PLAYBOY Interview with Ex-CIA agent PHILIP AGEE
Excerpts:
Q: In your opinion, what will be the result of the [1975] CIA
investigations in Washington?
"The Rockefeller Commission was never a real danger to the
CIA. President Ford set it up to whitewash The Company."
Q: But what does covert action have to do with economics?
"Think back to the end of World War II.
"The United States faced a really alarming economic crisis.
In 1945, 11 million men were still under arms -- and out of the
work force. Even so, production was more than double what it had
been in the best prewar year. But then something scary happened.
"In the first six months after the war ended, production was
cut in half, and unemployment shot up from 830,000 to 2,700,000.
In six months!
"It looked as if the US might have won the war only to fall
back into another Great Depression.
"The people who were running the country --politicians and
those who later became known as the "military-industrial complex"
-- were badly frightened. Somehow they had to create 11 million
new jobs or face catastrophe.
"So they decided to reconstruct the European and Japanese
economies, thus providing new markets for the US, and adopted the
"containment" policies of such military alliances as NATO that
brought on the Cold War.
"When World War II ended, US policy toward the Soviet Union
came to be dominated by the anti-Soviet school in the State
Department led by George Kennan and Chip Bohlen, who were
convinced that the Soviets wanted to conquer the world ...
"In those days, though, the Soviets were militarily much
weaker than the US public was led to believe.
"But the scenario of an innocent and defensive America
struggling to save the world from Communist dictatorship provided
the rationalization for the dominance of foreign economies by
American companies.
"This was the CIA's main mission: to guarantee a favorable
foreign-investment climate for US industry.
"You see, the domestic market isn't big enough to support
the kind of production the 'Free World' needs to keep
unemployment down to so-called acceptable levels. It has to
export --not only products but finance capital-- or die.
"But where were our markets when the CIA was established?
"Europe was in ruins. Japan was flat on its back.
"Reconstruction of foreign economies [by the "CIA-military-
industrial complex"] under the guise of "defending them against
the Red Menace" would create a stronger market for the US .."
"In my opinion, the Marxists are right about American
economic imperialism. American multinational corporations have
built up colossal interests all over the world, and you can bet
your ass that wherever you find US business interests, you also
find the CIA.
"Why? Because the foreign operations of American companies
are the key to our domestic prosperity.
"The multinational corporations want a peaceful status quo
in countries where they have investments, because that gives them
undisturbed access to cheap raw materials, cheap labor, and
stable markets for their finished goods. The status quo suits
bankers, because their money remains secure and multiplies.
"And of course, the status quo suits the small ruling groups
the CIA supports abroad, because all they want is to keep
themselves on top of the socioeconomic pyramid and the majority
of their people on the bottom.
"But do you realize what being on the bottom means in most
parts of the world? Ignorance, poverty, often early death by
starvation or disease."
PLAYBOY: We all agree that the free-enterprise system has faults.
But no system that has been set up so far provides the sort of
idealistic paradise you envision, with everything distributed
fairly. The point at issue here is the CIA -- whether it does
more good than harm, whether the world would be better served by
its existence as is, by its reform, or by its destruction.
"I leave it to you to decide.
"I promise you that the CIA now knows who you are and is
undoubtedly at this moment running you through its computers.
"Have you ever been arrested?
"Are your tax returns up to date?
"Did you ever fail to pay a bill?
"Have you ever been to an analyst?
"Did you ever knock a girl up?
"Are you strictly heterosexual?
"Do you sometimes blow a little grass?
"And, by the way, when you leave the hotel, glance over your
shoulder. Somebody may be following you."
_______________________________________________________________
Full text of interview in file attached
PHILIP AGEE on the CIA
Philip Agee: The Playboy Interview
PLAYBOY: Are you in danger here?
AGEE: Probably not. If they tried any rough stuff, it would have
to look like an accident, and if anybody slipped up, there would
be a very big flap.
PLAYBOY: Is the room bugged?
AGEE: I doubt it. Too much trouble for a short visit. But the
phone may be tapped. The hell with them. Let's talk.
PLAYBOY: How do you like having the Central Intelligence Agency
breathing down your neck?
AGEE: Not much. That's a dangerous bunch of people to tangle
with. I don't want to sound as if I think I'm a hero. I'm not. I
just think something's got to be done about the CIA. Remember,
I'm not the first ex-CIA man to come out against the agency.
Victor Marchetti was the first. But while he was fighting to get
his book published, I was working fast and furiously on mine in
secret.
PLAYBOY: Why did you decide to blow the whistle on the CIA?
AGEE: I finally understood, after 12 years with the agency, how
much suffering it was causing, that millions of people all over
the world had been killed or at least had had their lives
destroyed by the CIA and the institutions it supports. I just
couldn't sit by and do nothing.
PLAYBOY: Millions of people? Aren't you overstating the case?
AGEE: I wish I were. Even after the revelations we've had so far,
people still don't understand what a huge, powerful and sinister
organization the CIA is.
PLAYBOY: How big is it?
AGEE: In my opinion, it's the biggest and most powerful secret
service that has ever existed. I don't know how big the K.G.B. is
inside the Soviet Union, but its international operation is small
compared with the CIA's. It's known now that the CIA has 16,500
employees and an annual budget of $750,000,000. But that's not
counting its mercenary armies, its commercial subsidiaries. Add
them all together, the agency employs or subsidizes hundreds of
thousands of people and spends more like billions every year.
Even its official budget is secret; it's concealed in those of
other Federal agencies. Nobody tells the Congress what the CIA
spends. By law, the CIA isn't accountable to Congress. Not for
anything.
PLAYBOY: To whom is it accountable?
AGEE: To the National Security Council, which is composed of the
President and officials chosen by him. So it's really an
instrument of the President to use in any way he pleases. If
there are legal restraints on this, I don't know of them. It's
frightening, but it's a fact: The CIA is the President's secret
army.
PLAYBOY: What does this army do?
AGEE: To understand that, you have to understand why the CIA was
set up. There are two reasons: the official reason, as set forth
in the National Security Act of 1947, which authorized the CIA to
collect and analyze foreign intelligence, and the real reason,
which was carefully hidden. There was a sleeper clause in the
National Security Act, allowing the CIA to "perform such other
functions and duties related to intelligence affecting the
national security as the NSC may from time to time direct."
Right from the start, it was those "other functions" that
occupied most of the CIA's time. And money.
PLAYBOY: Just what are those other functions?
AGEE: Covert action. The dagger inside the cloak. It's a form of
intervention somewhere between correct, polite diplomacy and
outright military invasion. Covert action is the real reason for
the CIA's existence, and it was born out of political and
economic necessity.
PLAYBOY: What does covert action have to do with economics?
AGEE: Think back to the end of World War Two. The United States
faced a really alarming economic crisis. In 1945, 11,000,000 men
were still under arms--and out of the work force. Even so,
production was more than double what it had been in the best
prewar year. But then something scary happened. In the first six
months after the war ended, production was cut in half and
unemployment shot up from 830,000 to 2,700,000. In six months!
It looked as if the U.S. might have won the war only to fall back
into a depression. And the people who were running the country,
politicians and those who later became known as the
military-industrial complex, were badly frightened. Somehow they
had to create 11,000,000 new jobs or face catastrophe. So they
decided to reconstruct the European and Japanese economies, thus
providing new markets for the U.S., and adopted the "containment"
policies of such military alliances as NATO that brought on the
Cold War.
PLAYBOY: Wait a minute. Are you saying that we started the Cold
War? Didn't the Russians have something to do with it?
AGEE: I'm saying that when World War Two ended, U.S. policy
toward the Soviet Union came to be dominated by the anti-Soviet
school in the State Department led by George Kennan and Chip
Bohlen, who were convinced that the Soviets wanted to conquer the
world. Such a foreign policy meant that revolutionary socialism
must be opposed, with arms if necessary, wherever it appeared,
because the Soviets were supposed to be behind it all. Sure, the
Soviets also helped start the Cold War; they were aggressive and
they reneged on agreements. Militarily, though, they were much
weaker in those days than the U.S. public was led to believe.
But the scenario of an innocent and defensive America struggling
to save the world from Communist dictatorship provided the
rationalization for the dominance of foreign economies by
American companies. This was the CIA's main mission, to guarantee
a favorable foreign-investment climate for U.S. industry. You
see, the U.S. market isn't big enough to support the kind of
production we need to keep unemployment down to so-called
acceptable levels. We've got to export --finance capital as well
as products-- or die. But where were our markets when the CIA was
established? Europe was in ruins. Japan was flat on its back.
Reconstruction of those economies would re-create those markets.
PLAYBOY: Do you discount America's humanitarian motives in
rebuilding Europe and Japan?
AGEE: No. Most Americans, I think, felt a generous, really
unselfish obligation to help the people whose countries had been
devastated by the war. But European Communists opposed the
Marshall Plan because they understood that U.S. economic
domination would accompany it. So the CIA's covert-action
operations began as secret political warfare against those people
who opposed the Marshall Plan. For example, the CIA broke dock
strikes against Marshall Plan aid, got non-Communist labor unions
to withdraw from the World Confederation of Trade Unions and
establish the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions.
All this, of course, with the help of George Meany, who----
PLAYBOY: You're saying that the president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. is
a CIA collaborator?
AGEE: One of the most effective. For almost 30 years, he has
helped the CIA pour money and agents into the "free world" labor
movement. By the Fifties, unions supported by the CIA had become
a pretty effective counterweight to the ones controlled by
Communists in western Europe. This meant 20 years of relative
labor peace during which U.S. companies and their local
counterparts could consolidate investments. But those labor-union
penetrations were only the beginning of The Company's covert
actions.
