Uncovering the CIA Our Hidden History

Agee: Yes. It means that the book I'm writing with Weissman would be jeopardized. It means the film would be jeopardized. It means another book which I've participated in ... I don't know if this would be directly affected, but I've helped work on another book and I've written the introduction to it. I hope it's published early in 1976, which is a book on the CIA in Europe, called The CIA in Europe Who's Who and What They Do [editors note: I believe he is refering to a book that was eventually published under the title Dirty Work: The CIA in Western Europe].

Agee: It is a series of stories on current and recent CIA operations in Europe, such as the recruiting of mercenaries for Angola, and the recruitment in Sweden, for example, of a journalist by blackmail.

Marks: The Swedish journalist?

Agee: A Kenyan journalist who was resident in Stockholm, and who's cousin had been arrested and was being tortured in Nairobi, by the Kenyan security service at the CIA's request, in order to get a handle over the journalist living in Stockholm, because they wanted to send him ... He was a Black ... to Angola to collect information last year during the Civil War in Angola.

But anyway this book is a series of stories. It's all prepared and ready to go, but it also has, as a second section besides the stories, a section on biographies, which starts with date of birth and place of birth and continues on through education and whole career program of over 500 CIA people who have been the subject of the various revelations of CIA people all over Europe in the past year, more or less since the Welch killing -

Marks: And their names have been named?

Agee: Yes and there are over 500 people involved in this.

Marks: The trips to Moscow, Havana, you said they were five years ago, but that it bothered people, especially people you might call establishment journalists in the United States are very bothered by that, you know, the bad things said about you because you go to Moscow, because you've been to Moscow once and because you've been to Havana for longer period of time. Do you just want to talk about that a bit?

Agee: Well, I didn't go to Moscow or Eastern Europe until this year.

Marks: That's five years after you started to write the book.

Agee: No, that's seven years after I started to write the book.

Marks: Seven years.

Agee: But I had felt very sensitive about any trip I might make to Eastern Europe, or to the Soviet Union because of the implications, because people would say, or the CIA would certainly say as they did anyway, that I had been recruited by the KGB.

Marks: Which is not true.

Agee: Which is not true of course. The Cuba trip in 19 -

Marks: No, let's stay with this. Why did you go in 1976, after eight years of not having gone? I don't know if you've been invited before but ...

Agee: No, I never been invited but what happened was this. In May or so of 1975, the Novosti correspondent in London, like hundreds of others, asked me for an interview. Of course, I granted it, and he took that interview at his place after a Sunday dinner I think, and then he went off to Soviet Union to pass his vacation there, in the summer of '75. Sorry.

He came back in the fall and called me and said he had the clippings and wanted to see me. If I was interested, he would be glad to read them to me in English, because the interview was published in two or three hundred newspapers in the Soviet Union. He was going to explain to me what he'd written. So I went to his place and he explained that to me.

But at the same time, he earlier had agreed to try to see what the possibility for publishing my book in the Soviet Union was. He came back saying that they were interested and were going to publish it. Well, I supposed in late '75 and early '76, I might have spoken to him twice, or three times. I don't remember exactly.

Because, first the Soviets were going to publish. Then I got a letter from Progress Publishers in Moscow saying that they were not going to publish. Then he said again that they were going to publish, so there was a question of whether they were or they weren't. Finally, in July of this year, they wanted to discuss the edition of the book with me, and I went to Moscow with my wife and we worked for a week on shortening the book to the size or the length that the Soviets would be able to publish, and discussing contract and all those matters. That's the beginning of the end of the Soviet connection.

Marks: Now you, as an ex-CIA man knows full well that when you went to the apartment of the Novosti correspondent, that somebody probably made a note of it, and that that's the kind of thing that would drive the CIA wild and the like.

How do you feel about that?

Agee: Well I did it perfectly openly. There was no secret about it. He called me by telephone. I said yes I'd go by telephone. I assumed all along that the British security services were monitoring my telephone, probably his too, and that they would understand that it was a normal, open contact.

Marks: It's a problem dealing with that kind of paranoia isn't it, because the other people have it. You call up a member ... or Soviet calls you up, and suddenly bells ring in Langley, Virginia. That's tough.

Agee: Well, you know I had lots of contacts with Soviets when I was in the CIA. One of my jobs was to cultivate KGB officers, so I never felt odd or spooked by the other side, by the KGB. My book documents cases in which I participated where the KGB was concerned.

I look upon KGB or Soviet officials as ordinary human beings just like CIA people, and I didn't think that there could be any special implications if I were to give an interview with a Novosti correspondent ... Who knows if he was KGB or not ... in London. If he were to try to push the publication of my book through the Soviet publishing bureaucracy, I didn't know.

Marks: I had a Novosti correspondent come to visit me in Washington, and he was one of these characters who's been named 16 columns as the KGB meeting man at Novosti, so I believe he probably is a KGB man at Novosti, the Soviet press agency.

