March 14, 2001.
The Standard Europe.
From CIA agent to renegade to left-wing activist, Philip Agee is a man
adept at change. Now living in Havana, his latest venture is to entice tourists
to Cuba with a new online travel agency, Cubalinda.com
By Anya Schiffrin
On a recent weekend in Havana, activists from around the world gathered for
the Global Meeting on Solidarity and Friendship. Organised by the Cuban
Institute for Friendship of the People, an offshoot of the ruling Communist
Party, the four-day conference at the Karl Marx theatre was a magnet for earnest
sandal-wearers from around the world. Latin American delegates danced the salsa
in the streets of old Havana, and West Coast lefties showed up to express their
support. Less committed Irish trade unionists skipped some meetings, staying out
drinking until 5am and chatting up the locals in halting Spanish.
Another no-show was Philip Agee, who was supposed to speak on CIA
disinformation campaigns. A former CIA agent, Agee became a renegade who went on
to expose hundreds of other US agents around the world. He was banned from five
NATO countries (including the UK) and stripped of his US citizenship in 1979.
Today he lives in Havana.
Agee missed the meeting because he had too much e-mail to answer and there
was work to do at his Internet start-up company. After spending hours at the
office where he runs Cubalinda.com – a Web site for tourists who want to
travel to Cuba – Agee prepared for lunch. This was followed by a visit to
the old quarter of the city, where a state-owned construction company is
renovating the 18th century apartment he was considering renting.
"What kind of idiot would choose those doors," he exclaimed on
seeing the shiny wooden doors – with ugly brass-coloured handles –
that had been just been mounted in one of the more attractive buildings in
Havana's oldest plaza. "They must have read that these were traditional so
they just stuck them on. It's a terrible disappointment."
From notorious spy to disgruntled homeowner, from wild-eyed activist and
left-wing poster boy to expat small businessman, Agee at 65 is now on his third
career. This time, though, it doesn't involve buying elections, planting stories
in South American newspapers or railing against US imperialism from a podium.
Rather, he has launched an online travel agency. Agee's business is to bring
tourists to Cuba and to make money doing it.
There are former Black Panthers and other expatriate radicals living in
Havana. There is a small community of foreign investors, diplomats and reporters
in town. But Agee shuns their company in favour of working. He does attend to
some visiting socialists and he maintains good relations with the Cuban
government. But Saturday nights will find him at the Hemingway Marina trying to
drum up business from visiting American yachts. He sleeps in a small room in his
office. He spends hours every day answering his e-mails.
"I get irritable if I don't reply quickly," he says. "The
amount we have received is overwhelming."
Indeed, in his neatly pressed khaki trousers and button-down shirt, Agee
looks far more like the Florida businessman his father was than the notorious
traitor still loathed by the CIA. But if he looks the same, he is not.
Colleagues from the CIA remember the young man of 21 who joined the agency
straight out of college and established his "cover" at George Air
Force Base in Victorville,
California, before being sent down to Ecuador in 1960.
Agee describes himself as being politically "naive" at the time.
Others, though, remember him as so right-wing that he argued against the minimum
wage, saying it would bankrupt small businessmen such as his father, who ran a
laundry and uniform rental service in Tampa.
There can't be many former agents who have an Internet start-up. The idea
came to Agee when he bought a book from Amazon.com a few years ago and decided
that the Web was a good way to sell trips to Cuba. His two sons, Chris and
Philip, are computer consultants; they gave Agee advice about what he needed to
do to set up his Web site. Agee registered a company in the Bahamas and raised
funds from investors that he does not wish to identify.
The site launched last spring. After holding a press conference to announce
the start-up of the first "wholly owned US business" on the island in
40 years (despite his German passport, Agee still thinks of himself as
American), he got 800,000 page views. He also received a flood of e-mail which
took months to answer, and included irate messages from Cuban Americans and
former university and military colleagues outraged by his activities.