PLAYBOY: The Company?
AGEE: To the people who work for it, the CIA is known as The
Company. The Big Business mentality pervades everything. Agents,
for instance, are called assets. The man in charge of the United
Kingdom desk is said to have the "U.K. account." But, as I was
going to say, The Company has conducted covert actions all over
the world. In the Forties and early Fifties, it operated mainly
in Europe. In the late Fifties and Sixties, emphasis shifted to
the Third World: Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Middle East.
These operations are carried out at different levels of
intensity, of course. Not all of them are violent. Sometimes The
Company forges documents or spreads false rumors and untrue news
stories -- what it calls disinformation. The Company sends
hecklers to public meetings, pays strikebreakers and industrial
spies, organizes propaganda services like Radio Free Europe,
launders millions of dollars' worth of dirty cash each year. It
has also spent huge amounts to buy elections and overthrow
liberal or socialist or nationalist governments -- or to prop up
repressive regimes. But The Company gets into a lot of violence,
too. It trains and equips saboteurs and bomb squads. The police
and military-intelligence services of many countries are trained,
financed and controlled by the CIA. Worse than that, The Company
has assassinated thousands of people, some of them famous, most
of them unknown. If it has to, it will conduct paramilitary
campaigns and even full-scale wars. You name it, the CIA does it.
PLAYBOY: Those are sensational but very general accusations. Can
you give specific examples of such actions?
AGEE: Sure. In the past 25 years, the CIA has been involved in
plots to overthrow governments in Iran, the Sudan, Syria,
Guatemala, Ecuador, Guyana, Zare and Ghana. Will that do for
starters? In Greece, the CIA participated in bringing in the
repressive and stupid regime of the colonels. In Brazil, the CIA
worked to install a regime that tortures children to make their
parents confess their political activities. In Chile, The Company
spent millions to "destabilize" --that's the Company word-- the
Allende government and set up the military junta, which has since
massacred tens of thousands of workers, students, liberals and
leftists. And there is a very strong probability that the CIA
station in Chile helped supply the assassination lists. In
Indonesia in 1965, The Company was behind an even bloodier coup,
the one that got rid of Sukarno and led to the slaughter of at
least 500,000 and possibly 1,000,000 people. In the Dominican
Republic --you want more?-- the CIA arranged the assassination of
the dictator Rafael Trujillo and later participated in the
invasion that prevented the return to power of the liberal
ex-president Juan Bosch. And in Cuba, of course, The Company paid
for and directed the invasion that failed at the Bay of Pigs.
Some time later, the CIA had a go at assassinating Fidel Castro.
That one was close, but no cigar.
PLAYBOY: What you are saying is that the CIA can overthrow
governments practically at its pleasure. How is that possible?
AGEE: It's not a question of snapping fingers and telling some
generals, "Now's the time, boys." What the CIA does is to work
carefully, usually over several years' time, to undermine those
governments whose policies are unfavorable to U. S. interests.
Through propaganda, political action and the fomenting of
trade-union unrest, often carried out through many different
front organizations, the CIA cuts away popular support from the
undesired government or political leader. Major emphasis is
placed on influencing reactionary military officers. Once this
process gets started, it will acquire its own momentum and
eventually lead to the desired coup. The CIA can sometimes speed
things up by providing a catalyst: let's say preparing a forged
document such as a list of military officers allegedly due for
assassination, then seeing that the list gets publicized.
PLAYBOY: You mentioned the CIA's role in Indonesia. What about
Indochina?
AGEE: I figure everybody knows the war there began as a CIA war,
as far as direct U. S. intervention was concerned. This is
documented in the Pentagon papers. CIA officers were in Indochina
before the French left. They organized the Montagnards into a
paramilitary force to fight the Viet Cong. CIA agents helped put
Ngo Dinh Diem in power and CIA agents at the very least
cooperated in his assassination. It was the failure of the CIA's
secret operations in the Fifties that led to the overt military
intervention of the Sixties.
PLAYBOY: Speaking of the Diem assassination, are the rumors we
hear true -- that the CIA was involved in Diem's killing without
President Kennedy's approval and that when Kennedy found out he
was furious with the agency?
AGEE: I don't know, but I've heard that from people who should
know.
PLAYBOY: If the CIA were to admit to all your allegations, what
justification would it give for such actions?
AGEE: The same old emotional appeal: that we have to prop up our
so-called friends --usually the tiny minority that has cornered
most of the wealth in poor countries-- or they'll fall victim to
the Soviets and lose their freedom. Kissinger and people like him
keep reviving that argument, but the truth is --and the CIA knows
it better than anybody else-- that for many years there has been
NO worldwide Communist conspiracy! The socialist bloc has just
as many cracks in it as the capitalist bloc. I think most
revolutionary socialists --call them Communists, if you like--
want
the advantages of socialism without the disadvantages of some
Soviet-style police state.
PLAYBOY: You don't believe in Marxist conspiracies, but you do
admit there's repression in Russia?
AGEE: Don't put me on. Sure there's repression in Russia -- and
it goes back for centuries, not just to 1917. But I think it'll
take another generation of Soviet leaders to relax things there;
today's leaders can't answer very well the question of what they
were doing during Stalin's reign of terror.
PLAYBOY: But if the CIA knows, as you claim it does, that there
is no worldwide Communist conspiracy, why does it act as if there
were?
AGEE: Remember, the CIA is an instrument of the President; it
only carries out policy. And, like everyone else, the President
has to respond to forces in the society he's trying to lead,
right? In America, the most powerful force is Big Business, and
American Big Business has a vested interest in the Cold War.
PLAYBOY: Hold on. This is beginning to sound like Marxist jargon
about the big bad imperialists on Wall Street.
AGEE: That's because, in my opinion, the Marxists are right about
American economic imperialism. American multinational
corporations have built up colossal interests all over the world,
and you can bet your ass that wherever you find U. S. business
interests, you also find the CIA. Why? Because the foreign
operations of American companies are the key to our domestic
prosperity. The multinational corporations want a peaceful status
quo in countries where they have investments, because that gives
them undisturbed access to cheap raw materials, cheap labor and
stable markets for their finished goods. The status quo suits
bankers, because their money remains secure and multiplies. And,
of course, the status quo suits the small ruling groups the CIA
supports abroad, because all they want is to keep themselves on
top of the socioeconomic pyramid and the majority of their people
on the bottom. But do you realize what being on the bottom means
in most parts of the world? Ignorance, poverty, often early death
by starvation or disease.
PLAYBOY: You paint a bleak picture. Hasn't the CIA accomplished
anything positive, at least for the U. S.?
AGEE: Over the short run, quite a bit. The CIA certainly helped
goose up the American economic boom of the past 25 years. What
many Americans don't seem to have noticed, though, is that
American prosperity over those years was to some degree a false
one. Have you noticed that as the political and economic
independence of the Third World has increased, American
prosperity has begun to sputter? In the long run, I'm betting
that the CIA will be seen to have done a lot of damage to the
United States, because, along with its business allies, it has
caused us to be hated by millions of people as the last of the
great colonial exploiters. That hatred is going to haunt us for a
long, long time, and it has got to be focused on the few people
who deserve it and not on the American people as a whole.
PLAYBOY: Your own experience in the CIA has been mostly with its
overseas operations. What do you know about alleged CIA
activities inside the U.S.?
AGEE: Very little--but enough to suspect strongly that they're
much more extensive than anybody outside the CIA or the National
Security Council realizes. I think a lot of sinister things will
come out in the investigations that are under way in Washington.
I think the American people may be in for some severe shocks.
PLAYBOY: What are you hinting at?
AGEE: I can only hint, because I have no direct knowledge. But I
can tell you what I was told by Marchetti. I told him I thought
that most of the 10,000 cases the CIA admits to having
investigated inside the U. S. would turn out to be connected, no
matter how tenuously, with some sort of foreign-intelligence
effort. "You're wrong," he said. "You just don't know. You
haven't been here. There are going to be some revelations that
will chill your spine, really grisly things. And some of them,"
he said, "may be connected with the assassinations of President
Kennedy, Senator Kennedy, Martin Luther King and other well-known
individuals both at home and abroad."
PLAYBOY: Connected how? What are you trying to say?
AGEE: Just what I said. That's all I know. But by the time this
interview appears, a lot of these things may have come out. I
hope so. That's really all I know. I can give you an opinion,
though, for what it's worth. Knowing the CIA as I do, I can tell
you that everything I have read about the assassination of
President Kennedy --Lee Harvey Oswald's background, Jack Ruby's
background, the photograph that seems to place E. Howard Hunt at
the scene of the crime, the mysterious deaths of so many people
involved-- everything makes me very suspicious of the Warren
Commission's version of what happened. And remember: Allen
Dulles, the former head of the CIA, was a member of the Warren
Commission. If the agency had anything to cover up, Dulles was in
a very good position to do so. But I don't have any proof that
the CIA was involved. Remember, I wasn't working in Washington
then. What I can tell you about best is the normal, everyday
dirty tricks a CIA man is up to.
PLAYBOY: All right. Let's go into that. Beginning at the
beginning, how did you get into the CIA?
AGEE: Through my college placement bureau. No kidding. Just
before I was graduated from Notre Dame, I was interviewed by a
CIA man. He made his pitch like any other company recruiter:
interesting work, good pay, opportunity for advancement, foreign
travel. He also mentioned patriotism and public service. I said
no at first, but a year later, when the draft began to catch up
with me, I changed my mind. The CIA training program allowed me
to do my compulsory military service as an agency man. So I went
away for two years with the Air Force --always in the special CIA
program-- and in 1959 I returned to Washington to begin formal
training as a CIA officer. After about three months of classes at
headquarters in Langley, Virginia, learning the structure and
functions of the CIA, most of us went to The Farm for operational
training.
