The Fate of Agee Is Not the Fate of Snowden

Philip Agee joined the CIA in 1957 and left 12 years later. He then spent much of the rest of his life “exposing undercover American spies overseas” in order to “neutralize” the CIA’s work as an “agency of oppression.”

In Agee’s 2008 obituary, Scott Shane (the NYT reporter now covering the NSA) wrote that Agee was for decades “an avowed enemy of American foreign policy and particularly of the covert intelligence work that supported it.” The U.S. took his passport, and he spent the second half of his life abroad, dying in Cuba at age 72.

“Phil Agee was really the first person to do whistle-blowing on the C.I.A. on the grand scale,” said a friend in the obituary. “He blew the whistle on hundreds and hundreds of undercover operations.”

Agee was disillusioned by the dirty work of the CIA, and felt that exposing it was more humane than supporting it. “After 12 years with the agency I finally understood how much suffering it was causing, that millions of people all over the world had been killed or had their lives destroyed by the C.I.A. and the institutions it supports,” he wrote in his 1975 book, Inside the Company: CIA Diary.

In that book and other writings, Agee exposed the CIA’s work manipulating leaders around the globe, as well as controlling journalists, police, labor leaders, students, and diplomats. He did not hesitate to name names. On the contrary, Inside the Company included an appendix with the names of hundreds of undercover Agency operatives and organizations. William Blum wrote: “What Agee revealed is still the most startling and important information about U.S. foreign policy that any American government whistleblower has ever revealed.”

A turning point in Agee’s life and career with the CIA came during a meeting with police in Montevideo, Uruguay, when he heard firsthand the suffering of a person whose name he had given them as part of his agency work. “The moaning grew in intensity, turning to screams,” Agee wrote. “By then I knew we were listening to someone being tortured.”

“The senior officers merely turned up a radio report of a soccer game to drown [the man’s] screams,” wrote a reviewer of CIA Diary. Soon after, Agee “saw the dilemma of supporting ‘miserable, corrupt, and ineffectual governments…we’re reduced to promoting one type of injustice to avoid another.’” As editor of Dirty Work 2, Agee tried to expose the CIA’s regime-building and -destroying work in Africa (and its recruitment of black professors to spy on Africans).

The comparison between Agee and Snowden is obvious. Both believed that uncovering their agencies’ doings was in the public interest. Both were labeled traitors by their former colleagues, and both caused Congress to reassess national security measures, though, in Agee’s case, the change was not exactly what he had hoped for. His identification of U.S. and foreign agents in CIA Diary “led Congress to pass the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982, which made it a crime to intentionally reveal the identity of a covert intelligence officer,” according to the NYT.

“You can package it any way you want—the simple reality is he defected to the enemy during the cold war,” said Frank R. Anderson, 65, who worked as a clandestine officer for the C.I.A. abroad from 1968 to 1995. “He did everything he could to endanger his colleagues and fellow American citizens.”

Mr. Agee’s efforts and those of his associates, Mr. Anderson said, placed in danger not only Americans doing covert work but also all the foreign citizens who had associated with them, whether as spies or in daily life. Even when it did not result in physical threats, the exposure of spies disguised as diplomats or businesspeople forced the agency to withdraw them and caused costly disruptions of intelligence efforts, Mr. Anderson said.

Snowden has never given the name of an undercover agent, and while he has been continually accused of handing over files to the Chinese and Russians, there is zero evidence to support those charges.

While his detractors denounce Snowden for “aiding our enemies” and “making our country less safe,” anyone who has followed Glenn Greenwald’s reporting knows that Snowden went out of his way to make sure that any information that could be damaging to specific individuals was not released. As Greenwald wrote:

The oft-repeated claim that Snowden’s intent is to harm the US is completely negated by the reality that he has all sorts of documents that could quickly and seriously harm the US if disclosed, yet he has published none of those. When he gave us the documents he provided, he repeatedly insisted that we exercise rigorous journalistic judgment in deciding which documents should be published in the public interest and which ones should be concealed on the ground that the harm of publication outweighs the public value. If his intent were to harm the US, he could have sold all the documents he had for a great deal of money, or indiscriminately published them, or passed them to a foreign adversary. He did none of that.

He carefully vetted every document he gave us, and then on top of that, asked that we only publish those which ought to be disclosed and would not cause gratuitous harm: the same analytical judgment that all media outlets and whistleblowers make all the time. The overwhelming majority of his disclosures were to blow the whistle on US government deceit and radical, hidden domestic surveillance.

It’s less clear whether Agee’s disclosures resulted in any harm to specific individuals. They certainly resulted in agents being relocated or withdrawn. Wrote Shane: “Mr. Agee was sometimes accused—wrongly, according to him and his friends—of bearing some responsibility for the death of Richard Welch, the agency’s Athens station chief, who was assassinated in 1975 by the Greek terrorist group November 17. Barbara Bush, the former first lady, included such an accusation in her autobiography. Mr. Agee sued, and Mrs. Bush omitted the reference to him from later printings.”

