Philip Agee, ex-CIA agent who alleged misdeeds

Philip Agee wrote "Inside the Company: CIA Diary," in which he exposed US covert activities and operatives. (getty images file/2000)

WASHINGTON - Philip Agee, a former undercover officer with the Central Intelligence Agency whose disillusionment with American policy in support of dictatorial regimes prompted him to name names and reveal CIA secrets, died Monday in Havana. He was 72.

His wife, Giselle Roberge Agee, told the Associated Press that Mr. Agee had undergone surgery for perforated ulcers. His death, she said, was the result of a related infection. He had lived primarily in Hamburg, but kept an apartment in Havana, she said.

In his controversial 1975 book, "Inside the Company: CIA Diary," Mr. Agee detailed the inner workings of US intelligence operations around the world, but primarily in Latin America, where he had been stationed for eight years during the 1960s. The CIA, he charged, was interested only in propping up decaying dictatorships and thwarting radical reform efforts. Published in 20 languages, the book also included a 22-page list of purported agency operatives.

"That was right in the middle of a political crisis in the United States connected to the war in Vietnam, and the history of the CIA was very much on people's minds," said Thomas Powers, author of "Intelligence Wars: American Secret History from Hitler to al-Qaeda." "The elementary-school version of American history had always been that the US is always on the side of the good guys, and here comes Philip Agee to tell us it ain't so, and especially in Latin America."

Mr. Agee insisted that publishing the names of fellow case officers was a political act in the "long and honorable tradition of dissidence in the United States." Former colleagues and government officials termed it treason.

The book "caused serious damage to the national security," the State Department said shortly after its publication, and in 1979, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance stripped Mr. Agee of his passport.

Prompted in large part by Mr. Agee's book, Congress in 1982 passed the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, making it illegal to knowingly divulge the identity of covert CIA officers.

Former president George H.W. Bush, who directed the CIA in 1976-77, accused Mr. Agee of identifying Richard Welch, the CIA chief in Athens who had been assassinated by Greek terrorists in December 1975. Bush maintained in 1989 that by publicly identifying Welch, Mr. Agee was responsible for his death.

Mr. Agee insisted Welch's identity was known before the book was published.

Bush's wife, Barbara, repeated the contention in her 1994 autobiography, and Mr. Agee sued her for libel. As part of a legal settlement, she agreed to remove the allegation from the paperback edition of her book.

Mr. Agee also wrote "Dirty Work: The CIA in Western Europe" (1978) and "On the Run" (1987), detailing what he alleged was a CIA campaign to silence him.

A native of Tacoma, Fla., Mr. Agee attended Jesuit schools and graduated from the University of Notre Dame in 1956.

He served as an Air Force officer from 1957 to 1960 and then began his CIA career. At the time, he considered himself a "patriot dedicated to the preservation of my country and our way of life," he wrote in "Inside the Company."

His first overseas assignment was in Quito, Ecuador. He also worked as an attaché during the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City and as a case officer in Uruguay.

"I began to realize more and more that all of the things that I and my colleagues were doing in the CIA had one goal, that was that we were supporting the traditional power structures in Latin America," he wrote. "Eventually I decided I didn't want anything to do with that."