From: Speak Out! <speakout@igc.apc.org>
Subject: Agee Responds to LA Times
Followup-To: alt.activism.d
Originator: rich@pencil.cs.missouri.edu
Organization: ?
Date: Wed, 12 Aug 1992 18:38:58 GMT

The following is Philip Agee's response to a page 1 article in the 
Monday, August 10 edition of the Los Angeles Times, entitled "CIA 
Critic Agee Reportedly Paid by Cuba."  The lengthly article alleges 
that Philip Agee, former CIA officer-turned-critic, has repeatedly 
taken money from the KGB which was funneled to him through the DGI 
(Cuban intelligence).  The source of the allegation is Florintino 
Aspillaga, a defector from the DGI.  Aspillaga alleges that Agee has 
received from the KGB "a million dollars or more" for his anti-CIA 
work. The article also renews the false charge that Agee was 
responsible for the death of then-CIA Station Chief Richard Welch 
who was murdered in Athens in 1975. 
 
Those who have followed Mr. Agee's work will recognize the article as 
yet another piece of disinformation in the CIA's 20+ year efforts 
to discredit and silence him.
 
 
                      August 10, 1992
 
      LETTER TO THE LOS ANGELES TIMES FROM PHILIP AGEE
 
 
The Editor:
 
      Your  article by Robert Toth published today,  and  entitled
"CIA  Critic Agee Reportedly Paid by Cuba," will be welcome  news
to  my  friends and family,  and creditors  as  well,  who  never
suspected  that  I  am a KGB---via-Cuba----made  millionaire  who
lives  "like the Shah of Iran."   But I find the comments that  I
was   ungrateful,   complaining   that  the   large   sums   were
insufficient,  and  that I was "anti-Soviet" while unaware of  my
Soviet benefactors, thoroughly unflattering.
 
     As  for  my  Cuban  code  name,   "Curiel,"  that  could  be
dangerous.   For  that  is  the name of a man I knew  before  his
murder in Paris in 1978.  He was Egyptian-born but  stateless,  a
former political prisoner,  and a tireless advocate for political
refugees.   His  press credits included such praise as "a one-man
revolutionary clearing house" and "a redoubtable Soviet spymaster
and  terrorist boss extraordinaire."  Perhaps his code  name  was
Agee.
 
     Today's  article reminds me of the CIA's first  attempt,  in
mid-1974,  to  link  me  with the KGB through  a  similar  "press
plant," but in the New York Times.  According to that story I had
been  drunk  and despondent somewhere in Latin America  in  1972,
telling all to the KGB.   In fact, in 1972 I was in Paris, nearly
destitute and working on Inside the Company:  CIA Diary, my first
book.   Had it not been for CIA money,  passed to me then through
two  Americans  who  had  "befriended" me,  I  might  never  have
finished the book, now available in almost 30 languages.
 
   Over  the nearly 20 years from that New York Times  piece,  to
this  L.A.  Times  article,  CIA officials have  never  tired  of
"surfacing" such fairy tales in order to discredit and isolate an
opponent.  That  Mr.  Toth should be the current vehicle does not
surprise,  given  his work while your correspondent in Moscow  in
compiling  a  list  of  secret Soviet  defense  plants  for  U.S.
intelligence.   Toth's  apparent carelessness with papers got his
source,  Anatoly Shcharansky, a 15-year sentence for espionage in
1978.
 
     Your  readers  should know that  Florentino  Aspillaga,  the
Cuban intelligence defector who spoke to Toth, is under total CIA
control and has been used by the Agency to "plant" the false,  if
hardly credible,  allegations.  Readers may also find of interest
some  of  Aspillaga's  background that Toth  admitted  to  me  to
knowing, but chose not to mention.
 
     Aspillaga defected to the CIA in 1987,  the same year that I
ended  more  than 15 years' absence from the U.S.   Since then  I
have  travelled nearly the entire country speaking  at  literally
hundreds of events.  Aspillaga, meanwhile, was serving the CIA in
such  places  as London where in September 1988 he  attempted  to
induce  the  defection  of  a Cuban Embassy official  on  a  busy
street.   The  Embassy  official  fired a  pistol  at  Aspillaga,
apparently wounding one of his CIA-British intelligence escorts.
 
