Robert Baer: Havana's Man in Havana
[Robert Baer is a retired case officer for the Central Intelligence Agency. He is the author of See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism.]
I first heard the name Philip Agee, the legendary, rogue Central Intelligence Agency operative one cloudless, blue morning in San Francisco. It was my first interview with the CIA.
The CIA recruiter and I met in his junior suite at the Hilton Hotel. He was an affable man in his 50s, thick in the middle with slicked-back hair, a tweed sports coat, and a club tie. He sat in an armchair, I on the edge of the sofa. ... He reached into his briefcase and pulled out a new paperback -- Agee's memoir, Inside the Company: CIA Diary....
After I was hired by the CIA, no one ever told me why or when recruiters started handing out Agee's book, but I soon understood from the agency's culture that it counted on reactions like mine; the book's appeal was that it opened people's eyes to a concealed, powerful world. Like it or hate it -- and many people did -- it was seductive. Later, I came to understand that the CIA prided itself on having an open-minded view of the world. It wanted its new hires to make up their own minds after they were inside. The irony, of course, was that Agee never expected his book would become a recruiting tool. He intended it to be a stake through the CIA's heart.
On Nov. 9, New York University's Tamiment Library released Agee's personal papers, including his correspondence with left-wing figures throughout Latin America and documents related to his subsequent life in exile in Cuba and Europe, a step that will no doubt case many to revisit his legacy. I don't know what's in these papers, but I can tell you this: I won't be reading a word of it.
The simple truth is that Agee was a fraud. No, let me be exact: He was a paid traitor. As the U.S. government would come to learn, Cuban intelligence was behind Agee's campaign against the CIA -- and it paid him well for his work. Agee's claims of being driven by conviction and ideology were lies. Why believe any of whatever is buried in the NYU papers?...
Read entire article at Foreign Policy
I first heard the name Philip Agee, the legendary, rogue Central Intelligence Agency operative one cloudless, blue morning in San Francisco. It was my first interview with the CIA.
The CIA recruiter and I met in his junior suite at the Hilton Hotel. He was an affable man in his 50s, thick in the middle with slicked-back hair, a tweed sports coat, and a club tie. He sat in an armchair, I on the edge of the sofa. ... He reached into his briefcase and pulled out a new paperback -- Agee's memoir, Inside the Company: CIA Diary....
After I was hired by the CIA, no one ever told me why or when recruiters started handing out Agee's book, but I soon understood from the agency's culture that it counted on reactions like mine; the book's appeal was that it opened people's eyes to a concealed, powerful world. Like it or hate it -- and many people did -- it was seductive. Later, I came to understand that the CIA prided itself on having an open-minded view of the world. It wanted its new hires to make up their own minds after they were inside. The irony, of course, was that Agee never expected his book would become a recruiting tool. He intended it to be a stake through the CIA's heart.
On Nov. 9, New York University's Tamiment Library released Agee's personal papers, including his correspondence with left-wing figures throughout Latin America and documents related to his subsequent life in exile in Cuba and Europe, a step that will no doubt case many to revisit his legacy. I don't know what's in these papers, but I can tell you this: I won't be reading a word of it.
The simple truth is that Agee was a fraud. No, let me be exact: He was a paid traitor. As the U.S. government would come to learn, Cuban intelligence was behind Agee's campaign against the CIA -- and it paid him well for his work. Agee's claims of being driven by conviction and ideology were lies. Why believe any of whatever is buried in the NYU papers?...