Philip Agee, a renegade ex-CIA agent, recently died in obscurity in a run-down Havana neighbourhood. He betrayed his country and several agency operatives were murdered after being exposed by him. Agee’s treacherous behavior in this regard prompted a U.S. law against exposing government spies.
A distinguished panel joins us today to discuss Agee, the damage he did to this country and the lessons and significance we can draw from the life and career of this traitor. Our guests are:
Jim Woolsey, a former director of the Central Intelligence Agency (1993-1995).
Chris Simmons, a Counterintelligence Officer since 1987. From 1996-2004, he was deeply involved with the majority of US Counterintelligence successes against Cuba. He was a central figure in the identification, investigation, and debriefing of convicted Cuban spy, Ana Belen Montes. She remains the highest-ranking Cuban spy ever sent to prison in the US. Simmons was the lead military official in the May 2003 expulsion of 14 Cuban spies serving under diplomatic cover. This was the third largest expulsion of diplomats in US history, and the only one not targeted against Russia/USSR. He has lectured on Cuban Intelligence throughout the US Intelligence Community, to Congress, the Heritage Foundation, and in several academic forums. In addition, his views on Cuba are increasingly covered by the media, resulting in stories by EFE, TV and Radio Marti, Notimex, the Washington Times, the Miami Herald, and America TeVe in Miami. He writes a column on Cuban Intelligence for the Miami Herald and is founder of the Cuban Intelligence Research Center.
Lt. Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa, the highest official ever to have defected from the Soviet bloc. In 1989, Ceausescu and his wife were executed at the end of a trial where most of the accusations had come word-for-word out of Pacepa's book Red Horizons, republished in 27 countries. Pacepa’s new book, Programmed to Kill: Lee Harvey Oswald, the Soviet KGB, and the Kennedy Assassination, has just been published.
and
Andy McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor and a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. He prosecuted the Blind Sheik and his organization for seditious conspiracy in 1995. A failed American, Philip Burnett Franklin Agee, 72, "Pont" to the KGB for nearly four decades, is dead in Cuba, his spiritual home. He was a traitor, paid by the Cubans and Russians.
FP: Jim Woolsey, Christopher Simmons, Lt. Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa and Andy McCarthy, welcome to Frontpage Symposium.
Any McCarthy, let’s begin with you.
What were your thoughts on the occasion of Agee’s death?
McCarthy: Thanks, Jamie. It's a pleasure to join you and the rest of the group.
My interest in Agee is not that of a CIA insider but, instead, a fascinated outsider whose national-security work on the law-enforcement side of government was importantly affected by the intelligence community. From that perspective, Agee seems to me to have been the perfect storm of much that was excessive, or at least eccentric, about the Agency and the 1970s. It's an aspect of the critical but often overlooked difference between the skills of intelligence gathering/analysis/operations and criminal investigation that the CIA has always been more hospitable to those of a Leftist bent of mind than, say, the FBI. The Agency, after all, really came into being in the course of a great cause in which we and the British (whose intelligence services were obviously very influential for us) were aligned with the Soviet Union. It was, moreover, more concerned than law-enforcement with knowledge of the world and expertise in various disciplines; thus the top universities were much more of a recruiting base for the CIA than the FBI. That doesn't necessarily signal a leftward bent -- Bill Buckley, after all, joined the Agency, not the Bureau. Still, I don't think we can ignore that the decades immediately after the CIA's creation were those when the academy trended decidedly and identifiably to the political left.
From the pool of Agency personnel, I think you thus end up with a swath of people who are inclined -- or at least receptive -- to an anti-American worldview and who are less rigid than their law enforcement counterparts tend to be about bright-line rules, and rigid, hierarchical divisions of responsibility. Consequently, the hard line we try to draw between gathering information and exercising charging discretion is better respected in the law-enforcement system than the line between gathering intelligence and making policy is honored in the intelligence system. This is not to say that you don't have people in law-enforcement who heavy-handedly lobby to affect charges and policy. But I think you have a greater percentage of people in the intelligence community who think they know best and should be the ones steering national policy, and who, concurrently, are less apt to defer to protocols and conventions against taking matters into their own hands.
