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INSIDE THE COMPANY: CIA DIARY |
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Inside Cover: Excerpted from a page-one pre-publication review in the Washington Post "Book World" When Victor Marchetti's The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence was published it contained intriguing blanks where material deemed too sensitive by the CIA had been. There are no blanks in Philip Agee's Inside the Company: CIA Diary. This densely detailed expose names every CIA officer, every agent, every operation that Agee encountered during 12 years with "The Company" in Ecuador, Uruguay, Mexico and Washington. Among CIA agents or [contacts] Agee lists high ranking political leaders of several Latin American countries, U.S. and Latin American labor leaders, ranking Community Party members, and scores of other politicians, high military and police officials and journalists. After a stint as an Air Force officer (for cover) and CIA training, Agee arrived in Quito, Ecuador in late 1960. During the glory years of the Alliance for Progress and the New Frontier, he fought the holy war against communism by bribing politicians and journalists, forging documents, tapping telephones, and reading other people's mail. But it was a faraway event which seems to have disturbed him more. Lyndon Johnson's invasion of the Dominican Republic in 1965 was an overreaction Agee couldn't accept. In 1968, he resigned with the conviction that he had become a "servant of the capitalism I rejected" as a university student -- "one of its secret policemen." Agee decided to write this reconstructed diary to tell everything he knew. He spent four years writing the book in Europe, making research trips and dodging the CIA. At one point he lived on money advanced by a woman he believes was working for the CIA and trying to gain his confidence. Until recently, former CIA Director Richard Helm's plea that "You've just got to trust us. We are honorable men" was enough. With the revelations of domestic spying, it no longer is. In this book Agee has provided the most complete description yet of what the CIA does abroad. In entry after numbing entry, U.S. foreign policy in Latin America is pictured as a web of deceit, hypocrisy and corruption. Now that we can no longer plead ignorance of the webs our spiders spin, will be continue to tolerate CIA activities abroad? -- Patrick Breslin © The Washington Post Cover photograph by Dennis Rolfe shows a typewriter and bugged case planted on the author presumably by the CIA. Stonehill
Publishing Company
Philip Agee, who was a CIA operations officer for twelve years, now lives in England. "More than an expose, a unique chronicle ... the most complete description yet of what the CIA does abroad. In entry after numbing entry, U.S. foreign policy is pictured as a web of deceit, hypocrisy and corruption." -- The Washington Post "Unlike Victor Marchetti, who was so high in the CIA that many of his notions of what goes on at the operations level are downright absurd, Philip Agee was there. He has first-hand experience as a spy-handler ... as complete an account of spy work as is likely to be published anywhere ... presented with deadly accuracy." -- Miles Copeland, former CIA agent, in The London Observer "The workings of the world's most powerful secret police force -- the CIA -- comes across as a frightening picture of corruption, pressure, assassination and conspiracy." -- Evening News (London) |
