This is a man now living in Cuba former CIA traitor......his
appearance was not expected by some, but just think our President and
Castro were to meet at World Trade Center -
So now enters the Traitor Agee???? Will the Mafia return to Havanna?
And Agee said "no secret hand" in civil rioting in 60 period - what
is Agee doing in Cuba?
And to whom, did Castro answer? Chickens come home to roost?
A Saba
This page is black in protest of the CDA. If you do not know what that
is click here.
This is the unedited version of my interview with former CIA agent Phil
Agee. click here to go back to the Daily Beacon Page. If you want to
get in touch with me via e-mail click here.
SR: The first question that I have is that people have the impression
that the CIA is a Big Omnipresent Government Agency with its hand in
everything. How true is this belief?
PA: I think that's relatively untrue and it depends what period of
history you are talking about. During the 1960's President Johnson was
obsessed with the idea that there was a foreign hand behind the anti-war
movement and he told the FBI to find that hand. The FBI did the
investigation and they couldn't find it and they told Johnson that and
he hit the roof, he said there is a foreign hand in there. So he told
the CIA in 1967 "I want you to find the foreign hand."
And, so the CIA begin a whole series of illegal operations inside the
United States because they are, by law, barred from an internal security
function. But they searched high and low abroad and in the United States
and they went back to Johnson and told him "No, we can't find the
foreign hand; and there is no foreign hand as far as we're concerned of
any significance."
By that time Johnson's presidency was destroyed by the Vietnam War and
in came Richard Nixon in 1969. Nixon too was obsessed with finding the
foreign hand behind the anti-war movement. He had the CIA continue these
illegal operations that they were doing and had the FBI also continue a
whole series of operations that were illegal against the anti-war
movement and against various groups particularly the Black Panthers.
The FBI continued to tell Nixon that there was no foreign hand the CIA
did the same. So Nixon came up with what was known as the Houston Plan,
after Tom Houston who was an assistant council to the President, and
this was a whole series of illegal operations to intensify this search
for the foreign hand and at the same time to neutralize the opposition
to Nixon's policies in Vietnam.
He was paranoid, as everyone knows, he was so paranoid that he even
bugged himself. But, it never turned up, the foreign hand, because there
was no foreign hand to turn up. The CIA was collecting files on
thousands of people at that time inside this country. But that was an
unusual period, even though they had been reviewing mail, going out to
the Soviet Union and other communist countries and other places for some
20 years from 1952 to 1972, I don't think that you can say that the CIA
hand is everywhere.
Or ever was everywhere in the United States. It has a definite role and
it carries out this role mainly, almost exclusively, abroad. Whereas the
FBI is the Agency charged with internal security, and wherever a group
arose, and whenever a group arose that the FBI considered to be a threat
to the stability, a potential threat to the stability, of the United
States, and this goes on into the 1930's; they would initiate what they
call counterintelligence programs or COINTELLPROS for short.
These operations went on into the 1970's and they only became known
after unknown persons stole several thousand pages from the FBI offices
in Pennsylvania and this eventually came out in the press. And then the
whole COINTELPRO program became known and Hoover stopped it as such.
But, there can be know doubt that this continued on into the 1980's in
the operations against the solidarity movement with El Salvador and
Nicaragua because there have been exposes on those operations.
So, the way to look at this is that the FBI and the CIA are organized to
sustain and promote stability. The CIA outside the United States the FBI
inside the United States. And this means secret operations against all
those groups that are potentially destabalizing factors. And so its a
matter of looking at the groups that exist and assuming that they are
going to be targets and that there is where the attention will fall. But
not over the general population as such.
SR: How much of what the American public hears through the mass media
about foreign relations is true? Do we practice what we preach?
PA: We certainly don't practice what we preach. That is we don't
practice what we preach within the United States and much less abroad in
my long experience in this area. But, the media can be very deceptive.
The problem is not that so many lies are printed, there are plenty of
those though, but the worst part of it is the censorship, the self
censorship, that the media generally, I am speaking about the so called
established media, or mainstream media.
Starting with the New York Times and the broadcast networks. Where the
problem is their selection of what is news and what is not news. And
this is a form of censorship. That is why it is very important, if one
wants to stay well informed, one has to read the alternative media.