This type of person, I think, was catalyzed -- and not in a helpful way -- by the Zeitgeist of the Seventies which, in overreaction to Watergate, some intelligence abuses, and elite criticism of the war, evolved into what Jean Kirkpatrick memorably referred to as the "Blame America First" culture. They came to see the U.S. as immoral and imperialistic, and to see the intelligence business as particularly noxious -- what with its practices of deceit to cull information, its need to deal with unsavory characters (since nice, upstanding people rarely are found rubbing elbows with those who pose dire threats to the United States), and its secrecy and unilateral control by the (discredited) executive branch. Of course personal factors play a big part in why someone becomes a traitor. But just looking at the framework from the outside, I don't think it's a great mystery why you get an Agee, an Aldridge Ames, or even a lot of the current and former intelligence officials today who are so deeply and actively critical of U.S. policy.
FP: Thank you Andy McCarthy.
Mr. Woolsey?
Woolsey: Well, Andy's right that on the liberal-conservative spectrum there have historically been more liberals in the CIA and more conservatives in the FBI. But it's of course a long way between being even on the very left end of the American political spectrum, and even being willing to spin intelligence to affect policy, and being a homicidal traitor like Agee.
I have been struck by the degree to which, during most of the Cold War, ideology explained relatively little about American traitors. That wasn't true at first. Certainly in the 30's and 40's the Soviets snared a number of people who were on the left politically and who were attracted by the very far left ("I have seen the future and it works.") For some this was because their doubts about capitalism were heavily magnified by the Depression, for others because our wartime alliance with the USSR created a sense of common purpose. Here in the US (Alger Hiss) and in the UK (the Cambridge spy ring of which Kim Philby was a part) some true sons of the establishment spied for the Soviets not because they were failures in life, needed money, or were blackmailed but because they became true, believing communists.
By the time we were into the fifties, however, and the world had digested Khrushchev's disclosure of Stalin's crimes, the Soviets got very few American assets who were true believers. The traitors of the late cold war era tended to be of two types. One was flakey young guys such as the Falcon and the Snowman (F: "Hey Dude, stop Bogarting that joint and look what I've found here in the SCIF - a manual for the new reconaissance bird!" S: "Phat! Let's drop it off at the Soviet Embassy, get a few bucks, and score some more grass!"). Another common type was the mid-career loser, often with a weird psychological twist: Ames, Hanssen, Agee.
Now in the current era we have to be particularly aware of avoiding stereotypes. For example, the vast majority of Cold War era spies were white guys, but Cuba's penetration of DIA was with a Cuban-American woman. And a very senior FBI official a few years ago (happily now retired) was so convinced that there was another Ames, in his view, in the leftist CIA that he ruined more than one career at Langley while systematically overlooking for a long time the ostensibly deeply religious and quite conservative Robert Hansen spying for the Russians from his office just down the hall in the FBI building.
Our enemies are creative in finding spies that break stereotypes. We must get inside their heads and be creative ourselves.
FP: Thank you James Woolsey.
Mr. Pacepa, your thoughts on Mr. McCarthy’s and Woolsey’s comments?
And kindly also touch on Agee the man: the man who betrayed his former colleagues, the CIA and his own country. What damage did he do?
Pacepa: I am delighted to join such distinguished participants in discussing a crucial side of the intelligence war. Let me start by showing Agee as he was seen at the top of the Soviet bloc intelligence community, to which I belonged when he became a traitor. It is, I believe, a novel look.
According to Sergio del Valle, the head of the Cuban domestic and foreign intelligence services with whom I had a relatively close working relationship in the 1960s and 1970s, Agee was a venal womanizer who had been recruited in Mexico City by the Cuban espionage service, the DGI (Dirección General de Inteligencia), with the help of a Cuban lover.
At that time the Soviet espionage service, the PGU, was engaged in publishing bogus books by such supposed authors, such as White Russian commander General Vlasov and Soviet foreign commissar Maksim Litvinov, and even a collection of invented written correspondence between Tito and Stalin. [1] Agee was like manna from heaven for the PGU.