PLAYBOY: The Farm?
AGEE: Camp Peary, Virginia. A secret CIA training center. So
secret at the time that some of the foreign trainees weren't even
told they were in the United States. We worked hard, I can tell
you, for more than six months. There was a physical-conditioning
program, plenty of practice in the martial arts. How to disarm or
cripple, if necessary kill an opponent. We had classes in
propaganda, infiltration-exfiltration, youth and student
operations, labor operations, targeting and penetration of enemy
organizations. How to run liaison projects with friendly
intelligence services so as to give as little and get as much
information as possible. Anti-Soviet operations--that subject got
special attention. We had classes in how to frame a Russian
official and try to get him to defect. The major subject, though,
was how to run agents--single agents, networks of agents.
PLAYBOY: How does a CIA officer set up and operate a network of
spies?
AGEE: The first stage of the process is targeting prospects. Say
your objective is to penetrate a leftist political party. The
first thing to do is to probe for a weak spot in the
organization. Maybe you bug the phone of a leading party member
and find out he's playing around with the party's funds. In that
case, perhaps he can be blackmailed. Or one of your agents plays
on the same soccer team as a party member, or goes out with his
sister, and gets to know something about him that seems to make
him a good prospect. Then you make him an offer.
PLAYBOY: You mean money?
AGEE: Usually, but not necessarily. In rich countries, a man
might become a spy for ideological reasons, but in poor
countries, it's usually because he's short of cash. A hungry man
with a family to support will do almost anything for money, and
there are a lot of hungry people in most of the countries in the
world. So you make an offer. Maybe you make it yourself, but
maybe you have someone else do it, because you don't want the
prospective agent to know who he's working for. Not all CIA
agents are what The Company calls witting.
PLAYBOY: How could a person be a CIA agent without knowing it?
AGEE: Thousands of policemen all over the world, for instance,
are shadowing people for the CIA without knowing it. They think
they're working for their own police departments, when, in fact,
their chief may be a CIA agent who's sending them out on CIA jobs
and turning their information over to his CIA control. There's
also a lot of "false flag" recruiting, when one agent will
recruit another one by telling him he'll actually be working for
his own government, or even for Peking or Havana. You don't let
the recruit know he'll be working for the United States, because
if he knew that, he might not consent to do it.
PLAYBOY: How much do you pay a spy?
AGEE: It depends on local conditions. In a poor country, $100 a
month will get you an ordinary agent. In my day, about $700 a
month would buy a Latin-American cabinet minister.
PLAYBOY: After you've recruited your agent, what then?
AGEE: Then you've got to run him, and that's an exacting
job--mainly because of the secrecy. You both have to be very
careful what you put on paper or say on the phone. You
communicate mostly by signals agreed upon in advance. For
example, you can make a chalk or pencil mark or place a strip of
colored tape in a certain telephone booth or on a fence, wall or
utility pole. Different marks or colors signify different
instructions. Since you usually can't be seen together, you have
to meet in what the CIA calls "a safe house." Sometimes, even
that's too risky, so you arrange for your agent to leave his
information at a "dead drop," like a hollow place in a cement
block or a magnetized container you can fasten under the shelf in
a telephone booth -- anyplace a message or a roll of microfilm or
a reel of tape would be safe until it could be picked up.
PLAYBOY: What if you suspect that an agent's information is
false?
AGEE: You can put him through a polygraph test or cut off his
money--fire him. Or, if necessary, and headquarters approves, you
can "burn" him. In Companyese, that means to reveal his
connection with the agency, or frame him. I remember, for
instance, the case of Joaquin Ordoqui, who was an old-time leader
of the Communist movement in Cuba. I don't know if he was ever a
CIA agent, but a decision was made to burn him in order to create
dissension in Cuba. So a series of letters implicating him as a
CIA agent was sent to the Cuban embassy in Mexico City. In 1964,
Ordoqui was placed under house arrest in Cuba and the case caused
a lot of friction there. Just before he died in 1974, though, he
was exonerated. In 1966, Stan Archenhold, the CIA officer who
dreamed up this burning operation, got the Intelligence Medal
--the CIA's biggest merit badge-- for it. Then there's the really
extreme situation in which someone who has worked for the CIA has
to be physically eliminated for some reason or other. I don't
know of any of these cases, but I've heard that has happened,
especially in Indochina during the Sixties. So the stick is a
big element in keeping control of agents. But the carrot, usually
money, is at least as important.
PLAYBOY: How does a CIA officer make payments to his agents?
AGEE: In cash. Let's face it, you can't pay spies by check. The
minute you go into the bank, the operation goes public. No,
toward the end of every month. I'd go out with my pockets stuffed
full of little pay envelopes and run all over town to meet my
agents in cars or safe houses and pay them off. I had so many
envelopes that once in a while I got mixed up and gave an agent
the wrong one. I always made them count the cash in front of me,
though, so I was able to correct those mistakes on the spot.
PLAYBOY: Besides cash, what were you supplied with? Were you
given James Bond gadgets and trained to use them?
AGEE: Bond never had it so good. In CIA jargon, tradecraft covers
the tricky side of espionage; it includes all the techniques that
keep a secret operation secret. We learned how to write secret
messages--there's a carbon system, a microdot system and various
wet methods; we also learned how to open and then reseal a
letter. Very simple when you have the flat steam table.
PLAYBOY: What's that?
AGEE: It's a rectangular platform, about one foot by two feet,
with a heating element built into it and foam rubber all around
the outside. You plug the unit into a wall socket, let it heat up
and put a wet blotter on top of it. Right away, the steam begins
to rise from the blotter. By experience, you know just how wet to
get it. Then you place the envelope on top of the blotter, with
the flap side down. In a matter of seconds, any envelope will
come right open. Later you reseal it -- the CIA makes a very
effective clear glue. If it's done right, there's no trace that
the envelope has been tampered with.
We were also taught how to bug a room and how to restore a wall
or a ceiling to its original appearance afterward. The CIA puts
out a handy-dandy plaster-patching and paint-matching kit, by the
way, that is better than anything the public can buy. They give
you about 150 chips on a chain, practically every color you can
think of. You just match the chips to the wall paint until you
get the right color. Then you look on the back of the chip, which
gives you the formula for mixing the paint. It really works. I
took the kit home one weekend when I was renovating my apartment.
It's superquick-drying, odorless paint.
They trained us in the use of disguises, too --wigs, mustaches,
body pads-- and taught us to work with hidden cameras. Some of
them had lenses that looked like tie-clasp ornaments or locks on
briefcases. The Company had other cameras with telescopic lenses
that could photograph documents inside a room, right through a
curtain. There was also a machine through which we could overhear
a conversation inside a room across the street; it bounced an
infrared beam off a window, using the windowpane to pick up the
vibrations of the voices inside the room. The reflected infrared
beam would carry the vibrations to a receiving set.
PLAYBOY: All that, we suppose, comes under the heading of
gathering information. What about the dirty tricks we hear the
CIA pulls? Did you have special gadgets for those, too?
AGEE: The CIA has a department called the Technical Services
Division, TSD, and its laboratories have produced all sorts of
things. Some of them are pretty unpleasant. For instance, TSD has
developed an invisible itching powder --I think it's made of
asbestos fibers, actually-- that drives its victims wild for
about three days. My agents used a lot of it. They went to
leftist meetings and sprinkled it on the seats of toilets. TSD
has also produced an invisible powder that will just lie
harmlessly on the floor --at a meeting hall, say-- until people
arrive and start walking around, so the powder gets stirred up.
Within about five minutes, everybody in the room is gasping and
watering at the eyes, and the meeting has to break up.
I remember another chemical we had. If you dropped it into
somebody's drink, it would give him a horrible body odor. We also
had a drug that would make people say whatever they were
thinking, just babble on. We had a powder that, mixed with pipe
tobacco or sifted into a cigarette, would give the smoker an
annoying respiratory ailment. We even had an ointment that came
in a little container that looked like a ring. On the underside
was a little compartment filled with ointment that, when you
smeared it unobtrusively on the door handle of a car, would give
the person who opened the door terrible burns on his hand.
Ordinary stink bombs were effective, too -- small glass vials
with the vilest-smelling liquid on earth. One time at the Mexico
City station, some clown poured a bunch of that liquid down the
drain. It was going bad. I guess. At that time, the station
occupied the upper floors of the embassy, in a high-rise
building. Somehow the liquid didn't run out into the sewer
system; it got caught in the basement area, and the smell began
to seep back upstairs. They had to evacuate the whole building
for a while. I heard that when the Ambassador asked the station
chief if he knew anything about it, the chief replied that
somebody must have had a worse case of Montezuma's revenge than
usual.
PLAYBOY: But all those things --itching powder, stink bombs-- are
incredibly petty, the kinds of things nasty little kids might
think of.
AGEE: The CIA isn't always petty. For instance, we had a whole
inventory of sabotage devices. Chemicals to gum up printing
presses, foul bearings, contaminate wheat or rice or sugar sacks.
There were limpets to sink ships. Also some frightening stuff
called thermite powder. Add a little water and you could mold it
like clay -- into an ashtray or a book end or a doll. It looked
harmless, but when the time pencil up the doll's behind ignited,
there was a shuddering ball of violent white heat that ate
through concrete or even steel in a few seconds. There was no way
you could put it out. I heard it was a CIA thermite doll that
burned down El Encanto, the big department store in Havana. You
could also combine thermite with tear-gas rods and create a cloud
that would clear an area for blocks around.
