Ex-CIA Case Officer Philip Agee wrote tell all book

[hist2004]

Philip Agee: The Interview
INTERVIEWER: Are you in danger here?

AGEE: Probably not. If they tried any rough stuff, it would have
to look like an accident, and if anybody slipped up, there would
be a very big flap.

INTERVIEWER: Is the room bugged?

AGEE: I doubt it. Too much trouble for a short visit. But the
phone may be tapped. The hell with them. Let's talk.

INTERVIEWER: How do you like having the Central Intelligence Agency
breathing down your neck?

AGEE: Not much. That's a dangerous bunch of people to tangle with.
I don't want to sound as if I think I'm a hero. I'm not. I just
think something's got to be done about the CIA. Remember, I'm not
the first ex-CIA man to come out against the agency. Victor
Marchetti was the first. But while he was fighting to get his book
published, I was working fast and furiously on mine in secret.

INTERVIEWER: Why did you decide to blow the whistle on the CIA?

AGEE: I finally understood, after 12 years with the agency, how
much suffering it was causing, that millions of people all over
the world had been killed or at least had had their lives
destroyed by the CIA and the institutions it supports. I just
couldn't sit by and do nothing.

INTERVIEWER: Millions of people? Aren't you overstating the case?

AGEE: I wish I were. Even after the revelations we've had so far,
people still don't understand what a huge, powerful and sinister
organization the CIA is.

INTERVIEWER: How big is it?

AGEE: In my opinion, it's the biggest and most powerful secret
service that has ever existed. I don't know how big the K.G.B. is
inside the Soviet Union, but its international operation is small
compared with the CIA's. It's known now that the CIA has 16,500
employees and an annual budget of $750,000,000. But that's not
counting its mercenary armies, its commercial subsidiaries. Add
them all together, the agency employs or subsidizes hundreds of
thousands of people and spends more like billions every year. Even
its official budget is secret; it's concealed in those of other
Federal agencies. Nobody tells the Congress what the CIA spends.
By law, the CIA isn't accountable to Congress. Not for anything.

INTERVIEWER: To whom is it accountable?

AGEE: To the National Security Council, which is composed of the
President and officials chosen by him. So it's really an
instrument of the President to use in any way he pleases. If there
are legal restraints on this, I don't know of them. It's
frightening, but it's a fact: The CIA is the President's secret
army.

INTERVIEWER: What does this army do?

AGEE: To understand that, you have to understand why the CIA was
set up. There are two reasons: the official reason, as set forth
in the National Security Act of 1947, which authorized the CIA to
collect and analyze foreign intelligence, and the real reason,
which was carefully hidden. There was a sleeper clause in the
National Security Act, allowing the CIA to "perform such other
functions and duties related to intelligence affecting the
national security as the NSC may from time to time direct." Right
from the start, it was those "other functions" that occupied most
of the CIA's time. And money.

INTERVIEWER: Just what are those other functions?

AGEE: Covert action. The dagger inside the cloak. It's a form of
intervention somewhere between correct, polite diplomacy and
outright military invasion. Covert action is the real reason for
the CIA's existence, and it was born out of political and economic
necessity.

INTERVIEWER: What does covert action have to do with economics?

AGEE: Think back to the end of World War Two. The United States
faced a really alarming economic crisis. In 1945, 11,000,000 men
were still under arms--and out of the work force. Even so,
production was more than double what it had been in the best
prewar year. But then something scary happened. In the first six
months after the war ended, production was cut in half and
unemployment shot up from 830,000 to 2,700,000. In six months! It
looked as if the U.S. might have won the war only to fall back
into a depression. And the people who were running the country,
politicians and those who later became known as the
military-industrial complex, were badly frightened. Somehow they
had to create 11,000,000 new jobs or face catastrophe. So they
decided to reconstruct the European and Japanese economies, thus
providing new markets for the U.S., and adopted the "containment"
policies of such military alliances as NATO that brought on the
Cold War.

INTERVIEWER: Wait a minute. Are you saying that we started the Cold
War? Didn't the Russians have something to do with it?

AGEE: I'm saying that when World War Two ended, U.S. policy toward
the Soviet Union came to be dominated by the anti-Soviet school in
the State Department led by George Kennan and Chip Bohlen, who
were convinced that the Soviets wanted to conquer the world. Such
a foreign policy meant that revolutionary socialism must be
opposed, with arms if necessary, wherever it appeared, because the
Soviets were supposed to be behind it all. Sure, the Soviets also
helped start the Cold War; they were aggressive and they reneged
on agreements. Militarily, though, they were much weaker in those
days than the U.S. public was led to believe. But the scenario of
an innocent and defensive America struggling to save the world
from Communist dictatorship provided the rationalization for the
dominance of foreign economies by American companies. This was the
CIA's main mission, to guarantee a favorable foreign-investment
climate for U.S. industry. You see, the U.S. market isn't big
enough to support the kind of production we need to keep
unemployment down to so-called acceptable levels. We've got to
export--finance capital as well as products--or die. But where
were our markets when the CIA was established? Europe was in
ruins. Japan was flat on its back. Reconstruction of those
economies would re-create those markets.

INTERVIEWER: Do you discount America's humanitarian motives in
rebuilding Europe and Japan?

AGEE: No. Most Americans, I think, felt a generous, really
unselfish obligation to help the people whose countries had been
devastated by the war. But European Communists opposed the
Marshall Plan because they understood that U.S. economic
domination would accompany it. So the CIA's covert-action
operations began as secret political warfare against those people
who opposed the Marshall Plan. For example, the CIA broke dock
strikes against Marshall Plan aid, got non-Communist labor unions
to withdraw from the World Confederation of Trade Unions and
establish the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions.
All this, of course, with the help of George Meany, who----

INTERVIEWER: You're saying that the president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. is
a CIA collaborator?

AGEE: One of the most effective. For almost 30 years, he has
helped the CIA pour money and agents into the "free world" labor
movement. By the Fifties, unions supported by the CIA had become a
pretty effective counterweight to the ones controlled by
Communists in western Europe. This meant 20 years of relative
labor peace during which U.S. companies and their local
counterparts could consolidate investments. But those labor-union
penetrations were only the beginning of The Company's covert
actions.

INTERVIEWER: The Company?

AGEE: To the people who work for it, the CIA is known as The
Company. The Big Business mentality pervades everything. Agents,
for instance, are called assets. The man in charge of the United
Kingdom desk is said to have the "U.K. account." But, as I was
going to say, The Company has conducted covert actions all over
the world. In the Forties and early Fifties, it operated mainly in
Europe. In the late Fifties and Sixties, emphasis shifted to the
Third World: Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Middle East. These
operations are carried out at different levels of intensity, of
course. Not all of them are violent. Sometimes The Company forges
documents or spreads false rumors and untrue news stories--what it
calls disinformation. The Company sends hecklers to public
meetings, pays strikebreakers and industrial spies, organizes
propaganda services like Radio Free Europe, launders millions of
dollars' worth of dirty cash each year. It has also spent huge
amounts to buy elections and overthrow liberal or socialist or
nationalist governments--or to prop up repressive regimes. But The
Company gets into a lot of violence, too. It trains and equips
saboteurs and bomb squads. The police and military-intelligence
services of many countries are trained, financed and controlled by
the CIA. Worse than that, The Company has assassinated thousands
of people, some of them famous, most of them unknown. If it has
to, it will conduct paramilitary campaigns and even full-scale
wars. You name it, the CIA does it.



INTERVIEWER: Those are sensational but very general accusations. Can
you give specific examples of such actions?

AGEE: Sure. In the past 25 years, the CIA has been involved in
plots to overthrow governments in Iran, the Sudan, Syria,
Guatemala, Ecuador, Guyana, Za‹re and Ghana. Will that do for
starters? In Greece, the CIA participated in bringing in the
repressive and stupid regime of the colonels. In Brazil, the CIA
worked to install a regime that tortures children to make their
parents confess their political activities. In Chile, The Company
spent millions to "destabilize"--that's the Company word--the
Allende government and set up the military junta, which has since
massacred tens of thousands of workers, students, liberals and
leftists. And there is a very strong probability that the CIA
station in Chile helped supply the assassination lists. In
Indonesia in 1965, The Company was behind an even bloodier coup,
the one that got rid of Sukarno and led to the slaughter of at
least 500,000 and possibly 1,000,000 people. In the Dominican
Republic--you want more?--the CIA arranged the assassination of
the dictator Rafael Trujillo and later participated in the
invasion that prevented the return to power of the liberal
ex-president Juan Bosch. And in Cuba, of course, The Company paid
for and directed the invasion that failed at the Bay of Pigs. Some
time later, the CIA had a go at assassinating Fidel Castro. That
one was close, but no cigar.

INTERVIEWER: What you are saying is that the CIA can overthrow
governments practically at its pleasure. How is that possible?

AGEE: It's not a question of snapping fingers and telling some
generals, "Now's the time, boys." What the CIA does is to work
carefully, usually over several years' time, to undermine those
governments whose policies are unfavorable to U. S. interests.
Through propaganda, political action and the fomenting of
trade-union unrest, often carried out through many different front
organizations, the CIA cuts away popular support from the
undesired government or political leader. Major emphasis is placed
on influencing reactionary military officers. Once this process
gets started, it will acquire its own momentum and eventually lead
to the desired coup. The CIA can sometimes speed things up by
providing a catalyst: let's say preparing a forged document such
as a list of military officers allegedly due for assassination,
then seeing that the list gets publicized.

INTERVIEWER: You mentioned the CIA's role in Indonesia. What about
Indochina?

AGEE: I figure everybody knows the war there began as a CIA war,
as far as direct U. S. intervention was concerned. This is
documented in the Pentagon papers. CIA officers were in Indochina
before the French left. They organized the Montagnards into a
paramilitary force to fight the Viet Cong. CIA agents helped put
Ngo Dinh Diem in power and CIA agents at the very least cooperated
in his assassination. It was the failure of the CIA's secret
operations in the Fifties that led to the overt military
intervention of the Sixties.

INTERVIEWER: Speaking of the Diem assassination, are the rumors we
hear true--that the CIA was involved in Diem's killing without
President Kennedy's approval and that when Kennedy found out he
was furious with the agency?

AGEE: I don't know, but I've heard that from people who should
know.

INTERVIEWER: If the CIA were to admit to all your allegations, what
justification would it give for such actions?

AGEE: The same old emotional appeal: that we have to prop up our
so-called friends--usually the tiny minority that has cornered
most of the wealth in poor countries--or they'll fall victim to
the Soviets and lose their freedom. Kissinger and people like him
keep reviving that argument, but the truth is--and the CIA knows
it better than anybody else--that for many years there has been no
worldwide Communist conspiracy! The socialist bloc has just as
many cracks in it as the capitalist bloc. I think most
revolutionary socialists--call them Communists, if you like--want
the advantages of socialism without the disadvantages of some
Soviet-style police state.

INTERVIEWER: You don't believe in Marxist conspiracies, but you do
admit there's repression in Russia?

AGEE: Don't put me on. Sure there's repression in Russia--and it
goes back for centuries, not just to 1917. But I think it'll take
another generation of Soviet leaders to relax things there;
today's leaders can't answer very well the question of what they
were doing during Stalin's reign of terror.

INTERVIEWER: But if the CIA knows, as you claim it does, that there is
no worldwide Communist conspiracy, why does it act as if there
were?

AGEE: Remember, the CIA is an instrument of the President; it only
carries out policy. And, like everyone else, the President has to
respond to forces in the society he's trying to lead, right? In
America, the most powerful force is Big Business, and American Big
Business has a vested interest in the Cold War.



INTERVIEWER: Hold on. This is beginning to sound like Marxist jargon
about the big bad imperialists on Wall Street.

AGEE: That's because, in my opinion, the Marxists are right about
American economic imperialism. American multinational corporations
have built up colossal interests all over the world, and you can
bet your ass that wherever you find U. S. business interests, you
also find the CIA. Why? Because the foreign operations of American
companies are the key to our domestic prosperity. The
multinational corporations want a peaceful status quo in countries
where they have investments, because that gives them undisturbed
access to cheap raw materials, cheap labor and stable markets for
their finished goods. The status quo suits bankers, because their
money remains secure and multiplies. And, of course, the status
quo suits the small ruling groups the CIA supports abroad, because
all they want is to keep themselves on top of the socioeconomic
pyramid and the majority of their people on the bottom. But do you
realize what being on the bottom means in most parts of the world?
Ignorance, poverty, often early death by starvation or disease.

INTERVIEWER: You paint a bleak picture. Hasn't the CIA accomplished
anything positive, at least for the U. S.?

AGEE: Over the short run, quite a bit. The CIA certainly helped
goose up the American economic boom of the past 25 years. What
many Americans don't seem to have noticed, though, is that
American prosperity over those years was to some degree a false
one. Have you noticed that as the political and economic
independence of the Third World has increased, American prosperity
has begun to sputter? In the long run, I'm betting that the CIA
will be seen to have done a lot of damage to the United States,
because, along with its business allies, it has caused us to be
hated by millions of people as the last of the great colonial
exploiters. That hatred is going to haunt us for a long, long
time, and it has got to be focused on the few people who deserve
it and not on the American people as a whole.

INTERVIEWER: Your own experience in the CIA has been mostly with its
overseas operations. What do you know about alleged CIA activities
inside the U.S.?

AGEE: Very little--but enough to suspect strongly that they're
much more extensive than anybody outside the CIA or the National
Security Council realizes. I think a lot of sinister things will
come out in the investigations that are under way in Washington. I
think the American people may be in for some severe shocks.



INTERVIEWER: What are you hinting at?

AGEE: I can only hint, because I have no direct knowledge. But I
can tell you what I was told by Marchetti. I told him I thought
that most of the 10,000 cases the CIA admits to having
investigated inside the U. S. would turn out to be connected, no
matter how tenuously, with some sort of foreign-intelligence
effort. "You're wrong," he said. "You just don't know. You haven't
been here. There are going to be some revelations that will chill
your spine, really grisly things. And some of them," he said, "may
be connected with the assassinations of President Kennedy, Senator
Kennedy, Martin Luther King and other well-known individuals both
at home and abroad."