The PGU took over Agee from the Cubans and persuaded him to put his name on a “devastating book” against the CIA that would make him a “rich man.” During the Cold War the CIA was the West’s first line of defense against communist expansion, and the PGU believed that Agee could help it erode the CIA’s ability to recruit highly positioned people able to see what spy satellites could not—what communist despots were planning to do against the rest of the world.
The PGU resettled Agee in England, and tasked to write a book about his experience with the CIA. From General Aleksandr Sakharovsky, a former chief intelligence adviser in Romania who rose to head the PGU for an unprecedented 14 years, I learned that Agee’s book was in fact conceived and documented by a DGI/PGU team of disinformation experts in Moscow. The chapter drafts and the appended documentary materials were sent to Agee through a PGU officer assigned under cover as the London correspondent of the Novosti news agency, which was a PGU front. (I later identified the correspondent as Edgar Cheporov.)
In January 1975, this joint DGI/PGU disinformation effort took shape in the form of a book entitled Inside the Company: CIA Diary, attributed to Phillip Agee. The book claimed that “millions of people all over the world had been killed or had their lives destroyed by the CIA,” [2] and it identified some 250 “criminal” CIA officers involved in Latin American operations, whose names had been provided to Agee by the DGI/PGU team in Moscow.
Inside the Company became an instant bestseller and was translated into 27 foreign languages. Why? In my other life, as a communist intelligence tsar, I oversaw the Romanian equivalents of both the FBI and the CIA, and I came to realize that the populace has very different yardsticks for each. The domestic security agency carried out its duties more or less in the open, and its officers were seen as human beings with human failings. But foreign intelligence, which was buried in utter secrecy, was light years away from people’s everyday lives. It was considered to be a mysterious and magical organization, consisting of anonymous officers without name or face who could bring off anything asked of them.
The PGU capitalized on this perception.
In 1978 I learned about a new PGU operation, aimed at using Agee to make the CIA “toothless in Europe.” Soon after that I broke with communism, and of course I lost contact with those PGU plots. Twenty years later I learned a few details of this new effort from original PGU documents smuggled out of Moscow by PGU officer Vasily Mitrokhin, helped by the British MI6.
Documents in the Mitrokhin Archive—described by the FBI as “the most complete and extensive intelligence ever received from any source”—show that in 1978 the PGU created a task force staffed with officers from Service A (disinformation) and Directorate K (counterintelligence), headed by V.N Kosterin, assistant to the chief of Service A, and charged it to provide Agee with materials designed to create another book. This became Dirty Work: The CIA in Western Europe, which contained names and biographical details of some 700 CIA officers who were, or had been, stationed in Europe.
In 1979, according to other documents in the Mitrokhin Archive, the PGU tasked Agee to lend his name to a sequel book, Dirty Work: The CIA in Africa. Agee was met in Cuba by two PGU officers, Oleg Nechiporenko of Directorate K and A.N. Itskov of Service A, who gave him a list of CIA officers working on the African continent.
Dirty Work was published in September 1979, bringing the total number of CIA officers exposed by the PGU with Agee’s help to about 2,000. [3] [i]
Trust is the most valuable asset of any espionage service, whatever its nationality or political flavor, and the CIA was indeed harmed for a time—any high-ranking foreigner would think twice before putting his life in the hands of an espionage organization unable to protect the identity of its officers and sources. Nevertheless, the CIA continued to epitomize the notion of freedom for most of the people kept prisoner in the Soviet bloc, and it eventually become instrumental in winning the Cold War.
By the 1990s, Agee had become a forgotten relic. Now he has died of septicemia in an infected Cuban hospital, and he was immediately cremated to avoid future embarrassments. His books are turning to ashes as well.
I am always interested in the perceptive comments of Jim Woolsey, and I hope he can expand a little on how Agee has been regarded within our intelligence community. Is he now forgotten there as well?
