He made similiar revelations about the CIA in the 1970s, and there are strong allegations that he was managed by Soviet intelligence services. Does it not make you uncomfortable that Snowden is residing in Moscow, the capital of an authoritarian country with very powerful intelligence services who see the US as their main adversary? How do we know that the SVR is not simply exploiting Snowden?
Agee's version was that it was his Roman Catholic conscience that had persuaded him to leave the CIA, and he certainly succeeded in presenting himself as a principled critic of US intelligence. In 1978 he and a small group of his supporters began publishing the Covert Action Information Bulletin, a platform for his campaign to "expose" the workings of the CIA. In 1978-79 Agee published two volumes of Dirty Work, which exposed more than 2,000 covert CIA agents in western Europe and Africa as well as details about their activities.
But in 1992 a high-ranking Cuban defector accused Agee of receiving up to $1 million in payments from the Cuban intelligence service; and in 1999 Vasili Mitrokhin, a former KGB librarian who had secretly copied thousands of files and then donated them to British intelligence, gave further details of his relationship with Communist agents in The Sword and the Shield, co-written with Christopher Andrew.
According to Mitrokhin, Agee had directly approached the KGB with information about the CIA's work. Soviet and Cuban intelligence not only provided material for Inside the Company, Mitrokhin alleged, but had persuaded the author (codenamed Pont) to excise "all references to CIA penetration of Latin American Communist parties". The KGB file on the book claimed that it had been "prepared by Service A, together with the Cubans".
Agee maintained that these charges were smears, pointing out that he could not have been a useful double agent because once he had left the agency he lost access to its secrets. But his value to the Soviets lay in his credibility with a large swathe of western opinion. Mitrokhin claimed that the Covert Action Information Bulletin was founded on the initiative of the KGB, which assembled a task force to keep the Bulletin supplied with material designed to compromise the CIA.
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What's your take on Philip Agee?
He made similiar revelations about the CIA in the 1970s, and there are strong allegations that he was managed by Soviet intelligence services. Does it not make you uncomfortable that Snowden is residing in Moscow, the capital of an authoritarian country with very powerful intelligence services who see the US as their main adversary? How do we know that the SVR is not simply exploiting Snowden?
A snippet from the Telegraph:
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