And hear I am talking about such publications as The Nation, Covert
Action Quarterly, Extra from Fairness and accuracy in reporting. These
publications are circulating all over the United States and there is far
more on the internet with the news groups and the apc/igc conferences
through peacenet and women's net and eco net and labor net and so forth.
So there are ways of staying very well informed and I get far more that
I can read. But, one can pick and choose, and devote a certain amount of
time to keeping informed and not depend on the straight media.
I do get Time and Newsweek and I get the International Herald Tribune,
which is a combination of New York Times, Washington Post, and sometimes
LA Times articles. But that is simply to see the comparison between what
they publish and don't publish and what is to me, what is really news.
So, to keep informed one has to go beyond the mainstream media.
SR: What are some extreme examples of CIA intervention into foreign
policy?
PA: The CIA is an interventionist organization
into foreign policy from the start. Certainly the very beginning of the
functioning of the new national security structure in 1947, when the CIA
was established as the first peace time civilian national security
service in United States history, has been one of intervention.
Beginning with the intervention in the Italian elections of 1948, which
President Truman set aside 10 million dollars for the CIA to intervene
secretly. This operation was followed by many others. For example, some
of the more egregious operations have been the activities that the CIA
has undertaken with the foreign intelligence and security services of
other countries.
This is where the CIA has gotten involved with death squads, torture and
so forth. It begins very early on also and continues on into the 1990's.
I worked on these operations myself, they're called liaison operations.
It is when the CIA trains and finances and directs and gives information
to the local services in any particular country and this has been
especially horrifying in El Salvador in the 1980's, in Guatemala since
the 1950's, and in Iran for over 25 years from the time of the overthrow
of the civilian democratically elected government in 1953 in that
country until the fall of the Shah in 1979. There are many many examples
of these types of activities and they are interventionist to the hilt.
And you have not only election operations but you have the whole range
of what became known as covert action operations. Which are the ways in
which the CIA seeks to penetrate and manipulate the institutions of
power over the countries in order to manipulate events. I was involved
in all of these types of things in Latin America and I describe them in
great detail in Inside the Company, my book that came out in 1975. But
there have been other books since, they all are on the same theme, they
are variations on the same theme. They are the ways the CIA seeks to
manipulate and penetrate the governments and political parties, the
military and security services, the trade unions, the youth and student
organizations, the professional and cultural societies, the women's
organizations, church organizations and churches, and the public
information media. It is a way in which the United States has sought,
over the years, to control the situation in other countries. Because
there has been a point of view that what is not under our control is
dangerous.
SR: Publicly the CIA states that it does not promote political
assassinations. Do you have any information that refutes this
contention?
PA: I would refer you to the reports of the Senate Intelligence
Investigation of the 1970's, the so called Church Committee. They have a
whole volume on CIA assassination plots not just against Fidel Castro
but against various other people.
SR: That was involved with the Mafia in the 60's?
PA: Yes, the CIA began with the Mafia and they continued through the
years with others.
They tried to assassinate Lumumba in the Congo on the 1960's, there was
an attempt against Cho-Enli the Chinese Premiere. They did carry out the
assassination of Tru Heyo, the Dictator of the Dominican Republic.
Because he was turning to Moscow, relations with him went sour with the
United States. The Agency has been supposedly barred from assassination
since an executive order was executed by Ford around 1976. This
executive order is still in effect. It prohibits the CIA to seek the
assassination of a chief of state or something that could cause the
assassination of a chief of state in a foreign country. In actual fact,
the great great overwhelming numbers of murders caused by the CIA are
not done directly.
