Philip Agee

With all the talk about the Plame/Rove/Libby investigation, it's worth taking a look at why the specific law, the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, was put in place to begin with.  Actually, that law seems to be written so tightly that in practice, it's difficult to prosecute someone under that particular statute.  There were already laws in place against disclosing classified information and various forms of espionage when that law was passed in 1982.

The "Agee Law"

This piece gives some of the background, which had to do with the revelations of former CIA agent Philip Agee: In Rove case, one outing got another: White House adviser feels heat in leak probe by Vikki Haddock San Francisco Chronicle 07/17/05.

Renegade ex-CIA agent Philip Agee spent years ripping the masks off fellow secret spies -- hundreds of them.

Troubled by U.S. covert activities in Latin America, in the 1970s he wrote an expose and launched the bimonthly "Covert Action Information Bulletin, " a Who's Who of CIA operatives with detailed biographies. By Agee's estimate, the Agency had 5,000 officers experienced in clandestine operations, and he gleefully predicted "it should be possible to identify almost all of those who have worked under diplomatic cover."

The CIA was flabbergasted to discover no law against this. But it had a powerful friend in the next U.S. vice president, a former CIA director. George H. W. Bush made it his mission to get legislation making it a felony to out a covert agent. "I don't care how long I live, I will never forgive Philip Agee and those like him who wantonly sacrificed the lives of intelligence officers, " he said.

Even wife Barbara Bush, in her autobiography, said Agee's "traitorous" book blew the cover of the Athens CIA station chief, Richard Welch, causing his assassination (a charge stricken after Agee sued for libel, claiming Welch was outed by Counter Spy Magazine.)

Billmon made the same mistake in describing the background of the law two years ago: Whiskey Bar: Nice Guys Finish Last 07/18/03:

The law, by the way, was passed after CIA dissident Philip Agee deliberately published the identity of the agency's station chief in Athens, who was promptly assassinated.

But it was Agee's campaign against the CIA that gave the law the nickname of the "Agee Law."

I'm not sure how careful Vikki Haddock was in her account.  It was a brief article.  But it's worth noting, to avoid confusion, that though Agee may have released the names of some agents, as I understand it, some significant part of the Covert Action Information Bulletin's investigative reporting (use a less flattering term if you prefer) was based on research using largely public sources.  She quoted Agee saying "it should be possible to identify almost all of those who have worked under diplomatic cover."

As several of the articles on the Plame case have explained, agents working under diplomatic cover can generally claim diplomatic immunity if caught by the government of the country in which they are operating.  Which obviously doesn't exclude terrorist groups from targeting them for harm.  But agents like Valerie Plame were working without diplomatic cover, which means they couldn't have claimed diplomatic immunity if caught spying and were therefore in a more high-risk situation in their intelligence work.

Investigating CIA misconduct

As Chris Mooney pointed out in a 2001 article, it was not only Philip Agee who was accused of Welch's outing.  In an article about the Congressional investigations of CIA misconduct in the 1980s by the Church Committee (headed by Sen. Frank Church) and the Pike Committee (Chris Mooney, "Back to Church," The American Prospect vol. 12 no. 19, November 5, 2001 .) :

Probably the most malicious attack on Church suggests that his committee's activities compromised CIA operatives overseas. Following September 11, for example, the American Spectator editor R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr., wrote that Church's hearings "betrayed CIA agents and operations." This intimation has its roots in Christmas Day, 1975, when Richard Skeffington Welch, the CIA station chief in Greece, was assassinated. Welch's death was instantly used against the Church committee for political gain. Many CIA agents killed in the line of duty are memorialized only by anonymous stars in the lobby of the agency's headquarters in Langley, Virginia--but NBC's Today Show covered the airlifting of Welch's body back to the United States, and President Ford attended his funeral with various luminaries. The chief counsel of the Church committee remarked that intelligence defenders "danced on the grave of Richard Welch in the most cynical way." Following Welch's assassination, Church received death threats and letters calling him a murderer.

The truth is that Church stuck to his promise to Colby that there would be "no dismantling and no exposing of agents to danger. No sources will be compromised." The committee made sure that it received no names of active agents, so that none could be revealed. Colby's successor as CIA director, George H.W. Bush, fully admitted that Welch's death had nothing to do with the investigation. In fact, Welch had been warned not to live in the Athens home that his CIA predecessors had occupied, because it was "notorious." And the Greek media had identified him as a CIA officer. Yet when Church ran for re-election in 1980, Republican Senator Jim McClure of Idaho publicly blamed him for Welch's death. Church lost by just over 4,000 votes.

I don't know whether Welch's name had been published in Greece as a CIA officer before orafter the Counter-Spy revelation.

Mooney's article is also a good reminder that the CIA has often been involved in misconduct.  We know today, for instance, that they are practicing "rendition," i.e., outsourcing torture by sending terrorist suspects to countries where they will be tortured.  Mooney reminds us what prompted the special Congressional investigations of the CIA at that time:

It's important today to recall that the object of much of the Church committee's investigation were the abuses the CIA and other intelligence agencies inflicted on Americans here at home. They included the Huston Plan, a proposal to have the agencies infiltrate and disrupt student and other dissenting organizations; Operation HT Lingual, in which the CIA had for 20 years been opening the mail that Americans (including Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey) had sent to the Soviet bloc; and other operations that kept files, ran wiretaps, and performed medical experiments on U.S. citizens.

