Playboy Interview: Philip Agee

Flinching under an almost daily assault of headlines accusing the Central Intelligence Agency of everything from domestic spying to foreign coups and assassinations (with an occasional submarine-raising scheme out of Jules Verne), Americans--and the rest of the world--may well wish for the more innocent era of 1929, when Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson abolished an early version of the U. S. intelligence service, noting with a sniff that "gentlemen don't read other people's mail."

The CIA, it has become obvious, has no such scruples about the sanctity of private correspondence--nor about a host of other things. What it does subscribe to is a code of secrecy, and that code has nowhere been more deliberately flouted than in the publication, first by Penguin Books in Britain and, last month, by Stonehill Publishing Company in the U. S. of a detailed exposé, "Inside the Company: CIA Diary." Its author is Philip Agee, a 40-year-old Notre Dame graduate with a degree in philosophy who spent 12 years in the agency, nine of them as a field officer in Ecuador, Uruguay and Mexico. Though other CIA officers have written about their experiences, Agee is the first to have challenged the entire apparatus by publishing without CIA approval or censorship.

There had, of course, been previous flaps, earlier leaks about the CIA. The 1961 Bay of Pigs disaster exposed the agency's hand--which was all thumbs--in an abortive invasion of Cuba; in 1966, Ramparts magazine revealed a massive CIA attempt to co-opt leading universities, foundations and even the National Student Association with covert financial support. In 1974, after previous CIA director Richard Helms had denied to a Senate committee that the CIA had had anything to do with the rightist coup that assassinated Salvador Allende Gossens, the Marxist president of Chile, CIA director William Colby was forced to admit that the agency had, indeed, spent $8,000,000 to "destabilize" the Allende government. Helms later retracted his testimony and may face perjury charges.

Watergate opened a fresh can of dragons. Implicated in the scandal through its connections with E. Howard Hunt and his plumbers, the agency managed for three years to avert investigation of its domestic activities by an adroit combination of admissions, denials and appeals to national security. But on December 23, 1974, Seymour Hersh reported in The New York Times that the CIA had been spying on 10,000 U. S. radicals and other citizens--among them Congressmen and Government officials--all in violation of its charter, which forbids it to conduct operations inside the U. S. Glumly, the agency admitted that Hersh was right--and millions of Americans who had comfortably assumed that the CIA's immorality, if it existed, at least stopped at the water line realized with alarm that the U. S. was much closer than they had supposed to becoming a police state.

Within weeks, three Federal investigations of the CIA were under way. The White House set up a panel headed by Vice-President Nelson Rockefeller, several members of which--including Rockefeller--had previous ties to the CIA. A Senate committee headed by Idaho's Frank Church and a House committee led by Michigan's Lucien N. Nedzi seem likely to be more objective.

As the investigations cranked up, charges old and new kept surfacing on front pages. The CIA, rumor had it, had assassinated Jack and Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., Rafael Trujillo, Ngo Dinh Diem, Patrice Lumumba. The CIA had collaborated with the Mafia in an attempt to assassinate Fidel Castro. The CIA had once sent out three murder teams at the same time to waste Gamal Abdel Nasser. The CIA had arranged President Nixon's downfall. On the orders of Attorney General John Mitchell, the CIA had sprung Robert Vesco from a Swiss prison. The CIA owns and operates hundreds of private corporations that in some cases return enormous profits. The CIA is even now setting up an invasion of Portugal from bases in Spain.

Agee's charges in "Inside the Company: CIA Diary" are less sensational and, perhaps because of that, more devastating to the CIA. A careful man, he published nothing he could not document. And he named names--some 250 of them, CIA officers and agents--in what he hopes will be a first step toward the abolition of the CIA through exposure of its functionaries.

Clearly fearful that Agee's may be only the first of many security-breaching revelations by conscience-stricken CIA operatives, the agency has taken or threatened to take strong measures to discredit, impoverish and otherwise punish its most openly rebellious renegade. Reports have been leaked to the press that Agee has passed information to the Soviet secret police. CIA director Colby, having been sustained by the Supreme Court in his battle to censor a far less damaging book ("The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence," written by former CIA officer Victor Marchetti in collaboration with John Marks), vowed to try to prevent publication of "CIA Diary" in the United States. Colby also seems likely, if Agee dares to return to this country, to demand his indictment under national-security statutes for publishing official secrets.

So far, Agee has not decided whether or not to take up the fight where Daniel Ellsberg dropped it and thoroughly test the constitutionality of those statutes. He is currently living in Cornwall, England, with his two children by a former marriage and a young Brazilian woman who was tortured and imprisoned by a CIA-supported regime in her country. Recently, however, Agee made a two-week trip to Toronto to promote the Canadian edition of his book, which ran through its first printing in seven days. There he was interviewed for Playboy by Brad Darrach, who had conducted the February "Playboy Interview" with Mel Brooks. Darrach's description of the encounter:

"A person in his late 30s or early 40s was sitting in a far corner of the lobby reading a newspaper when I walked into the Toronto hotel where Philip Agee was staying. While I was checking in, I asked for the number of Agee's room and, a moment later, happened to drop my copy of his book on the floor. As I bent down to pick it up, I saw that the newspaper had been lowered and the person in the corner was watching me closely. When he saw me looking at him, he looked away.

"The next morning, I met Agee, a prototypal Black Irishman: stocky, square-faced, with thick black eyebrows and a good head of wavy black hair. His eyes are practically black, too, and steady; his voice deep, clear, hard but capable of subtlety. At first, Agee comes off as a man of action; as he talks, it quickly appears that he is intellectual, too. But not speculative. He has a practical, no-nonsense mind--perhaps in some ways a narrow mind. It grew on me as we talked that one view of the world is all that Agee can or will hold in his awareness at one time, and for him, that view is The Truth. There is a touch of the fanatic about Agee, but no more than a touch. He believes as passionately in socialism now as he believed in CIAism as a young man and in Catholicism as a schoolboy in Tampa, and he is convinced that what he sees as the evil, fragmented world of capitalism will someday be replaced by a shining universe of socialism.

"Do I make Agee seem an impractical idealist? He isn't. Twelve years in the CIA and six years as a fugitive have taught him cunning. In the thickest crowd he can spot a tail, and in a matter of minutes he can sense whether or not a new acquaintance is a CIA plant. 'Once a spook,' they say in the CIA, 'always a paranoid.' Except with the few people he totally trusts, Agee conceals his thoughts and feelings behind a plausible mask of easygoing naturalness. Curiously, that mask seems to serve two purposes. It prevents the world from penetrating his reserve and it prevents him from penetrating certain areas of his own psyche. In an era of galloping introspection, Agee is resolutely unself-knowing, an old-fashioned, Jesuit-trained layman who thinks feelings are something a man hides or controls.

"Most of our interview took place in Agee's hotel room, which a good deal of the time was crowded with TV and newspaper reporters, publishers' representatives, leaders of citizens' groups, former intelligence officers, historians in search of CIA data. When we went out to eat or do some shopping, we were shadowed, sometimes by the nondescript person I had seen in the lobby, sometimes by a younger man who on one occasion wore a modish suede coat and a mustache and on another a lumpy old Burberry and glasses. Agee didn't seem to mind, but it put me rather on edge. So I raised the subject of surveillance as the interview began."

[Q] Playboy: Are you in danger here?

[A] Agee: Probably not. If they tried any rough stuff, it would have to look like an accident, and if anybody slipped up, there would be a very big flap.

[Q] Playboy: Is the room bugged?

[A] Agee: I doubt it. Too much trouble for a short visit. But the phone may be tapped. The hell with them. Let's talk.

[Q] Playboy: How do you like having the Central Intelligence Agency breathing down your neck?

[A] Agee: Not much. That's a dangerous bunch of people to tangle with. I don't want to sound as if I think I'm a hero. I'm not. I just think something's got to be done about the CIA. Remember, I'm not the first ex--CIA man to come out against the agency. Victor Marchetti was the first. But while he was fighting to get his book published, I was working fast and furiously on mine in secret.

[Q] Playboy: Why did you decide to blow the whistle on the CIA?

[A] Agee: I finally understood, after 12 years with the agency, how much suffering it was causing, that millions of people all over the world had been killed or at least had had their lives destroyed by the CIA and the institutions it supports. I just couldn't sit by and do nothing.

[Q] Playboy: Millions of people? Aren't you overstating the case?

[A] Agee:I wish I were. Even after the revelations we've had so far, people still don't understand what a huge, powerful and sinister organization the CIA is.

[Q] Playboy: How big is it?