Simmons: To build upon Mr. Pacepa's observations, additional confirmation regarding the fact that Agee began collaborating with the KGB and DGI in the late 1960s comes from KGB General Oleg Kalugin and Cuban defector Pedro Anibal Riera Escalante. Riera served in the DGI (later simply the "DI") from 1969 until 1993. During his tour in Mexico (1986-1991/1992) he participated in Operation "Moncada," which targeted the secretary of the CIA's deputy station chief. Agee was used to approach the secretary, but he was quickly recognized and his effort just as quickly rebuffed.
I would also like expand upon Mr. Woolsey's comments on Agee's motivations. Agee has often been characterized as a traitor motivated by ideology. However, I believe revenge and greed also played significant roles in his betrayal of the United States. The CIA forced Agee to resign in 1968 due to his unprofessional and reckless behavior. Specific examples included irresponsible drinking, repeated and vulgar propositioning of colleagues' wives, and an inability to control his finances. These character flaws should have raised flags with US Counterintelligence. Instead, these failings fuelled Agee's bitterness and thirst for revenge.
Regarding the greed aspect, in 1992, two senior CIA officers and the highly respected DGI defector, Florentino Aspillaga, publicly charged Agee with repeatedly receiving money from Cuban Intelligence. In fact, Aspillaga said Agee's payments might have totaled more than a million dollars. Agee denied the charges, but a second Cuban defector both confirmed Havana's payments to Agee and charged Agee with teaching Sandinistas how to identify US intelligence personnel and their operations. It's important to remember that the Castro regime was, and is, disinclined to pay its agents. As such, for Havana to have paid Agee hundreds of thousands of dollars simply emphasizes the importance the DGI/DI placed on him.
McCarthy: I feel here like a student lucky enough to get into the faculty lounge on a day when the A-Team profs all happen to be there.
The Cuban and Soviet usage of Agee is fascinating stuff, and just as the last time General Pacepa and I were together in an FPM symposium, when the general spoke about the KBG role in marketing the Protocols on the Elders of Zion, I’m struck by how coldly calculating the Soviets were in exploiting prejudices and misconceptions in popular culture.
Of course, Jim and Chris can address this from the intelligence side of the house far better than I, but in working national security matters as a prosecutor and in studying them as a commentator, I’ve been struck by how politically correct we are. Showy politesse is, I suppose, necessary to some degree in diplomatic circles—I mean, who wants to ruin a perfectly lovely dinner party. But it seems positively stupid in the intelligence world.
To take one recent example, there is the case of Nada Nadim Prouty (maiden name Nada Nadim El-Aouar), who infiltrated both the FBI and the CIA despite being a former illegal alien and the sister-in-law of a top Hizballah operative, Talal Chahine. Prouty pled guilty last November to using her access to government intelligence files to review intelligence on Hizballah—and there seems to be a determined effort in government circles to understate the significance of what happened.
Prouty had fraudulently obtained U.S. citizenship with the help of her roommate, a U.S. marine captain named Samar Spinelli (maiden name Khalil Nabbouh) who pled guilty to that fraud. The third roommate in the group was a woman named Elfat El-Aouar: aka Mrs. Talal Chahine. He is now a fugitive—a Detroit restauranteur and apparent Hizballah big-wig who was laundering and routing millions to the terror organization in Lebanon (where it is now believed he has fled—El-Aouar pled guilty to tax fraud).
Now, I hear what Jim is saying about how, at a certain point, Soviet moles did not typically fit a “true-believer” profile. But one would think, if we took today’s threat environment into account, that someone like Prouty was straight out of central casting. How the hell does that happen? I fear we are so intimidated as a government by accusations of Islamophobia that we are overlooking what one might have thought was the undeniable connection between Islamic ideology and Islamic terror. It’s like you don’t even need to infiltrate us; we will actively recruit you and not screen for, or blithely dismiss, the pluperfectly obvious potential threat.
