Филип Эйджи: ЦРУ-дан тайып, Кубаға кеткен шпион

CIA officer and author (1935–2008)

Philip Burnett Franklin Agee ('/eɪ//dʒ//i/; January 19, 1935 – January 7, 2008) was a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) case officer and writer of the 1975 book, Inside the Company: CIA Diary, detailing his experiences in the CIA. Agee joined the CIA in 1957, and over the following decade had postings in Washington, D. C., Ecuador, Uruguay and Mexico. After resigning from the Agency in 1968, he became a leading opponent of CIA practices. A co founder of the CounterSpy and CovertAction series of periodicals, he died in Cuba in January 2008.

Agee was born in Takoma Park, Maryland and was raised in Tampa, Florida. He had, Agee wrote in On the Run, "a privileged upbringing in a big white house bordering an exclusive golf club". After graduating from Tampa's Jesuit High School, he attended the University of Notre Dame, from which he graduated cum laude in 1956. John Barron wrote in his book The KGB Today (1983) that Agee's resignation was forced "for a variety of reasons, including his irresponsible drinking, continuous and vulgar propositioning of embassy wives, and inability to manage his finances". Agee said these claims were ad hominem attacks meant to discredit him.

Russian exile Oleg Kalugin, former head of the KGB's Counterintelligence Directorate, claimed that in 1973 Agee approached the KGB's resident in Mexico City and offered a "treasure trove of information." According to Kalugin, the KGB was too suspicious to accept his offer. Kalugin writes that Agee then went to the Cubans, who "welcomed him with open arms." The Cubans shared Agee's information with the KGB, but Kalugin continued to regret the missed opportunity to have direct access to this asset. Agee was accused of receiving up to US$1 million in payments from the Cuban intelligence service. He denied the accusations, which were first made by a high ranking Cuban intelligence officer and defector in a 1992 Los Angeles Times report. A later Los Angeles Times article claimed that Agee posed as a CIA Inspector General staff member in order to target a member of the CIA's Mexico City station on behalf of Cuban intelligence. According to this story, Agee was identified during a meeting by a CIA case officer. Vasili Mitrokhin's KGB files claim that Inside the Company: CIA Diary was "prepared by Service A, together with the Cubans". Mitrokhin's notes however do not indicate what the KGB and DGI contributed to Agee's text. Mitrokhin claims that Agee removed all references to CIA penetration of Latin American Communist parties from his typescript before publication at the request of Service A. In 1978 Agee began the publication of the Covert Action Information Bulletin. Mitrokhin's files claim that the bulletin was founded on the KGB's initiative and the group running it was "put together" by First Chief Directorate counter intelligence and that Agee was the only member of the group who was aware of KGB or DGI involvement. According to Mitrokhin's files, KGB headquarters assembled a team to keep the Bulletin supplied with material specifically designed to compromise the CIA. A document titled Director of Central Intelligence: Perspectives for Intelligence, 1976 1981 was supplied to Agee by the KGB. Agee highlighted in his commentary Director of Central Intelligence William Colby's complaint that the Covert Action Information Bulletin was among the most serious problems facing the CIA.

Because of legal problems in the United States, Inside the Company was first published in 1975 in Britain, while Agee was living in London. Agee said that "Representatives of the Communist Party of Cuba also gave me important encouragement at a time when I doubted that I would be able to find the additional information I needed." The London Evening News called Inside the Company: CIA Diary "a frightening picture of corruption, pressure, assassination and conspiracy". The Economist called the book "inescapable reading". Miles Copeland, Jr., a former CIA station chief in Cairo, said the book was "as complete an account of spy work as is likely to be published anywhere" and it is "an authentic account of how an ordinary American or British 'case officer' operates All of it is presented with deadly accuracy." The book was delayed for six months before being published in the United States; it became an immediate best seller. While written as a diary, the book actually reconstructs events based on Agee's memory and his subsequent research. Agee describes his first overseas assignment in 1960 to Ecuador, where his primary mission had the aim of forcing a diplomatic break between Ecuador and Cuba. He writes that the technique he used included bribery, intimidation, bugging, and forgery. Agee spent four years in Ecuador penetrating Ecuadorian politics. He states that his actions subverted and destroyed the political fabric of Ecuador. The cover of the book featured an image of the bugged typewriter given to Agee by a CIA agent as part of their surveillance and attempts to stop publication of the book. The activity in support of Agee did not prevent his eventual deportation from the UK on June 3, 1977, when he traveled to the Netherlands. Agee was also eventually expelled from the Netherlands, France, West Germany and Italy. which was claimed by the United States House Intelligence Committee to be a hoax produced by the Soviet intelligence services. In 1978 and 1979, Agee published the two volumes of Dirty Work: The CIA in Western Europe and Dirty Work: The CIA in Africa which contained information on 2,000 CIA personnel. Agee's US passport was revoked by the US government in 1979. The State Department offered him an administrative hearing to challenge the passport revocation, but Agee instead sued in federal court. The case reached the Supreme Court, which ruled against Agee in 1981. In 1980 Maurice Bishop's government conferred citizenship of Grenada on Agee, and he took up residence on that island. The collapse of the Grenada Revolution removed that safe haven, and Agee then received a passport from the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. After a change of government there, this passport was revoked in 1990, and he was given a German passport, in accordance with the working status of his wife, the American ballet dancer Giselle Roberge who was working and living in Germany at the time. Agee was later readmitted to both the U. S. and United Kingdom. Agee's own description of his odyssey was published in his autobiography, On the Run, in 1987. Agee lived with his wife principally in Hamburg, Germany and Havana, Cuba, founding the Cubalinda. com travel website in the 1990s. U. S. President George H. W. Bush, who considered Agee a traitor, Agee and his friends rejected Bush's assertion about Welch.