INTERVIEWER: Connected how? What are you trying to say?

AGEE: Just what I said. That's all I know. But by the time this
interview appears, a lot of these things may have come out. I hope
so. That's really all I know. I can give you an opinion, though,
for what it's worth. Knowing the CIA as I do, I can tell you that
everything I have read about the assassination of President
Kennedy--Lee Harvey Oswald's background, Jack Ruby's background,
the photograph that seems to place E. Howard Hunt at the scene of
the crime, the mysterious deaths of so many people
involved--everything makes me very suspicious of the Warren
Commission's version of what happened. And remember: Allen
Dulles, the former head of the CIA, was a member of the Warren
Commission. If the agency had anything to cover up, Dulles was in
a very good position to do so. But I don't have any proof that the
CIA was involved. Remember, I wasn't working in Washington then.
What I can tell you about best is the normal, everyday dirty
tricks a CIA man is up to.

INTERVIEWER: All right. Let's go into that. Beginning at the
beginning, how did you get into the CIA?

AGEE: Through my college placement bureau. No kidding. Just before
I was graduated from Notre Dame, I was interviewed by a CIA man.
He made his pitch like any other company recruiter: interesting
work, good pay, opportunity for advancement, foreign travel. He
also mentioned patriotism and public service. I said no at first,
but a year later, when the draft began to catch up with me, I
changed my mind. The CIA training program allowed me to do my
compulsory military service as an agency man. So I went away for
two years with the Air Force--always in the special CIA
program--and in 1959 I returned to Washington to begin formal
training as a CIA officer. After about three months of classes at
headquarters in Langley, Virginia, learning the structure and
functions of the CIA, most of us went to The Farm for operational
training.

INTERVIEWER: The Farm?

AGEE: Camp Peary, Virginia. A secret CIA training center. So
secret at the time that some of the foreign trainees weren't even
told they were in the United States. We worked hard, I can tell
you, for more than six months. There was a physical-conditioning
program, plenty of practice in the martial arts. How to disarm or
cripple, if necessary kill an opponent. We had classes in
propaganda, infiltration-exfiltration, youth and student
operations, labor operations, targeting and penetration of enemy
organizations. How to run liaison projects with friendly
intelligence services so as to give as little and get as much
information as possible. Anti-Soviet operations--that subject got
special attention. We had classes in how to frame a Russian
official and try to get him to defect. The major subject, though,
was how to run agents--single agents, networks of agents.

INTERVIEWER: How does a CIA officer set up and operate a network of
spies?

AGEE: The first stage of the process is targeting prospects. Say
your objective is to penetrate a leftist political party. The
first thing to do is to probe for a weak spot in the organization.
Maybe you bug the phone of a leading party member and find out
he's playing around with the party's funds. In that case, perhaps
he can be blackmailed. Or one of your agents plays on the same
soccer team as a party member, or goes out with his sister, and
gets to know something about him that seems to make him a good
prospect. Then you make him an offer.



INTERVIEWER: You mean money?

AGEE: Usually, but not necessarily. In rich countries, a man might
become a spy for ideological reasons, but in poor countries, it's
usually because he's short of cash. A hungry man with a family to
support will do almost anything for money, and there are a lot of
hungry people in most of the countries in the world. So you make
an offer. Maybe you make it yourself, but maybe you have someone
else do it, because you don't want the prospective agent to know
who he's working for. Not all CIA agents are what The Company
calls witting.

INTERVIEWER: How could a person be a CIA agent without knowing it?

AGEE: Thousands of policemen all over the world, for instance, are
shadowing people for the CIA without knowing it. They think
they're working for their own police departments, when, in fact,
their chief may be a CIA agent who's sending them out on CIA jobs
and turning their information over to his CIA control. There's
also a lot of "false flag" recruiting, when one agent will recruit
another one by telling him he'll actually be working for his own
government, or even for Peking or Havana. You don't let the
recruit know he'll be working for the United States, because if he
knew that, he might not consent to do it.

INTERVIEWER: How much do you pay a spy?

AGEE: It depends on local conditions. In a poor country, $100 a
month will get you an ordinary agent. In my day, about $700 a
month would buy a Latin-American cabinet minister.

INTERVIEWER: After you've recruited your agent, what then?

AGEE: Then you've got to run him, and that's an exacting
job--mainly because of the secrecy. You both have to be very
careful what you put on paper or say on the phone. You communicate
mostly by signals agreed upon in advance. For example, you can
make a chalk or pencil mark or place a strip of colored tape in a
certain telephone booth or on a fence, wall or utility pole.
Different marks or colors signify different instructions. Since
you usually can't be seen together, you have to meet in what the
CIA calls "a safe house." Sometimes, even that's too risky, so you
arrange for your agent to leave his information at a "dead drop,"
like a hollow place in a cement block or a magnetized container
you can fasten under the shelf in a telephone booth--anyplace a
message or a roll of microfilm or a reel of tape would be safe
until it could be picked up.

INTERVIEWER: What if you suspect that an agent's information is false?

AGEE: You can put him through a polygraph test or cut off his
money--fire him. Or, if necessary, and headquarters approves, you
can "burn" him. In Companyese, that means to reveal his connection
with the agency, or frame him. I remember, for instance, the case
of Joaquin Ordoqui, who was an old-time leader of the Communist
movement in Cuba. I don't know if he was ever a CIA agent, but a
decision was made to burn him in order to create dissension in
Cuba. So a series of letters implicating him as a CIA agent was
sent to the Cuban embassy in Mexico City. In 1964, Ordoqui was
placed under house arrest in Cuba and the case caused a lot of
friction there. Just before he died in 1974, though, he was
exonerated. In 1966, Stan Archenhold, the CIA officer who dreamed
up this burning operation, got the Intelligence Medal--the CIA's
biggest merit badge--for it. Then there's the really extreme
situation in which someone who has worked for the CIA has to be
physically eliminated for some reason or other. I don't know of
any of these cases, but I've heard that has happened, especially
in Indochina during the Sixties.

So the stick is a big element in keeping control of agents. But
the carrot, usually money, is at least as important.

INTERVIEWER: How does a CIA officer make payments to his agents?

AGEE: In cash. Let's face it, you can't pay spies by check. The
minute you go into the bank, the operation goes public. No, toward
the end of every month. I'd go out with my pockets stuffed full of
little pay envelopes and run all over town to meet my agents in
cars or safe houses and pay them off. I had so many envelopes that
once in a while I got mixed up and gave an agent the wrong one. I
always made them count the cash in front of me, though, so I was
able to correct those mistakes on the spot.



INTERVIEWER: Besides cash, what were you supplied with? Were you given
James Bond gadgets and trained to use them?

AGEE: Bond never had it so good. In CIA jargon, tradecraft covers
the tricky side of espionage; it includes all the techniques that
keep a secret operation secret. We learned how to write secret
messages--there's a carbon system, a microdot system and various
wet methods; we also learned how to open and then reseal a letter.
Very simple when you have the flat steam table.

INTERVIEWER: What's that?

AGEE: It's a rectangular platform, about one foot by two feet,
with a heating element built into it and foam rubber all around
the outside. You plug the unit into a wall socket, let it heat up
and put a wet blotter on top of it. Right away, the steam begins
to rise from the blotter. By experience, you know just how wet to
get it. Then you place the envelope on top of the blotter, with
the flap side down. In a matter of seconds, any envelope will come
right open. Later you reseal it--the CIA makes a very effective
clear glue. If it's done right, there's no trace that the envelope
has been tampered with.

We were also taught how to bug a room and how to restore a wall or
a ceiling to its original appearance afterward. The CIA puts out a
handy-dandy plaster-patching and paint-matching kit, by the way,
that is better than anything the public can buy. They give you
about 150 chips on a chain, practically every color you can think
of. You just match the chips to the wall paint until you get the
right color. Then you look on the back of the chip, which gives
you the formula for mixing the paint. It really works. I took the
kit home one weekend when I was renovating my apartment. It's
superquick-drying, odorless paint.

They trained us in the use of disguises, too--wigs, mustaches,
body pads--and taught us to work with hidden cameras. Some of them
had lenses that looked like tie-clasp ornaments or locks on
briefcases. The Company had other cameras with telescopic lenses
that could photograph documents inside a room, right through a
curtain. There was also a machine through which we could overhear
a conversation inside a room across the street; it bounced an
infrared beam off a window, using the windowpane to pick up the
vibrations of the voices inside the room. The reflected infrared
beam would carry the vibrations to a receiving set.

INTERVIEWER: All that, we suppose, comes under the heading of
gathering information. What about the dirty tricks we hear the CIA
pulls? Did you have special gadgets for those, too?

AGEE: The CIA has a department called the Technical Services
Division, TSD, and its laboratories have produced all sorts of
things. Some of them are pretty unpleasant. For instance, TSD has
developed an invisible itching powder--I think it's made of
asbestos fibers, actually--that drives its victims wild for about
three days. My agents used a lot of it. They went to leftist
meetings and sprinkled it on the seats of toilets. TSD has also
produced an invisible powder that will just lie harmlessly on the
floor--at a meeting hall, say--until people arrive and start
walking around, so the powder gets stirred up. Within about five
minutes, everybody in the room is gasping and watering at the
eyes, and the meeting has to break up.

I remember another chemical we had. If you dropped it into
somebody's drink, it would give him a horrible body odor. We also
had a drug that would make people say whatever they were thinking,
just babble on. We had a powder that, mixed with pipe tobacco or
sifted into a cigarette, would give the smoker an annoying
respiratory ailment. We even had an ointment that came in a little
container that looked like a ring. On the underside was a little
compartment filled with ointment that, when you smeared it
unobtrusively on the door handle of a car, would give the person
who opened the door terrible burns on his hand. Ordinary stink
bombs were effective, too--small glass vials with the
vilest-smelling liquid on earth. One time at the Mexico City
station, some clown poured a bunch of that liquid down the drain.
It was going bad. I guess. At that time, the station occupied the
upper floors of the embassy, in a high-rise building. Somehow the
liquid didn't run out into the sewer system; it got caught in the
basement area, and the smell began to seep back upstairs. They had
to evacuate the whole building for a while. I heard that when the
Ambassador asked the station chief if he knew anything about it,
the chief replied that somebody must have had a worse case of
Montezuma's revenge than usual.



INTERVIEWER: But all those things--itching powder, stink bombs--are
incredibly petty, the kinds of things nasty little kids might
think of.

AGEE: The CIA isn't always petty. For instance, we had a whole
inventory of sabotage devices. Chemicals to gum up printing
presses, foul bearings, contaminate wheat or rice or sugar sacks.
There were limpets to sink ships. Also some frightening stuff
called thermite powder. Add a little water and you could mold it
like clay--into an ashtray or a book end or a doll. It looked
harmless, but when the time pencil up the doll's behind ignited,
there was a shuddering ball of violent white heat that ate through
concrete or even steel in a few seconds. There was no way you
could put it out. I heard it was a CIA thermite doll that burned
down El Encanto, the big department store in Havana. You could
also combine thermite with tear-gas rods and create a cloud that
would clear an area for blocks around.

INTERVIEWER: Did you learn these techniques during your CIA training
in the States?

AGEE: Yes.

INTERVIEWER: Where was your first assignment outside the country?

AGEE: Quito, Ecuador. I went there in December 1960 under cover as
a State Department political officer, but using my own name. My
secret Company name was Jeremy S. HODAPP. I fell in love with
Ecuador. The mountains are spectacular, and high; Quito is 9000
feet above sea level. On the coastal plain, there are endless palm
forests and banana plantations. But the country is appallingly
poor. When I was there, the average income was $18 a month. A
conservative upper class, about one percent of the population,
held most of the wealth. However, for about 12 years before I went
there, Ecuador had been politically stable and some economic
progress was being made. But from 1961 to 1963, we really
subverted that country.

INTERVIEWER: What was the point of that?

AGEE: Cuba was the point. The Cuban Revolution had swung to the
far left and the State Department was terrified. So were I.T.T.
and United Fruit and the big U.S. banks with Latin-American
interests; they feared that Cuba would export revolution to other
countries in the hemisphere, and then those countries might
nationalize their holdings. So the top priority of U.S. policy in
Latin America became to seal off Cuba from the continent. In
Quito, our orders were to do everything possible to force Ecuador
to break diplomatic and economic relations with Cuba and to weaken
the Communist Party there whatever it cost?

INTERVIEWER: What did it cost?

AGEE: About $2,000,000. We bought everybody willing to sell
himself to get our jobs done. The vice-president of the
country--his name was Reinaldo Varea--was a CIA agent. We paid him
$1000 a month and kept a suite for him in Quito's best hotel,
where he could take his girlfriends. The president's personal
physician, Felipe Ovalle, was on the CIA's payroll, too. So were
the president of the Chamber of Deputies, the minister of the
treasury, the minister of labor and the chief of police
intelligence. So were the leaders of several right-wing political
parties and some key members of the Communist Party, too. Several
ministers of government and the director of immigration also
worked closely with us. It was like a covert occupation of the
country. But, at the time, I didn't see anything wrong in what we
were doing. I believed what the CIA told me, that we were buying
time for liberal reforms by checking the spread of communism. So I
went out and worked like a demon to make that policy effective. We
ran over Ecuador like a steam roller. It was like living a fantasy
of absolute power. That's one of the insidious things about the
CIA. If you get exciting assignments, you can get hooked on your
own adrenaline.

INTERVIEWER: Let's get into some of those assignments.