PLAYBOY: Did you learn these techniques during your CIA training
in the States?
AGEE: Yes.
PLAYBOY: Where was your first assignment outside the country?
AGEE: Quito, Ecuador. I went there in December 1960 under cover
as a State Department political officer, but using my own name.
My secret Company name was Jeremy S. HODAPP. I fell in love with
Ecuador. The mountains are spectacular, and high; Quito is 9000
feet above sea level. On the coastal plain, there are endless
palm forests and banana plantations. But the country is
appallingly poor. When I was there, the average income was $18 a
month. A conservative upper class, about one percent of the
population, held most of the wealth. However, for about 12 years
before I went there, Ecuador had been politically stable and some
economic progress was being made. But from 1961 to 1963, we
really subverted that country.
PLAYBOY: What was the point of that?
AGEE: Cuba was the point. The Cuban Revolution had swung to the
far left and the State Department was terrified. So were I.T.T.
and United Fruit and the big U.S. banks with Latin-American
interests; they feared that Cuba would export revolution to other
countries in the hemisphere, and then those countries might
nationalize their holdings. So the top priority of U.S. policy in
Latin America became to seal off Cuba from the continent. In
Quito, our orders were to do everything possible to force Ecuador
to break diplomatic and economic relations with Cuba and to
weaken the Communist Party there whatever it cost?
PLAYBOY: What did it cost?
AGEE: About $2,000,000. We bought everybody willing to sell
himself to get our jobs done. The vice-president of the
country --his name was Reinaldo Varea-- was a CIA agent. We paid
him $1000 a month and kept a suite for him in Quito's best hotel,
where he could take his girlfriends. The president's personal
physician, Felipe Ovalle, was on the CIA's payroll, too. So were
the president of the Chamber of Deputies, the minister of the
treasury, the minister of labor and the chief of police
intelligence. So were the leaders of several right-wing political
parties and some key members of the Communist Party, too. Several
ministers of government and the director of immigration also
worked closely with us. It was like a covert occupation of the
country. But, at the time, I didn't see anything wrong in what we
were doing. I believed what the CIA told me, that we were buying
time for liberal reforms by checking the spread of communism. So
I went out and worked like a demon to make that policy effective.
We ran over Ecuador like a steam roller. It was like living a
fantasy of absolute power. That's one of the insidious things
about the CIA. If you get exciting assignments, you can get
hooked on your own adrenaline.
PLAYBOY: Let's get into some of those assignments.
AGEE: Don't think it was all excitement. A CIA officer spends at
least half of his day on paperwork. Then he spends hours in musty
little basement rooms, waiting for agents to show up and make
their reports. Then he spends more hours listening to agents'
problems--how their girlfriends are pregnant, how their cars need
new transmissions, how their brothers-in-law would make good
spies. When he isn't mothering agents, a CIA officer is at a
cocktail party or a diplomatic reception or trudging around some
golf course, sucking up to a corrupt politician in hopes of
corrupting him still further. But some wild things did happen. I
would say maybe our most successful operation in Ecuador was the
framing of Antonio Flores Benitez, a key member of a Communist
revolutionary movement.
PLAYBOY: Tell us about that one.
AGEE: By bugging Flores' telephone, we found out a lot of what he
was doing. His wife was a blabbermouth. He made a secret trip to
Havana and we decided to do a job on him when he landed back in
Ecuador. With another officer, I worked all one weekend to
compose a "report" from Flores to the Cubans. It was a
masterpiece. The report implied that Flores' group had already
received funds from Cuba and was now asking for more money in
order to launch guerrilla operations in Ecuador. My Quito station
chief, Warren Dean, approved the report -- in fact, he loved it
so much he just had to get into the act. So he dropped the report
on the floor and walked on it awhile to make it look pocket-worn.
Then he folded it and stuffed it into a toothpaste tube--from
which he had spent three hours carefully squeezing out all the
tooth paste. He was like a kid with a new toy. So then I took the
tube out to the minister of the treasury, who gave it to his
customs inspector. When Flores came through customs, the
inspector pretended to go rummaging through one of his suitcases.
What he really did, of course, was slip the tooth-paste tube into
the bag and then pretend to find it there. When he opened the
tube, he of course "discovered" the report. Flores was arrested
and there was a tremendous scandal. This was one of a series of
sensational events that we had a hand in during the first six
months of 1963. By July of that year, the climate of
anti-Communist fear was so great that the military seized a
pretext and took over the government, jailed all the Communists
it could find and outlawed the Communist Party.
PLAYBOY: Is forgery often resorted to by the CIA?
AGEE: It's a standard technique. The catalyst for the coup in
Chile was almost exactly like the Flores incident. A document
describing a leftist plot to seize absolute power and start a
reign of terror was "discovered" by the enemies of Allende. Plan
Z, it was called. It made big headlines and the military used it
as an excuse to take over the country and start a real reign of
terror. I can't prove it, but I strongly suspect that Plan Z was
written by a CIA officer, or by the coup makers at the CIA's
suggestion.
PLAYBOY: You mentioned that the Communist Party was outlawed in
Ecuador. Did you succeed in your other objective, getting the
Ecuadorian government to break off relationships with Cuba?
AGEE: Yes. The government of Jos Maria Velasco Ibarra, who was a
moderate liberal, had resisted breaking with Cuba. He was
followed in 1961 by a moderate leftist, Carlos Julio Arosemena,
who also tried at first to resist U.S. policy. Finally, though,
he caved in and broke with Cuba after about six months in office.
When I left Ecuador, with the military junta in power, the
short-run security situation had been improved from our
viewpoint, but there hadn't been much improvement for most of the
people there. Practically none of the reforms everyone agreed
were needed --redistribution of income, agrarian reform, and so
forth-- had been installed. Do you know that today the Ecuadorian
government is still talking about those reforms without really
acting on them? But, at that time, I didn't realize how
reactionary the effects of our CIA operations really were.
PLAYBOY: Why not?
AGEE: For one thing, I suppose, I barely had time to stop and
turn around. The job of an operations officer calls for
dedication to the point of obsession, if you try to do it well.
You have too many secrets; you can't relax with outsiders. It's a
very unnatural life, hard on the people who live it. There's a
lot of alcoholism and a lot of emotional breakdowns in the CIA.
PLAYBOY: What sort of breakdowns?
AGEE: I'm not an expert on this, but it's a schizophrenic sort of
situation. Sometimes a CIA officer is using several identities at
once, and when you wake up in the morning, your mind goes click!
OK, who am I today? All day long, there's the same problem.
Somebody asks you a simple question: "What did you do over the
weekend?" Click! Who does he think I am? What would the guy he
thinks I am do over the weekend? You get so used to lying that
after a while it's hard to know when you're telling the truth.
PLAYBOY: How did that sort of stress affect CIA marriages?
AGEE: It didn't do mine any good. I had married Janet the year
before I went to Ecuador, but after we got there, we began to
have difficulty. I was gone all day and half the night and when
we did see each other, I couldn't tell her what I was doing. On
top of that, she had trouble learning Spanish, so she was
somewhat cut off from the Ecuadorians. More and more, she spent
her time playing bridge with embassy wives.
PLAYBOY: What did you do when you weren't working?
AGEE: I had some pretty wild friends, and some close calls;
barely missed a scandal several times. One time -- God, was I
lucky! I went to Guayaquil for the weekend. It's a steamy,
tropical town and I spent Saturday night with a convivial agent,
making the rounds of the sleazier dives. About 15 minutes after
we left one of them, a place called Cuatro y Media, President
Arosemena and some of his cronies came in. The waiters in that
joint were all homosexual and Arosemena and his friends began to
taunt them. Arosemena would get wild when he drank, and after a
while he ordered one of the waiters to put a lamp shade on his
head. Then he took out his pistol, but instead of shooting the
lamp shade off, he shot the waiter in the head. The whole affair
was hushed up, so I still don't know if the man was killed or
just wounded. But if I'd been in the Cuatro y Media when the shot
was fired and the Ambassador had found out, I'd have had to leave
the country.
PLAYBOY: Which, of course, you eventually did -- though not under
a cloud. What was your next station?
AGEE: Montevideo, and I think Uruguay had something to do with
turning me around in my attitudes toward the CIA. For years,
Uruguay had been one of the most prosperous and progressive
countries on the continent. It had a $700-a-year per-capita
income and a 90 percent literacy rate, an eight-hour day, a
minimum wage, workmen's compensation, free, secular,
state-supported education, free elections. The country was
showcase of liberal reform, but in the Fifties some deep cracks
showed up in the window. The reforms hadn't touched land tenure
-- a few rich men owned most of the countryside. Uruguay had a
sheep-and-cattle economy, and a collapse in the prices of wool,
hides and meat after the Korean War sent the country into a tail
spin of inflation, deficits, unemployment, stagnation, strikes
and corruption. The left was getting stronger, and the CIA
reinforced its station in Montevideo.
PLAYBOY: When did you arrive in Uruguay, and what did you do
there?
AGEE: I got there in March 1964 and stayed about two and a half
years. We pretty well ran the military and the police
intelligence services, gave them information from our penetration
agents in the Communist Party and used the police to tap
telephones. I ran an operation to bug the United Arab Republic's
embassy, which enabled us to break the U.A.R.'s diplomatic codes.
My main responsibility, though, was for operations against the
Cubans. We had an agent in the Cuban embassy, the chauffeur, and
we thought at one point that we'd recruited the Cuban code clerk.