I’ve seen some of this syndrome myself in the astounding mishandling of al Qaeda operative Ali Mohamed by the CIA, the FBI and the U.S. army. (Shameless plug—I write about Mohamed in my soon-to-be published book, Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad). And why, to take a slightly different example, would the army drum out a highly respected scholar like Stephen Coughlin … because he declined to modulate his (entirely correct) views on jihadism to fit the military’s rose-tinted vision of Islam?
Woolsey: I very much agree with the statements of this fascinating panel.
The Pacepa perspective is invaluable and I certainly agree with the Simmons point on Agee's having been motivated by revenge and greed.
The McCarthy points about the recent cases set the tone for what we must focus on in the future -- we're not in Kansas any more dealing with cynical Soviets with a dead ideology. Our current problem is much harder because the operatives who serve our major adversary -- several varieties of radical Islamic extremism -- are far from being cynics and their ideology is far from dead. Indeed they very much believe that they are commanded by God to destroy our civilization and way of life and to use any means -- nuclear weapons, suicide bombing, and total duplicity in order to achieve that end. Hence the cases pointed out in the McCarthy comment. All is fair game to them: lying about their citizenship, lying about a knowledgeable student of Islam who understands their ideology, financing terrorists and then denying it, and so on.
We must first of all cease the practice of the US Government's honoring the radical Islamic extremists -- however cleverly they speak and whatever their oil wealth and however large their corps of lobbyists. If Harry Truman had decided to reach out to the American legal community at the beginning of the cold war, he would not have elevated the communist-front Lawyer's Guild to being his chief adviser. And the US Government needs to stop its current parallel practice of honoring the advice and company of Wahhabi-funded, Muslim Brotherhood organizations and ignoring truly moderate Muslims such as many Sufi, traditional Shia, Indonesians, and the like. Otherwise we will see many more espionage cases of the sort that are set out in the McCarthy comment -- and worse.
Pacepa: In order to protect our country and our allies against terrorist and nuclear despots, we need highly positioned intelligence sources. Only they can tell us what those despots have in mind, and what their most secret war plans against us are. How can we get such sources? The most important thing is to earn the trust of potential agents and defectors, in spite of the vitriolic anti-American climate they may be living under.
This takes me back to the subject of our Symposium. Agee died of septicemia, but he left an infected legacy that it is still causing considerable damage to the trustworthiness of the CIA, our first line of defense against terrorism and nuclear proliferation. For one thing, Moscow is still using Agee’s name to discredit the CIA as an organization incapable of preserving the secrecy of its officers, foreign agents and foreign operations. For another thing, Agee’s revelations have encouraged some American political figures to promote themselves by revealing CIA secrets.
From own experience I know how difficult it is for high-ranking enemy officials to be persuaded to place their lives in the hands of an espionage organization distrusted by the general public and by its own government. In 1975 I decided to defect to the CIA. I trusted it, I admired the efficiency of its secret war against the Soviet empire, and I wanted to help. But, just before taking that irreversible step, I was slapped in the face by the Rockefeller Commission report describing the CIA as a rogue organization. The following year, the Senate’s Church Commission published 14 more reports portraying the CIA as a criminal organization. A cable sent to Bucharest from KGB chief Yury Andropov triumphantly prophesied: “The CIA’s tyranny is over.” Ceausescu popped a bottle of champagne. A couple of months later I had dinner with Janos Kadar, the ruler of Hungary and the first chief of its communist espionage service; he raised his glass of vodka with a toast: “To the CIA’s funeral!”
The reports of the Rockefeller and Church Commissions froze me in place for three more years. If the U.S. government did not trust its own CIA, why should I? After I finally defected in 1978, I was sure that other heads of Soviet bloc espionage services would follow in my footsteps. It did not happen. Further investigations hit the press, this time publicly revealing the CIA’s failures in handling intelligence defectors and agents. Those new reports would have scared the guts out of me, had I still been in Romania.
Right now the CIA is being publicly raked over the coals in numerous investigations—all “politically correct.” I understand the openness of American society. But espionage is, by definition, a secret and merciless war that is especially perilous when waged against brutal tyrants—even the slightest indiscretion could endanger the lives of CIA officers and their sources. This sensitive national security tool should not be used to improve the domestic stature of ambitious politicians.