Although the CIA had ballooned to the size of the State Department by the late 1950s, prior to 1975 the U.S. intelligence community had never undergone significant congressional scrutiny. The laissez-faire attitude was encapsulated by a remark to Church from the Republican Senator Leverett Saltonstall of Massachusetts: "It's better for gentlemen not to know what's going on." But after a 1974 New York Times series by Seymour Hersh revealed that the CIA had conducted "massive" illegal spying activities against American antiwar protesters and dissidents, Congress and the executive branch convulsed into action. Three separate bodies were formed to investigate the intelligence services: Church's committee in the Senate, a committee headed by New York Democrat Otis Pike in the House of Representatives, and a commission led by Vice President Nelson Rockefeller.

The Watergate hearings lingered in recent memory, and Church was in some sense the congressional equivalent of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. The amount of information amassed by his committee of 11 senators and more than 100 staff members was staggering: 800 interviews, 110,000 pages of documents. ... And as the embarrassing revelations tumbled out--that the CIA had kept lethal shellfish poisons despite an order from President Nixon to destroy them, for example, or that it had administered LSD to "unwitting" human subjects--the Ford administration dug in its heels. Indeed, the rhetoric of "dismantling" and "crippling" the CIA comes from ur-Realpolitickers Gerald Ford and Henry Kissinger. ...

The chief legacies of the Church committee - besides President Ford's executive order banning political assassinations, a key policy change resulting from the 1975 CIA probes [Bush has lifted the ban. - Bruce] - were the standing House and Senate intelligence committees formed after the investigation. How such oversight could have hamstrung the CIA is not clear. If anything, the committees were too lax with William Casey, the Reagan-era CIA director who easily misled them about the agency's dangerous mining of harbors in Nicaragua.

This background of the law is worth remembering.  Because there could be instances of genuine misconduct by CIA officers that would make it ethical for a reporter to expose their activities and even their identities.  I won't both to try to troll-proof that comment.  But I would hope that no one would ever again divulge undercover CIA for such light reasons and in such an irresponsible way as Karl Rove, Scooter Libby and Robert Novak did.  Even if the underlying issue is serious misconduct by the CIA.

And it's worth remembering, as Mooney's article notes, that despite the dishonest accusations by Republican partisans, the Church Committee exposed much CIA misconduct in ways that allowed meaningful reforms to be put in place without exposing the identities of undercover agents.

Philip Agee Today

Agee is still around.  For instance, in this interview, he discusses his view of Bush administration efforts to oust Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez: Interview with Philip Agee former CIA Operative : The nature ofCIA intervention in Venezuela 03/23/05 AxisofLogic.com.

I saw him described on some blog the other day as having "defected" to Cuba.  I'm not sure  if that's technically true.  And so far as I know, there are no warrants out against him.  But he definitely did cooperate with Cuba and other groups that have been highly critical of US policies in Latin America.  In his 1987 book On the Run, Agee himself provides some strong impressions of his own perspective.  Describing a press conference in Nicaragua during the time when the Reagan administration was funding armed opposition to the Sandinista government there, he writes:

To nobody's surprise the press conference itself started trouble with the U.S. Embassy—a controversy that continued even after I had left three weeks later. I planned in my remarks to describe the CIA's targets, the general techniques used to penetrate, divide and weaken progressive organizations, and to stress the need for unity and constant vigilance. But I also wanted to focus attention on the CIA's presence in the U.S. Embassy where they had as many as a dozen people, maybe more, under various covers. So I brought up the previous accusations that I had influenced the assaults on U.S. Embassies in Tehran, Islamabad and Tripoli.

"I denied it," I said, "but the people in those countries knew the CIA was hard at work every day in those Embassies, and they gave them a direct answer. People ought to prepare themselves, like the Moslems, so that the U.S. government knows the cost of aggression, that people will answer violence with violence, that the cost will be too high, that if the Reagan administration invades Nicaragua too many young Americans will be going home in nylon bags."

I was careful not to say anything that could be interpreted as inciting people to attack the Embassy or any Embassy personnel, but that people should be prepared to respond. I went on to emphasize that Nicaraguans should know exactly who the CIA people in the Embassy are: their names and home addresses. "They're not invulnerable, and they should know that they're in for the same fate as the people they attack."

Those remarks, I knew, would be seen as a provocation, but little did I anticipate the reaction. The next day they were carried in headline articles by Barricada, the FSLN [Sandinista party] newspaper, and by El Nuevo Diario, the other pro-government paper. Wire services reported immediately that theU.S. Embassy had gone on full alert against a possible assault, had implemented plans to evacuate families, and had started burning files.

That was fine, I thought. Let them worry a bit.

It's pretty obvious why even dissident CIA officers or Americans who were strongly critical of Reagan's Latin America policies - and his support for the rightwing Nicaraguan contras was unpopular - would not feel comfortable with Agee's approach, to put it mildly.  Comments like "they should know they're vulnerable" and "let them worry a bit" sound like Mad Annie Coulter talking about liberals today.

"People ought to prepare themselves, like the Muslims," is not the kind of comment that tends to win friends and influence people in Western democratic countries these days, either.

And it's not too hard to see how appeals like this might seem like calls for defection:

CIA employees who reject this policy should know that there is a "whole world out here" ready to give the help and support you if you take  a stand. You will find the same approval I did, the same acceptance, the same loyalty I found in the peace movement and among progressives and revolutionaries everywhere I went. And if you take a strong and principled position, you will never regret it.

For more effective resistance to the Reagan Doctrine, the cruelty of "low intensity conflict," and the "new cold war," present and former CIA employees are needed now more than ever.

I hope this book will encourage some of them to join the international solidarity movement and to speak out on Agency deception and promotion of terrorism. Those who join will not find enemies of the American people, but enemies of a system that appropriates natural resources, imposes mass poverty, and relies on political repression for social control.