I just told him. I said, "Look. With the kind of work, the writing I do about the CIA, I don't want any part of you folks," in any real kind of sense.

It probably is better not to have that kind of contact, and he said to me, "I'm leaving," with kind of a sly smile on his face, "Ah yes. If I can be of any help to you in the future, Mr. Marks, you will call me, about journalistic matters of course."

I felt I didn't want to get involved, and I assume you feel the same way.

Agee: Well you may have felt there, a certain insinuation that was was uncomfortable. In my case, I had no occasion to suspect that he might have been an intelligence officer. Although, there are two ways to look at it.

One, they might understand that it would be very improper for them to try to compromise me by sending a intelligence officer working under journalistic cover, to try to interview me. I don't see that they would gain anything by that.

While at the same time, they might feel that they better send an intelligence officer who would be able to handle himself better with an ex-CIA officer. I don't know. But in any case, there was no intelligence content to any of the meetings I had with him, which had been just a handful over the period of time. In fact, it appears that they're going to publish my book in whatever shortened length we finally come up with.

Marks: They published our book ... They published a chapter of our book in one of their publications too, and I think we got paid $250.

Agee: Well you know, the key to it is whether or not a person like me, as I said in the very beginning, can have a non-compromising relationship with officials of a country, or with the publishing house of a country, which is one of the major important countries of the world today.

It wasn't until Morton Halperin, former assistant secretary of defense, stopped to see me in London ... last year, I think it was ... on his way back from Moscow where he spent a couple of weeks I think at the American Studies Institute there ... that I began to think that maybe I might be able to go to the Soviet Union too and not be compromised into some sort of relationship that would damage my credibility.

Marks: You know Averell Harriman and Cyrus Vance have been going for years.

Agee: That's right, but those are establishment figures. What makes it more touchy in my case is that I'm a critic of the CIA, so it gives them the leverage or the issue they want in order to promote this story that there's some sinister subversive KGB connection, which just doesn't exist.

Marks: They've alluded that in leaks to newspapers, haven't they?

Agee: They've been doing that for two and a half years, and this most recent crisis, which is my imminent deportation from Britain, is a continuation of the same campaign. What is most interesting of the whole campaign is that it is completely unattributed.

No CIA person, or officer, or employee has ever stood up and made the allegations. They have simply tried to surface them in a subtle way, to susceptible journalists, like Jack Anderson for example, who have published these things as if they were the truth.

But no CIA person has ever stood up and said it himself, and certainly there has been no court action, which would be the normal procedure, if in fact they had something substantial that I had done with the Soviets or Cubans or some other country.

Marks: Newsweek said you got drunk one night and told everything you knew to, was it a Cuban or a Soviet agent?

Agee: That was the first story. That was in July 1974. It was just at the time I had finished my book, and when my name was about to come out in connection with the Watergate scandals and the report of the Senate, the Ervin committee remember, on the Watergate scandals.

Marks: That's because you were the WH/FLAP.

Agee: That's right. That was mentioned. They though WH stood for White House flap at first, so they went back and checked.

Marks: What did it stand for?

Agee: Western Hemisphere Division of the CIA.

Marks: You were a Western Hemisphere Division officer?

Agee: Yeah. So I was about to come to the surface, even though my book was still six months away from publication. I was about to come to the surface in that context, so the CIA decided they'd get in the first blow. They leaked this preposterous story about a former CIA officer, not naming me at first, telling all drunk and despondent to the KGB.

This was headlines all over the United States. My family in Florida practically ... They knew that it must attach to me, and I called them right away when Victor Marchetti called me about the matter.

Marks: Victor knew it was you because he had the same lawyer also.

Agee: Yes, well, I was out in Cornwall. I wasn't reading newspapers or listening to telephones or listening to radios or anything. I didn't have a telephone, but he sent me a telegram and I immediately called him.

He said, "Look Phil," he said, "they started it."

He explained to me what had happened, about that story, and I said, "My gosh. That's incredible."

He said, "Look, if you want to talk to a friend of mine, from The Washington Post, he'd be glad to fly over and talk to you."

That was when Larry Stern came over to see me in Cornwall, and we spent two days together, and he went back and wrote a story. Then, all of the media thing ...

Marks: That you hadn't got drunk and you hadn't talked to a Soviet Agent.

Agee: No, and they didn't say when. They didn't say where. They didn't say the name of the Soviet officer. They didn't say anything. It was just one of those very vague stories, which unfortunately American media snap on to, and propagate.

Marks: Then the other charge they tend to throw at you is that you spent considerable time in Cuba.

Agee: I did spend considerable time in Cuba. I lived there for six months.

Marks: When was that?

Agee: In 1971. I had been working on my book since early 1970, which was a little over a year after I left he CIA. I had been turned down my five American publishers, when I presented the book project in New York. I think they thought I was an imposter or they just didn't know what to think, because this was before the Pentagon Papers, before Watergate, all the rest.