[A] Agee: In my opinion, it's the biggest and most powerful secret service that has ever existed. I don't know how big the K.G.B. is inside the Soviet Union, but its international operation is small compared with the CIA's. It's known now that the CIA has 16,500 employees and an annual budget of $750,000,000. But that's not counting its mercenary armies, its commercial subsidiaries. Add them all together, the agency employs or subsidizes hundreds of thousands of people and spends more like billions every year. Even its official budget is secret; it's concealed in those of other Federal agencies. Nobody tells the Congress what the CIA spends. By law, the CIA isn't accountable to Congress. Not for anything.

[Q] Playboy: To whom is it accountable?

[A] Agee: To the National Security Council, which is composed of the President and officials chosen by him. So it's really an instrument of the President to use in any way he pleases. If there are legal restraints on this, I don't know of them. It's frightening, but it's a fact: The CIA is the President's secret army.

[Q] Playboy: What does this army do?

[A] Agee: To understand that, you have to understand why the CIA was set up. There are two reasons: the official reason, as set forth in the National Security Act of 1947, which authorized the CIA to collect and analyze foreign intelligence, and the real reason, which was carefully hidden. There was a sleeper clause in the National Security Act, allowing the CIA to "perform such other functions and duties related to intelligence affecting the national security as the NSC may from time to time direct." Right from the start, it was those "other functions" that occupied most of the CIA's time. And money.

[Q] Playboy: Just what are those other functions?

[A] Agee: Covert action. The dagger inside the cloak. It's a form of intervention somewhere between correct, polite diplomacy and outright military invasion. Covert action is the real reason for the CIA's existence, and it was born out of political and economic necessity.

[Q] Playboy: What does covert action have to do with economics?

[A] Agee: Think back to the end of World War Two. The United States faced a really alarming economic crisis. In 1945, 11,000,000 men were still under arms--and out of the work force. Even so, production was more than double what it had been in the best prewar year. But then something scary happened. In the first six months after the war ended, production was cut in half and unemployment shot up from 830,000 to 2,700,000. In six months! It looked as if the U. S. might have won the war only to fall back into a depression. And the people who were running the country, politicians and those who later became known as the military-industrial complex, were badly frightened. Somehow they had to create 11,000,000 new jobs or face catastrophe. So they decided to reconstruct the European and Japanese economies, thus providing new markets for the U. S., and adopted the "containment" policies of such military alliances as NATO that brought on the Cold War.

[Q] Playboy: Wait a minute. Are you saying that we started the Cold War? Didn't the Russians have something to do with it?

[A] Agee: I'm saying that when World War Two ended, U. S. policy toward the Soviet Union came to be dominated by the anti-Soviet school in the State Department led by George Kennan and Chip Bohlen, who were convinced that the Soviets wanted to conquer the world. Such a foreign policy meant that revolutionary socialism must be opposed, with arms if necessary, wherever it appeared, because the Soviets were supposed to be behind it all. Sure, the Soviets also helped start the Cold War; they were aggressive and they reneged on agreements. Militarily, though, they were much weaker in those days than the U. S. public was led to believe. But the scenario of an innocent and defensive America struggling to save the world from Communist dictatorship provided the rationalization for the dominance of foreign economies by American companies. This was the CIA's main mission, to guarantee a favorable foreign-investment climate for U. S. industry. You see, the U. S. market isn't big enough to support the kind of production we need to keep unemployment down to so-called acceptable levels. We've got to export--finance capital as well as products--or die. But where were our markets when the CIA was established? Europe was in ruins. Japan was flat on its back. Reconstruction of those economies would re-create those markets.

[Q] Playboy: Do you discount America's humanitarian motives in rebuilding Europe and Japan?

[A] Agee: No. Most Americans, I think, felt a generous, really unselfish obligation to help the people whose countries had been devastated by the war. But European Communists opposed the Marshall Plan because they understood that U. S. economic domination would accompany it. So the CIA's covert-action operations began as secret political warfare against those people who opposed the Marshall Plan. For example, the CIA broke dock strikes against Marshall Plan aid, got non-Communist labor unions to withdraw from the World Confederation of Trade Unions and establish the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions. All this, of course, with the help of George Meany, who--

[Q] Playboy: You're saying that the president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. is a CIA collaborator?

[A] Agee: One of the most effective. For almost 30 years, he has helped the CIA pour money and agents into the "free world" labor movement. By the Fifties, unions supported by the CIA had become a pretty effective counterweight to the ones controlled by Communists in western Europe. This meant 20 years of relative labor peace during which U. S. companies and their local counterparts could consolidate investments. But those labor-union penetrations were only the beginning of The Company's covert actions.

[Q] Playboy: The Company?

[A] Agee: To the people who work for it, the CIA is known as The Company. The Big Business mentality pervades everything. Agents, for instance, are called assets. The man in charge of the United Kingdom desk is said to have the "U. K. account." But, as I was going to say, The Company has conducted covert actions all over the world. In the Forties and early Fifties, it operated mainly in Europe. In the late Fifties and Sixties, emphasis shifted to the Third World: Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Middle East. These operations are carried out at different levels of intensity, of course. Not all of them are violent. Sometimes The Company forges documents or spreads false rumors and untrue news stories--what it calls disinformation. The Company sends hecklers to public meetings, pays strikebreakers and industrial spies, organizes propaganda services like Radio Free Europe, launders millions of dollars' worth of dirty cash each year. It has also spent huge amounts to buy elections and overthrow liberal or socialist or nationalist governments--or to prop up repressive regimes. But The Company gets into a lot of violence, too. It trains and equips saboteurs and bomb squads. The police and military-intelligence services of many countries are trained, financed and controlled by the CIA. Worse than that, The Company has assassinated thousands of people, some of them famous, most of them unknown. If it has to, it will conduct paramilitary campaigns and even full-scale wars. You name it, the CIA does it.

[Q] Playboy: Those are sensational but very general accusations. Can you give specific examples of such actions?

[A] Agee: Sure. In the past 25 years, the CIA has been involved in plots to overthrow governments in Iran, the Sudan, Syria, Guatemala, Ecuador, Guyana, Zaïre and Ghana. Will that do for starters? In Greece, the CIA participated in bringing in the repressive and stupid regime of the colonels. In Brazil, the CIA worked to install a regime that tortures children to make their parents confess their political activities. In Chile, The Company spent millions to "destabilize"--that's the Company word--the Allende government and set up the military junta, which has since massacred tens of thousands of workers, students, liberals and leftists. And there is a very strong probability that the CIA station in Chile helped supply the assassination lists. In Indonesia in 1965, The Company was behind an even bloodier coup, the one that got rid of Sukarno and led to the slaughter of at least 500,000 and possibly 1,000,000 people. In the Dominican Republic--you want more?--the CIA arranged the assassination of the dictator Rafael Trujillo and later participated in the invasion that prevented the return to power of the liberal ex--president Juan Bosch. And in Cuba, of course, The Company paid for and directed the invasion that failed at the Bay of Pigs. Some time later, the CIA had a go at assassinating Fidel Castro. That one was close, but no cigar.

[Q] Playboy: What you are saying is that the CIA can overthrow governments practically at its pleasure. How is that possible?

[A] Agee: It's not a question of snapping fingers and telling some generals, "Now's the time, boys." What the CIA does is to work carefully, usually over several years' time, to undermine those governments whose policies are unfavorable to U. S. interests. Through propaganda, political action and the fomenting of trade-union unrest, often carried out through many different front organizations, the CIA cuts away popular support from the undesired government or political leader. Major emphasis is placed on influencing reactionary military officers. Once this process gets started, it will acquire its own momentum and eventually lead to the desired coup. The CIA can sometimes speed things up by providing a catalyst: let's say preparing a forged document such as a list of military officers allegedly due for assassination, then seeing that the list gets publicized.

[Q] Playboy: You mentioned the CIA's role in Indonesia. What about Indochina?

[A] Agee: I figure everybody knows the war there began as a CIA war, as far as direct U. S. intervention was concerned. This is documented in the Pentagon papers. CIA officers were in Indochina before the French left. They organized the Montagnards into a paramilitary force to fight the Viet Cong. CIA agents helped put Ngo Dinh Diem in power and CIA agents at the very least cooperated in his assassination. It was the failure of the CIA's secret operations in the Fifties that led to the overt military intervention of the Sixties.

[Q] Playboy: Speaking of the Diem assassination, are the rumors we hear true--that the CIA was involved in Diem's killing without President Kennedy's approval and that when Kennedy found out he was furious with the agency?

[A] Agee: I don't know, but I've heard that from people who should know.

[Q] Playboy: If the CIA were to admit to all your allegations, what justification would it give for such actions?

