Philip Agee died in January this year. Reading the obituaries I came across the allegations that he had gone to the KGB with his information about the CIA, something he had always denied. There is this section from the memoir of senior KGB officer Oleg Kalugin, The First Chief Directorate: My 32 Years in Intelligence and Espionage Against the West:
‘In the Communist sphere outside of Europe, we [KGB) worked closest with the Cubans…….The Cubans’ ardour also spurred them to take chances that we, a conservative superpower (USSR), were reluctant to take. A perfect example occurred shortly after I became head of Foreign Counterintelligence in 1973. CIA officer Philip Agee approached our KGB station in Mexico City, offering us reams of information about CIA operations. But our station chief in Mexico City thought Agee was a CIA plant spreading disinformation, and rejected him. Agee then went to the Cubans, who welcomed him with open arms. As it turned out, Agee was absolutely genuine, divulging the names of hundreds of CIA agents and informants, and providing the Cubans with mounds of information about US Intelligence. Agee proved to be one of the most damaging CIA turncoats in history.’(1)
Reading this I remembered that some years ago I had discovered Agee’s e-mail address and sent him a question. I still had it on my computer.
Sent: Thursday, April 27, 2000 8:54 PM
Subject: recent allegations
Dear Mr Agee,
Got your e-mail from being on the Bill Blum distribution list and so saw your comment on the latest Cuban/Miami thing. I’m still publishing Lobster to which you were a subscriber many years ago. My reasons for contacting you is to ask if you have issued a public statement on the allegations contained in the recent book the Mitrokhin Archive about your relationship with the Cuban and Soviet intelligence service. If there is such a statement please send me a copy. If there isn’t, would you care to comment?
Agee replied:
From: Philip Agee <>
Subject: Re: recent allegations
Hello, Robin,
I remember Lobster very well and am happy that you are continuing to publish it. Concerning Mitrokin (sic), I believe someone sent me a review of the book some months ago that I found in a large pile of mail after three months in Cuba. I read it and put it aside without action as I’ve done for some years on those kinds of allegations. I used to go through them refuting point by point and then hope that the original publication would publish my reply. But refusals were fairly regular. Finally I decided that it wasn’t worth taking the time. On Mitrokin (sic) I think there was some preposterous stuff there but I don’t remember the details.
In fact I have been working intensively for three years to get a modest business going here in Havana and have had practically no time to follow such publications. Check out www.cubalinda.com and you’ll see what I mean. Nice to hear from you.
Philip
Which is what is known as a nondenial denial.
I see no reason to disbelieve Kalugin’s statement that Agee went first to the KGB with his information. Why wouldn’t he? Since he wanted to do the maximum damage to the CIA operations in Latin America, that was the place to go. That the KGB declined his offer is just one of those ironies of the intelligence game.(2)
I can write this now, but could I have written it during the Cold War? Would I have been persuaded by a Kalugin figure in – say – 1979 that Agee had gone first to the KGB? I find it hard to recall how I saw the world then but somehow I doubt it. In the first place, I would probably have assumed that any Soviet defector was singing what he was being paid to sing. Secondly, the members of the British Left who gathered round Agee’s attempt to stay in the UK, whom I had kind of adopted at long range as a reference group, thought the KGB story was a smear. Agee told us the lie we wanted to hear. (And one or two of the Labour MPs involved may have been within the Soviet orbit at the time.)
Further, in the Soviet-American competition of the Cold War, to say something bad about one side was willy-nilly to support the other. It was hard for some of us on the left to deal with the nature of the Soviet bloc because to do so was to defend/support America. ‘Neither Washington nor Moscow’ was a good slogan but it was sometimes much harder to put into practice than we were willing to admit. It’s not that we weren’t anti-Soviet, we just weren’t anti-Soviet enough.
Notes
- See <http://jya.com/agee-kgb.htm> for a detailed account of the events, from the point of view of state actors, which surrounded the publication of Agee’s book in London and the subsequent expulsion of Agee and journalist Mark Hosenball – in effect the point at which I began taking notice.
- ‘Soviet Active Measures in The “Post-Cold War” Era 1988-1991’, a section of a long report on Soviet ‘active measures’ written by the United States Information Agency, published in June 1992, discusses Agee, Covert Information Action Bulletin, the magazine he helped set up and European magazines which followed its example, the French Intelligence and Parapolitics (later Intelligence) and the German Geheim and its English-language version, Top Secret. This report portrays them all as part of Soviet disinformation strategies. <http://intellit.muskingum.edu/russia_folder/pcw_era/index.htm> If this was true of Geheim/Top Secret, I don’t think it true of Intelligence. Lobster does not appear on the lists of publications which allegedly ran Soviet disinfo, even though Herb Rommerstein of USIA (or was it USIS?) accused it of doing so in the late 1980s.