The six-month delay between the publication of the British and American editions of Inside the Company, and the associated legal difficulties, merely served to increase media interest in the United States and ensure its place high on the bestseller list. A review of Inside the Company in the CIA’s classified in-house journal, Studies in Intelligence, acknowledged that it was “a severe body blow” to the Agency: “A considerable number of CIA personnel must be diverted from their normal duties to undertake the meticulous and time-consuming task of repairing the damage done to its Latin-American program…”51
On November 16, 1976 a deportation order served on Agee requiring him to leave England turned his case, much to the delight of the Centre, into a cause célèbre. According to one of the files noted by Mitrokhin:
The KGB employed firm and purposeful measures to force the Home Office to cancel their decision… The London residency was used to direct action by a number of members of the Labor Party Executive, union leaders, leading parliamentarians, leaders of the National Union of Journalists to take a stand against the Home Office decision.52
On November 30 the first in a series of well-publicized meetings to protest against the deportation order was held in London, with speakers including Judith Hart, former Labor Minister of Overseas Development, the leading Labor left-winger Ian Mikardo, Alan Sapper of the film and TV technicians union and the distinguished historian E. P. Thompson. An active defense committee53 based at the National Council of Civil Liberties organized petitions, rallies and pickets of the Home Office. In the Commons Stan Newens sponsored a protest supported by over fifty MPs and led a delegation to see the Home Secretary, Merlyn Rees. Agee addressed sympathetic meetings in Birmingham, Blackpool, Brighton, Bristol, Cambridge, Cardiff, Coventry, London, Manchester and Newcastle. At his appeal against deportation in January and February 1977, Agee’s character witnesses included Stan Newens, Judith Hart, former Home Office minister Alex Lyon, former US Attorney-General Ramsey Clark, Kissinger’s former aide Morton Halperin and Sean MacBride, Nobel Peace Prize winner and UN High Commissioner for Namibia. Hart and another ex-Labor minister, Barbara Castle, sponsored a motion, supported by 150 MPs, to reform the appeals procedure. According to Agee’s KGB file, “Campaigns of support for PONT were initiated in France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Holland, Finland, Norway, Mexico and Venezuela.” After Agee’s appeals had failed, the final act in the long drawn-out protest campaign was a Commons debate on May 3. The Guardian, which supported Agee’s appeal, commented:
When Merlyn Rees… decided that Philip Agee and [American journalist] Mark Hosenball must go, he must equally have known there would be a fuss. But did he realize the endlessly stretching, deeply embarrassing nature of that fuss—the evidence at a length to rival War and Peace, the press conferences, the parade of fervent witnesses?54
Though Agee was eventually forced to leave England for Holland on June 3, 1977, the KGB was jubilant at the “deeply embarrassing nature of [the] fuss” his deportation had caused. The London residency’s claim that it had been able to “direct” the campaign by prominent Labor politicians and others in support of Agee was, however, greatly exaggerated.55 It doubtless did not occur to the vast majority of Agee’s supporters to suspect the involvement of the KGB and the DGI.56
After Agee’s well-publicized expulsion from Britain, the KGB continued to use him and some of his supporters in active measures against the CIA.57 Among the documents received by Agee from what he described as “an anonymous sender” was an authentic copy of a classified State Department circular, signed by Kissinger, which contained the CIA’s “key intelligence questions” for fiscal year 1975 on economic, financial and commercial reporting.58 KGB files identify the source of the document as Service A.59 In the summer of 1977 the circular was published in a pamphlet entitled “What Uncle Sam Wants to Know about You,” with an introduction by Agee. While acknowledging that it was “not the most gripping document in the world,” Agee claimed that it demonstrated the unfair assistance secretly given to US companies abroad by the American intelligence community.60
In 1978 Agee and a small group of supporters began publishing the Covert Action Information Bulletin in order to promote what Agee called “a worldwide campaign to destabilize the CIA through exposure of its operations and personnel.”61 Files noted by Mitrokhin claim that the Bulletin was founded “on the initiative of the KGB” and that the group running it (collectively codenamed RUPOR), which held its first meeting in Jamaica early in 1978, was “put together” by FCD Directorate K (counterintelligence). 62 The Bulletin was edited in Washington by Bill Schaap, a radical lawyer codenamed RUBY by the KGB, his wife, the journalist Ellen Ray, and another journalist, Louis Wolf, codenamed ARSENIO. Agee and two other disaffected former members of the CIA, Jim and Elsie Wilcott (previously employed by the Agency as, respectively, finance officer and secretary), contributed articles and information.63 There is no evidence in Mitrokhin’s notes that any member of the RUPOR group, apart from Agee, was conscious of the role of the DGI or KGB.