AGEE: Don't think it was all excitement. A CIA officer spends at
least half of his day on paperwork. Then he spends hours in musty
little basement rooms, waiting for agents to show up and make
their reports. Then he spends more hours listening to agents'
problems--how their girlfriends are pregnant, how their cars need
new transmissions, how their brothers-in-law would make good
spies. When he isn't mothering agents, a CIA officer is at a
cocktail party or a diplomatic reception or trudging around some
golf course, sucking up to a corrupt politician in hopes of
corrupting him still further. But some wild things did happen. I
would say maybe our most successful operation in Ecuador was the
framing of Antonio Flores Benitez, a key member of a Communist
revolutionary movement.



INTERVIEWER: Tell us about that one.

AGEE: By bugging Flores' telephone, we found out a lot of what he
was doing. His wife was a blabbermouth. He made a secret trip to
Havana and we decided to do a job on him when he landed back in
Ecuador. With another officer, I worked all one weekend to compose
a "report" from Flores to the Cubans. It was a masterpiece. The
report implied that Flores' group had already received funds from
Cuba and was now asking for more money in order to launch
guerrilla operations in Ecuador. My Quito station chief, Warren
Dean, approved the report--in fact, he loved it so much he just
had to get into the act. So he dropped the report on the floor and
walked on it awhile to make it look pocket-worn. Then he folded it
and stuffed it into a toothpaste tube--from which he had spent
three hours carefully squeezing out all the tooth paste. He was
like a kid with a new toy. So then I took the tube out to the
minister of the treasury, who gave it to his customs inspector.
When Flores came through customs, the inspector pretended to go
rummaging through one of his suitcases. What he really did, of
course, was slip the tooth-paste tube into the bag and then
pretend to find it there. When he opened the tube, he of course
"discovered" the report. Flores was arrested and there was a
tremendous scandal. This was one of a series of sensational events
that we had a hand in during the first six months of 1963. By July
of that year, the climate of anti-Communist fear was so great that
the military seized a pretext and took over the government, jailed
all the Communists it could find and outlawed the Communist Party.

INTERVIEWER: Is forgery often resorted to by the CIA?

AGEE: It's a standard technique. The catalyst for the coup in
Chile was almost exactly like the Flores incident. A document
describing a leftist plot to seize absolute power and start a
reign of terror was "discovered" by the enemies of Allende. Plan
Z, it was called. It made big headlines and the military used it
as an excuse to take over the country and start a real reign of
terror. I can't prove it, but I strongly suspect that Plan Z was
written by a CIA officer, or by the coup makers at the CIA's
suggestion.

INTERVIEWER: You mentioned that the Communist Party was outlawed in
Ecuador. Did you succeed in your other objective, getting the
Ecuadorian government to break off relationships with Cuba?

AGEE: Yes. The government of JosŠ Maria Velasco Ibarra, who was a
moderate liberal, had resisted breaking with Cuba. He was followed
in 1961 by a moderate leftist, Carlos Julio Arosemena, who also
tried at first to resist U.S. policy. Finally, though, he caved in
and broke with Cuba after about six months in office. When I left
Ecuador, with the military junta in power, the short-run security
situation had been improved from our viewpoint, but there hadn't
been much improvement for most of the people there. Practically
none of the reforms everyone agreed were needed--redistribution of
income, agrarian reform, and so forth--had been installed. Do you
know that today the Ecuadorian government is still talking about
those reforms without really acting on them? But, at that time, I
didn't realize how reactionary the effects of our CIA operations
really were.



INTERVIEWER: Why not?

AGEE: For one thing, I suppose, I barely had time to stop and turn
around. The job of an operations officer calls for dedication to
the point of obsession, if you try to do it well. You have too
many secrets; you can't relax with outsiders. It's a very
unnatural life, hard on the people who live it. There's a lot of
alcoholism and a lot of emotional breakdowns in the CIA.

INTERVIEWER: What sort of breakdowns?

AGEE: I'm not an expert on this, but it's a schizophrenic sort of
situation. Sometimes a CIA officer is using several identities at
once, and when you wake up in the morning, your mind goes click!
OK, who am I today? All day long, there's the same problem.
Somebody asks you a simple question: "What did you do over the
weekend?" Click! Who does he think I am? What would the guy he
thinks I am do over the weekend? You get so used to lying that
after a while it's hard to know when you're telling the truth.

INTERVIEWER: How did that sort of stress affect CIA marriages?

AGEE: It didn't do mine any good. I had married Janet the year
before I went to Ecuador, but after we got there, we began to have
difficulty. I was gone all day and half the night and when we did
see each other, I couldn't tell her what I was doing. On top of
that, she had trouble learning Spanish, so she was somewhat cut
off from the Ecuadorians. More and more, she spent her time
playing bridge with embassy wives.

INTERVIEWER: What did you do when you weren't working?

AGEE: I had some pretty wild friends, and some close calls; barely
missed a scandal several times. One time--God, was I lucky! I
went to Guayaquil for the weekend. It's a steamy, tropical town
and I spent Saturday night with a convivial agent, making the
rounds of the sleazier dives. About 15 minutes after we left one
of them, a place called Cuatro y Media, President Arosemena and
some of his cronies came in. The waiters in that joint were all
homo****** and Arosemena and his friends began to taunt them.
Arosemena would get wild when he drank, and after a while he
ordered one of the waiters to put a lamp shade on his head. Then
he took out his pistol, but instead of shooting the lamp shade
off, he shot the waiter in the head. The whole affair was hushed
up, so I still don't know if the man was killed or just wounded.
But if I'd been in the Cuatro y Media when the shot was fired and
the Ambassador had found out, I'd have had to leave the country.

INTERVIEWER: Which, of course, you eventually did--though not under a
cloud. What was your next station?

AGEE: Montevideo, and I think Uruguay had something to do with
turning me around in my attitudes toward the CIA. For years,
Uruguay had been one of the most prosperous and progressive
countries on the continent. It had a $700-a-year per-capita income
and a 90 percent literacy rate, an eight-hour day, a minimum wage,
workmen's compensation, free, secular, state-supported education,
free elections. The country was showcase of liberal reform, but in
the Fifties some deep cracks showed up in the window. The reforms
hadn't touched land tenure--a few rich men owned most of the
countryside. Uruguay had a sheep-and-cattle economy, and a
collapse in the prices of wool, hides and meat after the Korean
War sent the country into a tail spin of inflation, deficits,
unemployment, stagnation, strikes and corruption. The left was
getting stronger, and the CIA reinforced its station in
Montevideo.

INTERVIEWER: When did you arrive in Uruguay, and what did you do
there?

AGEE: I got there in March 1964 and stayed about two and a half
years. We pretty well ran the military and the police intelligence
services, gave them information from our penetration agents in the
Communist Party and used the police to tap telephones. I ran an
operation to bug the United Arab Republic's embassy, which enabled
us to break the U.A.R.'s diplomatic codes. My main responsibility,
though, was for operations against the Cubans. We had an agent in
the Cuban embassy, the chauffeur, and we thought at one point that
we'd recruited the Cuban code clerk. We offered him $50,000 for a
look at the code pads and $3000 a month if he'd continue working
at the embassy, but at the last minute he backed out. I'm glad now
that we lost him, but I was really disappointed then.



INTERVIEWER: What about the Russians? Did you run any operations
against them?

AGEE: Another officer was in charge of anti-Soviet operations, but
after we finally got the Uruguayans to break with Cuba, I began
working against the Soviets. In fact, I really made trouble for
the Russians in Uruguay. It all began when I met a K.G.B. officer
from the Soviet embassy named Sergei Borisov. We met at the
Montevideo Diplomatic Club and struck up a kind of unreal
friendship. He knew what I was, I knew what he was. We both knew
we were spying on each other, but we went ahead and did it anyway,
because it was part of the game we were playing. It was like
chess. In fact, we sometimes played chess and he beat my ass off
every time, but I liked to think I beat him at the spy game.

INTERVIEWER: How?

AGEE: Well, it started by my inviting Sergei and his wife, Nina,
to dinner at our house. Then we began to see them every month or
so. Go to the beach, have dinner, drink a little vodka and play
some chess while the wives talked girl talk. Then one day our
telephone tap on the Soviet embassy gave us a sensational piece of
information about infidelity in the Borisov mŠnage.

INTERVIEWER: You mean Sergei was sneaking out for a quick one now and
then?

AGEE: No. Nina was! Sergei had a new boss, a K.G.B. station chief
named Khalturin, and one of Khalturin's first unofficial acts
after arriving in the country, even before he had a permanent
place to live, was to jump into bed with Nina. Then I found out
that Khalturin was interested in an apartment owned by a friend of
mine, a Philip Morris distributor named Carlos Salguero. Salguero
agreed to make sure Khalturin took the apartment--but to give us
access before the Russian moved in. We bugged the sofa and the
bed, and we got another apartment on the floor above and just off
to one side. My secretary moved into the other apartment until we
could find an agent to cover it. To operate the bugs, we used one
of the CIA's less amazing technological achievements, a
transmitter-receiver that was fitted into a gray, two-suiter
Samsonite suitcase and gave us nothing but trouble.

INTERVIEWER: What went wrong?

AGEE: Well, for one thing, the damned thing put out so much
radiation that you had to wear a lead a**** so the radiation
wouldn't homogenize your balls. And for another, you had to tilt
the suitcase to just the right angle so that the beam was aimed
directly at the switches in Khalturin's apartment. Otherwise, the
switches would get stuck in the On or Off position and somebody
would have to sneak into his apartment to move them.

INTERVIEWER: What did you learn from Nina and Khalturin's
conversations?

AGEE: It's funny, I don't know. None of us could understand
Russian, so we sent the tapes to headquarters to be transcribed,
and I was so busy with other operations that I never bothered to
read the English transcriptions that came back. But that situation
served as the basis for one of the weirdest operational ideas I
ever had. I suggested to Washington that I should arrange to find
myself alone with Sergei and tell him how sorry I was to hear that
his wife was having an affair with his boss. That would have put
Sergei and Khalturin into a tricky situation on two levels,
personal and political.

INTERVIEWER: We can see the personal problem, but how would it affect
them politically?

AGEE: Well, if a Russian told Sergei his wife was having an affair
with his boss, he would not be obliged to report it to Moscow.
Extramarital affairs in a Soviet colony abroad are, in fact,
rather common. Sergei might even have known about the affair and
was allowing it to continue. But if a CIA man told Sergei about
the affair, that would be another matter altogether. All CIA
contacts must be reported. Not to report what I said would be to
take a first step toward treason. If he did report it, he'd create
an uncomfortable situation for himself and for Khalturin. What I
hoped, of course, was that he wouldn't. Then we might have gotten
him into a position for blackmail. If he told his wife what I'd
said, we'd have her, too. And if Nina told Khalturin and we got
their conversation on tape, we could make big trouble for all of
them. We might even find ourselves with some very valuable new
assets inside the K.G.B.

INTERVIEWER: So what happened?

AGEE: Washington killed the idea. They were afraid Sergei might
throw a punch at me and cause a flap. I think they were wrong.

INTERVIEWER: So that was that?

AGEE: Far from it. We kept right on after Khalturin. I helped
forge a document pretty much like the Flores report, this time
seeming to involve the Soviet embassy in Uruguay with the damaging
strikes the country had been having. By using some of our
well-placed agents in the Uruguayan government, we had six
officers in the Russian embassy expelled, most of them from
Khalturin's department. That left him terribly shorthanded, so he
had to work day and night. From our observation posts at the
Soviet embassy, we could see him coming and going, and he looked
really run-down. We hoped he might crack. But I left Uruguay
before Khalturin and the Borisovs did, so I don't know what
finally happened with them.

INTERVIEWER: But something happened to you? You were saying that in
Uruguay you began to have a change of heart about the CIA.

AGEE: Yes. Part of the trouble was the atmosphere in the
Montevideo station. Ned Holman, the chief, was a really
unpleasant, middle-aged ex-FBI man. And God, was he lazy! He was
only four years from retirement and all he wanted to do was serve
out his time. When anything went wrong, he wrote scurrilous
letters about his officers to our superiors in Washington. I found
the combination to his file and read them. He gave me good
reports, because I was a bear for work, but he really hurt most of
the others. There was a foul atmosphere there.

INTERVIEWER: What about the atmosphere in your home?

AGEE: That kept getting worse, too. And so did the atmosphere in
the country. While I was in Uruguay, inflation soared from 33.5
percent a year to more than 100 percent. For months on end, one
sector of the economy or another was paralyzed by strikes. The
more I got to know about the corrupt government we were backing,
the less I liked my work. I began to see that the landowners,
ranchers, bankers and professionals--a small minority--were using
the government for their own selfish purposes. Why were we
supporting such people? Then came the invasion of the Dominican
Republic by U.S. Marines. That really got to me. It was done under
the pretext that the Dominican Republic might become another Cuba,
which was so absurd I had to wonder what the real reason was. For
the first time, I had to consider that the CIA might not really be
serving the cause of liberal reform. And then one day I got a
shock that's still painful to talk about.

INTERVIEWER: What was it?

AGEE: I overheard a man being tortured by the police--a man I'd
fingered for them. You know, at that time, the police in
Latin-American countries didn't use torture as some of them do
now. For years I'd been having people arrested, but I don't think
I'd ever actually seen what happened to them afterward. Then, in
December 1965, during a state of siege, I told the Uruguayan
police to pick up a Communist named Oscar Bonaudi for preventive
detention, because he was quite active in street demonstrations.
About five days later, the new chief of station, John Horton, and
I were visiting police headquarters to show the police chief a
forged document we'd prepared, and I began to hear moans coming
from somewhere above the police chief's office. The chief was
embarrassed and told one of his assistants to turn up the radio. I
remember there was a soccer game on. Well, the moans got louder
and the assistant kept turning up the radio. Finally, the moans
turned to screams and the radio was blaring so loudly we couldn't
hear ourselves talk. I had this strange feeling--terror and
helplessness. Two days later, I found out that the man they had
been torturing was Bonaudi.

INTERVIEWER: What was your reaction?

