Julian Borger in Havana. Guardian Unlimited, UK. Monday July 10, 2000
Spies have to find their way around unfamiliar surroundings. They must be ready to fly from one far-flung location to another, moving money around the world quickly and discreetly. No wonder they make perfect travel agents.
That is what Philip Agee has discovered. The CIA agent who turned whistleblower and fugitive in the 1970s has changed career once more, and opened up shop as a tour operator in Havana.
His newly launched company, Cubalinda.com, sells package tours offering everything you might expect from a tropical island: beach hotels, scuba-diving, car hire and fishing trips.
The website caters for Europeans but targets the US market, making it doubly unusual. Not only is it run by a former secret agent, but its principal goal is to invite potential customers to break the law. The US trade embargo, now nearly four decades old, bans Americans from spending money in
Cuba, with penalties of up to 10 years in jail or tens of thousands of dollars in fines.
Cubalinda has two ways of getting around this problem. Firstly, it does business on the internet and has a parent company based in the Bahamas, so technically the customers' money does not go to Cuba. In theory, an American tourist could pay for everything up front, and arrive in Cuba with empty
pockets.
The second approach on offer to customers is to follow Mr Agee's example and live dangerously.
"The whole idea is to take a chance. I mean, what fun is life if you're not taking a chance. I've been taking chances for a long, long time. I took a lot of chances when I was in the CIA," declared Mr Agee at the recent launch of a campaign to persuade American tourists to come for the
summer carnival.
The biggest chance Mr Agee probably ever took was to leave the CIA in 1969 and then to write a tell-all book about his 12 years with the agency, destabilising governments and generally spreading mayhem across Latin America. The 1975 expose, Inside the Company: CIA Diary, also published a 22-page
list of alleged CIA operatives. It did not go down well with his former employers, who revoked his US passport and declared him a threat to national security.
After years as a fugitive, he decided to set up home and business in Havana, home of the revolution he admired.
His flat and office - on the fourth floor of a dilapidated block in the district of Vedado - were reached by a rickety lift. Mr Agee's name was by the door but the security gate was bolted. His employees across the corridor said he was in Germany, but was in touch by email and would be pleased
to respond to questions by email, as indeed he was.
He scoffed at the suggestion that his business was built around persuading people to break the law. "Come on, the law is absurd - a reflection of extremist Miami Cuban influence - and should be ignored," he wrote. "I started this business to promote contact between ordinary
Americans and Cubans and to help Americans learn the truth about Cuba."
There is a demand. The website has between 30,000 and 50,000 hits a day, and reservations are coming in by the hundred. Mr Agee reckons Cubalinda.com will be breaking even before the end of the year. "Not bad for a little dot.com start up."
Each year, an estimated 80,000 Americans travel illegally to Cuba, where immigration officials oblige by not stamping their passports. Tourists rarely get caught on their way home, but the thrill of the forbidden adds to the romance, especially for would-be Hemingways keen to go deep-sea fishing
and drink rum.
With the publicity generated by Mr Agee and Elian Gonzalez , the numbers are bound to rise. The old spy has come in from the cold and is drinking mojitos on the beach.
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