So they turned me down -

Marks: They didn't believe you were a real CIA operative who wanted to unload his knowledge to the world.

Agee: It's hard to say. I don't know why they turned me down, frankly. I was flabbergasted because I thought I had an important story, and I was scared to death that the CIA would get wind of the fact that I wanted to write a book. Also, I was continuing to live in Mexico, which was my last country of assignment in the CIA, and I was very afraid that if the word got around in Mexico that I had been a CIA agent, I would just have had to leave, and that meant the whole domestic disruption, and all that.

Marks: Moving households.

Agee: Yeah. I wanted to stay living in Mexico, and I'd already enrolled in the National University of Mexico for a graduate program, and I thought eventually I'd come back to the United States to teach.

In any case, I eventually, in early 1971, got support, or pledge of support, an interest in a offer from François Maspero in Paris.

Marks: Who is a French publisher.

Agee: He's a French publisher, and I made the proposal to him through a mutual friend in Mexico, who never wanted to be openly involved in the case, because she's still there.

Maspero thought, and I agreed, that I could never get the book written in Mexico because they simply didn't have the research materials. I wanted to go back and reconstruct the events that had occurred in Mexico and Uruguay and Ecuador and other countries.

Marks: The countries you had served in.

Agee: Yeah, and other countries too, in order to show the CIA participation in those events. It was a major research task to go back, partly with memory and partly with one document leading to another.

Marks: And newspapers.

Agee: Newspapers, etc. So how was I going to do it? Should I go to the United States, for example, and try it, already having been to the American publishers and expecting the CIA may have learned through them that I was on this project. Or should I go to the cities in Latin America where I had served, and where other operations had occurred, in order to research in the newspaper mourges, for example, or other places, what I needed.

Should I go to Paris where I could be working with Maspero more, or should I go to London? There were all sorts of possibilities. Maspero suggested that Havana might be on possibility because they did have research facilities there, and they have several documentation centers that might be of use.

Marks: In other words, libraries that have the newspapers from Latin America.

Agee: They had newspapers and magazines and all sorts of other material, which would help on the reconstruction of the events, and on the general description of the realities. So I was extremely, let's say, interested in the possibility of the Cuban angle, because I had been to Cuba during the Batista Era, before I went into the CIA.

Marks: As a tourist.

Agee: As a tourist, and I had lived in Latin America for the last ten years, or eleven years, and I had sent agents to Cuba to spy.

Marks: You would have people you had recruited in Ecuador or Uruguay, who's purpose was to go into Cuba and spy.

I sent agents to Cuba to spy, and they came back praising the Cuban revolution, so I was quite fascinated by the possibility of going and seeing firsthand for myself. I knew though that if I did go, that would give the CIA every reason to try to denounce me as being a turncoat or traitor, defector, all those things.

Agee: I sent them there to spy, and they came back praising the Cuban revolution, so I was quite fascinated by the possibility of going and seeing firsthand for myself. I knew though that if I did go, that would give the CIA, when they finally found out, every reason to try to denounce me as having sold out or being a turncoat or traitor, defector, all those things.

I had to decide then whether I would do it the really safe way and not go to Cuba, simply do whatever I could do in Paris or whatever city, or whether I should go ... let's say a lo macho in Spanish, which means straightforward and all out ... and go ahead and go to Cuba and hope that they agreed, because what I had done was to tell Maspero, "Look. I don't want to go to Cuba to be a defector in the sense of what a Soviet or Cuban or somebody else would be in the United States. I don't want to go through months and months, or even years of debriefing. I don't want to get involved in counter intelligence ploys, which would arise from the revelations that I might make. I don't want other people telling me what to do. I don't want to write a book for other people."

Marks: You didn't still want to be a spook.

Agee: No, and I wanted to write the book for Americans, not for Cubans or for Soviets or anybody else. I wanted to write the book so that Americans who, at the end of the day, are the only people who are going to stop this, would be able to get a knowledge of what the CIA is and what the CIA does, particularly the covert action interventionist operations which serve to promote repression in many countries and cause terrible human suffering.

The Cubans accepted this version or this scenario, this condition. I was never pressured by them in Cuba when I went. I went wondering, of course, and worried, but when I got there, it was serious. It was straight forward, and in addition to getting to two university students to help me on the research at the José Martí library, for example, the Casa las Américas, I also was able to travel all over the island and see different projects which were just fascinating to me because I could compare the developments in the Cuban Revolution with what I had seen in Latin America for the last 10 or 11 years, and also what I'd seen in Cuba under Batista.

Marks: What were the differences?

Agee: Well, the differences were tremendous. You saw a health program which was serving the needs of the country. You saw no unemployment at all. In fact, you saw a tremendous labor shortage. You saw an educational system which is very, very impressive, not only in the formal sense, but in the adult educational system. That is the night courses that everybody was taking.

