialist government of Salvador Allende, and encouraged truckers to strike in order to help create a climate of chaos that justified a military coup.

The webinar ended with another speech by Agee at the time of the Persian Gulf War, whose roots according to Agee lay in the post-World War II grand strategy.

Since that time, the U.S. required a permanent threat to preserve the war economy, which had to be kept intact out of fear of returning to the conditions of the Great Depression.

According to Agee, those in positions of political power in the U.S. had no interest in solving the major crises afflicting U.S. society—including its lack of a national health plan.

They wanted to keep the public ill-informed because, otherwise, the public might debate substantive issues in the electoral process and form a third party—or rather second party—since both major parties served similar interests.

The new world order of the 1990s, according to Agee, was nothing more than the institutionalization of the North-South dimension of the Cold War.

Third World countries were supposed to know their place and continue to provide cheap raw materials and access to cheap labor to multinational corporations.

If they stepped out of line, they would be smashed.

Naming Names

Louis Wolf, who helped found CovertAction Information Bulletin in the 1970s, recalled during the webinar meeting Agee in 1975 in London, when Agee later said that he thought Wolf was sent by the Agency to “get close” to him, and telling him that he was surprised that the CIA had not killed him yet. 

Together with Bill Schaap, Ellen Ray, the renowned lawyers Bill Kunstler and Michael Ratner, also with CIA finance officer in the Tokyo CIA station James Wilcott and his CIA secretary-wife Elsie who had both resigned from the CIA in 1966, Wolf and Agee in 1978 co-founded CovertAction Information Bulletin, later renamed CovertAction Quarterly, and now Covert Action Magazine.

A key feature of CovertAction Information Bulletin at its inception was the “Naming Names” column—which drew exclusively from open public sources, not from a single classified document.

Agee was nevertheless deported from seven European countries at the behest of the State Department and CIA and was the first U.S. citizen since civil rights leader Paul Robeson at the height of the McCarthy era to have his passport canceled.

Agee’s son Chris, at the webinar, emphasized how his father felt that one could not separate the people from the activities that they had carried out.

In comparison to other whistleblowers, Agee was remarkable because he developed a sophisticated critique of the political-economic dimensions underlying U.S. imperialism and worked to tirelessly educate the public and develop anti-imperialist solidarity networks, and trained students to organize a CIA-off-the-campus movement.

Stevenson in his book wanted to label Agee as a “bad” whistleblower because he questioned the U.S. imperial project, but this made Agee a good whistleblower like Ellsberg, according to Chris, because he did not just question one specific program, but challenged the entire framework of U.S. foreign policy.

Agee provided a deep analysis about U.S. imperialism and its thirst for grabbing oil, minerals and other natural resources and accessing cheap labor—as Wolf put it—which lies at the root of the human tragedy.

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