PHILIP AGEE AND SPY BULLETIN DRAW BEAD ON TIMES, ITS EDITOR

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00845R000100120001-3
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: December 23, 2010
• Sequence Number: 1
• Publication Date: June 18, 1985
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2010/12/23: CIA-RDP90-00845R000100120001-3
ON m WASHINGTON TIM
18 June 1985
Philip Agee and `spy bulletin
draw bead on Times, its editor
Last week, Covert Action Informa-
tion Bulletin (CAIB), which special-
izes in exposing CIA agents, called
the publicity department at The
Washington Times and asked for a
photograph of the new editor-in-
chief. The caller said that he needed
it then, being on deadline. This was
the first anyone at The Times had
heard of the CAIB story. CAIB
reporters never called the editor. The
following is the story behind the story
of the CAIB and its activities, which
this newspaper's new editor has been
tracking for several years.
The CIAs best known ideological
defector, Philip Agee, is the "godfa-
ther" of an international network of
researchers and writers who spe-
cialize in disruptive exposes of U.S.
and other Western intelligence agen-
cies.
Their stories, undermining the
secret intelligence activities of the
Central Intelligence Agency, mili-
tary and electronic intelligence
endeavors, are picked up by mag-
azines, newspapers and television in
the United States and abroad. The
U.S. television networks appear to
regard the material merely as
"news" as do certain well-known
reporters for some of the largest cir-
culation newspapers.
Even that bastion of business and
finance, The Wall Street Journal, has
run Agee network materials on its
front page on several occasions in
recent years. In one of these,
reporter Jonathan Kwitny used
material from an Agee network
group in Washington to suggest that
compromising documents captured
from guerrillas in El Salvador and
released by the U.S. State Depart-
ment, were forgeries. Curiously, the
Agee groups have themselves been
documented as circulating a noted
KGB forgery of a faked U.S. Army
manual.
Yet they have acknowledged that
they have a "hidden agenda" - the
destruction of the CIA and other ele-
ments of America's intelligence col-
lection and covert action
capabilities.
When Philip Burnett Franklin
Agee (born Jan. 19, 1935), then a
10-year veteran of the CIA's Latin
American operations, quit while
serving in Mexico city in 1969, he
embarked on a new profession -
that of full-time saboteur of
American intelligence activities
around the world. He later described
himself as a convert to "revolution-
ary socialism:'
In his first expose book, "Inside
the Company: CIA Diary," which
appeared 10 years ago, Mr. Agee
acknowledged the assistance of
members of the Central Committee
of the Cuban Communist Party,
agencies of the Cuban government,
and a variety of pro-Castro
"researchers" associated with the
North American Congress on Latin
America (NACLA) and other groups.
While Mr. Agee has
acknowledged "visiting" Cuba, he
has never described what
"research" documents regarding
the CIA the Cuban government pro-
vided. Neither has Mr. Agee
acknowledged that his 1971
"research" visit lasted about six
months, during which time it is
inconceivable that he was not
debriefed at length to establish the
sincerity of his disaffection.
After his first book was pub-
lished, he visited Moscow - a trip
Mr. Agee explained as aimed at
arranging details for a Russian edi-
tion of "Inside the Company." Mr.
Agee has not discussed the financial
arrangements he made for "royal-
ties" with the Soviets.
But in an interview with Peter
Studer, published in the Zurich
Thges-Anzeiger, Mr. Agee said: "The
CIA is plainly on the wrong side, that
is, the capitalistic side. I approve
KGB activities, communist activi-
ties in general, when they are to the
advantage of the oppressed. In fact,
the KGB is not doing enough in this
regard, because the U.S.S.R.
depends upon the people to free
themselves. Between the activities
that the CIA initiates and the more
modest activities of the KGB, there
is absolutely no comparison."
Mr. Agee began to travel to var-
ious countries conducting highly
publicized exposes of alleged CIA
activities and, in a number of areas,
helping set up and instruct networks
of "new left" researchers and writ-
ers to carry out a sustained series of
exposes and attacks on intelligence
operations. His networks in Eng-
land, the U.S. and West Germany
have been among the most active.
In the United States, among the
organizations supporting Agee
exposes have been NACLA, the Insti-
tute for Policy Studies (IPS), several
so-called investigative journalism
groups, such as the Center for Inves-
tigative Reporting, the Pacific News
Service, a news service sponsored
by IPS (with more than 200 newspa-
per clients), and most especially
CounterSpy magazine and the
Covert Action Information Bulletin.
CounterSpy is the oldest. It was
founded in the early 1970s by Tim
Butz and Perry Fellwock, alias Wins-
low Peck, members of Vietnam Vet-
erans Against the War (VVAW) who
had served in military intelligence
and the National Security Agency
(NSA).
The CounterSpy expose concept
attracted support not only from Mr.
Agee, but from members of the
National Lawyers Guild. The guild is
the American section of a Soviet-
controlled "active measures" front,
the International Association of
Democratic Lawyers (IADL). TWO
laywers, William Schaap and Ellen
Ray, had worked on the NLG's Mili-
tary Law Project in Southeast Asia.
The CounterSpy legal counsel was
Alan Dranitske, an NLG member
whose partners, now dead, were vet-
eran members of the Communist
Party, U.S.A. (CPUSA), and had
become paid agents of the Cuban
government once Castro took power.
Mr. Agee's English group cen-
tered around Time Out magazine.
Among Agee's London-based
friends were Duncan Campbell,
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STAT
Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2010/12/23: CIA-RDP90-00845R000100120001-3