I also saw a lot of the economic development projects such as citrus growing area, such as the agricultural projects such as rice growing areas and other cultivations, the efforts to create new and better herds of cattle according to the special needs of the tropical climate there in Cuba.

I really did spend a lot of time studying these different projects, and took a lot of notes, and in fact while I was there I was infatuated by the idea of writing a book on the Cuban Revolution.

At the same time, I also saw the failings, the disruption, which had been caused by the Ten Million Ton project of the year before, which had failed.

Marks: The sugar, when they didn't harvest enough.

Agee: That's right. I also saw, for example, the long lines. They had a lot of rationing still ... restaurants, for example ... You had to wait in line for long periods of time or you had to make reservations the day before. There were still grave problems that they were facing, which people were accepting and working to overcome.

So I thought that, at least of what I saw, the Cuban Revolution was very positive on balance. Housing, for example, was another major area of concern, and I could see for myself that the people were really participating, even though there was really a lot of hardship and aggravating things like standing in lines.

Compared to what I'd seen in Latin America before, like in Mexico, Uruguay, or Ecuador, it was very significant. While I was there, of course, the Pentagon Papers were surfaced. I'd gone there about April I think of 1971, and I think in June the Pentagon Papers first came out, and I was given a tremendous jolt of encouragement by that and did everything I had to do over a six month period.

You know, the odd thing is, John, that I went back to the United States after I'd been in Cuba, and nobody ever approached me. No one ever said anything. I had been in Cuba about three months, and I decided to go back to the United States to visit and be with my sons, who were with their mother in Washington ... in August I think it was ... Or July and August of '71 ... and I went back and spent about six weeks, I suppose, in the States.

I had gone to Cuba perfectly openly, and had flown back under my own name to Spain and the back the normal route. Apparently CIA didn't know anything about it.

Marks: But you knew from your own CIA experience that those passenger lists coming into Madrid or coming into Mexico City, were surveilled. I mean, you knew they knew.

Agee: Yes I did, and I was so stupid for doing that. I was so desperate to see my children and to be with them, that I did a stupid thing.

Marks: What difference did it make? I mean, why didn't you, as an American citizen, have the right to go to Cuba?

Agee: Well, I knew what they would think, you see, and I knew that they might be able to take ... or I suspected they might be able to take some measures against me there in the States, but as I say, I was somewhat ... I just didn't have a very good political criteria at the time, and if it were to happen today, I wouldn't take that risk.

Marks: You obviously were impressed by Cuba. Shouldn't you, as an American citizen, have the right to go see positive economic development in Cuba or any other place in the world?

Agee: Of course, but again there is this question of fact that I am so special, having worked in the CIA, and I was writing a book. If I wanted to get the book finished, I shouldn't have placed myself under the control of the people who stood the most to lose by the publication of my book.

So no matter what the reality was, I was sure that, somehow the CIA and the government would concoct a way to ... or this is what I thought afterwards, because I went there thinking, oh no, I'll get away with it, which in fact I did; but it was absolute chance.

Of course, when I went back to Cuba, then I began to think, well, the Cubans are going to think that something is fishy because they'll think surely if the CIA has been monitoring, as anyone would assume they do, people who come and go from Cuba... In fact, in Mexico, they used to take people off planes and send them back up to the United States.

Marks: Oh that's interesting. The Mexican's would take people off planes on their way to Cuba and deport them to the United States?

Agee: Damn right. Anybody flying to Cuba on Cubana from ... well anybody flying to Cuba ... had to be there about three hours ahead of time. When they got there, they had to wait, had to fill out a card with all sorts of data ... you know, place and date of birth and full name and all that stuff. Then that would all be phoned into the American Embassy, to the CIA.

The CIA would then check all their files against those people, and any -

Marks: Run them through the computers.

Agee: Well, they didn't have computers. It was all done sort of manually, but in any case, the CIA was able to say, "No this guy shouldn't go," and the Mexicans wouldn't let him go.

They photographed everybody in the airport while they were waiting.

Marks: What would they do to the people who the CIA said shouldn't go?

Agee: Well if it was American that they didn't want to go, they'd just bundle him in a car with a bunch of guards and send him back up and dump him across the border in Brownsville or in Laredo or some place like that.

Marks: Do you know anybody specifically that ever happened to?

Agee: No, I don't from memory off hand but I'm sure I can find a case.

Marks: What kinds of people though?

Agee: Americans who were wanted for some political offense in the United States, who may have been active in some sort of criminal activities in the United States.

Marks: Would somebody who was in the anti-war movement fit into that category?

Agee: That could certainly be, yes.

Marks: Did you know of cases -

Agee: No, but now that you mention it, I think there may have been. There probably were. I would expect that there're people who will remember that sort of thing.

Marks: The CIA always seemed disturbed about people and things like Venceremos Brigade, young American radicals who went to Cuba to cut sugar and things like that. What was your experience on that attitude?