[A] Agee: The same old emotional appeal; that we have to prop up our so-called friends--usually the tiny minority that has cornered most of the wealth in poor countries--or they'll fall victim to the Soviets and lose their freedom. Kissinger and people like him keep reviving that argument, but the truth is--and the CIA knows it better than anybody else--that for many years there has been no worldwide Communist conspiracy! The socialist bloc has just as many cracks in it as the capitalist bloc. I think most revolutionary socialists--call them Communists, if you like--want the advantages of socialism without the disadvantages of some Soviet-style police state.

[Q] Playboy: You don't believe in Marxist conspiracies, but you do admit there's repression in Russia?

[A] Agee: Don't put me on. Sure there's repression in Russia--and it goes back for centuries, not just to 1917. But I think it'll take another generation of Soviet leaders to relax things there; today's leaders can't answer very well the question of what they were doing during Stalin's reign of terror.

[Q] Playboy: But if the CIA knows, as you claim it does, that there is no worldwide Communist conspiracy, why does it act as if there were?

[A] Agee: Remember, the CIA is an instrument of the President; it only carries out policy. And, like everyone else, the President has to respond to forces in the society he's trying to lead, right? In America, the most powerful force is Big Business, and American Big Business has a vested interest in the Cold War.

[Q] Playboy: Hold on. This is beginning to sound like Marxist jargon about the big bad imperialists on Wall Street.

[A] Agee: That's because, in my opinion, the Marxists are right about American economic imperialism. American multinational corporations have built up colossal interests all over the world, and you can bet your ass that wherever you find U. S. business interests, you also find the CIA. Why? Because the foreign operations of American companies are the key to our domestic prosperity. The multinational corporations want a peaceful status quo in countries where they have investments, because that gives them undisturbed access to cheap raw materials, cheap labor and stable markets for their finished goods. The status quo suits bankers, because their money remains secure and multiplies. And, of course, the status quo suits the small ruling groups the CIA supports abroad, because all they want is to keep themselves on top of the socioeconomic pyramid and the majority of their people on the bottom. But do you realize what being on the bottom means in most parts of the world? Ignorance, poverty, often early death by starvation or disease.

[Q] Playboy: You paint a bleak picture. Hasn't the CIA accomplished anything positive, at least for the U. S.?

[A] Agee: Over the short run, quite a bit. The CIA certainly helped goose up the American economic boom of the past 25 years. What many Americans don't seem to have noticed, though, is that American prosperity over those years was to some degree a false one. Have you noticed that as the political and economic independence of the Third World has increased, American prosperity has begun to sputter? In the long run, I'm betting that the CIA will be seen to have done a lot of damage to the United States, because, along with its business allies, it has caused us to be hated by millions of people as the last of the great colonial exploiters. That hatred is going to haunt us for a long, long time, and it has got to be focused on the few people who deserve it and not on the American people as a whole.

[Q] Playboy: Your own experience in the CIA has been mostly with its overseas operations. What do you know about alleged CIA activities inside the U. S.?

[A] Agee: Very little--but enough to suspect strongly that they're much more extensive than anybody outside the CIA or the National Security Council realizes. I think a lot of sinister things will come out in the investigations that are under way in Washington. I think the American people may be in for some severe shocks.

[Q] Playboy: What are you hinting at?

[A] Agee: I can only hint, because I have no direct knowledge. But I can tell you what I was told by Marchetti. I told him I thought that most of the 10,000 cases the CIA admits to having investigated inside the U. S. would turn out to be connected, no matter how tenuously, with some sort of foreign-intelligence effort. "You're wrong," he said. "You just don't know. You haven't been here. There are going to be some revelations that will chill your spine, really grisly things. And some of them," he said, "may be connected with the assassinations of President Kennedy, Senator Kennedy, Martin Luther King and other well-known individuals both at home and abroad."

[Q] Playboy: Connected how? What are you trying to say?

[A] Agee: Just what I said. That's all I know. But by the time this interview appears, a lot of these things may have come out. I hope so. That's really all I know. I can give you an opinion, though, for what it's worth. Knowing the CIA as I do, I can tell you that everything I have read about the assassination of President Kennedy--Lee Harvey Oswald's background, Jack Ruby's background, the photograph that seems to place E. Howard Hunt at the scene of the crime, the mysterious deaths of so many people involved--everything makes me very suspicious of the Warren Commission's version of what happened. And remember: Allen Dulles, the former head of the CIA, was a member of the Warren Commission. If the agency had anything to cover up, Dulles was in a very good position to do so. But I don't have any proof that the CIA was involved. Remember, I wasn't working in Washington then. What I can tell you about best is the normal, everyday dirty tricks a CIA man is up to.

[Q] Playboy: All right. Let's go into that. Beginning at the beginning, how did you get into the CIA?

[A] Agee: Through my college placement bureau. No kidding. Just before I was graduated from Notre Dame, I was interviewed by a CIA man. He made his pitch like any other company recruiter: interesting work, good pay, opportunity for advancement, foreign travel. He also mentioned patriotism and public service. I said no at first, but a year later, when the draft began to catch up with me, I changed my mind. The CIA training program allowed me to do my compulsory military service as an agency man. So I went away for two years with the Air Force--always in the special CIA program--and in 1959 I returned to Washington to begin formal training as a CIA officer. After about three months of classes at headquarters in Langley, Virginia, learning the structure and functions of the CIA, most of us went to The Farm for operational training.

[Q] Playboy: The Farm?

[A] Agee: Camp Peary, Virginia. A secret CIA training center. So secret at the time that some of the foreign trainees weren't even told they were in the United States. We worked hard, I can tell you, for more than six months. There was a physical-conditioning program, plenty of practice in the martial arts. How to disarm or cripple, if necessary kill an opponent. We had classes in propaganda, infiltration-exfiltration, youth and student operations, labor operations, targeting and penetration of enemy organizations. How to run liaison projects with friendly intelligence services so as to give as little and get as much information as possible. Anti-Soviet operations--that subject got special attention. We had classes in how to frame a Russian official and try to get him to defect. The major subject, though, was how to run agents--single agents, networks of agents.

[Q] Playboy: How does a CIA officer set up and operate a network of spies?

[A] Agee: The first stage of the process is targeting prospects. Say your objective is to penetrate a leftist political party. The first thing to do is to probe for a weak spot in the organization. Maybe you bug the phone of a leading party member and find out he's playing around with the party's funds. In that case, perhaps he can be blackmailed. Or one of your agents plays on the same soccer team as a party member, or goes out with his sister, and gets to know something about him that seems to make him a good prospect. Then you make him an offer.

[Q] Playboy: You mean money?

[A] Agee: Usually, but not necessarily. In rich countries, a man might become a spy for ideological reasons, but in poor countries, it's usually because he's short of cash. A hungry man with a family to support will do almost anything for money, and there are a lot of hungry people in most of the countries in the world. So you make an offer. Maybe you make it yourself, but maybe you have someone else do it, because you don't want the prospective agent to know who he's working for. Not all CIA agents are what The Company calls witting.

[Q] Playboy: How could a person be a CIA agent without knowing it?

[A] Agee: Thousands of policemen all over the world, for instance, are shadowing people for the CIA without knowing it. They think they're working for their own police departments, when, in fact, their chief may be a CIA agent who's sending them out on CIA jobs and turning their information over to his CIA control. There's also a lot of "false flag" recruiting, when one agent will recruit another one by telling him he'll actually be working for his own government, or even for Peking or Havana. You don't let the recruit know he'll be working for the United States, because if he knew that, he might not consent to do it.

[Q] Playboy: How much do you pay a spy?

[A] Agee: It depends on local conditions. In a poor country, $100 a month will get you an ordinary agent. In my day, about $700 a month would buy a Latin-American cabinet minister.

[Q] Playboy: After you've recruited your agent, what then?

[A] Agee: Then you've got to run him, and that's an exacting job--mainly because of the secrecy. You both have to be very careful what you put on paper or say on the phone. You communicate mostly by signals agreed upon in advance. For example, you can make a chalk or pencil mark or place a strip of colored tape in a certain telephone booth or on a fence, wall or utility pole. Different marks or colors signify different instructions. Since you usually can't be seen together, you have to meet in what the CIA calls "a safe house." Sometimes, even that's too risky, so you arrange for your agent to leave his information at a "dead drop," like a hollow place in a cement block or a magnetized container you can fasten under the shelf in a telephone booth--anyplace a message or a roll of microfilm or a reel of tape would be safe until it could be picked up.

[Q] Playboy: What if you suspect that an agent's information is false?