To the best of my knowledge, none of our main allies has voluntarily washed the dirty linen of its intelligence business in public. Their espionage services also occasionally make mistakes, but they are usually corrected in house.
It is not fair to compare the CIA with my former foreign intelligence service, the Romanian DIE, but there is a lesson there. After I broke with communism, the DIE became the subject of a public political investigation. Romania’s dictator needed to explain to the Politburo why he had been “betrayed” by his own spy chief, and he made the DIE his scapegoat. Soon after that the whole DIE collapsed—and I was credited with “single-handedly demolishing an entire Soviet bloc espionage service.”
Over the past 25 years I have worked with a number of CIA officers. All have been good professionals and devoted patriots, ready to go to any lengths to protect our national security. They do not need more Agee-style revelations. They need to be quietly helped to regain the trust of their potential sources abroad. Trust is the most valuable asset of any espionage service, no matter its nationality or political flavor.
Simmons: I agree with the insightful comments from the other panelists.
However, I would like to expand upon two points raised by Mr. McCarthy. First, the shrewd ability of our enemies to exploit prejudices and misconceptions in our popular culture and secondly, how political correctness undermines our counterintelligence services.
A long-term influence operation conducted by the Castro regime has been it masterful ability to justify its intelligence operations as defensive measures taken against US terrorists. One need not look further than the worldwide campaign known as "Free the 5" to witness Havana's ability to exploit prejudices and mistaken beliefs. This effort aggressively and methodically lies to global audiences by portraying the espionage operations of the now defunct Florida-based Wasp Network as Havana's innocent response to a violence-prone Miami-exile community. In reality, several members of the Wasp Network played key roles in the deaths of four members of Brothers to the Rescue. Cuba conducted similar, albeit much smaller influence operations following the arrest of INS official Mariano Faget, as well as Florida International University staff members Carlos and Elsa Alvarez.
For decades, Havana also successfully exploited the biases held by CIA Case Officers regarding the capabilities of Cuban Intelligence. This arrogance came to light in June 1987 when Florentino Azpillaga Lombard defected and revealed that 85 of the CIA's Cuban assets were Cuban agents or provocations. Many of these double agents "worked" for the CIA for decades, effectively denying the US leadership with "ground truth" regarding what was actually occurring in Cuba.
Moving onto the issue of political correctness, this behavior has a crippling effect on US Counterintelligence. We must remember that Havana is predisposed towards racial/ethnic/gender profiling. Cuban case officers favor the targeting of US minorities, specifically women, African Americans, and Hispanics. This practice is based on Havana's premise that minorities in the United States have been repressed for so long that a need for revenge can be nurtured and fueled within many members of these communities. Whether we believe it or not is irrelevant; Havana has been quite successful with this tactic. While Agee clearly didn't fit the racial/ethnic/gender profile, his need for revenge is well within Havana's spotting and assessing protocols. We need to view Cuba's preference towards profiling for what it is; an operational signature that leaves their agents very vulnerable. The US inflicted devastating losses on Cuban Intelligence from 1998-2003. We can better repeat those successes when we stop worrying about being "PC."
FP: Jim Woolsey, Christopher Simmons, Lt. Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa and Andy McCarthy, thank you for joining Frontpage Symposium. And a special thanks to Peter Collier, who planted the seeds from which this symposium grew.
Notes:
[1] Andrew and Gordievsky, pp. 463-464. The authors describe several bogus memoirs produced by the Agayants department, noting that the fraudulent Litvinov book was “sophisticated enough to deceive even such a celebrated Soviet scholar as E.H. Carr, who in 1955 contributed a forward” to it.
[2] Phillip Agee, Inside the Company: CIA Diary (London, Penguin, 1975), p. VIII.
[3] “Allegations Concerning Philip Agee and the Covert Action Information Bulletin,” source: The Sword and the Schield:: the Mitrokhin Archives and the History of the KGB, Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin,, October 5, 1999, p. 2, as published on http://jya.com/agee-kgb.htm.