[R-G] Ex-CIA Agent Philip Agee Dead in Cuba

[Richard Menec]

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5hyYAW2lkU6NJa4P6tJNEIZqCydBgD8U2E78G0

Ex-CIA Agent Philip Agee Dead in Cuba

By WILL WEISSERT

HAVANA (AP) - Philip Agee, a former CIA agent who became an outspoken critic 
of Washington's Cuba policy, has died in a Havana hospital following ulcer 
surgery, state media reported Wednesday. He was 72.

Agee quit the CIA in 1969 after 12 years working mostly in Latin America at 
a time when leftist movements were gaining prominence and sympathizers. His 
1975 book "Inside the Company: CIA Diary," cited alleged CIA misdeeds 
against leftists in the region that included a 22-page list of purported 
agency operatives.

Granma, Cuba's Communist Party newspaper, said Agee died Monday night and 
described him as "a loyal friend of Cuba and fervent defender of the 
peoples' fight for a better world."

Bernie Dwyer, a journalist with state-run Radio Havana, said in a Tuesday 
message posted to a Cuba e-mail group that Agee's wife called him to say he 
had died in the hospital, where he has he been since Dec. 15.

"He had several operations for perforated ulcers and didn't survive all the 
surgery," Dwyer wrote, adding that Agee was cremated Tuesday and that 
friends planned a memorial ceremony for him Sunday at his Havana apartment.

In 2000, with European investors and a state-run travel agent as his 
partners, Agee opened a travel Web site designed to bring U.S. tourists to 
Cuba. The site, cubalinda.com, offers package tours and other help with 
Cuban tourism that is largely off limits to Americans.

There was no word of Agee's death on the site Wednesday.

The author of several other books besides "Inside the Company," one of 
Agee's last essays was published in Granma International newspaper in 2003 
and came shortly after a Cuban government crackdown led to the arrest of 75 
leading dissidents and political activists.

"To think that the dissidents were creating an independent, free civil 
society is absurd, for they were funded and controlled by a hostile foreign 
power and to that degree, which was total, they were not free or independent 
in the least," he wrote.

Agee has also been accused of receiving up to $1 million in payments from 
the Cuban intelligence service. He denied the accusations, which were first 
made by a high-ranking Cuban intelligence officer and defector in a 1992 
report.

Barbara Bush, the wife of former President George H.W. Bush - himself a 
one-time CIA chief - in her autobiography accused Agee's book of exposing a 
CIA station chief, Richard S. Welch, who was later killed by leftist 
terrorists in Athens in 1975. Agee, who denied any involvement in the 
killing, sued her for $4 million for defamation, and she revised the book to 
settle the case.

Agee's U.S. passport was revoked in 1979. U.S. officials said he had 
threatened national security. After years of living in Hamburg, Germany - 
occasionally underground, fearing CIA retribution - Agee moved to Havana to 
open the travel site.

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