Today Cubalinda has a staff of 12, including a recent retiree from Cuba's
ministry of foreign affairs. Foreigners are generally not allowed to set up
tourism companies in Cuba unless they have established themselves overseas, but
Agee has been exempted from this ruling. The company's offices, rented from the
government's official news agency, Prensa Latina, are in a high-rise block near
the US interests section of the Swiss embassy.
Internet speeds can be incredibly slow in Cuba. Agee says it's because the
US embargo restricts Cuban access to undersea cables, so the country has limited
bandwidth. Computers are rare in Cuba anyway, confined mainly to government
offices. Agee is now using his third Internet service provider and usually gets
a 64Kbps connection, though he pays a hefty $600 (650 euros) a month for his
leased line.
It's not yet possible to book hotels and plane tickets on the site itself
and payments are carried out via a wire transfer to Agee's account in Germany.
But Agee hopes to have an online credit-card payment system in place before the
end of the year. For now, visitors log on to the site and then e-mail Agee with
specific requests for their trip.
He has organised biking tours for groups of Canadians and Americans,
skydiving trips, and visits to Cuba's colourful carnival, which takes place in
late July and August in Havana.
In the first six months of operation, Agee provided trips around Cuba for
about 100 people and realised gross revenues of about $50,000 (54,000 euros). He
passed the break-even point in November after invoicing nearly $100,000 (108,000
euros) and expects to become profitable by early this year.
He has big expansion plans and would like to provide customised tours, such
as visits to Havana's old Jewish quarter, architectural and archeological tours,
hiking and riding in the Sierra Maestra near Santiago de Cuba (in the east of
the country) and white-water rafting. Agee also has plans to provide package
tours in conjunction with carriers flying from major gateways such as Toronto,
Madrid, London, Paris and Frankfurt.
It is illegal for Americans to visit Cuba for tourism and the ban is
enforced through a prohibition on spending dollars there. But some 22,000 flew
in illegally last year and prosecutions are rare. It's that group of adventurous
travellers – as well as Europeans holidaymakers – that Agee wants to
target with his Web site.
"The Cubans have been misunderstood and so have I," says Agee. "The
plan is to continue what I have been doing for 30 years – working for
solidarity projects in Cuba."
When it comes to tourism, the Cubans are not yet experts. True, they have
fenced-off resorts in the north of the island which are purportedly as good as
anything you would find in Phuket or Bali. But a lot of the country's "resorts"
consist of stolid cement hotels, bad food and slightly grubby beaches.
It's all very reminiscent of the grim Cold War days, when trips to resorts
were rewards for workers who had faithfully served their local coal-belching
factory, or cadres who had done an above-average job at the requisite
proselytising for the Communist Party were given a free trip to the seaside.
But it's that rough unspoiled atmosphere which adds to Cuba's charm. On the
plus side, old Havana is one of the most attractive cities in the world, with
streets of colonial buildings completely unsullied by modern development. The
old plazas and restored houses and shops are beautiful examples of 18th and 19th
century Spanish colonial architecture. Cars have been banned from old Havana and
there is a constant background of live music. In addition, Cubans are incredibly
open, easy going and friendly to visitors.
But it's strange to see Cubans – who made a revolution in the hope of
getting rid of the dollar – now reduced to scrambling for it. And it's like
something out of a Graham Greene novel to see a former spy like Agee spend his
twilight years in Havana. It's a sign of the changed world that he spends his
time working on a Web site rather than inciting revolt in Third World countries.
But what else can the Cubans do with him? They have nowhere to send someone
like him because they don't support revolutionary movements anymore. It's years
since the Cubans sent substantial numbers of cadres or troops to help developing
countries free themselves from "imperialist tyranny".
So now, at the age of 65, Agee bides his time in Havana, living peacefully
with his wife, running a small Internet business, waiting for his retirement and
feeling grateful that the weather is as warm as the Florida he grew up in.
"On a sunny afternoon in November, Havana is not a bad place to be,"
Agee says.