We offered him $50,000 for a look at the code pads and $3000 a
month if he'd continue working at the embassy, but at the last
minute he backed out. I'm glad now that we lost him, but I was
really disappointed then.
PLAYBOY: What about the Russians? Did you run any operations
against them?
AGEE: Another officer was in charge of anti-Soviet operations,
but after we finally got the Uruguayans to break with Cuba, I
began working against the Soviets. In fact, I really made trouble
for the Russians in Uruguay. It all began when I met a K.G.B.
officer from the Soviet embassy named Sergei Borisov. We met at
the Montevideo Diplomatic Club and struck up a kind of unreal
friendship. He knew what I was, I knew what he was. We both knew
we were spying on each other, but we went ahead and did it
anyway, because it was part of the game we were playing. It was
like chess. In fact, we sometimes played chess and he beat my ass
off every time, but I liked to think I beat him at the spy game.
PLAYBOY: How?
AGEE: Well, it started by my inviting Sergei and his wife, Nina,
to dinner at our house. Then we began to see them every month or
so. Go to the beach, have dinner, drink a little vodka and play
some chess while the wives talked girl talk. Then one day our
telephone tap on the Soviet embassy gave us a sensational piece
of information about infidelity in the Borisov mnage.
PLAYBOY: You mean Sergei was sneaking out for a quick one now and
then?
AGEE: No. Nina was! Sergei had a new boss, a K.G.B. station
chief named Khalturin, and one of Khalturin's first unofficial
acts after arriving in the country, even before he had a
permanent place to live, was to jump into bed with Nina. Then I
found out that Khalturin was interested in an apartment owned by
a friend of mine, a Philip Morris distributor named Carlos
Salguero. Salguero agreed to make sure Khalturin took the
apartment -- but to give us access before the Russian moved in.
We bugged the sofa and the bed, and we got another apartment on
the floor above and just off to one side. My secretary moved into
the other apartment until we could find an agent to cover it. To
operate the bugs, we used one of the CIA's less amazing
technological achievements, a transmitter-receiver that was
fitted into a gray, two-suiter Samsonite suitcase and gave us
nothing but trouble.
PLAYBOY: What went wrong?
AGEE: Well, for one thing, the damned thing put out so much
radiation that you had to wear a lead apron so the radiation
wouldn't homogenize your balls. And for another, you had to tilt
the suitcase to just the right angle so that the beam was aimed
directly at the switches in Khalturin's apartment. Otherwise, the
switches would get stuck in the On or Off position and somebody
would have to sneak into his apartment to move them.
PLAYBOY: What did you learn from Nina and Khalturin's
conversations?
AGEE: It's funny, I don't know. None of us could understand
Russian, so we sent the tapes to headquarters to be transcribed,
and I was so busy with other operations that I never bothered to
read the English transcriptions that came back. But that
situation served as the basis for one of the weirdest operational
ideas I ever had. I suggested to Washington that I should arrange
to find myself alone with Sergei and tell him how sorry I was to
hear that his wife was having an affair with his boss. That would
have put Sergei and Khalturin into a tricky situation on two
levels, personal and political.
PLAYBOY: We can see the personal problem, but how would it affect
them politically?
AGEE: Well, if a Russian told Sergei his wife was having an
affair with his boss, he would not be obliged to report it to
Moscow. Extramarital affairs in a Soviet colony abroad are, in
fact, rather common. Sergei might even have known about the
affair and was allowing it to continue. But if a CIA man told
Sergei about the affair, that would be another matter altogether.
All CIA contacts must be reported. Not to report what I said
would be to take a first step toward treason. If he did report
it, he'd create an uncomfortable situation for himself and for
Khalturin. What I hoped, of course, was that he wouldn't. Then we
might have gotten him into a position for blackmail. If he told
his wife what I'd said, we'd have her, too. And if Nina told
Khalturin and we got their conversation on tape, we could make
big trouble for all of them. We might even find ourselves with
some very valuable new assets inside the K.G.B.
PLAYBOY: So what happened?
AGEE: Washington killed the idea. They were afraid Sergei might
throw a punch at me and cause a flap. I think they were wrong.
PLAYBOY: So that was that?
AGEE: Far from it. We kept right on after Khalturin. I helped
forge a document pretty much like the Flores report, this time
seeming to involve the Soviet embassy in Uruguay with the
damaging strikes the country had been having. By using some of
our well-placed agents in the Uruguayan government, we had six
officers in the Russian embassy expelled, most of them from
Khalturin's department. That left him terribly shorthanded, so he
had to work day and night. From our observation posts at the
Soviet embassy, we could see him coming and going, and he looked
really run-down. We hoped he might crack. But I left Uruguay
before Khalturin and the Borisovs did, so I don't know what
finally happened with them.
PLAYBOY: But something happened to you? You were saying that in
Uruguay you began to have a change of heart about the CIA.
AGEE: Yes. Part of the trouble was the atmosphere in the
Montevideo station. Ned Holman, the chief, was a really
unpleasant, middle-aged ex-FBI man. And God, was he lazy! He was
only four years from retirement and all he wanted to do was serve
out his time. When anything went wrong, he wrote scurrilous
letters about his officers to our superiors in Washington. I
found the combination to his file and read them. He gave me good
reports, because I was a bear for work, but he really hurt most
of the others. There was a foul atmosphere there.
PLAYBOY: What about the atmosphere in your home?
AGEE: That kept getting worse, too. And so did the atmosphere in
the country. While I was in Uruguay, inflation soared from 33.5
percent a year to more than 100 percent. For months on end, one
sector of the economy or another was paralyzed by strikes. The
more I got to know about the corrupt government we were backing,
the less I liked my work. I began to see that the landowners,
ranchers, bankers and professionals--a small minority--were using
the government for their own selfish purposes. Why were we
supporting such people? Then came the invasion of the Dominican
Republic by U.S. Marines. That really got to me. It was done
under the pretext that the Dominican Republic might become
another Cuba, which was so absurd I had to wonder what the real
reason was. For the first time, I had to consider that the CIA
might not really be serving the cause of liberal reform. And then
one day I got a shock that's still painful to talk about.
PLAYBOY: What was it?
AGEE: I overheard a man being tortured by the police -- a man I'd
fingered for them. You know, at that time, the police in
Latin-American countries didn't use torture as some of them do
now. For years I'd been having people arrested, but I don't think
I'd ever actually seen what happened to them afterward. Then, in
December 1965, during a state of siege, I told the Uruguayan
police to pick up a Communist named Oscar Bonaudi for preventive
detention, because he was quite active in street demonstrations.
About five days later, the new chief of station, John Horton, and
I were visiting police headquarters to show the police chief a
forged document we'd prepared, and I began to hear moans coming
from somewhere above the police chief's office. The chief was
embarrassed and told one of his assistants to turn up the radio.
I remember there was a soccer game on. Well, the moans got louder
and the assistant kept turning up the radio. Finally, the moans
turned to screams and the radio was blaring so loudly we couldn't
hear ourselves talk. I had this strange feeling--terror and
helplessness. Two days later, I found out that the man they had
been torturing was Bonaudi.
PLAYBOY: What was your reaction?
AGEE: I can't describe it. I just know that after that, I began
to notice certain things and think about them. For instance, I
began to observe what happened to Company men as they got older.
Unless they made it to a high-level job, a lot of them turned
into pale-faced paper pushers who believed in nothing but their
pensions. Burned-out cases. Was I going to be like that in 15
years? It worried me.
PLAYBOY: When did you decide to quit The Company?
AGEE: Before I left Uruguay. But I decided not to leave until I
found another job. When I was transferred back to Washington in
the fall of 1966, Janet and I separated, so my expenses were
pretty high. We had two children, Christopher, who was then two,
and Philip, who was five. Then I had a piece of luck. I was sent
to Mexico City--assigned, along with another man who was
legitimate, not CIA, as one of the U.S Ambassador's attachs for
the 1968 Olympic games. I spent a very pleasant year and a half
working on that assignment. The CIA's purpose in sending me was
to use the Olympic milieu to recruit new agents. I met a lot of
people, didn't recruit any, and meanwhile learned quite a bit
about the CIA's operation in Mexico.
PLAYBOY: Is it a sizable one?
AGEE: Huge. The station's annual budget even then was $5,500,000.
And the Mexicans were very cooperative. With Mexican security's
help, the station was able to tap as many as 40 telephone lines
at once. The president of the country at the time, Gustavo Diaz
Ordaz, was a very close CIA collaborator. So was his predecessor,
Adolfo Lopez Mateos. The current Mexican president, Luis
Echeverra, also was a station contact -- when he was Diaz Ordaz'
minister for internal security. But I'm pretty sure Echeverra
has broken with the CIA; in fact, he's now denouncing it and
accusing it of fomenting demonstrations by what he calls "young
fascists" against his administration.
PLAYBOY: Did you learn about any interesting operations in
Mexico?
AGEE: Two. One was a defection operation, the other involved the
use of a woman as bait. In the defection business, I learned how
much the CIA would pay to get what it wanted. We had access
through one of our agents to a senior K.G.B. officer named Pavel
Yatskov, who happened to be a fanatic about fishing. Well, cool
as you please, the Soviet Bloc Division in headquarters proposed
to induce Yatskov to defect by offering him $500,000! Not only
that, but the CIA was willing to set him up with an elaborate
cover as the owner of an income-producing fishing lodge in
Canada. The reason this plan wasn't adopted was that we feared
that our own man may have been a double agent, secretly recruited
by Yatskov.
PLAYBOY: And the case in which a woman was used as bait?