Agee: One of the things that impressed me most when I was in Cuba, in fact probably more than everything I saw in Cuba, was the book Venceremos by the Venceremos Brigade, because I could identify so closely with them. In Mexico, after I had left the CIA, I sort of became, I wouldn't say completely hippy, but I -

Marks: You got your hippy period at least.

Agee: Yeah, I kind of got into that and I drifted away from the convention and the conformity which was required of an American foreign service officer and CIA officer and all that. I didn't, like we used to say years ago, "go ape" or anything, but I still had my little release.

Marks: You were on the edge of the counter-culture at least.

Agee: Yeah and I tried to join from time to time too, but how does a former CIA officer join the counter-culture? I would drive down to Oaxaca and get friendly with students bumming around down there, or wherever it happened to be, but I always felt a little bit of a fraud.

Marks: Because of your age or because you came out of the CIA or what?

Agee: Well after all I was 33. That's not so old, but because mainly I'd had this background in the CIA, and I couldn't be really honest with anybody.

Marks: In other words if they asked you, "Hey man, what do you do?"

Agee: I began to stumble. Look at the words.

Marks: What would you say?

Agee: I'd say, "Well, I was a foreign service officer. I was an legal attache..." crap like that which generally turned people off anyway, you see.

Agee: Anyway, by the time I got into Cuba, maybe the Venceremos book jolted me back into reality because -

Marks: You had read it before you went to Cuba.

Agee: No, I ready when I got to Cuba. I found the copy someplace, or somebody gave me a copy; and it was a series of stories written by the actual participants in the Vinceremos Brigade. I just gobbled that up. I thought it was the most wonderful thing. At the same time, I was doing a lot of reading like, at that time, The Greening of America, for example, was a best seller. There was another book, The Age of Aquarius, by a fellow. I think his name was Braden. There was also Philip Slater, The Pursuit of Loneliness.

There were a number of books which I read at that time which had a really profound affect. The mafia story that was made into the movie -

Marks: The Godfather.

Agee: The Godfather also. I mean, I did a lot of reading of, let's say, provocative books and fiction, which I hadn't done before, because I didn't have anything else to do in Cuba. I had a motorcycle which they'd given me, and it kept breaking down, so I was sort of stuck a lot of the time, at a beach house where I lived.

I'd take a bus into Havana, or my motorcycle, and see my friends in there, then come back and I did a lot of reading. So the Venceremos book really had a profound effect and I thought, "Boy there's really a group of Americans who had their problems."

I mean, read the book and you see how they fight. They got sexist and racist and all kinds of problems, but fascinating reading, so I dearly wanted to join them. I mean, I in fact asked the Cubans, my friends there, if I could possibly go and meet the Brigade because they were -

Marks: The people who were down there cutting cane that year.

Agee: Yeah, or if I could go speak to them and talk about the CIA and all, and it didn't work. They -

Marks: The Cubans didn't want you to see them.

Agee: No, they didn't want ... Well, they were right, in fact, because if I'd gone there and then it was assorted, suddenly the story would be out about the CIA guy working in Cuba; but I was terribly deprived of human contact at that time and I was awfully lonely.

Marks: So I suppose we should go off into the political thing. I mean, you essentially support the aims of the Cuban Revolution.

Agee: Well it depends on which aims you talking about. The social aims, of course I would support, which is such things as medical care for everybody, adequate housing, educational system, the fact that he productive capacity and the distributive capacity of the country works for all of the people, that there isn't a small elite of the population that kind of festers and thrives on others, and also unemployment. Cuba had terrible, terrible unemployment problems before the Revolution.

They have been able to solve a lot of these problems. They have serious problems now currently because of the collapse in the sugar price, and they're still dependent on, or largely dependent on a monoculture. But at the same time, they have been able to create a spirit, a community spirit, or a national spirit of sharing the hardships, which has really been the key to the success of the Cuban Revolution.

I wonder really what would have happened in Cuba if the United States had not shown such terrible hostility toward the Cuban Revolution during the Eisenhower administration.

At the same time, they've been able to develop a certain independence in foreign policy, which is limited, but it's still an independence. I don't know. I wonder really what would have happened in Cuba if the United States had not shown such terrible hostility toward the Cuban Revolution during the Eisenhower administration.

Marks: And the Kennedy administration and the Johnson administration.

Agee: Yeah but it really started during the Eisenhower administration, and it started, remember, over the oil that -

Marks: The nationalization.

Agee: Well, first of all, no it was whether -

Marks: It was to refine Soviet -

Agee: Soviet oil as opposed to Venezuelan oil, and there were Cities Service Texaco, and I don't remember the other refinery which refused, and then they nationalized those refineries and brought in the Soviet oil. That was probably the most important event that determined the organization of the Bay of Pigs Invasion.

Marks: In other words, the United States government reacted to that, what turned out to be an expropriation and moving closer to the Soviets by deciding that Fidel Castro ought to be overthrown.

