Philip Agee

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Philip Agee (1977)

Philip Burnett Franklin Agee (born July 19, 1935 in Tacoma Park , Florida , † January 7, 2008 in Havana ) was an American secret agent , author and travel entrepreneur. Agee became known for his public aversion to the US intelligence service CIA and for criticizing their practices.

Life

Agee graduated from the University of Notre Dame in Indiana in 1956 . In 1957 he entered the service of the CIA, according to his own account of idealistic motives. He was posted to Latin America as an agent. His first assignment was to provoke a break in diplomatic relations between Ecuador and Cuba .

In 1968 he was stationed in Mexico. The news of the Vietnam War and, above all, the Tlatelolco massacre shook him. The following year he decided to leave the CIA.

In 1975 he published his book Inside the Company: CIA Diary ( CIA Intern. Diary 1956-1974 ). In it he denounced the practices of the CIA and revealed names of secret agents to the public. The CIA tried to prevent the book from being published, but it appeared in the UK, became a bestseller and has been translated into 27 languages.

Philip Agee received death threats and was publicly accused of working for the KGB and of guilty of the deaths of fellow agents by disclosing their identities. He fled to England. The American Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was able to convince the British government in 1978 that Philip Agee was to blame for the deaths of two British secret agents, and thus enforced Agee's expulsion from Great Britain. France and the Netherlands refused to accept the refugee. Agee told the story of his escape in his book On the Run . In 1979, the United States naturalized him and revoked his American passport. In 1980 he was granted asylum by the Grenada Republic , led by a left-wing government. In 1983 there was a violent overthrow in Grenada by an even more radical government. The United States then occupied the country militarily and Philip Agee had to flee again. He found new asylum in Sandinista Nicaragua .

In 1990 he married the German ballet dancer Giselle Roberge. As a result, he came into possession of a German passport. His two main centers of life, where he each spent about half of his time, were Hamburg and Havana. In 2000 he founded an online travel agency in Havana called Cubalinda.com ( Beautiful Cuba ). It organized trips to Cuba for US citizens who wanted to visit this island despite the United States' embargo on Cuba and the ban on US citizens from traveling to Cuba.

Publications (selection)

  • Philip Agee: Inside the Company: CIA Diary , Penguin 1975, ISBN 978-0140040074 .
    • German translation: CIA Intern. Diary 1956-1974 , Attica Verlag, Hamburg 1979, and Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1981, ISBN 978-3-434-25116-3 .
  • Philip Agee: Dirty Work: The CIA in Western Europe , Lyle Stuart, 1978, ISBN 0-88029-132-X .
    • German translation: The CIA in Western Europe , Deutscher Verlag der Wissenschaften, 1981, ISBN 3476005992 .
  • Philip Agee: Dirty Work 2: The CIA in Africa , Lyle Stuart, 1979, ISBN 0-81840-294-6 .
  • Philip Agee: On the Run , Lyle Stuart, 1987, ISBN 0-8184-0419-1 .
    • German translation (by Matthias Fienbork): On the Run , Europäische Verlagsanstalt, Hamburg 1994, ISBN 978-3-434-50036-0 .
  • Philip Agee: White Paper, Whitewash , Deep Cover Books, 1982, ISBN 0-940380-00-5 .
  • Philip Agee, Stefan Aust, Manfred Bissinger, Ekkehardt Jürgens: Unheimlich at service. Media abuse by secret services , Steidl Gerhard Verlag, 1987, ISBN 978-3882430745 .

Literature and press reports

  • Jean-Michel Caroit: Philip Agee , Le Monde , January 14, 2008, p. 19 (in French)
  • Died: Philip Agee . In: Der Spiegel . No. 3 , 2008, p. 142 ( online - 14 January 2008 ).
  • Philip Agee in: Texts: der RAF , p. 512 - p. 516 (press conference with Winslow Peck, Gary Thomas and Barton Osborn in Frankfurt am Main on June 23, 1976), Verlag Bo Cavefors, Malmö, October 1977, ISBN 91- 504-0688-X

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ "... pensant que je contribuerais à la sécurité défendre de mon pays et ... on aidant d'autres pays à leur liberté préserver" ( in the belief that I contribute to the defense of my country's security ... and help others Would help countries maintain their freedom , interview with Le Monde, 2002, quoted according to Le Monde from January 14, 2008).
  2. ↑ "... ce que nous faisions avait pour seul but de défendre la structure traditional du pouvoir au détriment de la majorité de la population", ( what we did, served the sole aim of gaining the traditional power structure at the expense of the majority of the population defend , ibid).
  3. ↑ For example, the support of dictatorial regimes and killer units in Latin America in the 1970s by the CIA with regard to "property relations" and personal interests. See Eliot Dickinson: Globalization and Migration. A World in Motion. Rowman & Littlefield, Maryland 2016, p. 51.

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Agee, Philip
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Agee, Phil; Agee, Philip Burnett Franklin
BRIEF DESCRIPTION US-German secret agent and author
DATE OF BIRTH July 19, 1935
PLACE OF BIRTH Tacoma Park , Florida
DATE OF DEATH January 7, 2008
Place of death Havana