AGEE: Straight out of Ian Fleming. She was a young Mexican girl,
recruited through a local businessman. She was used as bait to
lure the administrative officer of the Soviet embassy, a man
named Silnikov. He used to spend a lot of time horsing around
with the owner of a tiny grocery store near the Soviet embassy --
who just happened to be a CIA agent. The Soviets bought a lot of
Coca-Cola there and at one time the CIA was working on ways to
bug the Coke bottles that went into their embassy. Anyway, it
became obvious that Silnikov rose to the bait, shall we say.
After some hot necking sessions in the back of the store, they
went to the girl's pad, where, unbeknownst to her, a bug and a
hidden camera had been installed. I don't know how much
information Silnikov spilled, if any, but his virility was beyond
belief.
PLAYBOY: When you left the CIA, did you let The Company know how
you felt about what it was doing?
AGEE: Hell, no! I wanted them to think I was still a loyal
agency supporter --that there were no political reasons for my
resigning--s o I told them I was leaving for personal reasons.
This was true as far as it went, because the CIA knew I was
planning to marry a woman I'd met through the Olympics and to
live permanently in Mexico. If The Company had known how I really
felt, it could have made it impossible, through its Mexican
government friends, for me to remain in Mexico. As it was, the
CIA urged me to stay in The Company and offered me another
promotion. But I refused. In fact, I did something you have to be
pretty damn careful not to do in the CIA. I refused to obey an
order.
PLAYBOY: Is that like refusing to obey an order in the military?
AGEE: Almost as bad. It happened like this: Janet was resentful
because of the breakup and other things, so when I took a trip to
Washington, she refused to let me take the children back to
Mexico for a visit. I took them anyway and Janet was furious. She
said if I didn't send them back, she'd expose me as a CIA
officer. I knew she was bluffing, but The Company didn't. So Win
Scott, the station chief, called me in and said, "Send them
back." I said, "No. If you want to fire me right now, OK, I
quit." They couldn't fire me, because the Ambassador needed me;
it would have been too awkward for him to fire one of his Olympic
attachs on the eve of the games. But they were really in a
lather.
PLAYBOY: The CIA felt that you were disloyal?
AGEE: To put it mildly. But, in fact, I wasn't really disloyal to
the CIA even then. When I resigned, I had no intention of writing
a book, of doing the CIA any harm. I was still a prisoner of
middle-class respectability and of that pervasive CIA security
consciousness. I went to work for a friend in Mexico City who was
marketing a new product, and I figured I'd just forget I'd ever
worked for the CIA.
PLAYBOY: But you couldn't forget?
AGEE: I couldn't forget. The memories kept coming back like
things I'd swallowed but couldn't digest. Then my marriage plans
fell through and I had plenty of time to think. The feeling began
to grow inside me that I had some message to give -- that I
should tell the American people what their Government was doing
in their name. I found myself making notes. First I thought of
writing sort of a scholarly treatise on the CIA. I wrote an
outline and took it to New York. Five publishers turned it down.
But I'm stubborn, you know. I'm a Capricorn, if that means
anything. Headstrong. So back in Mexico, a friend who knew
Francois Maspero, a radical publisher in Paris, put me in touch
with him. And, well, Maspero agreed to give me a small advance
and help me get the book written. But I couldn't find the
research material I needed in Mexico. You see, I had no notes
from my CIA days; I had to find contemporary sources to refresh
my memory, so I could reconstruct events. I could have continued
in Paris or maybe London, someplace outside the jurisdiction of
U.S. courts, so they couldn't enjoin my work as they had
Marchetti's. Another possibility was Havana, and with Maspero's
help, arrangements were made for me to go
there.
PLAYBOY: Why Havana?
AGEE: We found that there were newspapers and magazines and other
reference works at the National Library and the Casa de las
Americas. But, besides, I really wanted to see for myself what
the Cuban Revolution was all about.
PLAYBOY: How much were you allowed to see in Cuba?
AGEE: They let me go anywhere except onto military reservations.
In 1971, I traveled all over the island, and I was impressed. The
Cubans were quite enthusiastic about the Revolution, in spite of
the many hardships caused by the U.S. economic blockade--and by
their own mistakes, too. They supported their government; they
were convinced it was giving them a fair deal. So was I. Cuba had
done what the other Latin-American countries had pledged to do in
the early Sixties: It had redistributed income and integrated
its society.
PLAYBOY: Did the CIA discover in 1971 that you were inside Cuba?
AGEE: Surprisingly, I don't think they did. I knew The Company
checks passenger manifests on all planes and ships that make
stops in Cuba. Somehow they missed me. I guess good luck made me
reckless, because before leaving Havana to continue research in
Paris, I did something really foolish. I wrote a long, signed
letter to a Montevideo political journal, describing some of the
CIA's covert-action operations in Uruguay. There was an electoral
campaign on there and I thought I could help the left-wing
coalition --which was similar to the Popular Unity coalition that
had elected Allende in Chile the year before-- by suggesting that
the CIA would be helping the corrupt traditional parties. It was
as if I had forgotten everything I had learned about the CIA and
how dangerous it can be. I was damn soon reminded, though.
PLAYBOY: What happened?
AGEE: I was visited in Paris by a CIA officer named Keith
Gardiner, a Harvard type, a guy I'd known a long time, who told
me that Richard Helms, who was director of the CIA then, wanted
to know what the hell I thought I was doing by writing that
letter to the Montevideo publication. It was a scary moment. I
decided I'd better bluff. I figured that if The Company knew how
little work I'd actually done on the book --less than a third of
the research-- they might figure it was safe to get rough. So I
told them it was already written and I was cutting it to a
publishable length. I promised to submit the final draft to the
CIA before publication.
PLAYBOY: But you didn't?
AGEE: I never intended to. At that time, I was just trying to
calm them down. I hoped that would stall them for a while, but I
couldn't be certain, and from that moment on, I lived under a big
strain.
PLAYBOY: Were you afraid you might be assassinated?
AGEE: I was too busy to think about that. But I was jumpy. For
one thing, I wasn't sure to what lengths the French secret
service might go to please The Company. At the very least, I was
afraid I might be deported and put on some plane that made its
first stop
in New York.
PLAYBOY: Did you see any indication that your fears were
justified?
AGEE: A few months after Gardiner's visit, I noticed I was being
followed on the street. I couldn't be sure if it was CIA people
or a French liaison operation working at the CIA's request. And I
had no idea what they might be setting me up for. For all I knew,
they might have been a bunch of killers. Anyway, about the same
time, my advance from the publisher ran out. The situation was
pretty grim. The CIA was after me and sometimes I literally
didn't have a franc for cigarettes. I felt pretty damn small and
alone. Friends helped out with food and some small cash
donations, and to avoid the surveillance, I went to live in the
room of a friend who's an artist. In the daytime, I worked as
usual at the library doing my research, but I kept the place
where I was living a secret.
PLAYBOY: How did you duck the people who were tailing you?
AGEE: It wasn't too hard. I'd take the Mtro, for example, the
Paris subway, and when the train arrived, I'd just stand by the
door and let it go off again and see if anybody had stayed in the
station with me when all the other people were gone. Or when I
got off the train, I'd stay there on the platform and let
everybody leave and then see if anybody else had remained on the
platform. Usually, there was a group of three or four of them.
Once identified, they'd be easy to lose. One time, when I had a
little cash, I took a cab. My retinue took a cab, too. I told my
driver to stop at the Arc de Triomphe. When he did, I pretended
to be fumbling for my money, but I was really watching my
surveillance team in the rearview mirror. They got out of their
cab fast, all set to keep following me on foot. But the minute
their cab drove off, I told my driver I'd decided to ride a
little farther. So we pulled away and left them standing there. I
couldn't resist -- I turned around slowly, held my hand up and
gave them the finger.
PLAYBOY: Besides following you, did The Company make any other
moves?
AGEE: Some surprisingly obvious ones. A CIA man visited my father
in Florida and tried to scare him about what might happen to me.
Another CIA man called on Janet and got her to write me a letter
of concern. He also told her they'd pay me to stop and not
publish. She didn't tell me this, but my older son did -- he was
listening secretly. God, I hope spying isn't congenital!
In the spring of 1972, The Company moved against me more
directly. A young man who said his name was Sal Ferrera showed up
in a caf I liked and introduced himself as an underground
journalist. I told him who I was and what I was doing. He offered
me a small loan and suggested that he might do an interview with
me. I was desperate for money, so I took the loan and let him
have the interview. He bought me a dinner one night and afterward
we met a woman named Leslie Donegan, who said she was a
Venezuelan heiress. At Sal's urging, I saw Leslie again and soon
she offered to support me while I finished the book -- provided I
let her read the manuscript. I needed money so badly I let her
have a copy for a few days.
PLAYBOY: Did Leslie come through with the money?
AGEE: In dribs and drabs, enough to keep me going. It's ironic to
think that the book may have got finished partly because the CIA,
through Leslie, supported me through my darkest hour. But the
situation had its risks. I was just plain foolish to keep seeing
Sal and Leslie. The bugged typewriter was the last straw.
PLAYBOY: The CIA bugged your typewriter?
AGEE: Sal lent me a portable that Leslie eventually switched for
a different one. I took it to my secret living place. One
afternoon I went out to get a bottle of beer and when I went back
to the room, I saw a man and a woman in the hall outside my door.
When they saw me, they began kissing. I thought right away they
might be surveillance agents -- but how had they found out where
I lived? The friend whose room I was staying in went out to see
what they were doing in the hall. When they saw her, they hurried
down the back stairs but couldn't get out the back door, because
it was locked. When she followed them down, they started
embracing and whispering again and then ran up to the main floor
and escaped by the front door. They had something bulky under
their coats -- probably the receiving set for monitoring the bug
in the typewriter.