When Philip Agee was sent on his first overseas posting, US foreign policy
was based on president Kennedy's Alliance for Progress. The Cold War was close
to its height, and the US government was afraid Castro's 1959 revolution would
spread to South America.
The US government's plan was to support Latin American governments'
counter-insurgency efforts by giving them money and building up their police and
military. This aid was accompanied by economic reforms, educational and health
programmes, and land reforms. Latin America was intensely polarised: the vast
majority of the population comprised illiterate peasants scraping by on less
than $1 a day, while tiny elites ran the countries and controlled most of the
wealth.
The Latin American division of the CIA was known to be its most reactionary,
but Agee joined thinking he was going to change the world. As one former
colleague of Agee's recalls: "Young people find it hard to believe now, but
in the 1950s and 1960s the CIA was the bastion of great progressive thinking in
foreign policy. We were working to help Third World countries become independent
without them getting into bed with the Russians or the Chinese. It sounds so
corny and primitive now, but we believed we had a better system."
Instead, Agee found that economic reform and social justice was the last
thing the CIA and the State Department cared about. He spent his days
cultivating local oligarchs (and their chauffeurs), planting propaganda items in
local newspapers, reading people's mail, arranging phone taps, and smearing
anyone thought to be left-wing. In one case, he even counted out the money
needed by the Chilean branch to buy off the 1964 elections so that Salvador
Allende would not win. (Allende was eventually elected president in 1970.)
Agee recounts his years in the CIA in his book, Inside The Company: A CIA
Diary. At times it seemed as though the Keystone Kops were running the show. In
one incident, Agee describes the CIA losing track of one of its spies, an
Ecuadorian driver at the Cuban embassy. The agency had panicked for several
weeks, worrying that the spy had been exposed and killed, only to find he had
bragged to the embassy gardener about his spying, then rushed back to his
hometown in fear, after discovering the gardener had told the Cubans.
On another occasion, a phone-tapping operation at the Czech embassy in Quito
was interrupted – and aborted – by the unexpected appearance of an
embassy guard. But apart from the humourous asides, the CIA's activities in
Latin America come across as mean-spirited, petty, immoral and on occasions,
horrifying.
Indeed, Agee found his job increasingly abhorrent and became tired of the
plots and conspiracies. He began to feel that US policy was to shore up
repressive and unpopular governments, whose aims were to protect their economic
interests, not help the poor.
His break with the CIA came during 1969 while he was in Mexico. Agee met and
fell in love with a leftist American living there. He decided to leave the CIA
and marry her. The romance eventually fell apart, but by that time Agee was
enrolled in the Universidad de Autonoma – a hotbed of activism – where
he got a master's degree in Latin American history. Unsurprisingly, Agee says
his studies made him more radical and he decided to write a book about his
experiences with the CIA. The result was a 639-page tome which outlines the
CIA's disinformation, propaganda and destabilisation campaigns and which names
dozens of CIA employees – from low-level local officials to station chiefs.
It took Agee five years to finish the book. He went to Cuba hoping to do
research there and then worked in London and Paris. They were hard years for
Agee, who lived mainly on hand-outs from sympathisers.
During this period the CIA put pressure on Agee's ex-wife in the hope of
getting him to return to the US, and sent agents to Paris to find out where he
was living. They tried to lure him to Spain – where he feared they might
try to kill him – and even gave him a type-writer that turned out to be
bugged. US publishers were afraid to touch his book, so it first appeared in
1975 in Britain. Agee's financial problems were over. The book was later
published in the US, became a bestseller, and was translated into 30 languages.
According to Thomas Powers, a writer who specialises in intelligence
organisations: "The emotional and moral response Agee displayed at that
time was not untypical. A lot of people were angry at what the US was doing in
the world and angry at what we did to radical movements in Latin America.
"People hoped that revolutionary activism was in a new phase and would
have great results, when in fact we were watching the dying gasp of the world
Communist movement."
When Inside The Company was first published it received international
attention. Agee became a poster boy for the left and a traitor to the right. At
the time, the CIA was the object of widespread criticism for its policies.