[A] Agee: You can put him through a polygraph test or cut off his money--fire him. Or, if necessary, and headquarters approves, you can "burn" him. In Companyese, that means to reveal his connection with the agency, or frame him. I remember, for instance, the case of Joaquin Ordoqui, who was an old-time leader of the Communist movement in Cuba. I don't know if he was ever a CIA agent, but a decision was made to burn him in order to create dissension in Cuba. So a series of letters implicating him as a CIA agent was sent to the Cuban embassy in Mexico City. In 1964, Ordoqui was placed under house arrest in Cuba and the case caused a lot of friction there. Just before he died in 1974, though, he was exonerated. In 1966, Stan Archenhold, the CIA officer who dreamed up this burning operation, got the Intelligence Medal--the CIA's biggest merit badge--for it. Then there's the really extreme situation in which someone who has worked for the CIA has to be physically eliminated for some reason or other. I don't know of any of these cases, but I've heard that has happened, especially in Indochina during the Sixties.

So the stick is a big element in keeping control of agents. But the carrot, usually money, is at least as important.

[Q] Playboy: How does a CIA officer make payments to his agents?

[A] Agee: In cash. Let's face it, you can't pay spies by check. The minute you go into the bank, the operation goes public. No, toward the end of every month, I'd go out with my pockets stuffed full of little pay envelopes and run all over town to meet my agents in cars or safe houses and pay them off. I had so many envelopes that once in a while I got mixed up and gave an agent the wrong one. I always made them count the cash in front of me, though, so I was able to correct those mistakes on the spot.

[Q] Playboy: Besides cash, what were you supplied with? Were you given James Bond gadgets and trained to use them?

[A] Agee: Bond never had it so good. In CIA jargon, tradecraft covers the tricky side of espionage; it includes all the techniques that keep a secret operation secret. We learned how to write secret messages--there's a carbon system, a microdot system and various wet methods; we also learned how to open and then reseal a letter. Very simple when you have the flat steam table.

[Q] Playboy: What's that?

[A] Agee: It's a rectangular platform, about one foot by two feet, with a heating element built into it and foam rubber all around the outside. You plug the unit into a wall socket, let it heat up and put a wet blotter on top of it. Right away, the steam begins to rise from the blotter. By experience, you know just how wet to get it. Then you place the envelope on top of the blotter, with the flap side down. In a matter of seconds, any envelope will come right open. Later you reseal it--the CIA makes a very effective clear glue. If it's done right, there's no trace that the envelope has been tampered with.

[A] We were also taught how to bug a room and how to restore a wall or a ceiling to its original appearance afterward. The CIA puts out a handy-dandy plaster-patching and paint-matching kit, by the way, that is better than anything the public can buy. They give you about 150 chips on a chain, practically every color you can think of. You just match the chips to the wall paint until you get the right color. Then you look on the back of the chip, which gives you the formula for mixing the paint. It really works. I took the kit home one weekend when I was renovating my apartment. It's superquick-drying, odorless paint.

[A] They trained us in the use of disguises, too--wigs, mustaches, body pads--and taught us to work with hidden cameras. Some of them had lenses that looked like tie-clasp ornaments or locks on briefcases. The Company had other cameras with telescopic lenses that could photograph documents inside a room, right through a curtain. There was also a machine through which we could overhear a conversation inside a room across the street; it bounced an infrared beam off a window, using the windowpane to pick up the vibrations of the voices inside the room. The reflected infrared beam would carry the vibrations to a receiving set.

[Q] Playboy: All that, we suppose, comes under the heading of gathering information. What about the dirty tricks we hear the CIA pulls? Did you have special gadgets for those, too?

[A] Agee: The CIA has a department called the Technical Services Division, TSD, and its laboratories have produced all sorts of things. Some of them are pretty unpleasant. For instance, TSD has developed an invisible itching powder--I think it's made of asbestos fibers, actually--that drives its victims wild for about three days. My agents used a lot of it. They went to leftist meetings and sprinkled it on the seats of toilets. TSD has also produced an invisible powder that will just lie harmlessly on the floor--at a meeting hall, say--until people arrive and start walking around, so the powder gets stirred up. Within about five minutes, everybody in the room is gasping and watering at the eyes, and the meeting has to break up.

[A] I remember another chemical we had. If you dropped it into somebody's drink, it would give him a horrible body odor. We also had a drug that would make people say whatever they were thinking, just babble on. We had a powder that, mixed with pipe tobacco or sifted into a cigarette, would give the smoker an annoying respiratory ailment. We even had an ointment that came in a little container that looked like a ring. On the underside was a little compartment filled with ointment that, when you smeared it unobtrusively on the door handle of a car, would give the person who opened the door terrible burns on his hand. Ordinary stink bombs were effective, too--small glass vials with the vilest-smelling liquid on earth. One time at the Mexico City station, some clown poured a bunch of that liquid down the drain. It was going bad, I guess. At that time, the station occupied the upper floors of the embassy, in a high-rise building. Somehow the liquid didn't run out into the sewer system; it got caught in the basement area, and the smell began to seep back upstairs. They had to evacuate the whole building for a while. I heard that when the Ambassador asked the station chief if he knew anything about it, the chief replied that somebody must have had a worse case of Montezuma's revenge than usual.

[Q] Playboy: But all those things--itching powder, stink bombs--are incredibly petty, the kinds of things nasty little kids might think of.

[A] Agee: The CIA isn't always petty. For instance, we had a whole inventory of sabotage devices. Chemicals to gum up printing presses, foul bearings, contaminate wheat or rice or sugar sacks. There were limpets to sink ships. Also some frightening stuff called thermite powder. Add a little water and you could mold it like clay--into an ashtray or a book end or a doll. It looked harmless, but when the time pencil up the doll's behind ignited, there was a shuddering ball of violent white heat that ate through concrete or even steel in a few seconds. There was no way you could put it out. I heard it was a CIA thermite doll that burned down El Encanto, the big department store in Havana. You could also combine thermite with tear-gas rods and create a cloud that would clear an area for blocks around.

[Q] Playboy: Did you learn these techniques during your CIA training in the States?

[A] Agee: Yes.

[Q] Playboy: Where was your first assignment outside the country?

[A] Agee: Quito, Ecuador. I went there in December 1960 under cover as a State Department political officer, but using my own name. My secret Company name was Jeremy S. HODAPP. I fell in love with Ecuador. The mountains are spectacular, and high; Quito is 9000 feet above sea level. On the coastal plain, there are endless palm forests and banana plantations. But the country is appallingly poor. When I was there, the average income was $18 a month. A conservative upper class, about one percent of the population, held most of the wealth. However, for about 12 years before I went there, Ecuador had been politically stable and some economic progress was being made. But from 1961 to 1963, we really subverted that country.

[Q] Playboy: What was the point of that?

[A] Agee: Cuba was the point. The Cuban Revolution had swung to the far left and the State Department was terrified. So were I.T.T. and United Fruit and the big U. S. banks with Latin-American interests; they feared that Cuba would export revolution to other countries in the hemisphere, and then those countries might nationalize their holdings. So the top priority of U. S. policy in Latin America became to seal off Cuba from the continent. In Quito, our orders were to do everything possible to force Ecuador to break diplomatic and economic relations with Cuba and to weaken the Communist Party there whatever it cost.

[Q] Playboy: What did it cost?

[A] Agee: About $2,000,000. We bought everybody willing to sell himself to get our jobs done. The vice-president of the country--his name was Reinaldo Varea--was a CIA agent. We paid him $1000 a month and kept a suite for him in Quito's best hotel, where he could take his girlfriends. The president's personal physician, Felipe Ovalle, was on the CIA's payroll, too. So were the president of the Chamber of Deputies, the minister of the treasury, the minister of labor and the chief of police intelligence. So were the leaders of several right-wing political parties and some key members of the Communist Party, too. Several ministers of government and the director of immigration also worked closely with us. It was like a covert occupation of the country. But, at the time, I didn't see anything wrong in what we were doing. I believed what the CIA told me, that we were buying time for liberal reforms by checking the spread of communism. So I went out and worked like a demon to make that policy effective. We ran over Ecuador like a steam roller. It was like living a fantasy of absolute power. That's one of the insidious things about the CIA. If you get exciting assignments, you can get hooked on your own adrenaline.

[Q] Playboy: Let's get into some of those assignments.

[A] Agee: Don't think it was all excitement. A CIA officer spends at least half of his day on paperwork. Then he spends hours in musty little basement rooms, waiting for agents to show up and make their reports. Then he spends more hours listening to agents' problems--how their girlfriends are pregnant, how their cars need new transmissions, how their brothers-in-law would make good spies. When he isn't mothering agents, a CIA officer is at a cocktail party or a diplomatic reception or trudging around some golf course, sucking up to a corrupt politician in hopes of corrupting him still further. But some wild things did happen. I would say maybe our most successful operation in Ecuador was the framing of Antonio Flores Benitez, a key member of a Communist revolutionary movement.

[Q] Playboy: Tell us about that one.