PLAYBOY: The typewriter had led them to you?
AGEE: This typewriter--the one you see right here on the table.
The one that's photographed on the cover of my book. After
catching the monitors, I began to examine the typewriter Leslie
had given me. I noticed that when it was facing a certain way, I
heard a beeping sound on my FM radio. So I tore off the lining on
the inside roof of the case and there it was -- a complicated
system of miniaturized transistors, batteries, circuits,
antennas, even a tiny switch glued flat against the roof of the
case.
PLAYBOY: Have you ever been accused of rigging this yourself to
discredit the CIA?
AGEE: I wouldn't know how to make one of these. My editor in
London had a technical study made and the thing is
legitimate -- made in TSD.
PLAYBOY: So they'd found out where you lived--what did they do
then?
AGEE: I didn't give them a chance to do anything. I left that
room the same day and slept in a different hotel every night
until I took off for London.
PLAYBOY: Why did you go to London?
AGEE: Partly to get information, partly to look for a new
publisher. I found one almost overnight. An editor of Penguin
Books, Neil Middleton, believed in the book and gave me an
advance. I also found the information I still needed. I'd been
looking desperately for Latin-American newspapers that covered
the years when I was there. John Gerassi, who has written
extensively on Latin America and was teaching at the University
of Paris when I was in France, had told me the British Museum had
completed files and he was right. They were just what I needed. I
decided to stay in London and rewrite the book. With all the new
material available, I saw I could reconstruct a diary of the
whole period. I finished the research in eight months, then in
the next six months I wrote over 600 pages in a terrific burst of
work.
PLAYBOY: Did the new material inspire you?
AGEE: Well, it wasn't only the material. I had met a young woman
just before I left Paris. Angela's a Brazilian in her early 20s.
We fell in love before she knew I had worked for the CIA and
before I knew she had been in prison and been tortured by the
CIA-supported military regime in Brazil. Strange, isn't it, that
two people with such opposite experiences should have come
together? It was from Angela that I learned the full horror of
what I had been doing in supporting repression. When I was in
Montevideo, I was actually in charge of spying on Brazilian
exiles who opposed the military regime and had fled to Uruguay. I
reported on their activities to our CIA station in Rio. Anyway,
Angela came over to London a few months after I did and we've
been together ever since. She was a tremendous help with the
book, reading and discussing every sentence with me, helping with
the typing and the Xeroxing. I was so scared that the CIA might
try to steal the manuscript that every time I got 20 or 30 pages
done, we'd Xerox copies and hide them all over London.
PLAYBOY: You say Angela was tortured by the Brazilian government?
AGEE: In early 1970; she was 19, a student at Catholic University
in Rio. She had gotten involved in radical politics and had to go
underground, and was wounded in an ambush by the military police.
They left her for dead and she had almost escaped when they
spotted her and hauled her off to an interrogation center, where
they began to torture her.
PLAYBOY: What kinds of torture did they use?
AGEE: Clubs, truncheons, fists. They hung her upside down from a
bar and beat her. They would stand behind her and clap her ears
as hard as they could with both hands. She says her head felt as
if it were exploding, blood spurted out of her ears and she
passed out. But most of the torture was done with a field
telephone. They attached electrodes to sensitive parts of the
body, the nipples or the lips, and then cranked the telephone as
hard as they could. Sometimes they poured water on her before
they turned the crank; because water is a conductor of
electricity, the pain was even more excruciating. One of her
torturers got the bright idea of putting the electrodes on her
gunshot wound and then cranking the generator. The electricity
forced the wound open again. Somehow Angela held out. All she
admitted under torture, which went on over a period of maybe four
months, was her membership in an underground party -- and she was
ashamed of admitting that. A year and a half after she was
arrested, she went to trial. A year after that, she finally got
out. Her closest relative, an aunt who is a lawyer, shipped her
out of the country.
PLAYBOY: Is torture still going on in Brazil?
AGEE: Every day. There's one difference. At first, the torturers
wore name plates and didn't bother to hide their faces. Later,
after several were executed by revolutionaries, the torturers got
nervous and began to hood their victims. But many names were
already known. They turned up in Chile, too, and were recognized
there. After Allende fell, the Brazilian military lent the
Chilean military some of its most successful torture teams as a
gesture of good will.
PLAYBOY: How is Angela now?
AGEE: Solid. No emotional scars that I can see. A very gentle and
spiritual woman. She's with me and my children, who are living
with us permanently now, in England. The book is for her and for
all the people who have suffered torture because of the CIA. You
know, when and if the history of the CIA's support to torturers
gets written--not just in Brazil but in Chile, Uruguay, Portugal,
Greece, Iran, Indonesia, above all in Vietnam--my God, it'll be
the all-time horror story.
PLAYBOY: Has The Company kept after you in England the way it did
in France?
AGEE: I've been shadowed and my phone was tapped.
PLAYBOY: People are always saying their phones are tapped. How do
you know your phone was tapped?
AGEE: How about this? Just last week, at home, the telephone went
dead for a couple of hours. Then it rang and a guy on the line
asked, "Is this a WB 400 number?" or some letters like that and
then a number. And I said, "What's that?" And he said, "Oh, this
is the telephone-company engineer, and we've just installed a new
cable up the hill toward your house, and I'm in here in the
exchange right now, connecting it." And I said, "What do you
mean, a WB 400 number?" And he said, "Oh, you know, it's one of
those observation lines." And I said, "Observing what?" He
said, "Well, they don't tell you very much about it. I'm new;
this is my first job. But there's this little black box on the
frame here where your pair is." And I said, "Well, I don't
know." And he said, "Well, now tell me, are you ... is this a
private line?" And I said, "Yes." And he said, "Oh, excuse me.
Yes, yes, yes -- everything's all right. Thanks. Bye." I checked
later with some people who know about phone tapping in Britain,
and they have a system there for monitoring lines where they have
obscene or threatening calls, and they use that as a cover for
political line tapping.
PLAYBOY: Have there been any obvious attempts to harass you?
AGEE: Nothing overt until Angela and I and the boys went on a
two-week trip to Portugal over Christmas and New Year's. We went
with the car by ferry from Southampton to San Sebastin, Spain,
and when we were rolling off the ferry, Christopher said, "Hey,
Dad, I just saw that policeman looking at our license plate and
now he's making a phone call." Sure enough, when we pulled out
of the docking area, five cars pulled out after us! We looked
like a funeral procession. It was obvious what had happened: The
CIA had known of our trip from the telephone tap and had asked
the Spanish service to shadow us -- I hoped that was all. But it
occurred to me, for instance, that they could have planted some
drugs in my car. If they stopped us and "found" drugs, I could be
put away for 20 years! Anyway, with that army on our tail, I
figured they had something major in mind, but I knew I couldn't
outrun them. They were all in big cars and I was driving a little
VW. So I just moseyed along steadily for an hour or so.
Occasionally, one of them would pass me, then drop back. Once I
pulled into a rest area just as one of the drivers was changing
his license plates -- the CIA makes an all-purpose quick-change
license-plate bracket that fits different sizes of plates from
different countries. When we reached the caves at Altamira, two
of our shadows went down into the caves with us to see the
pre-historic paintings. When we came out, I saw another agent
holding in a curious way what looked like a TSD briefcase. So I
drifted in his direction and when I passed him, I heard the
camera inside the briefcase go zing!
It was getting scary, but suddenly I had a real bit of luck. We
came to a city named Torrelavega. It was about six, the rush
hour, and the streets were crowded with cars. Up ahead there was
a big intersection, maybe seven streets coming together and one
traffic cop in the middle, trying to keep all the lines moving.
OK, I thought, this is my chance. I stopped the car against the
cop's signal and pretended I was stalled. He got hysterical.
There were horns blowing, mass confusion. The cop forced all the
cars behind me, including, of course, all the surveillance cars,
to go around me and keep moving. I watched which streets they
turned into, then took a different street and made a couple of
quick turns. Pretty soon I was on the back road to Burgos and we
never saw them again. But that was lucky. They were asleep.
PLAYBOY: Do you think The Company is behind the leaks that have
been made to the press about you in the past year?
AGEE: Sure it is. During the Watergate hearings, while Senator
Howard Baker was investigating the CIA's involvement, he came
across a veiled mention of a "WH Flap." He assumed the phrase
meant White House Flap. Actually, it meant Western Hemisphere
Flap and referred to me and my book. This had to be explained to
Senator Baker. The CIA figured that someone would talk and the
cat would soon be out of the bag. So an attempt was made to
discredit me in advance. A story was leaked to The New York
Times, A.P., The Washington Post and Newsweek about a "drunk and
despondent former CIA officer" who was talking to the K.G.B.,
telling them all about the CIA.
PLAYBOY: And were you drunk and despondent?
AGEE: Why should I be? I'd finally finished my book.
PLAYBOY: Were you talking to the K.G.B.?
AGEE: No way. And they knew I wasn't. In the CIA's so-called news
leak, the CIA officer wasn't identified, the K.G.B. people
weren't identified, the time and place and substance of the
supposed conversations weren't given. Nevertheless, the Times and
Newsweek fell for the story and printed it as fact. The
Washington Post printed an item but said it was unconfirmed.
PLAYBOY: Nobody bothered to check the story out?
AGEE: That's right. Where the CIA is concerned, very few
journalists have learned to tell information from disinformation.
