HAVANA — Renegade former CIA agent Philip Agee, whose naming of agency operatives helped prompt a U.S. law against exposing government spies, has died in Cuba, his wife said 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 misdeeds against leftists in the region and included a 22-page list of purported agency operatives.
The list created an uproar around the world and helped prompt Congress to pass a law against naming clandestine U.S. agents abroad. It also led the State Department to strip Agee of his U.S. passport.
Vince Cannistraro, a former CIA counterterrorism chief, said Agee’s book “was considered a very serious blow to CIA’s clandestine operations.”
“It had a major impact, some people had to be pulled out,” he said.
Former CIA colleagues and some U.S. officials called Agee a traitor and alleged he was linked to Cuban and Soviet intelligence agencies. Agee denied the allegations and said he thought of himself as part of the American tradition of dissent and as “a critic of hypocrisy, a critic of crime in high places.”
His wife, Giselle Roberge Agee, said Agee was hospitalized in Havana on Dec. 16 and underwent surgery for perforated ulcers. He died Monday because of a related infection and his remains were cremated. He is survived by her and two grown sons from a previous marriage.
Agee said she and her husband lived in Hamburg, Germany, but kept an apartment in Havana’s Vedado district and frequently traveled to Cuba as part of Agee’s business, a Web site specializing in bringing Americans to the island despite Washington’s decades-old embargo.
“He was a friend of the Cuban revolution,” she said.
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