Agee spent his twilight years living in Cuba, running a travel website, Cubalinda.com, which is still up and running. In this 2001 press release, the CIA-officer-turned-whistle-blower explained his path:

One day in the fall of 1997 I was checking for some books at amazon.com and I suddenly wondered: why couldn’t someone market travel to Cuba and all the things to do there like amazon.com markets books?….This, I thought, would be a concrete way to continue solidarity activities with the revolution by presenting Cuban realities to the world on-line and by bringing people to see Cuba with their own eyes. The effect, I hoped, would help to correct the many years of lies and distortions fomented by the U.S. government and others about the revolutionary process here.

Agee spent the last 10 years of his life recruiting Americans to visit Cuba. In another press release from Cubalinda.com, Agee invited people “in the United States, Canada and Western Europe to take a break from anxiety and tension and come to Cuba, one of the safest countries in the world. Now is the perfect time…”

Though some call him a traitor, it seems to me that Agee was a force for good, making it more difficult for the CIA to covertly manipulate world events, and may even have led the way for a more obvious moral hero such as Snowden. Exiled from his country, Agee spent his last years trying to get people to illegally visit Cuba through his website. One friend wrote that, in Cuba, he was living in“a fourth-floor walkup (the elevator had long since stopped running) and you got there by climbing a dark stairwell with a rusted-out metal banister.” A fairly quiet way to end a very noisy, brave life.

Some believe that Snowden too is fated to end his life in a relatively uncelebrated manner. In a recent interview with Snowden in the Washington Post, Barton Gellman noted: “Former NSA and CIA director Michael V. Hayden predicted that Snowden will waste away in Moscow as an alcoholic, like other ‘defectors.’” (Snowden responded that “He does not drink at all. Never has.”) Raul Gallegos, in a November Bloomberg article, proposed that Snowden faces a gloomy future similar to Agee’s:

As with Snowden, many journalists, left-wing governments and other U.S. detractors initially hailed Agee as a hero. But soon the world became less welcoming. Agee was well received in the U.K. where he fought a U.S. extradition request until he was forced to leave for the Netherlands in 1977. He was eventually expelled from the Netherlands and a host of other U.S. friendly nations, such as France, Italy and West Germany, and lived in Grenada and Nicaragua before finally settling in Cuba under Fidel Castro (the type of regime he once worked to undermine).

“The career prospects for Snowden look even bleaker,” wrote Gallegos, resorting to the standard Snowden criticism that he is a “a high-school dropout.” As if that is the true sign of his ability to impact the world, and not the actions that made him the most important person on the planet in 2013.

Snowden’s idealism also stands in stark contrast to Agee’s motivations. Agee became a convinced leftist who sought to help U.S. enemy regimes during the Cold War. Snowden’s belief that his leaks will help end what he calls the U.S.’s “harmful behavior” shows a lack of sophistication.

To call Snowden unsophisticated is to ignore everything he has written, everything he has said on video, and everything he has done in the past six months. It’s to ignore the news and reality. Snowden is more technically sophisticated than 99.999% of humans. Snowden is worldly enough that every newspaper Gallegos has ever read has quoted him. As Anthony D. Romero, Executive Director the ACLU, commenting on the methods Snowden took to release the NSA documents,wrote, “The simple answer is that Snowden was too smart to expect real results from the ‘official’ channels.” He’s been one step ahead of his detractors since his first interview with Greenwald and Laura Poitras. Still, as Gallegos wrote, Agee and Snowden do have a lot in common:

Even a man of Agee’s intelligence was left with no options late in life….If Snowden can somehow avoid capture and jail, he has little more to look forward to than a lifetime in the shadows, or as the anti-U.S. trophy of regimes where the freedom of information he claims to defend doesn’t exist.

But Agee’s fate is not Snowden’s. While it’s easy for me to imagine Snowden wanting a quiet life away from the spotlight (as a former Snowden critic, Richard Cohen of the Washington Post,remarked, “Maybe his most un-American act is passing up a chance at easy money”), his acts have made him a hero to millions throughout the world and in the U.S. He will certainly be co-opted as an “anti-U.S. trophy,” but Snowden strikes me as too sophisticated for that. His goal in releasing the NSA documents in the way that he did (“the most responsible way possible”) was not to cause anarchy or to bring down the U.S. It was to help the U.S. become a better country.

“My sole motive is to inform the public as to that which is done in their name and that which is done against them,” said Snowden.

If Snowden can successfully stay out of the limelight, as it seems he would prefer, and as Agee mostly did as his life wound down, it might not be such a sad fate. It might be exactly what he was hoping for.