AGEE: I can't describe it. I just know that after that, I began to
notice certain things and think about them. For instance, I began
to observe what happened to Company men as they got older. Unless
they made it to a high-level job, a lot of them turned into
pale-faced paper pushers who believed in nothing but their
pensions. Burned-out cases. Was I going to be like that in 15
years? It worried me.



INTERVIEWER: When did you decide to quit The Company?

AGEE: Before I left Uruguay. But I decided not to leave until I
found another job. When I was transferred back to Washington in
the fall of 1966, Janet and I separated, so my expenses were
pretty high. We had two children, Christopher, who was then two,
and Philip, who was five. Then I had a piece of luck. I was sent
to Mexico City--assigned, along with another man who was
legitimate, not CIA, as one of the U.S Ambassador's attachŠs for
the 1968 Olympic games. I spent a very pleasant year and a half
working on that assignment. The CIA's purpose in sending me was to
use the Olympic milieu to recruit new agents. I met a lot of
people, didn't recruit any, and meanwhile learned quite a bit
about the CIA's operation in Mexico.

INTERVIEWER: Is it a sizable one?

AGEE: Huge. The station's annual budget even then was $5,500,000.
And the Mexicans were very cooperative. With Mexican security's
help, the station was able to tap as many as 40 telephone lines at
once. The president of the country at the time, Gustavo Diaz
Ordaz, was a very close CIA collaborator. So was his predecessor,
Adolfo Lopez Mateos. The current Mexican president, Luis
Echeverr�a, also was a station contact--when he was Diaz Ordaz'
minister for internal security. But I'm pretty sure Echeverr�a has
broken with the CIA; in fact, he's now denouncing it and accusing
it of fomenting demonstrations by what he calls "young fascists"
against his administration.

INTERVIEWER: Did you learn about any interesting operations in Mexico?

AGEE: Two. One was a defection operation, the other involved the
use of a woman as bait. In the defection business, I learned how
much the CIA would pay to get what it wanted. We had access
through one of our agents to a senior K.G.B. officer named Pavel
Yatskov, who happened to be a fanatic about fishing. Well, cool as
you please, the Soviet Bloc Division in headquarters proposed to
induce Yatskov to defect by offering him $500,000! Not only that,
but the CIA was willing to set him up with an elaborate cover as
the owner of an income-producing fishing lodge in Canada. The
reason this plan wasn't adopted was that we feared that our own
man may have been a double agent, secretly recruited by Yatskov.

INTERVIEWER: And the case in which a woman was used as bait?

AGEE: Straight out of Ian Fleming. She was a young Mexican girl,
recruited through a local businessman. She was used as bait to
lure the administrative officer of the Soviet embassy, a man named
Silnikov. He used to spend a lot of time horsing around with the
owner of a tiny grocery store near the Soviet embassy--who just
happened to be a CIA agent. The Soviets bought a lot of Coca-Cola
there and at one time the CIA was working on ways to bug the Coke
bottles that went into their embassy. Anyway, it became obvious
that Silnikov rose to the bait, shall we say. After some hot
necking sessions in the back of the store, they went to the girl's
pad, where, unbeknownst to her, a bug and a hidden camera had been
installed. I don't know how much information Silnikov spilled, if
any, but his virility was beyond belief.

INTERVIEWER: When you left the CIA, did you let The Company know how
you felt about what it was doing?

AGEE: Hell, no! I wanted them to think I was still a loyal agency
supporter--that there were no political reasons for my
resigning--so I told them I was leaving for personal reasons. This
was true as far as it went, because the CIA knew I was planning to
marry a woman I'd met through the Olympics and to live permanently
in Mexico. If The Company had known how I really felt, it could
have made it impossible, through its Mexican government friends,
for me to remain in Mexico. As it was, the CIA urged me to stay in
The Company and offered me another promotion. But I refused. In
fact, I did something you have to be pretty damn careful not to do
in the CIA. I refused to obey an order.

INTERVIEWER: Is that like refusing to obey an order in the military?

AGEE: Almost as bad. It happened like this: Janet was resentful
because of the breakup and other things, so when I took a trip to
Washington, she refused to let me take the children back to Mexico
for a visit. I took them anyway and Janet was furious. She said if
I didn't send them back, she'd expose me as a CIA officer. I knew
she was bluffing, but The Company didn't. So Win Scott, the
station chief, called me in and said, "Send them back." I said,
"No. If you want to fire me right now, OK, I quit." They couldn't
fire me, because the Ambassador needed me; it would have been too
awkward for him to fire one of his Olympic attachŠs on the eve of
the games. But they were really in a lather.

INTERVIEWER: The CIA felt that you were disloyal?

AGEE: To put it mildly. But, in fact, I wasn't really disloyal to
the CIA even then. When I resigned, I had no intention of writing
a book, of doing the CIA any harm. I was still a prisoner of
middle-class respectability and of that pervasive CIA security
consciousness. I went to work for a friend in Mexico City who was
marketing a new product, and I figured I'd just forget I'd ever
worked for the CIA.

INTERVIEWER: But you couldn't forget?

AGEE: I couldn't forget. The memories kept coming back like things
I'd swallowed but couldn't digest. Then my marriage plans fell
through and I had plenty of time to think. The feeling began to
grow inside me that I had some message to give--that I should tell
the American people what their Government was doing in their name.
I found myself making notes. First I thought of writing sort of a
scholarly treatise on the CIA. I wrote an outline and took it to
New York. Five publishers turned it down. But I'm stubborn, you
know. I'm a Capricorn, if that means anything. Headstrong. So back
in Mexico, a friend who knew Franc‡ois Maspero, a radical
publisher in Paris, put me in touch with him. And, well, Maspero
agreed to give me a small advance and help me get the book
written. But I couldn't find the research material I needed in
Mexico. You see, I had no notes from my CIA days; I had to find
contemporary sources to refresh my memory, so I could reconstruct
events. I could have continued in Paris or maybe London, someplace
outside the jurisdiction of U.S. courts, so they couldn't enjoin
my work as they had Marchetti's. Another possibility was Havana,
and with Maspero's help, arrangements were made for me to go
there.

INTERVIEWER: Why Havana?

AGEE: We found that there were newspapers and magazines and other
reference works at the National Library and the Casa de las
Americas. But, besides, I really wanted to see for myself what the
Cuban Revolution was all about.

INTERVIEWER: How much were you allowed to see in Cuba?

AGEE: They let me go anywhere except onto military reservations.
In 1971, I traveled all over the island, and I was impressed. The
Cubans were quite enthusiastic about the Revolution, in spite of
the many hardships caused by the U.S. economic blockade--and by
their own mistakes, too. They supported their government; they
were convinced it was giving them a fair deal. So was I. Cuba had
done what the other Latin-American countries had pledged to do in
the early Sixties: It had redistributed income and integrated its
society.

INTERVIEWER: Did the CIA discover in 1971 that you were inside Cuba?

AGEE: Surprisingly, I don't think they did. I knew The Company
checks passenger manifests on all planes and ships that make stops
in Cuba. Somehow they missed me. I guess good luck made me
reckless, because before leaving Havana to continue research in
Paris, I did something really foolish. I wrote a long, signed
letter to a Montevideo political journal, describing some of the
CIA's covert-action operations in Uruguay. There was an electoral
campaign on there and I thought I could help the left-wing
coalition--which was similar to the Popular Unity coalition that
had elected Allende in Chile the year before--by suggesting that
the CIA would be helping the corrupt traditional parties. It was
as if I had forgotten everything I had learned about the CIA and
how dangerous it can be. I was damn soon reminded, though.



INTERVIEWER: What happened?

AGEE: I was visited in Paris by a CIA officer named Keith
Gardiner, a Harvard type, a guy I'd known a long time, who told me
that Richard Helms, who was director of the CIA then, wanted to
know what the hell I thought I was doing by writing that letter to
the Montevideo publication. It was a scary moment. I decided I'd
better bluff. I figured that if The Company knew how little work
I'd actually done on the book--less than a third of the
research--they might figure it was safe to get rough. So I told
them it was already written and I was cutting it to a publishable
length. I promised to submit the final draft to the CIA before
publication.

INTERVIEWER: But you didn't?

AGEE: I never intended to. At that time, I was just trying to calm
them down. I hoped that would stall them for a while, but I
couldn't be certain, and from that moment on, I lived under a big
strain.

INTERVIEWER: Were you afraid you might be assassinated?

AGEE: I was too busy to think about that. But I was jumpy. For one
thing, I wasn't sure to what lengths the French secret service
might go to please The Company. At the very least, I was afraid I
might be deported and put on some plane that made its first stop
in New York.

INTERVIEWER: Did you see any indication that your fears were
justified?

AGEE: A few months after Gardiner's visit, I noticed I was being
followed on the street. I couldn't be sure if it was CIA people or
a French liaison operation working at the CIA's request. And I had
no idea what they might be setting me up for. For all I knew, they
might have been a bunch of killers. Anyway, about the same time,
my advance from the publisher ran out. The situation was pretty
grim. The CIA was after me and sometimes I literally didn't have a
franc for cigarettes. I felt pretty damn small and alone. Friends
helped out with food and some small cash donations, and to avoid
the surveillance, I went to live in the room of a friend who's an
artist. In the daytime, I worked as usual at the library doing my
research, but I kept the place where I was living a secret.

INTERVIEWER: How did you duck the people who were tailing you?

AGEE: It wasn't too hard. I'd take the MŠtro, for example, the
Paris subway, and when the train arrived, I'd just stand by the
door and let it go off again and see if anybody had stayed in the
station with me when all the other people were gone. Or when I got
off the train, I'd stay there on the platform and let everybody
leave and then see if anybody else had remained on the platform.
Usually, there was a group of three or four of them. Once
identified, they'd be easy to lose. One time, when I had a little
cash, I took a cab. My retinue took a cab, too. I told my driver
to stop at the Arc de Triomphe. When he did, I pretended to be
fumbling for my money, but I was really watching my surveillance
team in the rearview mirror. They got out of their cab fast, all
set to keep following me on foot. But the minute their cab drove
off, I told my driver I'd decided to ride a little farther. So we
pulled away and left them standing there. I couldn't resist--I
turned around slowly, held my hand up and gave them the finger.

INTERVIEWER: Besides following you, did The Company make any other
moves?

AGEE: Some surprisingly obvious ones. A CIA man visited my father
in Florida and tried to scare him about what might happen to me.
Another CIA man called on Janet and got her to write me a letter
of concern. He also told her they'd pay me to stop and not
publish. She didn't tell me this, but my older son did--he was
listening secretly. God, I hope spying isn't congenital!

In the spring of 1972, The Company moved against me more directly.
A young man who said his name was Sal Ferrera showed up in a cafŠ
I liked and introduced himself as an underground journalist. I
told him who I was and what I was doing. He offered me a small
loan and suggested that he might do an interview with me. I was
desperate for money, so I took the loan and let him have the
interview. He bought me a dinner one night and afterward we met a
woman named Leslie Donegan, who said she was a Venezuelan heiress.
At Sal's urging, I saw Leslie again and soon she offered to
support me while I finished the book--provided I let her read the
manuscript. I needed money so badly I let her have a copy for a
few days.

INTERVIEWER: Did Leslie come through with the money?

AGEE: In dribs and drabs, enough to keep me going. It's ironic to
think that the book may have got finished partly because the CIA,
through Leslie, supported me through my darkest hour. But the
situation had its risks. I was just plain foolish to keep seeing
Sal and Leslie. The bugged typewriter was the last straw.

INTERVIEWER: The CIA bugged your typewriter?

AGEE: Sal lent me a portable that Leslie eventually switched for a
different one. I took it to my secret living place. One afternoon
I went out to get a bottle of beer and when I went back to the
room, I saw a man and a woman in the hall outside my door. When
they saw me, they began kissing. I thought right away they might
be surveillance agents--but how had they found out where I lived?
The friend whose room I was staying in went out to see what they
were doing in the hall. When they saw her, they hurried down the
back stairs but couldn't get out the back door, because it was
locked. When she followed them down, they started embracing and
whispering again and then ran up to the main floor and escaped by
the front door. They had something bulky under their
coats--probably the receiving set for monitoring the bug in the
typewriter.

INTERVIEWER: The typewriter had led them to you?

AGEE: This typewriter--the one you see right here on the table.
The one that's photographed on the cover of my book. After
catching the monitors, I began to examine the typewriter Les

[hist2004]

I began to examine the typewriter Leslie
had given me. I noticed that when it was facing a certain way, I
heard a beeping sound on my FM radio. So I tore off the lining on
the inside roof of the case and there it was--a complicated system
of miniaturized transistors, batteries, circuits, antennas, even a
tiny switch glued flat against the roof of the case.

INTERVIEWER: Have you ever been accused of rigging this yourself to
discredit the CIA?

AGEE: I wouldn't know how to make one of these. My editor in
London had a technical study made and the thing is
legitimate--made in TSD.




INTERVIEWER: So they'd found out where you lived--what did they do
then?

AGEE: I didn't give them a chance to do anything. I left that room
the same day and slept in a different hotel every night until I
took off for London.

INTERVIEWER: Why did you go to London?

AGEE: Partly to get information, partly to look for a new
publisher. I found one almost overnight. An editor of Penguin
Books, Neil Middleton, believed in the book and gave me an
advance. I also found the information I still needed. I'd been
looking desperately for Latin-American newspapers that covered the
years when I was there. John Gerassi, who has written extensively
on Latin America and was teaching at the University of Paris when
I was in France, had told me the British Museum had completed
files and he was right. They were just what I needed. I decided to
stay in London and rewrite the book. With all the new material
available, I saw I could reconstruct a diary of the whole period.
I finished the research in eight months, then in the next six
months I wrote over 600 pages in a terrific burst of work.

INTERVIEWER: Did the new material inspire you?