[A] Agee: By bugging Flores' telephone, we found out a lot of what he was doing. His wife was a blabbermouth. He made a secret trip to Havana and we decided to do a job on him when he landed back in Ecuador. With another officer, I worked all one weekend to compose a "report" from Flores to the Cubans. It was a masterpiece. The report implied that Flores' group had already received funds from Cuba and was now asking for more money in order to launch guerrilla operations in Ecuador. My Quito station chief, Warren Dean, approved the report--in fact, he loved it so much he just had to get into the act. So he dropped the report on the floor and walked on it awhile to make it look pocket-worn. Then he folded it and stuffed it into a toothpaste tube--from which he had spent three hours carefully squeezing out all the tooth paste. He was like a kid with a new toy. So then I took the tube out to the minister of the treasury, who gave it to his customs inspector. When Flores came through customs, the inspector pretended to go rummaging through one of his suitcases. What he really did, of course, was slip the tooth-paste tube into the bag and then pretend to find it there. When he opened the tube, he of course "discovered" the report. Flores was arrested and there was a tremendous scandal. This was one of a series of sensational events that we had a hand in during the first six months of 1963. By July of that year, the climate of anti-Communist fear was so great that the military seized a pretext and took over the government, jailed all the Communists it could find and outlawed the Communist Party.

[Q] Playboy: Is forgery often resorted to by the CIA?

[A] Agee: It's a standard technique. The catalyst for the coup in Chile was almost exactly like the Flores incident. A document describing a leftist plot to seize absolute power and start a reign of terror was "discovered" by the enemies of Allende. Plan Z, it was called. It made big headlines and the military used it as an excuse to take over the country and start a real reign of terror. I can't prove it, but I strongly suspect that Plan Z was written by a CIA officer, or by the coup makers at the CIA's suggestion.

[Q] Playboy: You mentioned that the Communist Party was outlawed in Ecuador. Did you succeed in your other objective, getting the Ecuadorian government to break off relationships with Cuba?

[A] Agee: Yes. The government of José Maria Velasco Ibarra, who was a moderate liberal, had resisted breaking with Cuba. He was followed in 1961 by a moderate leftist, Carlos Julio Arosemena, who also tried at first to resist U. S. policy. Finally, though, he caved in and broke with Cuba after about six months in office. When I left Ecuador, with the military junta in power, the short-run security situation had been improved from our viewpoint, but there hadn't been much improvement for most of the people there. Practically none of the reforms everyone agreed were needed--redistribution of income, agrarian reform, and so forth--had been installed. Do you know that today the Ecuadorian government is still talking about those reforms without really acting on them? But, at that time, I didn't realize how reactionary the effects of our CIA operations really were.

[Q] Playboy: Why not?

[A] Agee: For one thing, I suppose, I barely had time to stop and turn around. The job of an operations officer calls for dedication to the point of obsession, if you try to do it well. You have too many secrets; you can't relax with outsiders. It's a very unnatural life, hard on the people who live it. There's a lot of alcoholism and a lot of emotional breakdowns in the CIA.

[Q] Playboy: What sort of breakdowns?

[A] Agee: I'm not an expert on this, but it's a schizophrenic sort of situation. Sometimes a CIA officer is using several identities at once, and when you wake up in the morning, your mind goes click! OK, who am I today? All day long, there's the same problem. Somebody asks you a simple question: "What did you do over the weekend?" Click! Who does he think I am? What would the guy he thinks I am do over the weekend? You get so used to lying that after a while it's hard to know when you're telling the truth.

[Q] Playboy: How did that sort of stress affect CIA marriages?

[A] Agee: It didn't do mine any good. I had married Janet the year before I went to Ecuador, but after we got there, we began to have difficulty. I was gone all day and half the night and when we did see each other, I couldn't tell her what I was doing. On top of that, she had trouble learning Spanish, so she was somewhat cut off from the Ecuadorians. More and more, she spent her time playing bridge with embassy wives.

[Q] Playboy: What did you do when you weren't working?

[A] Agee: I had some pretty wild friends, and some close calls; barely missed a scandal several times. One time--God, was I lucky! I went to Guayaquil for the weekend. It's a steamy, tropical town and I spent Saturday night with a convivial agent, making the rounds of the sleazier dives. About 15 minutes after we left one of them, a place called Cuatro y Media, President Arosemena and some of his cronies came in. The waiters in that joint were all homosexual and Arosemena and his friends began to taunt them. Arosemena would get wild when he drank, and after a while he ordered one of the waiters to put a lamp shade on his head. Then he took out his pistol, but instead of shooting the lamp shade off, he shot the waiter in the head. The whole affair was hushed up, so I still don't know if the man was killed or just wounded. But if I'd been in the Cuatro y Media when the shot was fired and the Ambassador had found out, I'd have had to leave the country.

[Q] Playboy: Which, of course, you eventually did--though not under a cloud. What was your next station?

[A] Agee: Montevideo, and I think Uruguay had something to do with turning me around in my attitudes toward the CIA. For years, Uruguay had been one of the most prosperous and progressive countries on the continent. It had a $700-a-year per-capita income and a 90 percent literacy rate, an eight-hour day, a minimum wage, workmen's compensation, free, secular, state-supported education, free elections. The country was a showcase of liberal reform, but in the Fifties some deep cracks showed up in the window. The reforms hadn't touched land tenure--a few rich men owned most of the countryside. Uruguay had a sheep-and-cattle economy, and a collapse in the prices of wool, hides and meat after the Korean War sent the country into a tail spin of inflation, deficits, unemployment, stagnation, strikes and corruption. The left was getting stronger, and the CIA reinforced its station in Montevideo.

[Q] Playboy: When did you arrive in Uruguay, and what did you do there?

[A] Agee: I got there in March 1964 and stayed about two and a half years. We pretty well ran the military and the police intelligence services, gave them information from our penetration agents in the Communist Party and used the police to tap telephones. I ran an operation to bug the United Arab Republic's embassy, which enabled us to break the U.A.R.'s diplomatic codes. My main responsibility, though, was for operations against the Cubans. We had an agent in the Cuban embassy, the chauffeur, and we thought at one point that we'd recruited the Cuban code clerk. We offered him $50,000 for a look at the code pads and $3000 a month if he'd continue working at the embassy, but at the last minute he backed out. I'm glad now that we lost him, but I was really disappointed then.

[Q] Playboy: What about the Russians? Did you run any operations against them?

[A] Agee: Another officer was in charge of anti-Soviet operations, but after we finally got the Uruguayans to break with Cuba, I began working against the Soviets. In fact, I really made trouble for the Russians in Uruguay. It all began when I met a K.G.B. officer from the Soviet embassy named Sergei Borisov. We met at the Montevideo Diplomatic Club and struck up a kind of unreal friendship. He knew what I was, I knew what he was. We both knew we were spying on each other, but we went ahead and did it anyway, because it was part of the game we were playing. It was like chess. In fact, we sometimes played chess and he beat my ass off every time, but I liked to think I beat him at the spy game.

[Q] Playboy: How?

[A] Agee: Well, it started by my inviting Sergei and his wife, Nina, to dinner at our house. Then we began to see them every month or so. Go to the beach, have dinner, drink a little vodka and play some chess while the wives talked girl talk. Then one day our telephone tap on the Soviet embassy gave us a sensational piece of information about infidelity in the Borisov ménage.

[Q] Playboy: You mean Sergei was sneaking out for a quick one now and then?

[A] Agee: No. Nina was! Sergei had a new boss, a K.G.B. station chief named Khalturin, and one of Khalturin's first unofficial acts after arriving in the country, even before he had a permanent place to live, was to jump into bed with Nina. Then I found out that Khalturin was interested in an apartment owned by a friend of mine, a Philip Morris distributor named Carlos Salguero. Salguero agreed to make sure Khalturin took the apartment--but to give us access before the Russian moved in. We bugged the sofa and the bed, and we got another apartment on the floor above and just off to one side. My secretary moved into the other apartment until we could find an agent to cover it. To operate the bugs, we used one of the CIA's less amazing technological achievements, a transmitter-receiver that was fitted into a gray, two-suiter Samsonite suitcase and gave us nothing but trouble.

[Q] Playboy: What went wrong?

[A] Agee: Well, for one thing, the damned thing put out so much radiation that you had to wear a lead apron so the radiation wouldn't homogenize your balls. And for another, you had to tilt the suitcase to just the right angle so that the beam was aimed directly at the switches in Khalturin's apartment. Otherwise, the switches would get stuck in the On or Off position and somebody would have to sneak into his apartment to move them.

[Q] Playboy: What did you learn from Nina and Khalturin's conversations?

[A] Agee: It's funny, I don't know. None of us could understand Russian, so we sent the tapes to headquarters to be transcribed, and I was so busy with other operations that I never bothered to read the English transcriptions that came back. But that situation served as the basis for one of the weirdest operational ideas I ever had. I suggested to Washington that I should arrange to find myself alone with Sergei and tell him how sorry I was to hear that his wife was having an affair with his boss. That would have put Sergei and Khalturin into a tricky situation on two levels, personal and political.

