By Steve Weissman
The phone rang much too early. An American diplomat named Richard Welch had just been killed in Greece, the caller told me. Did Phil Agee and I have anything to do with naming Welch as the CIA station chief in Athens?
This was just before Christmas 1975, and I had lived for less than a year in London, making my way as a magazine writer and TV researcher. In the course of several stories, I had gotten to know Agee, a former CIA operations officer and author of the best-selling "CIA Diary," in which he revealed the names and misdeeds of some 250 of his fellow spooks. His goal, quite simply, was to make it as difficult as he could for the CIA to continue doing its dirty work.
My phone continued to ring furiously, but finally came the one call for which I’d been waiting. "What’s happening?" asked the well-modulated voice. If the Brits were listening in, as I had to believe they were, they would have no problem recognizing who was on the line. He was calling from Italy, where he was vacationing with his family in Italy.
"Oh, it’s you," I answered. "Nice of you to call, Phil. Nothing’s happening - just an earthquake in Washington and a couple of hundred people trying to get in touch with you."
"Shit," he said. "It’s bad, huh?"
Phil published our conversation many years later in his book, "On the Run." The words, as he recalled them, seem a bit stilted, but he caught the gist of what I told him. With Welch’s body hardly cold, CIA spokesmen were already blaming Agee for the murder and using the outrage to fend off Congressional and media investigations of CIA activities.
He asked if I knew anything about Welch’s name being published in Athens. I didn’t know before, I told him. But I had managed to piece the story together.
In November, the English-language Athens News had published a letter from "a Committee of Greeks and Greek Americans" attacking the CIA for backing the harsh military dictatorship that had fallen just the year before. The letter identified ten CIA officers working in Greece. One was Richard Welch. I also told Phil that "Who’s Who in the CIA?" had identified Welch as early as 1968. The "Who’s Who" was published in East Germany, almost certainly by the KGB, and was so full of mistakes that we rarely bothered to consult it.
Phil already knew that our American friends in the Fifth Estate, a group initially funded by Norman Mailer, had outed Welch when he was still serving as station chief in Lima, Peru. Their magazine - CounterSpy - had published his name, along with an article by Agee urging a worldwide effort to "neutralize" CIA people wherever possible. The CIA was now calling Phil’s words an invitation to kill, which was never his intent. With its backing for the Greek generals, whom many saw as fascists, the CIA itself had provided more than enough motivation for murder.
Later, we learned two interesting side notes. A Maryknoll priest who had worked as a missionary in Peru had given CounterSpy a local publication that had earlier identified Welch. And when Welch moved to Athens, he insisted on living in a house widely known as the residence of the previous CIA station chief. As the story emerged in Congressional testimony, CIA headquarters had warned him not to live there, but poor Welch, supposedly a brilliant classics scholar, knew better. I don’t remember how long Phil and I talked that day, but we ended strangely upbeat. We agreed not to let the CIA’s counter-attack stop us from exposing the agency and what it was doing in Europe and around the world. Cambio 16 was about to publish a cover story I had written on the CIA in Spain, and I would come to Italy to write a front-page story for La Repubblica on the CIA station in Rome. "They’re going to burn your ass and Fifth Estate’s over Welch," he remembered my telling him. "But there’s no stopping that. So why should we stop?" Ah, the bravery of one’s younger years! Now older, if no wiser, I still think we made the right decision to carry on, but Phil paid a grievous price.
The following September, he traveled to Jamaica to expose a CIA destabilization campaign against the government of Prime Minister Michael Manley.
Phil’s work helped blunt the CIA effort, allowing Manley’s party win a second term. To my eyes, this was Phil’s finest moment. The Labour government in Britain took a different view and, with obvious prompting from Washington, began kangaroo-court proceedings to expel Phil from the country. I could easily write a book about the colorful campaign many of us waged to stop the deportation. But, after a fight, Phil had to leave, moving to Amsterdam, where the Dutch later kicked him out as well. In all, the Ford, Carter and Reagan administrations kept him on the run for years, pressuring at least six European allies, including France, to either boot Phil out or ban him from entering.
Over the years that followed, I managed to see Phil from time to time, including once in Florida, where my wife and I were then living. But, even without the unrelenting pressure, I think that Phil and I were destined to go our separate ways. We had never agreed politically about Cuba or what he ca me to call "the Socialist camp," and I thought it crazy when he and other friends publicly launched their Covert Action Information Bulletin from Havana.
Was he, then, in the pay of the Soviets or Cubans?
At the time I worked with him in the mid-1970s, I knew that he had lived several months in Cuba, where he must have talked to the Cuban security services. But my impression from other sources was that neither the Cubans nor the Russians felt they could trust him.
I also came to know Phil’s "Russian contact," Edgar Cheporov, who worked in London as correspondent for the Novosti News Agency. I assumed Edgar was KGB and was reporting back to Moscow on what we were doing, but he never gave us any information or guidance that I saw. I must admit, I found Edgar extremely good company, and my wife and I often went to London jazz clubs with him. Alas, we always split the check.
Even more to the point, Phil himself did not provide the original impetus for the rest of us to publicly out CIA officers. That came from a former State Department officer named John Marks, who wrote an instructive article in the Washington Monthly on "How to Spot a Spook?" As silly as it sounds, CIA officers working under diplomatic cover in American embassies always showed the same tell-tale career patterns. All we needed to identify them were the State Department’s Biographic Registers and Foreign Service Lists, which we found in the the library of the British Museum.
In the end, I don’t really care whether Phil ever dined out on Havana or Moscow gold. Everything I saw him write or say about the CIA was true, as even the agency’s defenders had to admit. And, in telling the truth, he alerted millions of people to the threat the CIA’s covert actions continue to pose, as much to the United States as to other countries.
My friend Philip Agee died in Havana in January. He was 72. May his work live on.
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