AGEE: Well, it wasn't only the material. I had met a young woman
just before I left Paris. Angela's a Brazilian in her early 20s.
We fell in love before she knew I had worked for the CIA and
before I knew she had been in prison and been tortured by the
CIA-supported military regime in Brazil. Strange, isn't it, that
two people with such opposite experiences should have come
together? It was from Angela that I learned the full horror of
what I had been doing in supporting repression. When I was in
Montevideo, I was actually in charge of spying on Brazilian exiles
who opposed the military regime and had fled to Uruguay. I
reported on their activities to our CIA station in Rio. Anyway,
Angela came over to London a few months after I did and we've been
together ever since. She was a tremendous help with the book,
reading and discussing every sentence with me, helping with the
typing and the Xeroxing. I was so scared that the CIA might try to
steal the manuscript that every time I got 20 or 30 pages done,
we'd Xerox copies and hide them all over London.

INTERVIEWER: You say Angela was tortured by the Brazilian government?

AGEE: In early 1970; she was 19, a student at Catholic University
in Rio. She had gotten involved in radical politics and had to go
underground, and was wounded in an ambush by the military police.
They left her for dead and she had almost escaped when they
spotted her and hauled her off to an interrogation center, where
they began to torture her.

INTERVIEWER: What kinds of torture did they use?

AGEE: Clubs, truncheons, fists. They hung her upside down from a
bar and beat her. They would stand behind her and clap her ears as
hard as they could with both hands. She says her head felt as if
it were exploding, blood spurted out of her ears and she passed
out. But most of the torture was done with a field telephone. They
attached electrodes to sensitive parts of the body, the nipples or
the lips, and then cranked the telephone as hard as they could.
Sometimes they poured water on her before they turned the crank;
because water is a conductor of electricity, the pain was even
more excruciating. One of her torturers got the bright idea of
putting the electrodes on her gunshot wound and then cranking the
generator. The electricity forced the wound open again. Somehow
Angela held out. All she admitted under torture, which went on
over a period of maybe four months, was her membership in an
underground party--and she was ashamed of admitting that. A year
and a half after she was arrested, she went to trial. A year after
that, she finally got out. Her closest relative, an aunt who is a
lawyer, shipped her out of the country.

INTERVIEWER: Is torture still going on in Brazil?

AGEE: Every day. There's one difference. At first, the torturers
wore name plates and didn't bother to hide their faces. Later,
after several were executed by revolutionaries, the torturers got
nervous and began to hood their victims. But many names were
already known. They turned up in Chile, too, and were recognized
there. After Allende fell, the Brazilian military lent the Chilean
military some of its most successful torture teams as a gesture of
good will.

INTERVIEWER: How is Angela now?

AGEE: Solid. No emotional scars that I can see. A very gentle and
spiritual woman. She's with me and my children, who are living
with us permanently now, in England. The book is for her and for
all the people who have suffered torture because of the CIA. You
know, when and if the history of the CIA's support to torturers
gets written--not just in Brazil but in Chile, Uruguay, Portugal,
Greece, Iran, Indonesia, above all in Vietnam--my God, it'll be
the all-time horror story.

INTERVIEWER: Has The Company kept after you in England the way it did
in France?

AGEE: I've been shadowed and my phone was tapped.

INTERVIEWER: People are always saying their phones are tapped. How do
you know your phone was tapped?

AGEE: How about this? Just last week, at home, the telephone went
dead for a couple of hours. Then it rang and a guy on the line
asked, "Is this a WB 400 number?" or some letters like that and
then a number. And I said, "What's that?" And he said, "Oh, this
is the telephone-company engineer, and we've just installed a new
cable up the hill toward your house, and I'm in here in the
exchange right now, connecting it." And I said, "What do you
mean, a WB 400 number?" And he said, "Oh, you know, it's one of
those observation lines." And I said, "Observing what?" He said,
"Well, they don't tell you very much about it. I'm new; this is my
first job. But there's this little black box on the frame here
where your pair is." And I said, "Well, I don't know." And he
said, "Well, now tell me, are you . . . is this a private line?"
And I said, "Yes." And he said, "Oh, excuse me. Yes, yes,
yes--everything's all right. Thanks. Bye." I checked later with
some people who know about phone tapping in Britain, and they have
a system there for monitoring lines where they have obscene or
threatening calls, and they use that as a cover for political line
tapping.

INTERVIEWER: Have there been any obvious attempts to harass you?

AGEE: Nothing overt until Angela and I and the boys went on a
two-week trip to Portugal over Christmas and New Year's. We went
with the car by ferry from Southampton to San Sebasti‚n, Spain,
and when we were rolling off the ferry, Christopher said, "Hey,
Dad, I just saw that policeman looking at our license plate and
now he's making a phone call." Sure enough, when we pulled out of
the docking area, five cars pulled out after us! We looked like a
funeral procession. It was obvious what had happened: The CIA had
known of our trip from the telephone tap and had asked the Spanish
service to shadow us--I hoped that was all. But it occurred to me,
for instance, that they could have planted some drugs in my car.
If they stopped us and "found" drugs, I could be put away for 20
years! Anyway, with that army on our tail, I figured they had
something major in mind, but I knew I couldn't outrun them. They
were all in big cars and I was driving a little VW. So I just
moseyed along steadily for an hour or so. Occasionally, one of
them would pass me, then drop back. Once I pulled into a rest area
just as one of the drivers was changing his license plates--the
CIA makes an all-purpose quick-change license-plate bracket that
fits different sizes of plates from different countries. When we
reached the caves at Altamira, two of our shadows went down into
the caves with us to see the pre-historic paintings. When we came
out, I saw another agent holding in a curious way what looked like
a TSD briefcase. So I drifted in his direction and when I passed
him, I heard the camera inside the briefcase go zing!

It was getting scary, but suddenly I had a real bit of luck. We
came to a city named Torrelavega. It was about six, the rush hour,
and the streets were crowded with cars. Up ahead there was a big
intersection, maybe seven streets coming together and one traffic
cop in the middle, trying to keep all the lines moving. OK, I
thought, this is my chance. I stopped the car against the cop's
signal and pretended I was stalled. He got hysterical. There were
horns blowing, mass confusion. The cop forced all the cars behind
me, including, of course, all the surveillance cars, to go around
me and keep moving. I watched which streets they turned into, then
took a different street and made a couple of quick turns. Pretty
soon I was on the back road to Burgos and we never saw them again.
But that was lucky. They were asleep.

INTERVIEWER: Do you think The Company is behind the leaks that have
been made to the press about you in the past year?

AGEE: Sure it is. During the Watergate hearings, while Senator
Howard Baker was investigating the CIA's involvement, he came
across a veiled mention of a "WH Flap." He assumed the phrase
meant White House Flap. Actually, it meant Western Hemisphere Flap
and referred to me and my book. This had to be explained to
Senator Baker. The CIA figured that someone would talk and the cat
would soon be out of the bag. So an attempt was made to discredit
me in advance. A story was leaked to The New York Times, A.P., The
Washington Post and Newsweek about a "drunk and despondent former
CIA officer" who was talking to the K.G.B., telling them all about
the CIA.

INTERVIEWER: And were you drunk and despondent?

AGEE: Why should I be? I'd finally finished my book.

INTERVIEWER: Were you talking to the K.G.B.?

AGEE: No way. And they knew I wasn't. In the CIA's so-called news
leak, the CIA officer wasn't identified, the K.G.B. people weren't
identified, the time and place and substance of the supposed
conversations weren't given. Nevertheless, the Times and Newsweek
fell for the story and printed it as fact. The Washington Post
printed an item but said it was unconfirmed.

INTERVIEWER: Nobody bothered to check the story out?

AGEE: That's right. Where the CIA is concerned, very few
journalists have learned to tell information from disinformation.
But that time, the smear wound up on the CIA's face, and I owe
that to Victor Marchetti. By the way, the CIA tried to get
Marchetti to spy on me. When The Company heard that he was going
to England, they asked him to steal my manuscript so they could
read it. We think they already had a copy of the book and were
just trying to use him so they could discredit him with his
friends as an informer. Of course, he turned them down.... But
getting back to the smear story. Marchetti told Larry Stern of The
Washington Post what the CIA was trying to do to me, and Larry
flew over to England to see me and got the facts and printed them.
The Times sent **** Eder to see me and then printed an item saying
its source had retracted the story. It's a small victory, I guess,
but to me it's not a trivial one. If the press can start to expose
some of the CIA's little lies, maybe someday it'll get around to
exposing some of the big ones.

The big victory for me right now, of course, is the publication of
the book and the fact that it's a success. But I've been lucky to
get this far, when you think of the odds. My father thinks what
I'm doing is some kind of personal vendetta against the
agency--not so, of course, but the agency sure trashed me in an
effort to complicate my negotiations for U.S. publication of my
book. There was, for example, a series of leaks to Jack Anderson
that he obligingly printed, to the effect that I'm under some kind
of Cuban-government control. Too bad about Anderson. You'd think
he'd have wanted to help get my book published in the U.S., since
his so-called CIA sources confirmed its accuracy to him. But it
finally is getting published there. The CIA can't hide its crimes
from the American public forever, and I'll bet other books will
follow Marchetti's and mine.

INTERVIEWER: But doesn't the CIA have a legitimate bone to pick with
you? For instance, like Daniel Ellsberg, you've been accused of
violating a secrecy agreement. What do you say to that?

AGEE: I did violate the secrecy agreement. But I think it was
worse to stay silent than to violate the agreement. The agreement
itself was plain immoral--like criminals' swearing secrecy.

INTERVIEWER: Do you plan to go back to the U.S. and risk indictment?

AGEE: I don't know if I'm subject to indictment and neither do my
lawyers. If it turns out I am subject to indictment, I may go back
and fight it as a test case. I may not.

INTERVIEWER: Even if you don't go back to the U.S., you're going to
publish your book there. Other than indirectly, as through the
leaks to Anderson, do you think the CIA has tried to block it?

AGEE: The CIA let prospective publishers know that if they tried
to publish it, they would face expensive litigation. But a lot has
happened since Marchetti's book was published. If as much comes
out as I expect, the CIA may look pretty silly if it tries to
assume a posture of civic virtue in front of a magistrate. That's
why I published the book first in England. I figured the CIA
couldn't so easily stop publication there and I figured that once
the truth was out somewhere in the world, it would be much harder
to keep from the American people. And that's what I really care
about. I wanted the book to be published in the United States
because I wanted the American people to know what I know about the
CIA, what the CIA has been doing all these years, all over the
world, in their name.

INTERVIEWER: Many people agree with your aims but disagree strongly
with your methods. They say that by revealing the names of CIA
agents and exposing CIA procedures your book jeopardizes U.S.
security. What is your answer to that?

AGEE: I think it's a little late in the day to pretend that what
I've written puts the country in any danger. What I've written
puts the CIA in danger. The CIA claims that secrecy is necessary
to hide what it is doing from the enemies of the United States. I
claim that the real reason for secrecy is to hide what the CIA is
doing from the American people and from the people victimized by
the CIA.

INTERVIEWER: But many people who dislike the CIA as much as you do
have charged that by revealing the names and functions of
individual officers and agents of the CIA, you have endangered the
lives of your former colleagues, many of whom you yourself induced
to become employees of The Company. Your accusers ask: Wasn't it
unnecessary, wasn't it immoral, wasn't it, in fact, a crime to
reveal those names?

AGEE: Absolutely not. Those people talk about the CIA as if it
were an international charity of some sort and about me as if I'd
done something horrible to a lot of decent, well-meaning Y.M.C.A.
leaders. In fact, the CIA, in my opinion, is a criminal
organization at least as nefarious as the Mafia and much, much
more powerful. Even more than the Vietnam war, the CIA represents
the destruction of our national ideals on the pretext of saving
them. What you've got to understand is that in revealing the names
of CIA operatives, I am revealing the names of people engaged in
criminal activities. These people live by breaking the law. Every
day of the week, CIA men break the laws of the countries they're
stationed in. I don't know any country in which bugging or
intercepting mail or bribing public officials is legal.

At the same time, it's nonsense to say that by exposing the CIA
officers and agents I knew, I have endangered their lives. I have
exposed some to problems, but The Company can solve those problems
for the indigenous agents in Latin America. As for the Company
officers I've named, well, they can stay in Langley if they want
to be safe.

INTERVIEWER: Do you think your book has disrupted CIA operations in
Latin America?

AGEE: I hope so, and I think the disruptions I've caused will be
followed by many more around the world. I think the fact that
Marchetti and I have broken ranks and somehow survived is going to
encourage a lot of other CIA men to come out of that poisonous fog
of secrecy they've been living in and tell their stories. There's
a lot of soul-searching going on in the CIA now and I'm going to
do all I can to help the people who decide to get out. If my book
is a commercial success, I'll be able to support CIA men who want
to talk.

INTERVIEWER: In your opinion, what will be the result of the CIA
investigations in Washington?

AGEE: The Rockefeller Commission was never a real danger to the
CIA. President Ford set it up to whitewash The Company. The House
committee shows real promise and so does the one in the Senate.
These committees have the chance right now to correct the mistake
the Congress made almost 30 years ago in not making sure the CIA
was closely controlled. I sure hope they do, and I would applaud
anything they could do to restrict CIA-promoted repression, even
though I think the CIA should be abolished.

INTERVIEWER: Do you think that's a serious possibility?

AGEE: I think that for the time being, we will have some kind of
intelligence collection for early warning and monitoring of
agreements with the Soviets. But this can be preserved under the
military services. Perhaps also the analytical work done by the
nonclandestine part of the CIA will be continued. But it could be
continued in a wholly different kind of organization, with a
different name and without any of the kinds of overseas operations
that I engaged in. Imagine the fear and suspicion and resentment
that would be eliminated on the part of other governments if the
CIA were abolished or at least if its overseas operations were.
And we might avoid those future Vietnams that are germinating
wherever The Company is supporting repressive governments.

INTERVIEWER: In your book, you support socialist revolution. Don't you
think that will turn a lot of people off to what you have to say?

AGEE: It's just the opposite: I couldn't answer all the letters
of support I'd gotten--even before the book had come out in the
U.S.

