REMEMBERING PHIL AGEE

LOUIS WOLF - On the occasion of the CIA's fiftieth year, Phil Agee wrote in Covert Action Quarterly: "During this last fifty years, the CIA and other agencies have served as instruments for imposing U.S. national security policies on the rest of the world. The human cost, especially in the Third World, is unspeakable. Yet, resistance goes on as surely as the oppression and repression that create it. This 50th anniversary of the CIA and the national security state should be a time of national shame, given the moral bankruptcy of the policies that 'won' the Cold War."

He was the master of seeing through the flowery but foul rhetoric emanating from the White House and Langley about democracy that masks what really goes on behind and beneath it. As he wrote in the 1978 article "Where Myths Lead to Murder":

"Today, notwithstanding recent 'reforms,' the CIA remains primarily an action agency--doing and not just snooping. Theirs is the grey area of interventionist action between striped-pants diplomacy and invasion by the Marines, and their targets in most countries remain largely the same: governments, political parties, the military, police, secret services, trade unions, youth and student organizations, cultural and professional societies, and the public information media. In each of these, the CIA continues to prop up its friends and beat down its enemies, while its goal remains the furthering of U.S. hegemony so that American multinational companies can intensify their exploitation of the natural resources and labor of foreign lands."

Writing about CIA operations in Africa, Phil wrote: "As in the rest of the world, U.S. policy viewed Africa as a continent where radical and communist influence should be eradicated--a goal that required military support to colonial powers or efforts that would deny real independence to African countries by imposing and sustaining client regimes. . . . Rare is the African country that in recent years could elude intervention by neo-colonialist interests and the retardation of national development that such intervention so often brings. Yet these secret agencies are not phantom forces. Their methods can be understood and their people can be identified. Measures to counter their operations can succeed, as their numerous blunders and failures demonstrate."

In the fall of 1979 as the Sandinistas had just won their popular revolution against the brutal Washington-supported regime of Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua, Phil wrote prophetically in what was then Covert Action Information Bulletin about "The CIA's Blueprint for Nicaragua." "The CIA's programs for covert collection of information on Nicaragua continue, of course, from the period before the Sandinista victory. Besides the CIA Station in the U.S. Embassy in Managua, officers in many other Stations such as those in the Andean Pact countries, San Jose, Panama, City, Mexico City, New York, Washington and Miami have special assignments for intelligence collection on Nicaragua . . . The CIA could have installed bugs in key government offices in Managua during the final days of Somoza as well as in Nicaraguan Embassies in key countries--no problem, given the CIA's intimate relations with the Somocistas. . . "

The infamous and bloody CIA "covert" paramilitary operations against the Sandinistas under the direction of Lt. Col. Oliver North and his CIA colleagues inside Ronald Reagan's National Security Council and which blossomed into the famous Iran-Contra debacle, were a direct offspring of the activities Phil foresaw.

Under the Freedom of Information Act, Phil told British investigative journalist Duncan Campbell one year ago this month, he was able to see through at least a small window into the immensity of what the CIA per se and the government in general has deployed against him through the years. "They admitted to having 18,000 pages on me. I figured out there were 120 pages a day for seven or eight years. That can only be things like telephone transcripts and letter intercepts. Some person from the Pentagon was talking about me and saying they had two or three people working on me full time."

[Louis Wolf is co-founder with Philip Agee and four others and director of research of the magazine Covert Action Information which was renamed Covert Action Quarterly, which published until 2005. Philip Agee co-authored two books with Wolf and others]