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Law of the father is visited upon the
son
BY PHILIP AGEE—taken
from the Sun Sentinel, Florida—
THE
current brouhaha over the outing of an undercover
CIA
officer brings to mind vivid memories and comic
ironies.
The
1982 law that now threatens Karl Rove, or whoever it
was
who leaked the officer's name, is the Intelligence
Identities Protection Act – and it was adopted to
silence
me.
I
was a CIA agent for 11 years in Latin America, but I
quit
in
1969 and wrote a book that told the true story of my
life
in the agency.
In
the 1970s, some colleagues and I followed up with a
campaign of "guerrilla journalism" to expose the
CIA's
operations and personnel around the world because we
thought we could combat the agency's role in support
of so
many
murderous dictatorships at that time, including
those
in
Viet Nam, Greece, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay and
Brazil.
The
Intelligence Identities Protection Act, which makes
it
a
felony to expose a covert intelligence agent, was
designed to stop us.
Here's the first irony: It was President George H.
W.
Bush
who
fought to get that law passed as CIA director in
1976-77 and later as vice president.
To
justify the law's restriction of First Amendment
rights,
Bush
the elder and other CIA officials repeated the same
lie
many times over: That by publicly identifying
Richard
Welch, the CIA chief in Athens who was assassinated
by
terrorists in December 1975, I was responsible for
his
death. Bush repeated that lie long after Congress
passed
the
law, during his term as president and even
afterward.
His
wife, Barbara, also repeated it in her 1994
autobiography – and I sued her for libel. As part of
the
legal settlement, she sent me a letter of apology
containing the admission that I had not identified
Welch.
In
fact, I'd never met Welch, didn't know he was in
Athens
and
had never published his name or given it to anyone.
But
Bush's campaign in the 1970s was effective. While he
was
CIA director, the agency worked with friendly
intelligence services in Europe to label me, at
different
times, a security threat, a defector and a Soviet or
Cuban
agent, and they succeeded in having me expelled from
five
NATO
countries.
Fast-forward to today. The son of George and Barbara
is now
a
sitting American president with a harsh,
neo-imperialist
agenda, including waging war to ensure U.S. control
of
Middle East oil.
In
order to sell this war of choice as a war of
necessity,
the
younger Bush concocts a pack of lies. But when
former
Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV pokes a small hole in
Bush's
farrago of justifications, someone in the White
House outs
Wilson's wife as a CIA officer in retaliation, a
clear
attempt to ruin her career.
One
has to wonder what Papa Bush thinks of this clear
violation of his law in his own son's office.
We
were right in exposing the CIA in the 1970s because
the
agency was being used to impose a criminal U.S.
policy.
Today I continue to believe that the agency's
operations
should be exposed in places like Venezuela, where it
is
doubtless working overtime to organize and support
the
forces bent on overthrowing the twice-elected
President
Hugo Chávez.
His apparent crime is to develop programs that
will
finally bring the benefit of that country's fabulous
oil
wealth to the common people.
But
instead of that appropriate kind of exposure, U.S.
intelligence officers are being outed, and the law
violated, by the Bush administration itself as part
of a
cheap political tactic to punish an enemy and to
maintain
support for a dishonest and indefensible war.
The
ironies are depressing.
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