A Drop of Treason: Philip Agee and His Exposure of the CIA by Jonathan Stevenson

Author:Jonathan Stevenson [Stevenson, Jonathan]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Military, Biography & Autobiography, 20th Century, HIS036060 History / United States / 20th Century, General, Intelligence & Espionage, BIO010000 Biography & Autobiography / Political, Political, history, HIS027000 History / Military / General, BIO000000 Biography & Autobiography / General, political science, United States, POL036000 Political Science / Intelligence & Espionage
ISBN: 9780226356686
Google: LkU6EAAAQBAJ
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2021-05-21T00:27:33.142551+00:00

6

Uneasy Normalization

Back in the early 1970s, the CIA’s leadership seemed incongruously unworried about the vertiginous lines case officers might walk. Due to James Angleton’s paranoid overthinking, the CIA almost from its inception—and certainly after Philby’s defection—had harbored a suspicion of defectors to the United States so extreme as to be counterproductive as well as an obsession with moles.1 But the fervor with which first-generation case officers embraced the Cold War as a new and existential threat and the United States’ postwar geopolitical primacy as a salutation of America’s destiny also seemed to entrench the assumption that these factors would lose none of their inspirational potency. The pioneers had faith that the next generation would remain impervious to competing circumstantial and ideological influences.

The agency’s institutional presumption had been that immersing intelligence officers in a mission aimed at safeguarding the United States would cement their instinctual loyalty with brotherhood, shared secret knowledge, and an ennobling appreciation for challenging duty. Little thought went to the other distinct possibility: that officers with an increasing awareness of American foibles might be less inclined toward moral relativism and exceptionalism. They might in fact become less tolerant of the ethically slippery methods and practices of espionage in a way that might alienate them from the agency in particular and, more rarely, from the American project as a whole. While Agee’s motivations were complex, he appears to have been especially open to this risk. The very belatedness of the agency’s recognition that it was salient helps explain the CIA’s durable loathing for him.

More substantively, Agee prompted concern in intelligence officials that he would be part of a trend. The author of a 1972 report had declared that “the CIA is confident that he will be the last” of its turncoats.2 But if Agee was officially cast as an aberration, on a visceral level “the Agee disclosures were painful because they were, at the time, the most open and damaging and ideological,” noted Walter Pincus, who covered the Agee story and for decades reported on intelligence for the Washington Post. “He was also of a new generation and created a new kind of fear that you could not trust newcomers who may disagree with policy.” The CIA was worried, he added, “about the transition to younger people.”3 The Agee precedent alerted them that the loyalty and commitment of other second-generation CIA case officers could be quite brittle.

This is not to deny the idiosyncratic aspects of Agee’s turn. In subsequent years, he said he was sheepish about the Che Guevara remark as well as the rather pat suggestion that a bland commitment to humanitarian principles and a preciously political love affair made him do what he did. The arduous pace of his transition overall, and especially the agonizing reticence he manifested about leaving the agency during his final posting in Mexico City, strongly suggest that his conversion was psychologically byzantine and probably quite opaque even to Agee himself. In a 1987 article in a professional intelligence journal, Winn Taplin, a

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