Philip Agee served as a CIA case officer from 1960 to 1968, with postings in Ecuador, Uruguay and Mexico. In his 1975 book Inside the Company: CIA Diary, he described bribery, intimidation, bugging, forgery and political penetration, including a 1960 operation intended to pressure Ecuador into breaking diplomatic relations with Cuba. He also described helping install microphones beneath the United Arab Republic code room in Montevideo and identifying people he said were CIA collaborators. Agee’s account alleged that U.S. embassies supported anti-Communist political fronts and worked with authoritarian security forces; the source also records his claim that he witnessed the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre’s aftermath and felt complicit in the Mexican crackdown.
The book named approximately 250 purported CIA officers and agents, prompting what former CIA officer David Atlee Phillips called a costly “program of cauterization,” in which operations and personnel known to Agee were reportedly terminated or relocated. Agee later published additional names through CovertAction Information Bulletin, whose alleged KGB and Cuban intelligence connections were reported in Vasili Mitrokhin’s files but denied by Agee. After the United Kingdom deported him on June 3, 1977, and other European states followed, the United States revoked his passport in 1979; the Supreme Court upheld the government in 1981. Congress passed the Intelligence Identities Protection Act in 1982, making intentional disclosure of covert officers’ identities a crime.