INTERVIEWER: Couching the world picture in your terms, those of class
warfare, is the CIA winning or losing?

AGEE: The question should be whether people, not the CIA, are
winning or losing. In the Third World, the poor are beginning to
win, in my opinion. In an era of expensive energy, the U.S. no
longer has the money to protect its foreign investments at all
costs and to repress every socialist movement. More and more,
we're going to have to learn to live within our own resources. The
CIA can still do a lot of harm, but its palmy days are
over--unless we really go fascist, and with a depression coming
on, that's a live possibility. In the United States, though, it
seems to me the poor are not yet winning. The system that's been
exploiting the rest of the world is also exploiting Americans. The
difference is that other people are more aware of it.

INTERVIEWER: Aren't you being doctrinaire? The American worker you
consider exploited is said to have the world's highest standard of
living.

AGEE: Poverty and prosperity are relative as well as absolute
measurements. Have you read the 1974 Report of the Senate Select
Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs? This report, written
before unemployment soared, stated that 40,000,000 Americans, 20
percent of the population, are living in poverty--in fact, are
sinking deeper into poverty every year. On the average, they were
hungrier and needier in 1974 than they had been five years
earlier. The report also pointed out that in the last 45
years--all through the New Deal, the Fair Deal and the biggest
economic boom in U.S. history--the proportion of the national
income received by the 20 percent at the bottom of the income
scale had not changed one iota. And get this: The Senate
committee discovered that the richest one percent of the U.S.
population not only has more wealth than the poorest 50 percent of
the population--it has eight times more! And we've supposedly had
40 years of liberal reform.

If we want social and economic justice, we're going to have to
scrap capitalism as we know it. Already in the space of three
short generations, a third of the world's population has done
this. Are we going to be the last? We should realize that
socialist societies are built on national traditions--for better
or for worse--and that we can build socialism and at the same time
preserve our special tradition of civil liberties and right to
dissent. But right now, unless someone's really rich, he's
demoralized by the fear that there won't be enough to go around
unless he screws the other guy. We're so goddamn alone, everybody
guarding his own pile, however small. Property separates people
from one another. But we're so tranquilized by *** and beer and
football and the chance to play a small hand in the game of
success that we don't even know we're being exploited. I suggest
it's time we noticed how badly we've been had and began to stand
up for ourselves. I suggest that if we want to, we can make sure
that whatever there is to go around goes around fairly. But that's
socialism. And remember: New systems can develop only when people
are ready for them and want them--if imposed by foreign peoples or
brute force, they fail.

INTERVIEWER: We all agree that the free-enterprise system has faults.
But no socialist system that has been set up so far provides the
sort of idealistic paradise you envision, with everything fairly
distributed. The point at issue here is the CIA--whether it does
more good than harm, whether the world would be better served by
its existence as is, by its reform or by its destruction.

AGEE: I leave it to you to decide. I promise you that the CIA now
knows who you are and is undoubtedly at this moment running you
through its computers. Have you ever been arrested? Are your tax
returns up to date? Did you ever fail to pay a bill? Have you ever
been to an analyst? Did you ever knock a girl up? Are you strictly
hetero******? Do you sometimes blow a little grass? And, by the
way, when you leave the hotel, glance over your shoulder. Somebody
may be following you.

Regards,
Hist2004

[Dennis G]

reminds me of that one audio file. I will have to come back later and read the rest. Good post

[catdat]

He mentions Marchetti so here goes his interview:

Ex-CIA Offical Speaks Out


Full Disclosure: I'd like to start out by talking about your well-known book, `The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence.' What edition is that in today?

Marchetti: The latest edition came out last summer. Its the Laurel edition, Dell paperback.

FD: Its gone through a couple of printings?

Marchetti: Yes. It was originally published by Alfred Knopf in hardback and by Dell in paperback. That was in 1974 with Knopf and 1975 with Dell. Then a few years later we got some more of the deletions back from the government, so Dell put out a second printing. That would have been about 1979. Then recently, during the summer of 1983, we got back a few more deletions and that's the current edition that is available in good bookstores (laughs) in Dell paperback, the Laurel edition.

Originally the CIA asked for 340 deletions. We got about half of those back in negotiations prior to the trial. We later won the trial, they were supposed to give everything back but it was overturned at the appellate level. The Supreme Court did not hear the case, so the appellate decision stood. We got back 170 of those deletions in negotiations during the trial period. A few years later when the second paperback edition came out there were another 24 deletions given back. The last time, in 1983, when the the third edition of the paperback edition was published, there were another 35 given back. So there are still 110 deletions in the book out of an original 340.

As for the trial, the CIA sued in early 1972 to have the right to review and censor the book. They won that case. It was upheld at the appellate court in Richmond some months later, and again the Supreme Court did not hear the case. Two years later we sued the CIA on the grounds that they had been arbitrary, capricious and unreasonable in making deletions and were in violation of the injunction they had won in 1972. We went before Judge Albert V. Bryan Jr., and in that case, he decided in our favor. Bryan was the same fourth district judge in Alexandria who heard the original case. He said that there was nothing in the book that was harmful to national security or that was logically classifiable. Bryan said the CIA was being capricious and arbitrary. They appealed, and a few months later down in Richmond the appellate court for the fourth district decided in the government's favor, and overturned Bryan's decision. Again, the Supreme Court did not hear the case. It chose not to hear it, and the appellate court's decision stood.

By this time, we had grown weary of the legal process. The book was published with blank spaces except for those items that had been given back in negotiations. Those items were printed in bold face type to show the kind of stuff the CIA was trying to cut out. In all subsequent editions, the additional material is highlighted to show what it is they were trying to cut out.

Of course the CIA's position is that only they know what is a secret. They don't make the national security argument because that is too untenable these days. They say that they have a right to classify anything that they want to, and only they know what is classifiable. They are establishing a precedent, and have established a precedent in this case that has been used subsequently against ex-CIA people like Frank Snepp and John Stockwell and others, and in particular against Ralph McGee. They've also used it against (laughing), its kind of ironic, two former CIA directors, one of whom was William Colby. Colby was the guy behind my case when he was director. In fact, he was sued by the CIA and had to pay a fine of I think, about $30,000 for putting something in that they wanted out about the Glomar Explorer. He thought they were just being, as I would say, ``arbitrary and capricious,'' so he put it in anyway, was sued, and had to pay a fine. Admiral Stansfield Turner was another who, like Colby when he was director, was the great defender of keeping everything secret and only allowing the CIA to reveal anything. When Turner got around to writing his book he had the same problems with them and is very bitter about it and has said so. His book just recently came out and he's been on a lot of TV shows saying, ``Hells bells, I was director and I know what is classified and what isn't but these guys are ridiculous, bureaucratic,'' and all of these accusations you hear. It is ironic because even the former directors of the CIA have been burned by the very precedents that they helped to establish.

FD: What are the prospects for the remaining censored sections of your book eventually becoming declassified so that they are available to the American people?

Marchetti: If I have a publisher, and am willing to go back at the CIA every year or two years forcing a review, little by little, everything would come out eventually. I can't imagine anything they would delete. There might be a few items that the CIA would hold onto for principle's sake. Everything that is in that book, whether it was deleted or not, has leaked out in one way or another, has become known to the public in one form or another since then. So you know its really a big joke.

FD: Looking back on it, what effect did the publication of the `The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence' have on your life?

Marchetti: It had a tremendous effect on my life. The book put me in a position where I would forever be persona non grata with the bureaucracy in the federal government, which means, that I cannot get a job anywhere, a job that is, specific to my background and talents. Particularly if the company has any form of government relationship, any kind of government contract. That stops the discussions right there. But even companies that are not directly allied with the government tend to be very skittish because I was so controversial and they just don't feel the need to get into this. I have had one job since leaving the CIA other than writing, consulting and things like that, and that was with an independent courier company which did no business with the government, was privately owned, and really didn't care what the government thought. They ran their own business and they hired me as their friend. But every other job offered to me always evaporates, because even those individuals involved in hiring who say they want to hire me and think the government was wrong always finish saying, ``Business is business. There are some people here who do not want to get involved in any controversial case.'' Through allies or former employees somebody always goes out of their way to make it difficult for me, so I never have any other choice but to continue to be a freelance writer, lecturer, consultant, etcetera, and even in that area I am frequently penalized because of who I worked for.

FD: The government views you as a troublemaker or whistleblower?

Marchetti: As a whistleblower, and, I guess, troublemaker. In the intelligence community, as one who violated the code.

FD: The unspoken code?

Marchetti: Right. And this has been the fate of all those CIA whistleblowers. They've all had it hard. Frank Snepp, Stockwell, McGee, and others, have all suffered the same fate. Whistleblowers in general, like Fitzgerald in the Department of Defense, who exposed problems with the C-5A, overruns, have also suffered the same kind of fate. But since they were not dealing in the magical area of national security they have found that they have some leeway and have been able to, in many other cases, find some other jobs. In some cases the government was even forced to hire them back. Usually the government puts them in an office somewhere in a corner, pays them $50,000 a year, and ignores them. Which drives them crazy of course, but thats the government's way of punishing anybody from the inside who exposes all of these problems to the American public.

FD: Phillip Agee explains in his book the efforts of the CIA to undermine his writing of `Inside The Company' both before and after publication. Have you run into similar problems with extralegal CIA harassment?

Marchetti: Yes. I was under surveillance. Letters were opened. I am sure our house was burglarized. General harassment of all sorts, and the CIA has admitted to some of these things. One or two cases, because the Church Committee found out. For example, the CIA admitted to working with the IRS to try and give me a bad time. The Church Committee exposed that and they had to drop it. They've admitted to certain other activities like the surveillance and such, but the CIA will not release to me any documents under the Freedom of Information Act. They won't release it all -- any documents under FOIA, period.

FD: About your time with the CIA?

Marchetti: No, about my case. I only want the information on me after leaving the agency and they just refuse to do it. They've told me through friends ``You can sue until you're blue in the face but you're not going to get this'' because they know exactly what would happen. It would be a terrible embarrassment to the CIA if all of the extralegal and illegal activities they took became public.

The most interesting thing they did in my case was an attempt at entrapment, by putting people in my path in the hopes that I would deal with these people, who in at least one case turned out to be an undercover CIA operator who was, if I had dealt with him, it would have appeared that I was moving to deal with the Soviet KGB. The CIA did things of that nature. They had people come to me and offer to finance projects if I would go to France, live there, and write a book there without any censorship. Switzerland and Germany were also mentioned. The CIA used a variety of techniques of that sort. I turned down all of them because my theory is that the CIA should be exposed to a certain degree in the hope that Congress could conduct some investigation out of which would come some reform. I was playing the game at home and that is the way I was going to play. Play it by the rules, whatever handicap that meant. Which in the end was a tremendous handicap.

But it did work out in the sense that my book did get published. The CIA drew a lot of attention to it through their attempts to prevent it from being written and their attempts at censorship, which simply increased the appetite of the public, media, and Congress, to see what they were trying to hide and why. All of this was happening at a time when other events were occurring. Ellsberg's Pentagon Papers had come out about the same time I announced I was doing my book. Some big stories were broken by investigative journalists. All of these things together, my book was part of it, did lead ultimately to congressional investigations of the CIA. I spent a lot of time behind the scenes on the Hill with senators and congressman lobbying for these investigations and they finally did come to pass.

It took awhile. President Ford tried to sweep everything under the rug by creating the Rockefeller Commission, which admitted to a few CIA mistakes but swept everything under the rug. It didn't wash publicly. By this time, the public didn't buy the government's lying. So we ultimately did have the Pike Committee, which the CIA and the White House did manage to sabotage. But the big one was the Church Committee in the Senate which conducted a pretty broad investigation and brought out a lot of information on the CIA. The result of that investigation was that the CIA did have to admit to a lot of wrongdoing and did have to make certain reforms. Not as much as I would have liked. I think everything has gone back to where it was and maybe even worse than what it was, but at least there was a temporary halt to the CIA's free reign of hiding behind secrecy and getting away with everything, up to and including murder. There were some changes and I think they were all for the better.

FD: So instead of some of the more harsher critics of the CIA who would want to see it abolished you would want to reform it?

Marchetti: Yes. Its one of these things where you can't throw out the baby with the bathwater. The CIA does do some very good and valuable and worthwhile and legal things. Particularly in the collection of information throughout the world, and in the analysis of events around the world. All of this is a legitimate activity, and what the CIA was really intended to do in the beginning when they were set up. My main complaint is that over the years those legitimate activities have to a great extent been reduced in importance, and certain clandestine activities, particularly the covert action, have come to the fore. Covert action is essentially the intervention in the internal affairs of other governments in order to manipulate events, using everything from propaganda, disinformation, political action, economic action, all the way down to the really dirty stuff like para-military activity. This activity, there was too much of it. It was being done for the wrong reasons, and it was counterproductive. It was in this area where the CIA was really violating U.S. law and the intent of the U.S. Constitution, and for that matter, I think, the wishes of Congress and the American people. This was the area that needed to be thoroughly investigated and reformed. My suggestion was that the CIA should be split into two organizations. One, the good CIA so to speak, would collect and analyze information. The other part, in the dirty tricks business, would be very small and very tightly controlled by Congress and the White House, and if possible, some kind of a public board so that it didn't get out of control.

My theory is, and I've proved it over and over again along with other people, is that the basic reason for secrecy is not to keep the enemy from knowing what you're doing. He knows what you're doing because he's the target of it, and he's not stupid. The reason for the CIA to hide behind secrecy is to keep the public, and in particular the American public, from knowing what they're doing. This is done so that the President can deny that we were responsible for sabotaging some place over in Lebanon where a lot of people were killed. So that the President can deny period. Here is a good example: President Eisenhower denied we were involved in attempts to overthrow the Indonesian government in 1958 until the CIA guys got caught and the Indonesians produced them. He looked like a fool. So did the N.Y. Times and everybody else who believed him. That is the real reason for secrecy.