The first issue of the Covert Action Information Bulletin was launched by Agee and the RUPOR group at a Cuban press conference on the eve of the Eleventh World Festival of Youth and Students, held to coincide with the Havana carnival in the summer of 1978. Agee also produced advance copies of another book, Dirty Work: The CIA in Western Europe, coauthored by himself and Wolf, which contained the names and biographical details of 700 CIA personnel who were, or had been, stationed in western Europe. “Press reaction,” wrote Agee, “was not disappointing. In the next few days we learned by telephone from friends in the States and elsewhere that most of the major publications carried stories about the Bulletin and Dirty Work. Perfect.”64
The Centre assembled a task force of personnel from Service A and Directorate K, headed by V. N. Kosterin, assistant to the chief of Service A, to keep the Covert Action Information Bulletin supplied with material designed to compromise the CIA. Among the material which the task force supplied for publication in 1979 was an eighteen-page CIA document entitled “Director of Central Intelligence: Perspectives for Intelligence, 1976-1981.” The document had originally been delivered anonymously to the apartment of the Washington resident, Dmitri Ivanovich Yakushkin, and at the time had been wrongly assessed by both the residency and the Centre as a “dangle” by US intelligence.65 Agee’s commentary on the document highlighted the complaint by DCI William Colby that recent revelations of its operations were among the most serious problems the CIA had to face.66 Kosterin’s task force, however, became increasingly concerned about the difficulty of finding enough secret material for the Bulletin, and recommended that it look harder for open-source material, ranging from readers’ letters to crises around the world which could be blamed on the CIA—among them the Jonestown massacre in Guyana, when 900 members of the American religious cult the “People’s Temple” had been persuaded to commit mass suicide or had been murdered.67
Following what Service A believed was the success of Dirty Work: The CIA in Western Europe, Agee began work with Wolf on a sequel, Dirty Work II: The CIA in Africa. Early in 1979 Oleg Maksimovich Nechiporenko of Directorate K and A. N. Itskov of Service A met Agee in Cuba and gave him a list of CIA officers working on the African continent.68 Shortly before Dirty Work II was finished, Agee decided not to be publicly identified as one of the authors for fear that he might lose his residence permit in Germany, where he now lived. He also changed his official role on the Covert Action Information Bulletin from editor to “editorial adviser.” “How that would save my residence in Germany,” Agee later acknowledged, “was a little obscure… but such was my fear that I was barely rational—at least on this point.”69 Nechiporenko and Itskov agreed with Pedro Pupo Perez, the head of the DGI, that publication of Dirty Work II should be timed to coincide with the conference of ninety-two heads of non-aligned nations to be held in Havana, presided over by Fidel Castro, in September 1979.70
By Agee’s own count, Dirty Work II broug
ht the total number of CIA officials exposed by him and the RUPOR team to about 2,000. For the KGB it had been a remarkably effective active measure. The Senate Intelligence Committee reported in 1980:
In recent years members of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees… have become increasingly concerned about the systematic effort by a small group of Americans… to disclose the names of covert intelligence agents… Foremost among them has been Philip Agee… The destructive effect of these disclosures has been varied and wide-ranging…
The professional effectiveness of officers who have been compromised is substantially and sometimes irreparably damaged. They must reduce or break contact with sensitive covert sources and continued contact must be coupled with increased defensive measures that are inevitably more costly and time-consuming. Some officers must be removed from their assignments and returned from overseas at substantial cost, and years of irreplaceable area experience and language skills are lost.