But that time, the smear wound up on the CIA's face, and I owe
that to Victor Marchetti. By the way, the CIA tried to get
Marchetti to spy on me. When The Company heard that he was going
to England, they asked him to steal my manuscript so they could
read it. We think they already had a copy of the book and were
just trying to use him so they could discredit him with his
friends as an informer. Of course, he turned them down ... But
getting back to the smear story. Marchetti told Larry Stern of
The Washington Post what the CIA was trying to do to me, and
Larry flew over to England to see me and got the facts and
printed them. The Times sent Dick Eder to see me and then printed
an item saying its source had retracted the story. It's a small
victory, I guess, but to me it's not a trivial one. If the press
can start to expose some of the CIA's little lies, maybe someday
it'll get around to exposing some of the big ones.
The big victory for me right now, of course, is the publication
of the book and the fact that it's a success. But I've been lucky
to get this far, when you think of the odds. My father thinks
what I'm doing is some kind of personal vendetta against the
agency -- not so, of course, but the agency sure trashed me in an
effort to complicate my negotiations for U.S. publication of my
book. There was, for example, a series of leaks to Jack Anderson
that he obligingly printed, to the effect that I'm under some
kind of Cuban-government control. Too bad about Anderson. You'd
think he'd have wanted to help get my book published in the U.S.,
since his so-called CIA sources confirmed its accuracy to him.
But it finally is getting published there. The CIA can't hide its
crimes from the American public forever, and I'll bet other books
will follow Marchetti's and mine.
PLAYBOY: But doesn't the CIA have a legitimate bone to pick with
you? For instance, like Daniel Ellsberg, you've been accused of
violating a secrecy agreement. What do you say to that?
AGEE: I did violate the secrecy agreement. But I think it was
worse to stay silent than to violate the agreement. The agreement
itself was plain immoral -- like criminals' swearing secrecy.
PLAYBOY: Do you plan to go back to the U.S. and risk indictment?
AGEE: I don't know if I'm subject to indictment and neither do my
lawyers. If it turns out I am subject to indictment, I may go
back and fight it as a test case. I may not.
PLAYBOY: Even if you don't go back to the U.S., you're going to
publish your book there. Other than indirectly, as through the
leaks to Anderson, do you think the CIA has tried to block it?
AGEE: The CIA let prospective publishers know that if they tried
to publish it, they would face expensive litigation. But a lot
has happened since Marchetti's book was published. If as much
comes out as I expect, the CIA may look pretty silly if it tries
to assume a posture of civic virtue in front of a magistrate.
That's why I published the book first in England. I figured the
CIA couldn't so easily stop publication there and I figured that
once the truth was out somewhere in the world, it would be much
harder to keep from the American people. And that's what I really
care about. I wanted the book to be published in the United
States because I wanted the American people to know what I know
about the CIA, what the CIA has been doing all these years, all
over the world, in their name.
PLAYBOY: Many people agree with your aims but disagree strongly
with your methods. They say that by revealing the names of CIA
agents and exposing CIA procedures your book jeopardizes U.S.
security. What is your answer to that?
AGEE: I think it's a little late in the day to pretend that what
I've written puts the country in any danger. What I've written
puts the CIA in danger. The CIA claims that secrecy is necessary
to hide what it is doing from the enemies of the United States. I
claim that the real reason for secrecy is to hide what the CIA is
doing from the American people and from the people victimized by
the CIA.
PLAYBOY: But many people who dislike the CIA as much as you do
have charged that by revealing the names and functions of
individual officers and agents of the CIA, you have endangered
the lives of your former colleagues, many of whom you yourself
induced to become employees of The Company. Your accusers ask:
Wasn't it unnecessary, wasn't it immoral, wasn't it, in fact, a
crime to reveal those names?
AGEE: Absolutely not. Those people talk about the CIA as if it
were an international charity of some sort and about me as if I'd
done something horrible to a lot of decent, well-meaning Y.M.C.A.
leaders. In fact, the CIA, in my opinion, is a criminal
organization at least as nefarious as the Mafia and much, much
more powerful. Even more than the Vietnam war, the CIA represents
the destruction of our national ideals on the pretext of saving
them. What you've got to understand is that in revealing the
names of CIA operatives, I am revealing the names of people
engaged in criminal activities. These people live by breaking the
law. Every day of the week, CIA men break the laws of the
countries they're stationed in. I don't know any country in which
bugging or intercepting mail or bribing public officials is
legal.
At the same time, it's nonsense to say that by exposing the CIA
officers and agents I knew, I have endangered their lives. I have
exposed some to problems, but The Company can solve those
problems for the indigenous agents in Latin America. As for the
Company officers I've named, well, they can stay in Langley if
they want to be safe.
PLAYBOY: Do you think your book has disrupted CIA operations in
Latin America?
AGEE: I hope so, and I think the disruptions I've caused will be
followed by many more around the world. I think the fact that
Marchetti and I have broken ranks and somehow survived is going
to encourage a lot of other CIA men to come out of that poisonous
fog of secrecy they've been living in and tell their stories.
There's a lot of soul-searching going on in the CIA now and I'm
going to do all I can to help the people who decide to get out.
If my book is a commercial success, I'll be able to support CIA
men who want to talk.
PLAYBOY: In your opinion, what will be the result of the CIA
investigations in Washington?
AGEE: The Rockefeller Commission was never a real danger to the
CIA. President Ford set it up to whitewash The Company. The House
committee shows real promise and so does the one in the Senate.
These committees have the chance right now to correct the mistake
the Congress made almost 30 years ago in not making sure the CIA
was closely controlled. I sure hope they do, and I would applaud
anything they could do to restrict CIA-promoted repression, even
though I think the CIA should be abolished.
PLAYBOY: Do you think that's a serious possibility?
AGEE: I think that for the time being, we will have some kind of
intelligence collection for early warning and monitoring of
agreements with the Soviets. But this can be preserved under the
military services. Perhaps also the analytical work done by the
nonclandestine part of the CIA will be continued. But it could be
continued in a wholly different kind of organization, with a
different name and without any of the kinds of overseas
operations that I engaged in. Imagine the fear and suspicion and
resentment that would be eliminated on the part of other
governments if the CIA were abolished or at least if its overseas
operations were. And we might avoid those future Vietnams that
are germinating wherever The Company is supporting repressive
governments.
PLAYBOY: In your book, you support socialist revolution. Don't
you
think that will turn a lot of people off to what you have to say?
AGEE: It's just the opposite: I couldn't answer all the letters
of support I'd gotten--even before the book had come out in the
U.S.
PLAYBOY: Couching the world picture in your terms, those of class
warfare, is the CIA winning or losing?
AGEE: The question should be whether people, not the CIA, are
winning or losing. In the Third World, the poor are beginning to
win, in my opinion. In an era of expensive energy, the U.S. no
longer has the money to protect its foreign investments at all
costs and to repress every socialist movement. More and more,
we're going to have to learn to live within our own resources.
The CIA can still do a lot of harm, but its palmy days are
over -- unless we really go fascist, and with a depression coming
on, that's a live possibility. In the United States, though, it
seems to me the poor are not yet winning. The system that's been
exploiting the rest of the world is also exploiting Americans.
The difference is that other people are more aware of it.
PLAYBOY: Aren't you being doctrinaire? The American worker you
consider exploited is said to have the world's highest standard
of living.
AGEE: Poverty and prosperity are relative as well as absolute
measurements. Have you read the 1974 Report of the Senate Select
Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs? This report, written
before unemployment soared, stated that 40,000,000 Americans, 20
percent of the population, are living in poverty -- in fact, are
sinking deeper into poverty every year. On the average, they were
hungrier and needier in 1974 than they had been five years
earlier. The report also pointed out that in the last 45
years --all through the New Deal, the Fair Deal and the biggest
economic boom in U.S. history-- the proportion of the national
income received by the 20 percent at the bottom of the income
scale had not changed one iota. And get this: The Senate
committee discovered that the richest one percent of the U.S.
population not only has more wealth than the poorest 50 percent
of the population -- it has eight times more! And we've
supposedly had 40 years of liberal reform.
If we want social and economic justice, we're going to have to
scrap capitalism as we know it. Already in the space of three
short generations, a third of the world's population has done
this. Are we going to be the last? We should realize that
socialist societies are built on national traditions --for better
or for worse-- and that we can build socialism and at the same
time preserve our special tradition of civil liberties and right
to dissent. But right now, unless someone's really rich, he's
demoralized by the fear that there won't be enough to go around
unless he screws the other guy. We're so goddamn alone, everybody
guarding his own pile, however small. Property separates people
from one another. But we're so tranquilized by sex and beer and
football and the chance to play a small hand in the game of
success that we don't even know we're being exploited. I suggest
it's time we noticed how badly we've been had and began to stand
up for ourselves. I suggest that if we want to, we can make sure
that whatever there is to go around goes around fairly. But
that's socialism. And remember: New systems can develop only
when people are ready for them and want them -- if imposed by
foreign peoples or brute force, they fail.
PLAYBOY: We all agree that the free-enterprise system has faults.
But no socialist system that has been set up so far provides the
sort of idealistic paradise you envision, with everything fairly
distributed. The point at issue here is the CIA -- whether it
does more good than harm, whether the world would be better
served by its existence as is, by its reform or by its
destruction.
AGEE: I leave it to you to decide. I promise you that the CIA now
knows who you are and is undoubtedly at this moment running you
through its computers. Have you ever been arrested? Are your tax
returns up to date? Did you ever fail to pay a bill? Have you
ever been to an analyst? Did you ever knock a girl up? Are you
strictly heterosexual? Do you sometimes blow a little grass? And,
by the way, when you leave the hotel, glance over your shoulder.
Somebody may be following you.