[Q] Playboy: We can see the personal problem, but how would it affect them politically?

[A] Agee: Well, if a Russian told Sergei his wife was having an affair with his boss, he would not be obliged to report it to Moscow. Extramarital affairs in a Soviet colony abroad are, in fact, rather common. Sergei might even have known about the affair and was allowing it to continue. But if a CIA man told Sergei about the affair, that would be another matter altogether. All CIA contacts must be reported. Not to report what I said would be to take a first step toward treason. If he did report it, he'd create an uncomfortable situation for himself and for Khalturin. What I hoped, of course, was that he wouldn't. Then we might have gotten him into a position for blackmail. If he told his wife what I'd said, we'd have her, too. And if Nina told Khalturin and we got their conversation on tape, we could make big trouble for all of them. We might even find ourselves with some very valuable new assets inside the K.G.B.

[Q] Playboy: So what happened?

[A] Agee: Washington killed the idea. They were afraid Sergei might throw a punch at me and cause a flap. I think they were wrong.

[Q] Playboy: So that was that?

[A] Agee: Far from it. We kept right on after Khalturin. I helped forge a document pretty much like the Flores report, this time seeming to involve the Soviet embassy in Uruguay with the damaging strikes the country had been having. By using some of our well-placed agents in the Uruguayan government, we had six officers in the Russian embassy expelled, most of them from Khalturin's department. That left him terribly shorthanded, so he had to work day and night. From our observation posts at the Soviet embassy, we could see him coming and going, and he looked really run-down. We hoped he might crack. But I left Uruguay before Khalturin and the Bori-sovs did, so I don't know what finally happened with them.

[Q] Playboy: But something happened to you? You were saying that in Uruguay you began to have a change of heart about the CIA.

[A] Agee: Yes. Part of the trouble was the atmosphere in the Montevideo station. Ned Holman, the chief, was a really unpleasant, middle-aged ex-FBI man. And God, was he lazy! He was only four years from retirement and all he wanted to do was serve out his time. When anything went wrong, he wrote scurrilous letters about his officers to our superiors in Washington. I found the combination to his file and read them. He gave me good reports, because I was a bear for work, but he really hurt most of the others. There was a foul atmosphere there.

[Q] Playboy: What about the atmosphere in your home?

[A] Agee: That kept getting worse, too. And so did the atmosphere in the country. While I was in Uruguay, inflation soared from 33.5 percent a year to more than 100 percent. For months on end, one sector of the economy or another was paralyzed by strikes. The more I got to know about the corrupt government we were backing, the less I liked my work. I began to see that the landowners, ranchers, bankers and professionals--a small minority--were using the government for their own selfish purposes. Why were we supporting such people? Then came the invasion of the Dominican Republic by U. S. Marines. That really got to me. It was done under the pretext that the Dominican Republic might become another Cuba, which was so absurd I had to wonder what the real reason was. For the first time, I had to consider that the CIA might not really be serving the cause of liberal reform. And then one day I got a shock that's still painful to talk about.

[Q] Playboy: What was it?

[A] Agee: I overheard a man being tortured by the police--a man I'd fingered for them. You know, at that time, the police in Latin-American countries didn't use torture as some of them do now. For years I'd been having people arrested, but I don't think I'd ever actually seen what happened to them afterward. Then, in December 1965, during a state of siege, I told the Uruguayan police to pick up a Communist named Oscar Bonaudi for preventive detention, because he was quite active in street demonstrations. About five days later, the new chief of station, John Horton, and I were visiting police headquarters to show the police chief a forged document we'd prepared, and I began to hear moans coming from somewhere above the police chief's office. The chief was embarrassed and told one of his assistants to turn up the radio. I remember there was a soccer game on. Well, the moans got louder and the assistant kept turning up the radio. Finally, the moans turned to screams and the radio was blaring so loudly we couldn't hear ourselves talk. I had this strange feeling--terror and helplessness. Two days later, I found out that the man they had been torturing was Bonaudi.

[Q] Playboy: What was your reaction?

[A] Agee: I can't describe it. I just know that after that, I began to notice certain things and think about them. For instance, I began to observe what happened to Company men as they got older. Unless they made it to a high-level job, a lot of them turned into pale-faced paper pushers who believed in nothing but their pensions. Burned-out cases. Was I going to be like that in 15 years? It worried me.

[Q] Playboy: When did you decide to quit The Company?

[A] Agee: Before I left Uruguay. But I decided not to leave until I found another job. When I was transferred back to Washington in the fall of 1966, Janet and I separated, so my expenses were pretty high. We had two children, Christopher, who was then two, and Philip, who was five. Then I had a piece of luck. I was sent to Mexico City--assigned, along with another man who was legitimate, not CIA, as one of the U. S. Ambassador's attachés for the 1968 Olympic games. I spent a very pleasant year and a half working on that assignment. The CIA's purpose in sending me was to use the Olympic milieu to recruit new agents. I met a lot of people, didn't recruit any, and meanwhile learned quite a bit about the CIA's operation in Mexico.

[Q] Playboy: Is it a sizable one?

[A] Agee: Huge. The station's annual budget even then was $5,500,000. And the Mexicans were very cooperative. With Mexican security's help, the station was able to tap as many as 40 telephone lines at once. The president of the country at the time, Gustavo Diaz Ordaz, was a very close CIA collaborator. So was his predecessor, Adolfo Lopez Mateos. The current Mexican president, Luis Echeverría, also was a station contact--when he was Diaz Ordaz' minister for internal security. But I'm pretty sure Echeverría has broken with the CIA; in fact, he's now denouncing it and accusing it of fomenting demonstrations by what he calls "young fascists" against his administration.

[Q] Playboy: Did you learn about any interesting operations in Mexico?

[A] Agee: Two. One was a defection operation, the other involved the use of a woman as bait. In the defection business, I learned how much the CIA would pay to get what it wanted. We had access through one of our agents to a senior K.G.B. officer named Pavel Yatskov, who happened to be a fanatic about fishing. Well, cool as you please, the Soviet Bloc Division in headquarters proposed to induce Yatskov to defect by offering him $500,000! Not only that, but the CIA was willing to set him up with an elaborate cover as the owner of an income-producing fishing lodge in Canada. The reason this plan wasn't adopted was that we feared that our own man may have been a double agent, secretly recruited by Yatskov.

[Q] Playboy: And the case in which a woman was used as bait?

[A] Agee: Straight out of Ian Fleming. She was a young Mexican girl, recruited through a local businessman. She was used as bait to lure the administrative officer of the Soviet embassy, a man named Silnikov. He used to spend a lot of time horsing around with the owner of a tiny grocery store near the Soviet embassy--who just happened to be a CIA agent. The Soviets bought a lot of Coca-Cola there and at one time the CIA was working on ways to bug the Coke bottles that went into their embassy. Anyway, it became obvious that Silnikov rose to the bait, shall we say. After some hot necking sessions in the back of the store, they went to the girl's pad, where, unbeknownst to her, a bug and a hidden camera had been installed. I don't know how much information Silnikov spilled, if any, but his virility was beyond belief.

[Q] Playboy: When you left the CIA, did you let The Company know how you felt about what it was doing?

[A] Agee: Hell, no! I wanted them to think I was still a loyal agency supporter--that there were no political reasons for my resigning--so I told them I was leaving for personal reasons. This was true as far as it went, because the CIA knew I was planning to marry a woman I'd met through the Olympics and to live permanently in Mexico. If The Company had known how I really felt, it could have made it impossible, through its Mexican-government friends, for me to remain in Mexico. As it was, the CIA urged me to stay in The Company and offered me another promotion. But I refused. In fact, I did something you have to be pretty damn careful not to do in the CIA. I refused to obey an order.

[Q] Playboy: Is that like refusing to obey an order in the military?

[A] Agee: Almost as bad. It happened like this: Janet was resentful because of the breakup and other things, so when I took a trip to Washington, she refused to let me take the children back to Mexico for a visit. I took them anyway and Janet was furious. She said if I didn't send them back, she'd expose me as a CIA officer. I knew she was bluffing, but The Company didn't. So Win Scott, the station chief, called me in and said, "Send them back." I said, "No. If you want to fire me right now, OK, I quit." They couldn't fire me, because the Ambassador needed me; it would have been too awkward for him to fire one of his Olympic attachés on the eve of the games. But they were really in a lather.

[Q] Playboy: The CIA felt that you were disloyal?

