IT IS difficult to overstate the consequences that flowed from the publication, in 1975, of a book by Philip Agee called Inside The Company: CIA Diary.
Certainly, the US government thought they were immense, since they drove Agee into a life of exile which ended last week in Havana, where he died at 72.
At that time, there was no freedom of information or whistle-blowing culture. Agee had been a
CIA agent in Latin America throughout the 1960s when, time and again, it was suspected that Washington was behind the overthrow of elected governments and their replacement with compliant tyrants. But it was not until Agee wrote Inside The Company that chapter and verse were delivered.
After he broke with the CIA, Agee moved to London with his family to write the book and have it published, in the teeth of US hostility.
By the time it came out, the elected government of Salvador Allende had been ousted in Chile and the Pinochet regime installed – later confirmed as a CIA-led operation driven by Nixon's Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger. The world finally woke up to the extent of malign US involvement in Latin America.
"It was a time in the '70s when the worst imaginable horrors were going on in Latin America," said Agee.
"Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Guatemala, El Salvador – they were all military dictatorships with death squads, all with the backing of the CIA and the US government. That was what motivated me to name all the names and work with journalists who were interested in knowing just who the CIA were in their countries".
The Americans demanded Agee's expulsion from Britain, with Kissinger directly lobbying his friend, James Callaghan. A deportation order was issued, creating a cause-célèbre among radical opinion.
To many, it appeared as outrageous confirmation of Britain's uncritical complicity in US foreign policy that a man whose offence was to expose the corruption of democracy in Latin America was to be driven from this country, in very real fear of his life.
I became involved in an effort at least to delay his expulsion until some other option could be established. Under a law of 1887, approval of the Scottish Secretary as well as the Home Secretary was required to validate a deportation order.
The late Lionel Daiches QC believed there was a case to be argued – though the fee was mainly in column inches rather than anything more tangible. Agee embarked on speaking tour of Scotland but the Court of Session gave him short shrift – the alternative would have been to invalidate every deportation from the UK for the previous 90 years!
Banished from Britain and deprived of his US passport, Agee was forced into an itinerant lifestyle. In 1990, he married a noted German ballet dancer, Giselle Roberge, and latterly divided his time between Hamburg and his adopted home of Havana, the safest haven for him on earth, where I met up with him on a few occasions in recent years.
The result of his own work and subsequent exposés, he said in our last conversation, was that "a government or political movement can anticipate US-sponsored subversion and take counter-measures."
He took satisfaction from the fact that there are now more elected, progressive governments in Latin American than ever before: "Every one of them represents another force for change, another force in the belief that a better world is possible".
The full article contains 582 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