Agee: Yeah, well Eisenhower's poker partner was the chairman of Cities Service, and I think he was eventually killed in a plane crash, but Cities Service I think had one of the refineries in Havana, so you see the very intimate relationship.

Marks: So the United States government, or at least the top level, decided they had to overthrow Castro.

Agee: Yes, because not only was the situation critical to Cuba, but the incentive, or the tremendous influence that the Cuban Revolution had all over the rest of Latin America was just incredible.

Marks: People in other countries were impressed in some favorable way by what was going on in Cuba.

Agee: Yes, well, you'd have to study the history or Latin America to understand it, but when most of Latin America was liberated from the Spanish in the early 19th Century, by 1825 every country was independent, and the United States backed it ... backed the wars of liberation in most of Latin America.

Marks: Wars of National Liberation.

Agee: Well, in Cuba it was a different story. In Cuba, the United States didn't want independence from Spain, because they realized, following the Haiti pattern, Cuba might become a refuge for runaway slaves from the South. Because of the great influence and power of Southern politicians in the Washington government, the American support for Cuban independence never existed, never cropped up.

In fact, Cuba wasn't liberated, and in the 1850's the United States offered to buy Cuba for I don't know how many millions of dollars, maybe something insulting like two million dollars from the Spanish government, which they refused. Then later on, after the Civil War, when the First Cuban War for Independence occurred in 1868, lasted for 10 years, the United States was very much opposed to it, because by that time, the United States American Capital had began to invest in Cuba, in sugar particularly.

This long drawn out war that lasted on into 1878 was very detrimental to American investment interests in Cuba. So much the more was the case in the 1890's when the Second War for Independence began in Cuba for independence from Spain, in 1895, when José Martí went back and was killed, I think, within two weeks of the landing.

In any case, that war went on, and finally the United States intervened in 1898, the Spanish-American War, which is what they call it, but it really the Cuban Independence War, and took over the running of the whole show.

Marks: So Cuba became our colony.

Agee: Cuba became a colony and remained a colony until 1959.

Marks: Yeah. You didn't directly participate in the secret war against Castro, did you?

Agee: My participation was peripheral in the sense that it occurred in the countries were Cuban missions existed, such as -

Marks: Cuban embassies.

Agee: Cuban embassies, yes. My job was to try to penetrate those embassies through technical devices, like bugging, telephone tapping, and also to recruit Cuban officials to betray the Cuban Revolution and to come over to our side.

Marks: Be spies for the CIA.

Agee: Right. I was very near to success a number of times in those types of operations. I never, let's say, was involved in the Bay of Pigs invasion, but I did do considerable damage where the foreign missions were concerned. But any case, this didn't come up and hit me in the face, in other words, when I went to Cuba in 1971.

Marks: What techniques would you use to recruit a Cuban diplomat?

Agee: It depended on what we knew about the diplomat. We -

Marks: You'd study them very carefully.

We would study our targets very carefully through telephone taps on their homes, and on the embassy. We would also get all the reports that we might have on this individual. We would look for all of the possible vulnerabilities of the person.

Agee: We would study them very carefully through telephone taps on their homes, and on the embassy. We would also get all the reports that we might have on this individual, from other countries where he may have served. That is the central file. We would look for all of the possible vulnerabilities of the person.

For example, in one case in Uruguay, the Cuban code clerk, his wife had just had a baby, but for months he had been running around with an Uruguayan woman, and we thought that he might want to re-settle someplace ... perhaps in Argentina ... with the Uruguayan woman and leave his wife, from a number of things he had said. Our principal source on this was not just a telephone, but it was the chauffeur of the Cuban Embassy, who was an Uruguayan -

Marks: Who was your agent.

Agee: ...who was our agent working for us, and who had also become a very good friend of this Cuban code clerk. So we worked out a possible recruitment scenario, and in fact, it almost worked. It in fact worked at first, and then it didn't work, and then it was going to work again and then finally it failed. He admitted what happened and they sent him back to Cuba under -

Marks: The Cuban wasn't sure, even though he may have had some love for this woman, that he really wanted to be a traitor to his country and become a CIA agent, even though you were promising money, a new life, and a beautiful woman, or something of that sort.

Agee: It's very hard to say. I never did understand quite what happened in that case, because it was quite irregular, and I think that, probably, if I had during the early period, taken out $50,000 and given it to him, or showed it to him at least, then he might have compromised himself completely.

Marks: Voted with his feet.

Agee: Yep. Well, voted with his dollars I suppose, but as it turned out, I was cautious on it, and was being directed all the time by Washington anyway on what exactly could be done, that finally he decided that ... He just got cold feet, and he decided that he would just confess all, and go back and spend five years on a correctional farm in Cuba and start a new life, which he probably did.

Marks: How did you feel about doing that to a human being? Did you have any compunctions about it?

When you get into the CIA you become arrogant with the sense of secret power. You become calloused to other people's sensitivities. You look at things in a very inhuman way.  I was arrogant and bold and simply rather despicable person.