Agee linked up with US radicals Bill and Ellen Shapp, who published the
bulletin CounterSpy. Using embassy directories and other phone lists, they began
to publish names of CIA agents working around the world. One of them –
Richard Welch, the station chief in Athens who had previously been posted to
Lima – was eventually killed. But even CIA insiders say the assassination
by Communist activists was not Agee's fault. The CIA was lax on security and has
routinely used the same houses for its station chiefs. This guaranteed that a
station chief became instantly identifiable as his predecessor's replacement
when transferred to a new posting.
Agee married again, to a German ballet dancer, and used Hamburg as the base
for his crusade. From 1975 he travelled on what he described as the "solidarity
circuit" – among other things going to Nicaragua to advise the
Sandinistas on likely CIA strategies against them and to Grenada to help that
island nation's left-wing leader, Maurice Bishop. He also worked with the
African National Congress.
From 1987 to 1997, Agee went on the lecture circuit, speaking about the CIA
at universities, churches and rallies all over the world. He also taught
political science at the University of Hamburg, and wrote a political
autobiography, On The Run, which described his life after the CIA.
The US did what it could to get him. Agee believes there may have been an
assassination plot – something his colleagues from the agency laugh off. A
former senior agency official says: "What could have put him more on the
front page than an attempt to kill him? It would have been a terrible blunder,
not to mention against the law."
In any case, Agee was stripped of his passport in 1979. For for several
years he travelled on Nicaraguan and Grenadian passports, before getting the
German one he uses now. The courts also ruled in the 1970s that his writings on
intelligence-related matters must be first reviewed and cleared by the CIA.
Even now, his former colleagues at the CIA regard him as one of the worst
traitors of the century. They say he was a hard-drinking womaniser who was never
very good at his job.
They are convinced he became a spy for Russia and Cuba, but don't believe he
was ever radicalised. Rather, their view is that he was seduced by a Russian
agent, got himself in a tight spot with his womanising, experienced some
financial difficulties, and defected because he didn't know how to extricate
himself from his personal problems. Later on, Agee persuaded himself he was a
radical, they believe.
"I don't think he was an ideological defector or motivated by love of
mankind," says John Horton, who was the station chief in Montevideo in 1965
when Agee was there. "He betrayed a lot of people and he did it
deliberately."
Agee says these charges are "absurd", and denies becoming a
Russian or Cuban spy. "They have been calling me an alcoholic or a
womaniser for 30 years. I don't know why. I think I must tweak their conscience.
Let them call me what they want. They are the ones who were discredited; not me."
But it could be that Agee marked a turning point in the history of Cold War
traitors. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg – like the British double agents
Philby, Burgess and MacLean – were idealists who believed the Soviet
Communists were trying to make the world a better place and that their cause was
something to which a moral person should subscribe.
After details of the Moscow show trials and other horrors of Stalinism came
to light, and after the crushing of the Hungarian and Czech uprisings in 1956
and 1968, it became pretty hard to defend Communist orthodoxy. Indeed, since the
1980s, US double agents such as John Walker and Aldrich Ames have worked for
foreign agencies only for the money.
Agee says the CIA's charges against him of working for the Russians and
Cubans are smears, used to discredit him. He could not have been a useful double
agent in the proper sense of the word, he claims, because once he left the
agency he lost access to information.
But what may have happened was that he spoke with the Cubans about CIA
operations and gave them information about its past activities and likely future
strategies.
Bill Hood, a former senior CIA official who knew Agee, says: "He would
have been a very valuable debriefing source, and an intelligence service worth
its beans would keep him on the shelf like a reference book. If they have 20 to
30 reference books like that on the shelf they become very handy, although they
have diminishing value as time goes by."
Was Agee the last of the ideologues? He dismisses the idea outright: "I
don't like the word defector. That implies going to the other side. Thank God I
had the malleability to absorb new ideas. That should not be amazing."
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