The CIA officers, like I was, do not go out and pull the trigger on
somebody in no way, you get other people to do it. That is where you
have the situation in Nicaragua, for example, the CIA's contras, which
where organized under the base of the old Samosa national guard, the
dictatorship that on went from the 30's until 1979, supported all the
way be the United States, reorganized in Honduras, under CIA
sponsorship. The CIA brought in training officers from the Argentine
military, which had just carries out the dirty war in Argentina with
thousands and thousands of people who were made to disappear, dropped
out of airplanes over the sea and so forth. During this Contra war,
which developed into a civil war in Nicaragua, some 35000 people were
killed. Mostly not main line Sandanistas defending, but defenseless
peasants and others who opposed the Contras. If you consider that
Nicaragua has a population of 3.5 million and 35000 were killed, that's
1 percent of the population. The comparable figure for the United States
is 2.5 million dead. Which is more than those killed in all the wars the
United States has ever had or ever participated in. So it was a
catastrophe visited upon Nicaragua. for which the United States owes
great shame. There is not a family in Nicaragua, practically, that does
not have somebody that was either killed or maimed in this US sponsored
terrorist war in this country,
SR: Do you believe in the governments right to withhold information
from the public on the grounds of national security?
PA: That is such a broad justification for withholding information that
certainly restrictions are in order. Far more has been declassified
since world war II than was necessary, you are talking about hundreds of
millions of pages of stuff and I classified so many documents when I was
in the CIA. Everything I wrote in the CIA was classified, and I was
writing every single day, like every other CIA officer. So, there is a
contradiction between a sunshine atmosphere where government is
concerned and the natural tendency of a government to deny knowledge to
the population. Because knowledge is power and the more people know
about what the government is really doing, the more they can object and
oppose and even replace that government. So that is one of the reasons
for secrecy in the government, because open government tends to foment
opposition. And no government wants opposition, they believe they are in
the drivers seat and believe what they say is the best.
SR: But is a society where the people are the government wouldn't
government be working against itself?
PA: Show me that society. I don't think I've found one, certainly not
in this country.
SR: It seems to be theory but not practice.
PA: In theory, if there were a popular government, a government which
responded to the needs of all the people, there would be very little
that would have to be maintained secret. There would be adversaries out
there, dangers of terrorism or activities undertaken to stop the
international drug trade or the spread of nuclear weapons or the spread
of weapons of mass destruction: nuclear, biological or chemical. In
these cases there is justified secrecy, but there would be far less than
there is now. But the fact is that we have a government, that has been
from the beginning, run by elites in this country and they have taken
power unto themselves to the exclusion of the vast majority of the
population and what is defined as National Security is their Security.
SR: How autonomous is the CIA? Does the government control the CIA or
does the CIA control itself?
PA: The CIA is by no means autonomous. It is under total control of the
President and what the CIA does, there is a paper trail which can be
found, and has been found in certain cases, from the President to the
National Security council to the CIA. In my time the orders from the
National Security Council, which is chaired by the President, were found
in the form of what is called National Security Council Intelligence
Directives. These were the broad instructions to the CIA on what to do
around the world. These then were interpreted by the director of Central
Intelligence, who is not only the head of the CIA but is, in theory, the
head of the whole intelligence community which is comprised of some 12
different agencies spending 28-29 billion dollars a year. These were
interpreted and redefined in what were known as Director of Central
Intelligence Directives. These were the director's interpretation of the
National Security Council Intelligence Directives which are then sent
out to the various intelligence agencies including the CIA. From there
came the various operations.
The CIA in theory, and in practice also, is not supposed to make policy.
It is an executive agency to carry out policy. Never the less there have
been times when the CIA has proposed certain operations, certain
activities when they saw a situation which they thought they could
influence. This was not exactly making policy, but they would propose a
type of activity in the belief that it was within the established policy
mandates from the President. But, when you get a person like, all these
things depend on personalities, William Casey in as director of Central
Intelligence and the CIA. There was a man who was given cabinet level
status. That is the highest under the president and the Vice President.
That has been the case with the director of Central of Intelligence
appointed in 1995. When a director of Central Intelligence sits as a
cabinet officer he has a whole lot more input into policy making than he
would if he did not. It is a very bad idea to have the intelligence
chief involved in making policy because that is what the cabinet does.
There is a strong argument to be made that no CIA director should be a
cabinet officer.
SR: The CIA knew that you intended to expose their operations in South
America when you left the agency. Is their a reason they didn't kill you
prior to publishing your book?
