Philip Agee remains unique in the annals of US intelligence in that he went from being the consummate intelligence insider—nobody is more entrenched than a Central Intelligence Agency case officer in the field—to being a thoroughgoing outsider, and did so by choice. Agee has continued to be, with the exception of Aldrich Ames, the United States’ most hated erstwhile spy. Within the CIA, his “was taken as one of the most harmful, worst betrayals that we [have] suffered, and the hostility to him was greater than it was towards almost anybody else,” notes Glenn Carle, himself a CIA whistleblower with respect to “enhanced interrogation.” While Agee did assert the natural right of purportedly noble individuals to speak truth to power against the agency’s cult of secrecy and insularity, what really set him apart from other angry spies was the way in which history in the making—the full sweep of contemporaneous events—wormed its way into his head and helped motivate and consolidate his turn, however he might later be judged.
 
When Agee left the CIA in 1969, it was still a relatively young organization, having been officially created by the National Security Act of 1947. But it was built on the rather unsteady foundations of the wartime Office of Strategic Services (OSS)—which had been, despite the legendary status it inspired then and continues to enjoy owing to the charitableness of nostalgia, an erratic seat-of-the-pants enterprise. The Cold War, of course, created a crucial demand for intelligence, prompted exponential growth in the CIA’s personnel strength and budget, and afforded the agency immense traction and clout within the United States’ national security bureaucracy. Furthermore, during the Eisenhower administration CIA Director Allen Dulles—fully supported by his older brother, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles—burnished its reputation with covert action that secured US-friendly regimes in Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), and the Congo (January 1961). Yet the agency had performed poorly in the Korean War and embarrassed itself with the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in April 1961. Rightly or wrongly, in the mid- to late 1960s its intelligence assessments were partially blamed for the United States’ ongoing frustrations in Vietnam. By the early 1970s, the CIA was an underconfident institution, worried about its place in an open democracy and less sanguine than it appeared about the stalwartness of its second generation of officers.
 
In fact, a fair number of intelligence officers who were Agee’s rough contemporaries were experiencing disillusionment. Some, of course, were imperturbable cold warriors for whom the twinned ends of planting capitalist democracy and extirpating MarxistLeninist communism justified any effective means. Others took a more nuanced view, subscribing to the American mission in general. Conceding that US institutions—including the CIA—made mistakes that ranged from mere operational errors to major strategic ones, they resolved to remain part of the system for lack of any better alternative. For them, becoming malcontents or whistleblowers or, beyond that, traitors, were not viable options; they had careers as professional patriots that they were not about to upend. Recrimination and reconsideration might someday be warranted, but not while they were busy doing what had to be done for themselves as well as their country. Then there were irrepressibly disaffected intelligence officers. What they had seen in the world of shadows they had chosen to inhabit had intolerably unsettling psychological effects. Some simply opted out of the intelligence business, leaving behind what they perceived as a somehow wrongheaded or just bad life, choosing never to talk about it or address it further. They might have had particular experiences that were disillusioning and upsetting, such as recruiting an agent who wound up dead. Or they might have developed a broader philosophical sense that convincing vulnerable, needy people to commit treason—the meat and drink of spycraft—was either immoral or, in the martial countries that were the focus of the agency’s attention, futile. Among officers leaving the CIA before retirement age, this variety was perhaps the most common. Very few felt compelled to do something about the putative iniquity of American spying. As David Corn has observed, “It’s very rare that someone decides to confront that institution, expose what they think is wrong about it, and bring it to a halt.”
 
Agee was just that rare. His turn shocked and traumatized the CIA, which characterized him as its first defector. Its institutional loathing of Agee, and its wariness of his story as precedent, have endured. To this day the CIA is sensitive to the public disclosure of information about Agee’s activities. The Philip Agee Papers— the various and sundry documents that he accumulated between the time of his resignation from the CIA and his death in January 2008, central to the composition of this book—have been held at New York University’s Tamiment Library/Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives since 2010, his wife Giselle Roberge Agee having donated them to the library. The papers were in his Havana apartment when he died in January 2008, and Michael Nash, then the Tamiment Library/ Wagner Archives’ associate curator, supervised their transport from Cuba to the United States. Owing to US restrictions on direct flights between the two countries, he arranged for the documents to be flown to Montreal by DHL and then transferred over land to New York. Unsurprisingly, the CIA and other government agencies got wind of these arrangements. When the flight stopped to refuel in Cincinnati, the CIA, the FBI, and other national security officials seized the papers, combed through all of them, and confiscated an appreciable number of documents before allowing the shipment to proceed to Montreal. They also appeared to tear out and retain a significant number of pages from Agee’s datebooks from several years—especially in the 1990s and 2000s, when Agee was spending much of his time in Cuba—and to confiscate his 1980, 1989, 2002, 2003, and 2005 datebooks in their entirety.
 
Agee was the only publicly disaffected American intelligence officer to confront the CIA on full-fledged ideological grounds and to oppose American strategy and foreign policy on a wholesale basis. He left the agency after twelve years as a case officer in Latin America, at least in part over his disenchantment with what he perceived as the CIA’s undermining of liberal democracy to serve American economic and political interests. He later resolved to subvert that effort by writing a book—entitled Inside the Company: CIA Diary—setting forth his political and philosophical grievances, published first in the United Kingdom in early 1975 and about six months later in the United States. It would take him five years to write and would become the urtext of spy tell-all books. Unlike most other vocally unhappy CIA officers, he also declined to submit the book to the CIA for vetting and redaction, violating his agency employment agreement. Unlike any other such officers, he published the names of some 400 clandestine CIA officers, agents, and fronts. (A CIA “officer” is a US government civil servant employed by the agency. A CIA “agent” is an outside party clandestinely recruited by the CIA to advance CIA objectives.)
 
Published in 1975—the so-called Year of Intelligence—Inside the Company scandalized the agency, enraged its top management as well as its rank and file, and compromised its operations in the Western Hemisphere. The book and Agee’s campaign to expose intelligence operatives and operations drew bipartisan opprobrium among American politicians—Barry Goldwater wanted Agee’s citizenship revoked, and Joe Biden said he should go to jail.4 For the rest of his life, Agee would continue, albeit with diminishing returns, his efforts to undermine CIA covert operations and other aspects of what he considered objectionable US policies.
 
There have been quite a few former intelligence officers who have turned against the CIA or some other federal intelligence agency. But Agee set himself apart from other government dissidents.