     More  than  a year ago,  the CIA-Aspillaga allegations  were
offerred to your newspaper by the same George Chritton  mentioned
in  the article as having lost his appointment as "CIA Officer in
Residence"  at UC,  Santa Barbara because of my  activities.   My
role there, as a matter of record, was to speak with other former
CIA  officers  at a 1987 fund-raiser for students  on  trial  for
civil  disobedience  in  protest of Chritten's  presence  at  the
university.
    Your newspaper,  I've been told,  rejected the CIA-Chritton-
Aspillaga story but assigned Mr. Toth to follow up.  In June 1991
Toth  called me,  and I denied the allegations while warning  him
that  the Agency's use of Aspillaga was a standard technique  for
placing  false stories.  Toth said his article would probably  be
out on June 30, more than a year ago,  but for reasons unknown to
me the CIA-Aspillaga-Toth story didn't appear.
 
     Then  this past April Toth called again about the  Aspillaga
allegations,  and  I  again denied them.   I referred him  to  an
earlier L.A. Times story, from January 1976, equally as absurd as
today's  story,  which  laid blame on me for the  destruction  of
NATO's top spy ring---some 120 people---centered in Poland.  Your
Bonn  correspondent  at  the time,  Murray  Seeger,  had  clearly
exceeded  even  the Times standards,  for the story was  given  a
"mandatory kill."  I also suggested to Toth that he consult other
"planted"  articles which I described in my 1987 memoir,  On  The
Run.
 
     Regarding today's article, I can assure your readers that if
Aspillaga's allegations had any truth to them,  the CIA would not
have  waited  for  four  years  following  his  defection  before
attempting last year to publish them.   The allegations are made-
in-CIA, plain and simple.
 
     Concerning  passports,  the State Department denied my  1987
application---the  first since the 1979 revocation---on the basis
of  a  letter from then-CIA Director Webster containing  a  dozen
unsubstantiated allegations and the conclusion that my activities
continued to harm U.S.  national security.   Under  the  passport
regulations, I had an explicit right to "confrontation and cross-
examination"  of every witness against me.  The Department denied
me  this right with Webster,  the only witness  against  me.   In
subsequent District Court proceedings,  Judge Gerhart Gesell, the
man  who bungled the Oliver North prosecution,  refused to  order
the Department to follow its own regulations.
 
     I  then  started the procedure again with  another  passport
application,  but  I demanded that the Department confirm that my
rights  this  time  would be honored,  a  demand  the  Department
refused.   Because of this,  and because I then received a German
passport  for aliens,  I withdrew the application to  avoid  more
waste of time and money.
 
     I cannot know why the CIA, in 1991, decided to float another
package  of  lies  about  me,   although  one  could  see  it  as
confirmation that my writings and speeches are still close to the
mark  or that I must be doing something right.
 
     The Agency did know,  however, that in 1991, before Toth got
on the story, I received confirmation from a former CIA colleague
of  an early 1970's CIA plot to stop my first book by killing me.
Years  earlier  I  had received documents under  the  Freedom  of
Information  Act revealing an Agency criminal conspiracy  against
me,  but without details.  And less than two months ago a  second
former  CIA  officer  also confirmed that it was a  murder  plot.
Documents  containing  the  details  have  been  in  the  Federal
District Court for ten years,  and the same Judge Gerhart  Gesell
has refused me access to them,  at the CIA's insistence.  This, I
told  Mr.  Toth,  was  a real news story,  not the  CIA-Aspillaga
farrago.
 
     Space limitations preclude a detailed analysis of Mr. Toth's
errors  of  fact.  The  documents containing  statements  by  the
Agency's   William  Webster and Lee E.  Carle are neither  "legal
depositions" nor "court documents" as described by Toth.   Rather
they are from the file of administrative proceedings in the State
Department on my passport case,  which parties in State or,  more
likely  the  CIA,  illegally  gave  him for  preparation  of  his
article.   And  he  is  all too clever in quoting  from  a  State
Department  letter to my lawyer while adding that  State  refused
him  copies of this private correspondence and that "The CIA  had
no comment."  Only the CIA and State,  and my lawyer and I,  have
copies,  so  Aspillaga  and the documentation are clearly a  CIA-
promo, give-away package.
 
     For  any  readers  who  might  give  credence  to  the  CIA-
Aspillaga-Toth story, I recommend perusal of the daily reports of
the current criminal trial of Clair George, the former CIA Deputy
Director  for Operations.   He's accused of---what else?---lying,
in this case, to Congress.  In other words he was doing what good
CIA officers do, and what the L.A. Times, through the Toth story,
has facilitated.
 
 

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