PA: There is no black and white answer to that question. My belief is
that they had a plan to lure me to Spain through 2 young Americans who
befriended me in Paris in the early 1970's and who did in fact do
everything they could to lure me to Spain. They offered financial
inducements and other things. But I knew that the CIA was thick as
thieves with the Franco facist security services. This was still the
Franco time in Spain. I have documentation, which I received under the
Freedom of Information Act, these are not CIA documents they are
criminal division documents from the Justice Department which show there
was a criminal conspiracy. I currently have a $7 million lawsuit against
the government under the federal court claims act for this conspiracy
for damages and we will see whether the lawsuit prospers and whether I
do get access to the documentation which we know exists. In fact this
documentation was judged by the justice department to be described as
illegal actions be taken against me in the 1970's. Because of these
documents, which I would have had access to had the government
prosecuted me at any particular point through criminal discovery
procedure, the CIA could not prosecute me. They tried in 1975 when my
first book came out and during the 1970's, from 1975 to 1980. All
together they tried 5 times to get a criminal indictment against me and
each time they had to back down because they could not let me have these
documents which showed the criminal activity which they conspiring to
carry out against me. They effectively, by their own actions, precluded
prosecution. Not to atypical for them.
SR: Looking back at all of the harassment you faced when you exposed
the covert operations, do you think you would do it all over again?
PA: I wouldn't think twice about doing it over again. Of course I
would. The most important thing is to be honest with yourself. I went
into the CIA right out of college as a product of the 1950's. Which
means the Mccarthy period and the anti-communist hysteria of that time.
It also meant that I had no political education. I simple accepted the
traditional assumptions that the soviet union was out to conquer the
world and I was going to play a patriotic role in stopping that. By age
25 I was down in South America doing the work. My eyes began to open
little by little down there as I began to realize more and more that all
of the things that I, and my colleagues were doing in the CIA had one
goal that was that we were supporting the traditional power structures
in Latin America. These power structures had been in place for
centuries. Where in a relative few families where able to control the
wealth and income and power of the state and the economy. To the
exclusion of the majority of the population in many countries. The only
glue that kept this system together was political repression. I was
involved in this. Eventually I decided I didn't want anything more to do
with that. I left the CIA to start a new life in 1969 I went back to the
university. I enrolled in the National University of Mexico in Mexico
City, where I remained living after resigning from the CIA. As I carried
out the studies, doing the reading and the research and writing papers
and such, I began to realize more and more that what I and my colleagues
had been doing in the 60's and 50's was nothing more than a continuation
of early 500 years of genocide of the worst imaginable political
repression that anyone can come up with. The figures are mind blowing in
terms of the numbers of Native Americans who were killed or put to work
in South America in what is now Bolivia and Brazil. Where their life
expectancy was measured in weeks and months once they went to work in
these places. Or in North America as well. So I then began to think at
that time about something that was unthinkable: a book about how it all
worked. No one had ever written such a book and I had a pretty wide
experience in CIA operations in Latin America and I knew many operations
that existed around the world as well. So I decided to write a book
about it.. I had to make a decision whether to continue these studies or
to write this book and I couldn't find the research material for this
book in Mexico City. I wanted to reconstruct events to show our hand in
the events. So I had to choose between the 2 and I chose to write the
book. Not knowing whether it would ever get written or where it would
take me.
As to whether I would do it over again. I wouldn't change a thing. I
might be a little more discreet and careful here and there. Not quite so
flamboyant in some places. I would certainly not change anything. I
would encourage people also to look at their own lives and determine
what role they or going to play. Whether they are going to go with the
flow. Whether they are going to adopt the proposition that you have to
go along to get along. Or whether they want to stand back and take a
look and join this long and honorable tradition of dissidence in the
United States. This goes back to the early opposition to the
Constitution, the abolitionist movement of the 1840's and 50's. Which
goes back to the opposition of wars: the Spanish- American War in 1898,
to world war 1 and 2, to the Vietnam war and the Korean war. There is a
long and respectable tradition in the United States of seeking change
and social justice. I can assure anyone that reads this interview that
they will never be disappointed if they try to help in this respect. If
they decide to, besides profession and family, that they will work
politically for change. That they will have great self esteem and
satisfaction from knowing that they are doing the right thing and that
they are not selling out.
A. Saba
Dare To Call It Conspiracy
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