Since the ability to reassign the compromised officer is impaired, the pool of experienced CIA officers who can serve abroad is being reduced. Replacement of officers thus compromised is difficult and, in some cases, impossible. Such disclosures also sensitize hostile security services to CIA presence and influence foreign populations, making operations more difficult.
All thirteen members of the House Intelligence Committee sponsored the Intelligence Identities Protection Bill, popularly known as the “Anti-Agee Bill,” which eventually became law in June 1982. Agee himself had been deprived of his American passport in 1981 and traveled over the next few years on passports issued by, successively, Maurice Bishop’s Marxist-Leninist regime in Grenada and the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. His influence, by now, was in sharp decline. As he complained, “My 1983 call for a continent-wide action front against the CIA’s people in Latin America went nowhere. People had other preoccupations and priorities.”71
LIKE THE CIA, the FBI was inevitably a major target of KGB active measures. Until the death of J. Edgar Hoover in 1972, many of these measures were personally directed against the Bureau’s long-serving, aging and irascible director. Service A employed three simple and sometimes crude techniques. The first was to portray Hoover as in league with extremists such as the ultra right-wing John Birch Society, whose founder regarded even the former Republican president Dwight D. Eisenhower as “a dedicated conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy.” Service A had acquired both some of the society’s stationery and samples of its leaders’ signatures from its California headquarters to assist it in its forgeries. In November 1965 it fabricated a letter of good wishes from Hoover to the leader of the John Birch Society, reminding him that the FBI funds put at his disposal would enable the society to open several more branches.72
A second, more sophisticated form of active measures concerned alleged FBI abuses of civil rights. Operation SPIRT was designed to demonstrate that the head of the Passport Office in the State Department, Frances Knight, was a secret FBI agent whose loyalty was to Hoover rather than to the Secretary of State. In 1967 Service A forged a letter from Ms. Knight to Hoover and arranged for it to be sent to the celebrated columnist Drew Pearson, who published it in the Washington Post on August 4.73 The fabricated letter reported that a situation of “extreme urgency” had arisen as a result of press enquiries about an alleged FBI request to her for information on Professor H. Stuart Hughes, a Harvard critic of American policy in Vietnam:
I am seriously afraid that this may indicate preparations for a sustained press campaign against us. We have already discussed the attitude of the Secretary of State towards the long-established practice of the department making inquiries at the request of the FBI…
Forgive me if I sound alarmist, but I am quite certain from what I have heard that a principle of vital importance is at stake which affects the whole conduct of the government and, in particular, the effectiveness of the Bureau.
Ms. Knight told Hoover she was unwilling to commit too much to paper and suggested an urgent meeting with him.74 Knight and Hoover both dismissed the letter as a forgery, but the fact that neither denied the FBI’s contacts with the Passport Office persuaded the KGB that at least some of its mud had stuck.75
A third line of attack deployed by Service A against Hoover was to accuse him of being a homosexual.76 The truth about Hoover’s probably severely repressed sexuality is unlikely ever to be known. Later, much-publicized claims that he was a gay cross-dresser whose wardrobe included a red dress and boa, which made him look like “an old flapper,” and a black dress, “very fluffy, with flounces, and lace stockings,” which he wore with a black curly wig, rest on little more than the discredited testimony of a convicted perjurer, Susan Rosenstiel, who claimed to have seen Hoover so attired. Nor is there any reliable evidence that Hoover and his deputy, Clyde Tolson, who shared his house, ever had a homosexual relationship. But attempts to portray him as a heterosexual are also less than convincing. Hoover had no known female liaisons. As his staunchly loyal number three, “Deke” DeLoach, acknowledges, probably the only person he had ever loved was his mother: “Hoover’s capacity to feel deeply for other human beings [was] interred with her in the Old Congressional Cemetery near Seward Square.”77
The later commercial success, admittedly in a more prurient period, of fanciful stories of Hoover at gay transvestite parties suggests that in fabricating stories of his homosexual affairs in the late 1960s Service A had hit upon a potentially promising active measures theme. DeLoach was later depressed to discover how readily such stories were accepted as “undeniable truth:”
“Tell us about Hoover and Tolson,” people would say.