[A] Agee: To put it mildly. But, in fact, I wasn't really disloyal to the CIA even then. When I resigned, I had no intention of writing a book, of doing the CIA any harm. I was still a prisoner of middle-class respectability and of that pervasive CIA security consciousness. I went to work for a friend in Mexico City who was marketing a new product, and I figured I'd just forget I'd ever worked for the CIA.

[Q] Playboy: But you couldn't forget?

[A] Agee: I couldn't forget. The memories kept coming back like things I'd swallowed but couldn't digest. Then my marriage plans fell through and I had plenty of time to think. The feeling began to grow inside me that I had some message to give--that I should tell the American people what their Government was doing in their name. I found myself making notes. First I thought of writing sort of a scholarly treatise on the CIA. I wrote an outline and took it to New York. Five publishers turned it down. But I'm stubborn, you know. I'm a Capricorn, if that means anything. Headstrong. So back in Mexico, a friend who knew Francois Maspero, a radical publisher in Paris, put me in touch with him. And, well, Maspero agreed to give me a small advance and help me get the book written. But I couldn't find the research material I needed in Mexico. You see, I had no notes from my CIA days; I had to find contemporary sources to refresh my memory, so I could reconstruct events. I could have continued in Paris or maybe London, someplace outside the jurisdiction of U. S. courts, so they couldn't enjoin my work as they had Marchetti's. Another possibility was Havana, and with Maspero's help, arrangements were made for me to go there.

[Q] Playboy: Why Havana?

[A] Agee: We found that there were newspapers and magazines and other reference works at the National Library and the Casa de las Americas. But, besides, I really wanted to see for myself what the Cuban Revolution was all about.

[Q] Playboy: How much were you allowed to see in Cuba?

[A] Agee: They let me go anywhere except onto military reservations. In 1971, I traveled all over the island, and I was (continued on page 78)Playboy Interview(continued from page 64) impressed. The Cubans were quite enthusiastic about the Revolution, in spite of the many hardships caused by the U. S. economic blockade--and by their own mistakes, too. They supported their government; they were convinced it was giving them a fair deal. So was I. Cuba had done what the other Latin-American countries had pledged to do in the early Sixties: It had redistributed income and integrated its society.

[Q] Playboy: Did the CIA discover in 1971 that you were inside Cuba?

[A] Agee: Surprisingly, I don't think they did. I knew The Company checks passenger manifests on all planes and ships that make stops in Cuba. Somehow they missed me. I guess good luck made me reckless, because before leaving Havana to continue research in Paris, I did something really foolish. I wrote a long, signed letter to a Montevideo political journal, describing some of the CIA's covert-action operations in Uruguay. There was an electoral campaign on there and I thought I could help the left-wing coalition--which was similar to the Popular Unity coalition that had elected Allende in Chile the year before--by suggesting that the CIA would be helping the corrupt traditional parties. It was as if I had forgotten everything I had learned about the CIA and how dangerous it can be. I was damn soon reminded, though.

[Q] Playboy: What happened?

[A] Agee: I was visited in Paris by a CIA officer named Keith Gardiner, a Harvard type, a guy I'd known a long time, who told me that Richard Helms, who was director of the CIA then, wanted to know what the hell I thought I was doing by writing that letter to the Montevideo publication. It was a scary moment. I decided I'd better bluff. I figured that if The Company knew how little work I'd actually done on the book--less than a third of the research--they might figure it was safe to get rough. So I told them it was already written and I was cutting it to a publishable length. I promised to submit the final draft to the CIA before publication.

[Q] Playboy: But you didn't?

[A] Agee: I never intended to. At that time, I was just trying to calm them down. I hoped that would stall them for a while, but I couldn't be certain, and from that moment on, I lived under a big strain.

[Q] Playboy: Were you afraid you might be assassinated?

[A] Agee: I was too busy to think about that. But I was jumpy. For one thing, I wasn't sure to what lengths the French secret service might go to please The Company. At the very least, I was afraid I might be deported and put on some plane that made its first stop in New York.

[Q] Playboy: Did you see any indication that your fears were justified?

[A] Agee: A few months after Gardiner's visit, I noticed I was being followed on the street. I couldn't be sure if it was CIA people or a French liaison operation working at the CIA's request. And I had no idea what they might be setting me up for. For all I knew, they might have been a bunch of killers. Anyway, about the same time, my advance from the publisher ran out. The situation was pretty grim. The CIA was after me and sometimes I literally didn't have a franc for cigarettes. I felt pretty damn small and alone. Friends helped out with food and some small cash donations, and to avoid the surveillance, I went to live in the room of a friend who's an artist. In the daytime, I worked as usual at the library doing my research, but I kept the place where I was living a secret.

[Q] Playboy: How did you duck the people who were tailing you?

[A] Agee: It wasn't too hard. I'd take the Métro, for example, the Paris subway, and when the train arrived, I'd just stand by the door and let it go off again and see if anybody had stayed in the station with me when all the other people were gone. Or when I got off the train, I'd stay there on the platform and let everybody leave and then see if anybody else had remained on the platform. Usually, there was a group of three or four of them. Once identified, they'd be easy to lose. One time, when I had a little cash, I took a cab. My retinue took a cab, too. I told my driver to stop at the Arc de Triomphe. When he did, I pretended to be fumbling for my money, but I was really watching my surveillance team in the rearview mirror. They got out of their cab fast, all set to keep following me on foot. But the minute their cab drove off, I told my driver I'd decided to ride a little farther. So we pulled away and left them standing there. I couldn't resist--I turned around slowly, held my hand up and gave them the finger.

[Q] Playboy: Besides following you, did The Company make any other moves?

[A] Agee: Some surprisingly obvious ones. A CIA man visited my father in Florida and tried to scare him about what might happen to me. Another CIA man called on Janet and got her to write me a letter of concern. He also told her they'd pay me to stop and not publish. She didn't tell me this, but my older son did--he was listening secretly. God, I hope spying isn't congenital!

In the spring of 1972, The Company moved against me more directly. A young man who said his name was Sal Ferrera showed up in a café I liked and introduced himself as an underground journalist. I told him who I was and what I was doing. He offered me a small loan and suggested that he might do an interview with me. I was desperate for money, so I took the loan and let him have the interview. He bought me a dinner one night and afterward we met a woman named Leslie Donegan, who said she was a Venezuelan heiress. At Sal's urging, I saw Leslie again and soon she offered to support me while I finished the book--provided I let her read the manuscript. I needed money so badly I let her have a copy for a few days.

[Q] Playboy: Did Leslie come through with the money?

[A] Agee: In dribs and drabs, enough to keep me going. It's ironic to think that the book may have got finished partly because the CIA, through Leslie, supported me through my darkest hour. But the situation had its risks. I was just plain foolish to keep seeing Sal and Leslie. The bugged typewriter was the last straw.

[Q] Playboy: The CIA bugged your typewriter?

[A] Agee: Sal lent me a portable that Leslie eventually switched for a different one. I took it to my secret living place. One afternoon I went out to get a bottle of beer and when I went back to the room, I saw a man and a woman in the hall outside my door. When they saw me, they began kissing. I thought right away they might be surveillance agents--but how had they found out where I lived? The friend whose room I was staying in went out to see what they were doing in the hall. When they saw her, they hurried down the back stairs but couldn't get out the back door, because it was locked. When she followed them down, they started embracing and whispering again and then ran up to the main floor and escaped by the front door. They had something bulky under their coats--probably the receiving set for monitoring the bug in the typewriter.

[Q] Playboy: The typewriter had led them to you?

[A] Agee: This typewriter--the one you see right here on the table. The one that's photographed on the cover of my book. After catching the monitors, I began to examine the typewriter Leslie had given me. I noticed that when it was facing a certain way, I heard a beeping sound on my FM radio. So I tore off the lining on the inside roof of the case and there it was--a complicated system of miniaturized transistors, batteries, circuits, antennas, even a tiny switch glued flat against the roof of the case.

[Q] Playboy: Have you ever been accused of rigging this yourself to discredit the CIA?

[A] Agee: I wouldn't know how to make one of these. My editor in London had a technical study made and the thing is legitimate--made in TSD.

[Q] Playboy: So they'd found out where you lived--what did they do then?

[A] Agee: I didn't give them a chance to do anything. I left that room the same day and slept in a different hotel every night until I took off for London.

[Q] Playboy: Why did you go to London?

[A] Agee: Partly to get information, partly to look for a new publisher. I found one (continued on page 164)Playboy Interview(continued from page 78) almost overnight. An editor of Penguin Books, Neil Middleton, believed in the book and gave me an advance. I also found the information I still needed. I'd been looking desperately for Latin-American newspapers that covered the years when I was there. John Gerassi, who has written extensively on Latin America and was teaching at the University of Paris when I was in France, had told me the British Museum had complete files and he was right. They were just what I needed. I decided to stay in London and rewrite the book. With all the new material available, I saw I could reconstruct a diary of the whole period. I finished the research in eight months, then in the next six months I wrote over 600 pages in a terrific burst of work.