There is a second reason for secrecy. That is that if the public doesn't know what you are doing you can lie to them because they don't know what the truth is. This is a very bad part of the CIA because this is where you get not only propaganda on the American people but actually disinformation, which is to say lies and falsehoods, peddled to the American public as the truth and which they accept as gospel. That's wrong. It's not only wrong, its a lie and it allows the government and those certain elements of the government that can hide behind secrecy to get away with things that nobody knows about. If you carefully analyze all of these issues that keep coming up in Congress over the CIA, this is always what is at the heart of it: That the CIA lied about it, or that the CIA misrepresented something, or the White House did it, because the CIA and the White House work hand in glove. The CIA is not a power unto itself. It is an instrument of power. A tool. A very powerful tool which has an influence on whoever is manipulating it. But basically the CIA is controlled by the White House, the inner circle of government, the inner circle of the establishment in general. The CIA is doing what these people want done so these people are appreciative and protective of them, and they in turn make suggestions or even go off on their own sometimes and operate deep cover for the CIA. So it develops into a self-feeding circle.

FD: Spreading disinformation is done through the newsmedia.

Marchetti: Yes. Its done through the newsmedia. The fallacy is that the CIA says the real reason they do this is to con the Soviets. Now I'll give you some examples. One was a fellow by the name of Colonel Oleg Penkovsky.

FD: Penkovsky Papers?

Marchetti: Yes. I wrote about that in `The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence. The Penkovsky Papers was a phony story. We wrote the book in the CIA. Now, who in the hell are we kidding? The Soviets? Do we think for one minute that the Soviets, who among other things captured Penkovsky, interrogated him, and executed him, do you think for one minute they believe he kept a diary like that? How could he have possibly have done it under the circumstances? The whole thing is ludicrous. So we're not fooling the Soviets. What we're doing is fooling the American people and pumping up the CIA. The British are notorious for this kind of thing. They're always putting out phony autobiographies and biographies on their spies and their activities which are just outright lies. They're done really to maintain the myth of English secret intelligence so that they will continue to get money to continue to operate. Thats the real reason. The ostensible reason is that we were trying to confuse the Soviets. Well that's bull**** because they're not confused.

One of the ones I think is really great is `Khruschev Remembers.' If anybody in his right mind believes that Nikita Khruschev sat down, and dictated his memoirs, and somebody -- Strobe Talbot sneaked out of the Soviet Union with them they're crazy. That story is a lie. That book was a joint operation between the CIA and the KGB. Both of them were doing it for the exact same reasons. They both wanted to influence their own publics. We did it our way by pretending that Khruschev had done all of this stuff and we had lucked out and somehow gotten a book out of it. The Soviets did it because they could not in their system allow Khruschev to write his memoirs. Thats just against everything that the Communist system stands for. But they did need him to speak out on certain issues. Brezhnev particularly needed him to short-circuit some of the initiatives of the right wing, the Stalinist wing of the party. Of course the KGB was not going to allow the book to be published in the Soviet Union. The stuff got out so that it could be published by the Americans. That doesn't mean that the KGB didn't let copies slip into the Soviet Union and let it go all around. The Soviets achieved their purpose too.

This is one of the most fantastic cases, I think, in intelligence history. Two rival governments cooperated with each other on a secret operation to dupe their respective publics. I always wanted to go into much greater length on this but I just never got around to it. Suffice it to say that TIME magazine threatened to cancel a two-page magazine article they were doing on me and my book if I didn't cut a brief mention of this episode out of the book.

FD: How was this operation initially set up?

Marchetti: I don't know all of the ins and outs of it. I imagine what happened is that it probably started with somebody in the Soviet Politburo going to Khruschev and saying, ``Hey, behind the scenes we're having lots of trouble with the right-wing Stalinist types. They're giving Brehznev a bad time and they're trying to undercut all of the changes you made and all of the changes Brehznev has made and wants to make. Its pretty hard to deal with it so we've got an idea. Since you're retired and living here in your dacha why don't you just sit back and dictate your memoirs. And of course the KGB will review them and make sure you don't say anything you shouldn't say and so on and so forth. Then we will get in touch with our counterparts, and see to it that this information gets out to the West, which will publish it, and then it will get back to the Soviet Union in a variety of forms. It will get back in summaries broadcast by the Voice of America and Radio Liberty, and copies of the book will come back in, articles written about it will be smuggled in, and this in turn will be a big influence on the intelligentsia and the party leaders and it will undercut Suslov and the right wingers.'' Khruschev said okay. The KGB then went to the CIA and explained things to them and the CIA said, Well that sounds good, we'll get some friends of ours here, the TIME magazine bureau in Moscow, Jerry Schecter would later have a job in the White House as a press officer. We'll get people like Strobe Talbot, who is working at the bureau there, we'll get these guys to act as the go-betweens. They'll come and see you for the memoirs and everyone will play dumb. You give them two suitcases full of tapes (laughs) or something like that and let them get out of the Soviet Union. Which is exactly what happened.

Strobe brought all of this stuff back to Washington and then TIME-LIFE began to process it and put a book together. They wouldn't let anybody hear the tapes, they didn't show anybody anything. A lot of people were very suspicious. You know you can tell this to the public or anybody else who doesn't have the least brains in their head about how the Soviet Union operates and get away with it. But anybody who knows the least bit about the Soviet Union knows the whole thing is impossible. A former Soviet premier cannot sit in his dacha and make these tapes and then give them to a U.S. newspaperman and let him walk out of the country with them. That cannot be done in a closed society, a police state, like the Soviet Union.

The book was eventually published but before it was published there was another little interesting affair. Strobe Talbot went to Helsinki with the manuscript, where he was met by the KGB who took it back to Leningrad, looked at it, and then it was finally published by TIME-LIFE. None of that has ever been explained in my book. A couple of other journalists have made references to this episode but never went into it. It's an open secret in the press corps here in Washington and New York, but nobody ever wrote a real big story for a lot of reasons, because I guess it's just the kind of story that it's difficult for them to get their hooks into. I knew people who were then in the White House and State Department who were very suspicious of it because they thought the KGB...

FD: Had duped TIME?

Marchetti: Exactly. Once they learned this was a deal they quieted down and ceased their objections and complaints, and even alibied and lied afterwards as part of the bigger game. Victor Lewis, who was apparently instrumental in all of these negotiations, later fit into one little footnote to this story that I've often wondered about. Lewis is (was)... After all of this happened and when the little furor that existed here in official Washington began dying down, Victor Lewis went to Tel Aviv for medical treatment. He came into the country very quietly but somebody spotted him and grabbed him and said, ``What are you doing here in Israel?'' ``Well I'm here for medical treatment, '' Lewis said. They said, ``What?! You're here in Israel for medical treatment?'' He said, ``Yes.'' They said, ``Well whats the problem?'' ``I've got lumbago, a back problem, and they can't fix it in the Soviet Union. but there's a great Jewish doctor here I knew in the Soviet Union and I came to see him.'' That sounds like the craziest story you ever wanted to hear. But then another individual appeared in Israel at the same time and some reporter spotted him. He happened to be Richard Helms, then-director of the CIA. He asked Helms what he was doing in Israel, and he had some kind of a lame excuse which started people wondering whether this was the payoff. Helms acting for the CIA, TIME-LIFE, and the U.S. government, and Lewis acting for the KGB, Politburo, and the Soviet government. Its really a fascinating story. I wrote about briefly in the book and it was very short. You'll find it if you look through the book in the section we're talking about. Publications and things like that. When I wrote those few paragraphs there wasn't much further I could go, because there was a lot of speculation and analysis.

Around the time my book came out, TIME magazine decided that they would do a two-page spread in their news section and give it a boost. Suddenly I started getting calls from Jerry Schecter and Strobe Talbot about cutting that part out. I said I would not cut it out unless they could look me in the eye and say I was wrong. If it wasn't true I would take the book and cut the material out. But neither of them chose to do that. Right before the article appeared in TIME I got a call from one of the editors telling me that some people wanted to kill the article. I asked why and he said one of the reasons is what you had to say about TIME magazine being involved in the Khruschev Remembers book. I asked him, ``Thats it?'' I had talked to Jerry and Strobe and this was their backstab. This editor asked me if I could find somebody who could trump the people who were trying to have the article killed. Somebody who could verify my credentials in telling the story. I said why don't you call Richard Helms, who by that time had been eased out of office by Kissinger and Nixon, and was now an ambassador in Teheran. So this editor called Helms to verify my credentials (laughing) and Helms said, ``Yeah, he's a good guy. He just got pissed off and wanted to change the CIA.'' So the article ran in TIME. I think you're one of the very few people I've explained this story to in depth.

FD: Did this operation have a name?

Marchetti: It probably did but I was already out of the agency and I don't know what it was. But I do know it was a very sensitive activity and that people very high up in the White House and State Department who you would have thought would have been aware of it were not aware of it. But then subsequently they were clearly taken into a room and talked to in discussions and were no longer critics and doubters and in fact became defenders of it.

FD: Let me make sure I am clear about the CIA's motivation...

Marchetti: The CIA's motivation was that here we have a former Soviet premier talking out about the events of his career and revealing some pretty interesting things about his thinking and the thinking of others. All of which shows that the Soviet Union is run by a very small little clique. A very small Byzantine-like clique. There is a strong tendency to stick with Stalinisn and turn to Stalinism but some of the cooler heads, the more moderate types, are trying to make changes. Its good stuff from the CIA's point of view and from the U.S. government's point of view. This is what we're dealing with. This is our primary rival. Look at how they are. And Khruschev had to dictate these things in secrecy and they had to be smuggled out of the Soviet Union.

Things like this are very subtle in their consistency. It's not a black and white thing on the surface. You might say, ``Well, what's wrong with that?'' What's wrong with that is that it is a lie. The truth would have been much more effective. Nikita Khruschev was approached by the KGB and Soviet Politburo to dictate his memoirs, which he did under their supervision, which means we don't know if he is telling the whole story or the complete truth because they had an opportunity to edit it. The Russians were so anxious to get this information out so that it could come back to the Soviet Union for two reasons. The first was to build international pressure. The second was to build up internal pressure against the Stalinists. They were so anxious that they were willing to make a deal with the CIA, and give us this material. So that we could then prepare a book. Which we did. Thats the kind of a government we are dealing with here. These are the kinds of people they are and the kind of lies they live.

FD: Let's turn to world affairs for a moment. One of the events of recent years that has always puzzled me is United States support for the Vanaaka Party in what was once the New Hebrides Islands. In the late '70s, before the New Hebrides achieved independence, there were basically two factions fighting between themselves to see who would maintain control when the colonial powers left. The British and the French had governed the New Hebrides under a concept known as the condominium, and before independence, the British and the labor movement in Australia threw their support behind the ubiquitous socialist faction, in this case, the Vanaaka Party. The French offered some behind-the-scenes support to the second faction, which was basically pro-free market and pro-West. The U.S. under Jimmy Carter went along with the British. Do you have any idea why this might have been done?

Marchetti: Offhand, I don't. The CIA has learned over the years that you sometimes cannot support the people you would prefer to support, because they just do not have the popular power to gain control or maintain control without a revolution and things of that sort. The classic example is West Berlin. Back in the '50s we were contesting with the Russians for influence in Berlin. This was at a time when the Russians and East Germans were putting tremendous pressure on to have West Berlin go almost voluntarily into the Soviet bloc. The United States was struggling mightily to keep West Berlin free. At that point in time the strong power in West Germany were the Christian Democrats under Konrad Adenauer, and these were the people that we were supporting.

The Christian Democrats, however, just did not have the wherewithal to save West Berlin. The situation was such that the Social Democrats were the ones who could save West Berlin. Not getting into all of the whys and wherefores and policy positions, the Social Democrats also had a very charismatic person named Willy Brandt. So by backing Willy Brandt and the Social Democrats, instead of putting all of our eggs in the Christian Democratic Party basket, Brandt and the Social Democrats were able to maintain a free West Berlin and we were able to achieve our goal. There were some people in the CIA who thought this was terrible, we were not being ideologically pure, and one of them happens to be E. Howard Hunt, who actually considered Willy Brandt a KGB spy. So there are times when you have to, I guess you would call it, choose the lesser of two evils.

It might have been a miscalculated gamble. I don't have all of the facts, but maybe the thinking was that if we left the pro-West faction in power we may end up with a goddamned civil war.

FD: In retrospect, the Carter administration's decision seems even more tragic and mistaken. Since coming to power the Vanaaka Party has consolidated power in the new country, now known as Vanuatu, and established diplomatic relations with governments like Cuba and Vietnam. Socialist Vanuatu has now come to serve as a beacon of sorts for other independence movements in that part of the world, such as the Kanaks in New Caledonia, who have subsequently adopted socialism as their ideology. When I asked Jimmy Carter about this during an interview recently he said he was sorry, but he did not remember the episode. Is it possible that this may have been an incompetent blunder on the part of the U.S. government? That somebody didn't do their homework, and as a result those responsible for the decision didn't have all of the facts?

Marchetti: Absolutely. Absolutely. Yes. Its not the kind of an issue that draws the most attention in Washington. As you just pointed out, Jimmy Carter doesn't even remember it. I'm sure that decision was made pretty far down the line. If Carter ever had to make a decision he probably doesn't even remember it because it was probably staffed down because it was considered so inconsequential at the time by Carter and everyone involved. They considered it so inconsequential that they don't even remember it. It's something they signed off on. My guess from what you have told me is that it was a mistake.

FD: You mentioned E. Howard Hunt earlier. I understand that you wrote an article for a Washington-based publication about the assassination of John F. Kennedy and Hunt sued the publication, charging libel. Could you give us some background on this matter?