Agee: Not at that time, because I must say that I was exceedingly cynical at that time. I was a very calloused guy. I just was insensitive. When you get into the CIA you ... It's very hard to explain. You have to be practically a psychologist or a psychiatrist to explain the attitude of a person, but you become arrogant with the sense of secret power. You become calloused to other person's sensitivities.

You simply become an operative who is calculating and cold and cool, so you look at things in a very inhuman way. That's more or less the way I was looking at them then. I had come down to Uruguay at that time, after three years in Ecuador, and I was arrogant and bold and simply, rather despicable person.

Marks: You weren't doing this to a human being, you were doing an operation.

Agee: Yes, and you detach yourselves from the realities. You detach yourselves from the personalities involved. You become something of a manipulator, and operator. I mean, you really become the American ... Let's say the epitome of the American ripoff con-man, and that sort of thing.

Marks: Have you ever felt an impulse to send letters of apology to any of these people? Or did you ever perhaps run into this guy in Cuba?

Agee: You'd be surprised. I've had a number of people that I mention in my book, who were on the other side, not the agents especially, but the activists on the other side, who bore the brunt of our operations have contacted me and have thanked me for writing the book.

One in particular who came to see me about a year ago, and who I saw a number of times since and did a number of film projects with, was Jaime Galarza. Galarza was the president of the Revolutionary Union of Ecuadorian Youth, and he spent long periods in jail because of us and what I was doing, and he wrote -

Marks: You got him arrested.

Agee: Oh, many times, and he was, to us, one of the most dangerous revolutionaries of the period. He eventually wrote the most important book of the century in Ecuador. It's a book called, El Festin del Petroleo, or The Petroleum Party, and is a historical study of how the petroleum resources of Ecuador, which is now a member of OPEC and one of the great petroleum producers in the world.

How these petroleum resources were discovered in the 1920's more or less, and covered up, and Ecuador became a banana republic and all the poverty and suffering continued until finally it was needed. In the 1970's they reopened the projects and built a pipeline over the Andes, and the country became a great exporter.

Galarza looked me up here in Cambridge through people in London.

Marks: He's now in exile.

Agee: He has gone back and he's politically active again in Ecuador, but he had spent years in prison there, long time in solitary confinement. I don't think that anything has been quite so gripping emotionally, since I wrote my book, as the times that I spent with him, particularly the first few hours of getting to know him, knowing that he had been on the receiving end of the operations that I had been doing, and that he had come to thank me for having written this book.

It was a gesture that, I can't describe how I feel about it.

Marks: Do you have that kind of forgiveness in your heart for people in the CIA? Could you forgive in that way?

Agee: Oh absolutely. I would do anything I possibly can to CIA people who would want to, or who would consider even doing something to try to weaken the agencies ability to promote repression, to promote torture and assassination and all the things that they do through their surrogate intelligence services in countries all around the world.

Marks: They don't actually torture themselves, do they?

Agee: I never knew of any case, no, but they give the training. They give the equipment financing, and everything from paper and pencil to automobiles, and weapons too.

Marks: And they know that the intelligence service who they're helping in Ecuador or Chile or Brazil is torturing?

We heard right through the walls, the moans and groans and screams of a man being tortured right in the Police Department. It turned out that I had given the person's name to the police intelligence. I heard that voice for ... I mean, I still hear the voice.

Agee: Absolutely. There's no possible way they can't know. John Horton, who was my Chief of Station in Montevideo, and I were sitting right in the Chief of Police office. He was an army general, and we heard right through the walls, the moans and groans and screams of a man being tortured in the Uruguayan police department, the Montevideo Police Department, 1965.

It so happened, which to me really was a traumatic experience, it turned out that I had given the person's name to the police intelligence for preventive detention, not expecting that he would be tortured of course.

Marks: And you would turn the name over as a representative of the CIA to the local intelligence service as part of your official duties.

Agee: Absolutely. Yes, that's what happened.

Marks: On a personal level, at the time, did it bother you?

Agee: Damn right, it bothered the hell out of me. I heard that voice for ... I mean, I still hear the voice.

Marks: Do you have guilts? Do you feel wracked by guilt in any way, or do you feel what you've done now has kind of made up for what you did before?

Agee: I don't feel too much guilt, no, anymore, mainly because of the tremendous acceptance and support and encouragement that I've gotten from people from country after country. Every place I go, I run into somebody who knew somebody who was in my book or whatever it happens to be; and the encouragement to keep on and to continue to focus attention on the CIA's work with other intelligence services, the promotion of repression, their secret aversions of the institutions of other countries.

All of this encouragement and support more or less precludes serious feeling of guilt. It's almost like never having worked with the CIA.

Marks: And you've got politics now, don't you?

Agee: What do you mean?

Marks: Don't you have a political commitment to the work you're doing?