“Was it obvious?”
“Did everyone know what was going on?”78
As sometimes happened, however, Service A spoiled a plausible falsehood by surrounding it with improbable amounts of conspiracy theory. It sent anonymous letters, intended to appear to come from the Ku Klux Klan, to the editors of leading newspapers, accusing Hoover of personally selecting for promotion in the FBI homosexuals from whom he expected sexual favors. Not content with turning the FBI into “a den of faggots,” Hoover had also allegedly been engaged for several decades in a larger gay conspiracy to staff the CIA and the State Department with homosexuals. The national security of the United States, claimed the letters, was now seriously at risk.79 Service A’s belief that major newspapers would take seriously nonsense of this kind, especially emanating from the Ku Klux Klan, was graphic evidence of the limitations in its understanding of American society. The letters had, predictably, no observable effect.
THE MOST CELEBRATED victim of the FBI’s own active measures was the great civil rights leader Martin Luther King. Hoover’s obsessive belief that King was “a tom cat with degenerate sexual urges” and his simmering resentment at King’s criticism of the FBI led him to make the preposterous allegation to a group of journalists in 1964 that “King is the most notorious liar in the country.” When his staff urged him to insist that his outburst was off the record, Hoover refused. “Feel free,” he told the journalists, “to print my remarks as given.” The active measures against King were organized, apparently without Hoover’s knowledge, by FBI Assistant Director William C. Sullivan. In December 1964 Sullivan sent King a tape recording of some of his adulterous sexual liaisons which the Bureau had obtained by bugging his room in Washington’s Willard Hotel. With the tape was an anonymous letter which purported to come from a disillusioned former supporter:
King, look into your heart. You know you are a complete fraud and a great liability to all of us Negroes… You could have been our greatest leader. You, even at an early age, have turned out to be a dissolute, abnormal moral imbecile… You are finished. You will find on the record for all time… your hideous abnormalities… What incredible evilness. It is all there on the record.80
King was probably the only prominent American to be the target of active measures by both the FBI and the KGB. By the mid-1960s the claims by the CPUSA leade
rship that secret Party members within King’s entourage would be able to “guide” his policies had proved to be hollow.81 To the Centre’s dismay, King repeatedly linked the aims of the civil rights movement not to the alleged worldwide struggle against American imperialism but to the fulfillment of the American dream and “the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.” He wrote in his inspirational “Letter from Birmingham Jail” in 1963:
I have no despair about the future… We will reach the goal of freedom in Birmingham [Alabama] and all over the nation, because the goal of America is freedom… We will win our freedom because the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of God are embodied in our echoing demands.82
Having given up hope of influencing King, the Centre aimed instead at replacing him with a more radical and malleable leader. In August 1967 the Centre approved an operational plan by the deputy head of Service A, Yuri Modin, former controller of the Magnificent Five, to discredit King and his chief lieutenants by placing articles in the African press, which could then be reprinted in American newspapers, portraying King as an “Uncle Tom” who was secretly receiving government subsidies to tame the civil rights movement and prevent it threatening the Johnson administration. While leading freedom marches under the admiring glare of worldwide television, King was allegedly in close touch with the President.83
The same operational plan also contained a series of active measures designed to discredit US policy “on the Negro issue.” The Centre authorized Modin:
• To organize, through the use of KGB residency resources in the US, the publication and distribution of brochures, pamphlets, leaflets and appeals denouncing the policy of the Johnson administration on the Negro question and exposing the brutal terrorist methods being used by the government to suppress the Negro rights movement.
The Sword and the Shield Page 42
