Philip Agee

KGB files list Agee as a DGI agent and note Agee’s collaboration with the KGB. However available documents do not formally list the him as a KGB agent.

On December 16, 2007, Agee was admitted to a hospital in Havana, and surgery was performed on him for perforated ulcers. His wife said on January 9, 2008 that he had died in Cuba on January 7 and had been cremated.

Agee was accused of receiving up to US$1 million in payments from the Cuban intelligence service. He denied the accusations, which were first made by a high-ranking Cuban intelligence officer and 'defector' in a 1992 Los Angeles Times report.

John Barron wrote in his book The KGB Today (1983) that Agee's resignation was forced "for a variety of reasons, including his irresponsible drinking, continuous and vulgar propositioning of embassy wives, and inability to manage his finances". Agee said these claims were ad hominem attacks meant to discredit him.

In 1982, the United States Congress passed the Intelligence Identities Protection Act (IIPA), legislation that seemed directly aimed at Agee's works. The law later figured in the 2003 Valerie Plame affair.

In 1980 Maurice Bishop's government conferred citizenship of Grenada on Agee, and he took up residence on that island. The collapse of the Grenada Revolution removed that safe haven, and Agee then received a passport from the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. After a change of government there, this passport was revoked in 1990, and he was given a German passport, in accordance with the working status of his wife, the American ballet dancer Giselle Roberge who was working and living in Germany at the time. Agee was later readmitted to both the U.S. and United Kingdom. Agee's own description of his odyssey was published in his autobiography, On the Run, in 1987.

Agee's US passport was revoked by the US government in 1979. The State Department offered him an administrative hearing to challenge the passport revocation, but Agee instead sued in federal court. The case reached the Supreme Court, which ruled against Agee in 1981.

In 1978 Agee began the publication of the Covert Action Information Bulletin . Mitrokhin's files claim that the bulletin was founded on the KGB's initiative and the group running it was "put together" by First Chief Directorate counterintelligence and that Agee was the only member of the group who was aware of KGB or DGI involvement. According to Mitrokhin's files, KGB headquarters assembled a team to keep the Bulletin supplied with material specifically designed to compromise the CIA. A document entitled "Director of Central Intelligence: Perspectives for Intelligence, 1976-1981", was supplied to Agee by the KGB. Agee highlighted in his commentary Director of Central Intelligence William Colby's complaint that the Covert Action Information Bulletin was among the most serious problems facing the CIA.

According to files from KGB defector Vasili Mitrokhin, Agee was sent documents by an "anonymous sender". The document was a classified State Department circular, signed by Henry Kissinger himself. In 1977, it was published with an introduction by Agee. KGB files noted by Mitrokhin claim that the originator was Service A, the Active Measures branch of the First Chief Directorate.

Agee was accused by U.S. President George H. W. Bush, who considered Agee to be a traitor, of being responsible for the death of Richard Welch, a Harvard-educated classicist who was murdered by the Revolutionary Organization 17 November while heading the CIA Station in Athens. Bush had directed the CIA from 1976 to 1977. Agee and his friends disputed Bush's assertion about Welch. This accusation was included in Barbara Bush's 1994 memoir, but was removed from its paperback edition after Agee sued her for libel.

Because of legal problems in the United States, Inside the Company was first published in 1975 in Britain, while Agee was living in London. In a Playboy magazine interview after the book's publication, Agee said: "Millions of people all over the world had been killed or at least had their lives destroyed by the CIA ... I couldn't just sit by and do nothing."

Russian exile Oleg Kalugin, former head of the KGB's Counterintelligence Directorate, claimed that in 1973 Agee approached the KGB's resident in Mexico City and offered a "treasure trove of information." According to Kalugin, the KGB was too suspicious to accept his offer.

Agee identified President José Figueres Ferrer of Costa Rica, President Luis Echeverría Álvarez (1970–1976) of Mexico and President Alfonso López Michelsen (1974–1978) of Colombia as CIA collaborators or agents.

Agee also ran CIA operations within the 1968 Mexico City Olympic Games and he witnessed the events of the Tlatelolco massacre.

On December 12, 1965 Agee visited senior Uruguayan military and police officers at a Montevideo police headquarters. He realized that the screaming he heard from a nearby cell was the torturing of a Uruguayan, whose name he had given to the police as someone to watch. The Uruguayan senior officers simply turned up a radio report of a soccer game to drown out the screams.

Agee stated that his Roman Catholic social conscience had made him increasingly uncomfortable with his work by the late 1960s leading to his disillusionment with the CIA and its support for authoritarian governments across Latin America. In his book Inside the Company, Agee condemned the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre in Mexico City and wrote that this was the immediate event precipitating his leaving the agency. Agee wrote that the CIA was "very pleased with his work" and had offered him "another promotion", and that his handler "was startled" when Agee told him about his plans to resign.

Agee was born in Takoma Park, Maryland and was raised in Tampa, Florida. He had, Agee wrote in On the run, "a privileged upbringing in a big white house bordering an exclusive golf club". After graduating from Tampa's Jesuit High School, he attended the University of Notre Dame, from which he graduated cum laude in 1956. Agee later attended the University of Florida College of Law. He served in the United States Air Force from 1957 to 1960. Agee then worked as a case officer for the Central Intelligence Agency from 1960 to 1968, including postings to Quito, Montevideo, and Mexico City.

Philip Agee was born on July 19, 1935 in Tacoma Park, Florida, USA as Philip Burnett Franklin Agee. He was married to Giselle Roberge and Janet Wasserberger.