Agee: Well I wouldn't do it obviously if I -

Marks: Tell us about your politics. What do you believe?

Agee: I don't know. Why don't we turn this off for a second and we'll come back to it in a minute.

Marks: Okay. I'll just say for the record that that was not a stop for Philip Agee to go off the record on his politics. It was a stop for both the interviewer and the interviewee to go to the bathroom.

I think that what the CIA is doing is like pollution. It's polluting the political environment for future generations of Americans, and that where American security is concerned, in the long run, the support for prevailing social and economic injustices is going to undermine the security of the American people.

Agee: Let's see how much time do we have to talk about politics, not very much. Okay, make it quick is this way. I think that what the CIA is doing is like pollution. It's polluting the political environment for future generations of Americans, and that where American security is concerned, in the long run, the support to the 21 families or the 100 families who control the wealth and income of a lot of countries, together with the support to the security services which enforce the prevailing social and economic injustices, is going to undermine in the long run, the security of the American people.

It serves the short run security, and the short run profits of special interests, particularly economic interests of American companies. I don't think it is the sort of policy that 100 years or 200 years from now, any American would look upon with pride.

Marks: So you think societies in Latin America could be organized a lot differently than they are today.

Agee: Yeah, I think American society could to.

Marks: How would you do that?

Agee: Well, I think there are many different ways. It depends on what the people are ready to take and accept, and what people want. First of all, what is needed is a process of political ... I suppose you'd have to say political education, or political development, whereby the fears which have been bred into us as a society from the very beginning that is the sense of insecurity, the sense of having to struggle so hard against insecurity we'll do anything to have a position of some influence or security, has got to be defeated.

We have to learn to live. We have to learn to live or learn to accept the fact that we can learn or that we can live secure with one another. In other words, that there is enough to go around, to satisfy everyone, that we can in fact have a decent life without ripping off our friends.

Marks: Other countries.

Agee: Particularly other countries.

Marks: But it's our own people too.

Agee: But I mean, within the United States, talking about the domestic politics.

Marks: That sounds suspiciously like socialism.

Agee: I think the trouble with terms like socialism is that they are emotive. Socialism to so many people means people who don't want to work, welfare state, people getting money for not working, that sort of thing. I would say yes, socialism in the sense that the major concern is in the welfare of the whole society.

Marks: A more equitable sharing of resources.

Agee: Of resources, of distribution, of all the things that go to make up the human needs of a society.

Marks: And your means to getting to that? The people say you're a radical socialist. Do you feel that armed revolution is the answer? Do you think we can peacefully evolve there, or is it going to have to be a combination or what?

Agee: I don't know really. Having not lived in the United States for so long, I can't tell what it is that would be best or people would want and all of that. I would think that probably the approach would be first education, I said before, first to show people that there are enough resources to go around, that we don't have to be that much farther ahead of our neighbors to have a sense of accomplishment in life, and that it's in everybody's best interest.

Certainly, you see the hatred of the United States all around the world today. Everywhere you go people are commenting or tied into the movement ...

The point is that you can't force change on people who are not ready to accept it. I think anybody would agree that it's a mistake to try to force revolution or force socialism onto a society which is not ready to accept it. The fact is, once the fire begins to burn, then people begin to realize what the possibilities are. Then, a lot of violence sometimes occurs, as in Cambodia recently and many other societies before.

Nothing is going to happen until people are ready to accept it, so if people are ready to accept democratic socialism and a mixed economy right now, then I'm all for that and would do anything I could to help promote it in the United States, to support it. I'd vote for it. I'd speak for it. I'd write for it, and everything else.

I also can see beyond that, the possibility of a society in which there isn't any private sector to speak of, but this is something far into the future because it is a whole cultural and political development, which takes sometimes hundreds of years to occur. I don't believe in trying to force people at the point of a sword, to change their ways overnight.

Marks: So you sound more like an evolutionary socialist with common sense than say a revolutionary socialist with theoretical base that had to be implemented tomorrow.

Agee: I don't have a theoretical base because I simply have not done the studying and I don't know the history, and I don't know all the figures and the different political views and all of what goes into sectarianism and left politics today, whether it's the United States or Europe or any other country.

What I do feel is there has to be a very humanist approach to the change so that a minimum of human suffering is caused, even among those people who are the worst exploiters. After all, I come from a very privileged, even elitest home life and education and background in the United States, and of course, naturally I went into the CIA. It wasn't an unusual thing in those days, having been a product of the McCarthy period and the cold war. The CIA wasn't known then for what it's known today.

You can't hold that sort of education against people and inflict pain on them because of them having been a product of those periods. But at the same time, I think that every encouragement should be given to create a more just society, a society in which people are not at the sword point of terrible insecurity and want in terms of food, in terms of education of children, housing, medical care and those sorts of things. And this is why I say I think that socialism will without any doubt come to the United States, but it has to come as Americans are willing to accept it.

Marks: And as it fits the American experience.

Agee: Exactly.