Marchetti: The article was written in the summer of 1978 and published by SPOTLIGHT, a weekly newspaper that advertises itself as `The Voice of the American Populist Party.' At the time I wrote the article for SPOTLIGHT the House Select Committee on Assassinations was getting ready to hold its hearings reviewing the Kennedy and King assassinations. I had picked up some information around town that a memo had recently been uncovered in the CIA, and that the CIA was concerned about it. I believe the memo was from James Angleton, who at the time was chief of counterintelligence for Richard Helms. I forget the exact date, but this memo was something like six years old, while Helms was still in office as director.

The memo said that at some point in time the CIA was going to have to deal with the fact that Hunt was in Dallas the day of the Kennedy assassination or words to that effect. There was some other information in it, such as did you know anything about it, he wasn't doing anything for me, and back and forth. I had that piece of information, along with information that the House Select Committee was going to come out with tapes that indicated there was more than one shooter during the Kennedy assassination and that the FBI, or at least certain people in the FBI, believed these tapes to be accurate and had always believed that there was more than one shooter.

I was in contact with the House Select Committee, and they were probing real deeply into things and they were very suspicious of the Kennedy assassination. There were some other reporters working on the story at the time, one in particular who has a tremendous reputation, and he felt there was something to it. So we rushed into print at SPOTLIGHT with a story saying, based on everything we put together, that we had this information, and we tried to predict what was going to happen. In essence we said whats going to happen is that the committee is going to unearth some new information that there was more than one shooter and probably come up with this memo, this internal CIA memorandum, and there will be some other things. Then the CIA will conduct a limited hangout, and will admit to some error or mistake, but then sweep everything else under the rug, and in the process they may let a few people dangle in the wind like E. Howard Hunt, Frank Sturgis, Jerry Hemming, and other people who have been mentioned in the past as being involved in something related to the Kennedy assassination. It was that kind of speculative piece.

What happened is that about a week after my article appeared in SPOTLIGHT the Wilmington News-Journal published an article by Joe Trento. This was a longer and more far-ranging article, in which he discussed the memo too but in greater detail. A couple of weeks after that Hunt informed SPOTLIGHT that he wanted a retraction. I checked with my sources and said I don't think we should retract. I said we should do a follow-up article. Now by this time some CIA guy was caught stealing pictures in the committee, some spy, so things were really hot and heavy at the time. There was a lot of expectation that the committee was going to do something, some really good work to bring their investigation around. So I said to SPOTLIGHT let's do a follow-up piece, but the publisher chickened out and said, nah, what we'll do is tell Hunt we'll give him equal space. He can say whatever he wants to in the same amount of space.

Hunt ignored the offer. A couple of months later Hunt comes to town for secret hearings with the committee, and was heard in executive session. Hunt was suing the publisher of the book `Coup D'Etat in America,' and deposed me in relation to that case, and then he brought in, he tried to slip in, this SPOTLIGHT article. I was under instructions from my lawyer not to comment. My lawyer would have me refuse to answer on the grounds of journalistic privilege, and also on the grounds of my relationship with the CIA. My lawyer had on his own gone to the CIA before I gave my deposition and asked them about this, and they said to tell me to just hide behind my injunction. I told my lawyer I don't understand it, and he told me all that the CIA said is that they hate Hunt more than they hate you and they're not going to give Hunt any help. So that's what I did, and that was the end of it. We thought.

Two years after it ran Hunt finally sued SPOTLIGHT over my article. SPOTLIGHT thought it was such a joke, all things considered, that they really didn't pay any attention. I never even went to the trial. I never even submitted an affidavit. I was not deposed or anything. The Hunt people didn't even try to call me as a witness or anything. I was left out of everything. Hunt ended up winning a judgment for $650,000. Now SPOTLIGHT got worried. They appealed and the Florida Appellate Court overturned the decision on certain technical grounds, and sent it back for retrial. The retrial finally occurred earlier this year. When it came time for the retrial, which we had close to a year to prepare for, SPOTLIGHT got serious, and went out and hired themselves a good lawyer, Mark Lane, who is something of an expert on the Kennedy assassination. They got me to become involved in everything, and we ended up going down there and just beating Hunt's pants off. The jury came in, I think, within several hours with a verdict in our favor. The interesting thing was the jury said we were clearly not guilty of libel and actual malice, but they were now suspicious of Hunt and everything he invoked because we brought out a lot of stuff on Hunt.

Hunt lost, and was ordered to pay our court costs in addition to everything else. He has subsequently filed an appeal and that's where its at now. It's up for appeal. I imagine it will probably be another six months to a year before we hear anything further on it. Based on everything I have seen, Hunt doesn't have a leg to stand on because the deeper he gets into this the more he runs the risk of exposing himself. We had just all kinds of material on Hunt. We had a deposition from Joe Trento saying, yes, he saw the internal CIA memo. We produced one witness in deposition, Marita Lorenz, who was Castro's lover at one point, and she said that Hunt was taking her and people like Sturgis and Jerry Hemmings and others and running guns into Dallas. Lorenz said that a couple of days before the assassination Hunt met them in Dallas and made a payoff. What they all were doing, whether it was connected to the assassination, we don't know.

I think if Hunt keeps pursuing this, all that he's doing is setting the stage for more and more people to come forward and say bad things about him, and raise more evidence that he was in Dallas that day and that he must have been involved in something. If it wasn't the assassination it must have been some kind of diversionary activity or maybe it was something unrelated to the assassination and the wires just got crossed and it was a coincidence at the time.

One of the key points in the mind of the jury as far as we`ve been able to tell at SPOTLIGHT is that Hunt to this day still cannot come up with an alibi for where he was the day of the assassination. Hunt comes up with the weakest, phoniest stories that he can't corroborate. Some guy who was drunk came out of a bar and waved at him. His story doesn't match with that guy's story. Hunt says he can produce his children to testify he was in Washington. None of his children appeared at the trial. It's a very, very strange thing. Hunt clearly was, in my mind, not in Washington doing what he says he was doing Nov. 22, 1963. He was certainly not at work that day at the CIA. This subject has come up before, whether he was on sick leave, an annual leave, or where the hell he was. Hunt just cannot come up with a good alibi.

Hunt has gone before committees. The Rockefeller Committee, I believe he was before the Church Committee, and before the House Select Committee. Nobody will give Hunt a clean bill of health. They always weasel words. Their comment on Hunt is always some sort of a way that can be interpreted anyway that you want. You can say this indicates the committee looked into it and they feel he wasn't involved. Or you can look at it and say the committee looked into it and they have a lot of doubts about Hunt, and they're just being very careful about what they are saying. Hunt himself will not tell you what happened before these committees. He says that his testimony is classified information. Well, if the testimony vindicates Hunt and provides him with an alibi then why can't he tell us? The mystery remains.

FD: Do you believe it possible that the CIA knows where Hunt was Nov. 22, 1963, but just do not want to release that information?

Marchetti: That's my guess. I think that subsequently, by now, the CIA may not have known where Hunt was at the time, and they may not have even realized what he was up to until years after and years later when his name started to be commonly mentioned in connection with the assassination. I think by now the CIA probably knows where Hunt was and what he was doing or have some very strong feelings about that, and they're not too happy about it. But whatever it was, and is, that Hunt was involved in, it seems to be, or would appear, that he was in or around Dallas about the time of the assassination, involved in some kind of clandestine activity. It may have been an illegal clandestine activity, even something the CIA was unaware of. The CIA acts very strangely about this. The CIA will not give Hunt any help. He got no help at all from the CIA in the preparation of his case against us or in the presentation of his case. They just left him out there. Hunt managed to scrounge up a couple of his CIA friends who on their own were willing to give some help, but caved in right away. One guy didn't testify. Another guy gave a stupid deposition in the middle of the night to us (laughs) which wasn't worth the paper it was written on.

Helms gave a deposition which said nothing. No way would he go out on a limb for Hunt. In my own mind, I have a feeling that the CIA knows where Hunt was and what he was doing, and while they're not going to prosecute him for a lot of reasons, they're involved in the cover-up themselves and don't want to bring any embarrassment upon the agency. On the other hand, they feel if he screws around and gets his own mit in the ringer, that's his own fault, and we can cover our ass. Hunt, for his own part, apparently feels he has some sort of pressure on the CIA that while it might not be strong enough to bring them forward to defend him before any committee or in a court of law, its at least strong enough for them not to take any overt action against him. So it seems to me to be some kind of double graymail. Hunt's graymailing the CIA on one hand and they're graymailing him on the other hand. Its a very, very strange thing.

FD: Did Jerry Hemmings give a deposition? I understand he is still in prison.

Marchetti: I think Jerry might still be in. He asked not to give a deposition or be called as a witness unless it was absolutely necessary, because he was either coming toward the end of his term, or he was up for parole. He preferred not to get involved. This was pretty much the attitude of another individual who was mentioned, but I was left with the feeling that if push really came to shove, these people could be brought forward. Now what they know, or whether they were going to risk perjury, which is a pretty big gamble when you`re dealing with Mark Lane, particularly on this subject. He's not only a brilliant lawyer, but this is a subject he has a lot of background in.

FD: Did Gordon Novel fit into this at all?

Marchetti: No.

FD: You mentioned that it is possible the CIA is withholding information on Hunt's whereabouts Nov. 22, 1963. The CIA has been accused many times in the past of engaging in a cover-up of the JFK assassination. Do you believe they are still covering up in a lot of ways?

Marchetti: Oh yeah, I think so, I'd think not only they and the FBI, I think everybody is covering up.

FD: Are they covering up necessarily to just keep the American people in the dark about the episode, or cover-up because of their own guilt and complicity?

Marchetti: I think its both. I think it all started with when it happened. I don't think anybody was really sure in Washington who was behind the assassination. I think they were very fearful that if they didn't come up with a lone nut theory, and in this case a lone nut who was removed from the scene in a matter of days, that the American people might panic. They might lose their faith in the government. They might lose their faith in the institutions. They might begin to point fingers at all kinds of people. The Russians. The Cubans. Other elements of our society like the right wing and organized crime and so on. I think there was a consensus in the minds of the establishmentarians in our government which was that we should put this to bed as quickly and as quietly as possible. We'll make a hero out of Kennedy and let's forget about it. And then of course they did have to have a Warren Commission, a blue-ribbon panel which would have the right people on it and then we'll lay the thing to rest officially. Which is essentially what happened. They didn't hear a lot of evidence. They ignored evidence. Evidence was hidden. Evidence was destroyed. I think it was pretty much clear that nobody was being absolutely forthcoming.

The former head of the CIA, Allen Dulles, even said he would lie to the people about anything he considered to pertain to national security. Dulles said he would lie to the people if he had to. I think the Kennedy assassination was laid to rest by the establishment and it became just a suspicion in the minds of the people. Then came the revelations. I think by now everybody involved was deeply involved in the coverup, that that maybe became even more paramount than the question of who did kill Kennedy and why. To admit that we covered up from the very begining, and that we've been covering up ever since, I think, would be more devastating than it would have been a few years ago to say O.K., we've looked into it, and figured it out, it was CIA renegades, or whoever was responsible for murdering Kennedy. I think by now there are just too many people that feel they may have started out originally for the most noble of motives but they cannot adjust to it. We saw it with the Watergate affair, and see it every day in life. Once somebody starts lying and covering up it just snowballs. It just keeps going on and on and on and on. It keeps getting harder and harder and harder to determine the truth. I think it's pretty difficult for somebody in 1985 to come forward and say, yes, I was part of a cover-up, 22 years ago. What he's saying is that I've lived a lie all of my life. I don't think we're ever going to get the answer, frankly. I don't think we're every going to get the answer to the story.

FD: You're pessimistic about the American people discovering the real truth about the JFK assassination?

Marchetti: This is not to say that 50 years from now that some historian may get access to some material when everybody is dead and buried, and might be able to put together a pretty accurate story. But even then, with all of the time that has gone by, the myth will have been established. You have those people that will say, ``Ugh. Conspiracy theorists,'' while other people will say, ``I never believe the government.'' But it will have no effect.

FD: So you believe it will only be time that will reveal the full truth about the JFK assassination? The truth won't be revealed because of another big government scandal like Watergate, or a president who is committed to seeing that the case is solved?

Marchetti: One of the presidents who might have unearthed all this, actually a potential president was Bobby Kennedy, but he got rubbed out.

FD: Bobby Kennedy made a statement three days before he was murdered that he felt only the office of the presidency could get at the truth.

Marchetti: I'm not sure if thats possible. I wonder in my own mind if, let's say, Teddy Kennedy would be elected president. I wonder if he, one, would have the courage to reopen the case at this point in time knowing everything he knows about it probably. And two, if he had the courage, would he have the muscle to be able to resolve it completely and fully to the satisfaction of everyone? I think there are those things in life you either resolve at the time or never. After awhile, as the years pass by, it becomes more and more difficult until it is impossible.

FD: The American people are told that they choose their leaders and run the government. Is this true, or is it the invisible state within a state, the intelligence community?

Marchetti: I don't think the intelligence community, although it is an invisible arm of the government, runs it. I think the people who run the country are the same people who usually run things not only here but all over the world. The powerful economic interests, whether they are bankers, or industrialists, or whatever. The real solid inner core of the establishment. These are the movers and shakers, but they don't have absolute power. They may not want a certain person to get nominated by a certain party. In some cases they may not even be able to stop them from getting to power or using it. Generally speaking, they have more influence on the government than the other people do. Its manifested itself in all sorts of ways. There are all of these forces at work.

FD: One last question: PSI. Both the CIA and the KGB had a great interest in this area. One of the things I know the CIA did, attempt to recruit KGB agents in the afterlife. Are you familiar with this?

Marchetti: I do know there was great interest in this whole area of parapsychology, for whatever benefit may have been achieved. Not only the CIA, but the Pentagon was involved, and for that matter, the KGB. Everybody has apparently examined it. There were a lot of stories floating around the CIA that they had tried to contact old agents like Penkovsky, who had been captured and killed, executed by the Soviet Union, in the hope that they could derive additional information. To my knowledge none of this stuff really worked.

FD: Thank you, Victor Marchetti.