[Q] Playboy: Did the new material inspire you?

[A] Agee: Well, it wasn't only the material. I had met a young woman just before I left Paris. Angela's a Brazilian in her early 20s. We fell in love before she knew I had worked for the CIA and before I knew she had been in prison and been tortured by the CIA-supported military regime in Brazil. Strange, isn't it, that two people with such opposite experiences should have come together? It was from Angela that I learned the full horror of what I had been doing in supporting repression. When I was in Montevideo, I was actually in charge of spying on Brazilian exiles who opposed the military regime and had fled to Uruguay. I reported on their activities to our CIA station in Rio. Anyway, Angela came over to London a few months after I did and we've been together ever since. She was a tremendous help with the book, reading and discussing every sentence with me, helping with the typing and the Xeroxing. I was so scared that the CIA might try to steal the manuscript that every time I got 20 or 30 pages done, we'd Xerox copies and hide them all over London.

[Q] Playboy: You say Angela was tortured by the Brazilian government?

[A] Agee: In early 1970; she was 19, a student at Catholic University in Rio. She had gotten involved in radical politics and had to go underground, and was wounded in an ambush by the military police. They left her for dead and she had almost escaped when they spotted her and hauled her off to an interrogation center, where they began to torture her.

[Q] Playboy: What kinds of torture did they use?

[A] Agee: Clubs, truncheons, fists. They hung her upside down from a bar and beat her. They would stand behind her and clap her ears as hard as they could with both hands. She says her head felt as if it were exploding, blood spurted out of her ears and she passed out. But most of the torture was done with a field telephone. They attached electrodes to sensitive parts of the body, the nipples or the lips, and then cranked the telephone as hard as they could. Sometimes they poured water on her before they turned the crank; because water is a conductor of electricity, the pain was even more excruciating. One of her torturers got the bright idea of putting the electrodes on her gunshot wound and then cranking the generator. The electricity forced the wound open again. Somehow Angela held out. All she admitted under torture, which went on over a period of maybe four months, was her membership in an underground party--and she was ashamed of admitting that. A year and a half after she was arrested, she went to trial. A year after that, she finally got out. Her closest relative, an aunt who is a lawyer, shipped her out of the country.

[Q] Playboy: Is torture still going on in Brazil?

[A] Agee: Every day. There's one difference. At first, the torturers wore name plates and didn't bother to hide their faces. Later, after several were executed by revolutionaries, the torturers got nervous and began to hood their victims. But many names were already known. They turned up in Chile, too, and were recognized there. After Allende fell, the Brazilian military lent the Chilean military some of its most successful torture teams as a gesture of good will.

[Q] Playboy: How is Angela now?

[A] Agee: Solid. No emotional scars that I can see. A very gentle and spiritual woman. She's with me and my children, who are living with us permanently now, in England. The book is for her and for all the people who have suffered torture because of the CIA. You know, when and if the history of the CIA's support to torturers gets written--not just in Brazil but in Chile, Uruguay, Portugal, Greece, Iran, Indonesia, above all in Vietnam--my God, it'll be the all-time horror story.

[Q] Playboy: Has The Company kept after you in England the way it did in France?

[A] Agee: I've been shadowed and my phone was tapped.

[Q] Playboy: People are always saying their phones are tapped. How do you know your phone was tapped?

[A] Agee: How about this? Just last week, at home, the telephone went dead for a couple of hours. Then it rang and a guy on the line asked, "Is this a WB 400 number?" or some letters like that and then a number. And I said, "What's that?" And he said, "Oh, this is the telephone-company engineer, and we've just installed a new cable up the hill toward your house, and I'm in here in the exchange right now, connecting it." And I said, "What do you mean, a WB 400 number?" And he said, "Oh, you know, it's one of those observation lines." And I said, "Observing what?" He said, "Well, they don't tell you very much about it. I'm new; this is my first job. But there's this little black box on the frame here where your pair is." And I said, "Well, I don't know." And he said, "Well, now, tell me, are you ... is this a private line?" And I said, "Yes." And he said, "Oh, excuse me. Yes, yes, yes--everything's all right. Thanks. Bye." I checked later with some people who know about phone tapping in Britain, and they have a system there for monitoring lines where they have obscene or threatening calls, and they use that as a cover for political line tapping.

[Q] Playboy: Have there been any obvious attempts to harass you?

[A] Agee: Nothing overt until Angela and I and the boys went on a two-week trip to Portugal over Christmas and New Year's. We went with the car by ferry from Southampton to San Sebastián, Spain, and when we were rolling off the ferry, Christopher said, "Hey, Dad, I just saw that policeman looking at our license plate and now he's making a phone call." Sure enough, when we pulled out of the docking area, five cars pulled out after us! We looked like a funeral procession. It was obvious what had happened: The CIA had known of our trip from the telephone tap and had asked the Spanish service to shadow us--I hoped that was all. But it occurred to me, for instance, that they could have planted some drugs in my car. If they stopped us and "found" drugs, I could be put away for 20 years! Anyway, with that army on our tail, I figured they had something major in mind, but I knew I couldn't outrun them. They were all in big cars and I was driving a little VW. So I just moseyed along steadily for an hour or so. Occasionally, one of them would pass me, then drop back. Once I pulled into a rest area just as one of the drivers was changing his license plates--the CIA makes an all-purpose quick-change license-plate bracket that fits different sizes of plates from different countries. When we reached the caves at Altamira, two of our shadows went down into the caves with us to see the prehistoric paintings. When we came out, I saw another agent holding in a curious way what looked like a TSD briefcase. So I drifted in his direction and when I passed him, I heard the camera inside the briefcase go zing!

[A] It was getting scary, but suddenly I had a real bit of luck. We came to a city named Torrelavega. It was about six, the rush hour, and the streets were crowded with cars. Up ahead there was a big intersection, maybe seven streets coming together and one traffic cop in the middle, trying to keep all the lines moving. OK, I thought, this is my chance. I stopped the car against the cop's signal and pretended I was stalled. He got hysterical. There were horns blowing, mass confusion. The cop forced all the cars behind me, including, of course, all the surveillance cars, to go around me and keep moving. I watched which streets they turned into, then took a different street and made a couple of quick turns. Pretty soon I was on the back road to Burgos and we never saw them again. But that was lucky. They were asleep.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think The Company is behind the leaks that have been made to the press about you in the past year?

[A] Agee: Sure it is. During the Watergate hearings, while Senator Howard Baker was investigating the CIA's involvement, he came across a veiled mention of a "WH Flap." He assumed the phrase meant White House Flap. Actually, it meant Western Hemisphere Flap and referred to me and my book. This had to be explained to Senator Baker. The CIA figured that someone would talk and the cat would soon be out of the bag. So an attempt was made to discredit me in advance. A story was leaked to The New York Times, A.P., The Washington Post and Newsweek about a "drunk and despondent former CIA officer" who was talking to the K.G.B., telling them all about the CIA.

[Q] Playboy: And were you drunk and despondent?

[A] Agee: Why should I be? I'd finally finished my book.

[Q] Playboy: Were you talking to the K.G.B.?

[A] Agee: No way. And they knew I wasn't. In the CIA's so-called news leak, the CIA officer wasn't identified, the K.G.B. people weren't identified, the time and place and substance of the supposed conversations weren't given. Nevertheless, the Times and Newsweek fell for the story and printed it as fact. The Washington Post printed an item but said it was unconfirmed.

[Q] Playboy: Nobody bothered to check the story out?

[A] Agee: That's right. Where the CIA is concerned, very few journalists have learned to tell information from disinformation. But that time, the smear wound up on the CIA's face, and I owe that to Victor Marchetti. By the way, the CIA tried to get Marchetti to spy on me. When The Company heard that he was going to England, they asked him to steal my manuscript so they could read it. We think they already had a copy of the book and were just trying to use him so they could discredit him with his friends as an informer. Of course, he turned them down.... But getting back to the smear story. Marchetti told Larry Stern of The Washington Post what the CIA was trying to do to me, and Larry flew over to England to see me and got the facts and printed them. The Times sent Dick Eder to see me and then printed an item saying its source had retracted the story. It's a small victory, I guess, but to me it's not a trivial one. If the press can start to expose some of the CIA's little lies, maybe someday it'll get around to exposing some of the big ones.

[A] The big victory for me right now, of course, is the publication of the book and the fact that it's a success. But I've been lucky to get this far, when you think of the odds. My father thinks what I'm doing is some kind of personal vendetta against the agency--not so, of course, but the agency sure trashed me in an effort to complicate my negotiations for U. S. publication of my book. There was, for example, a series of leaks to Jack Anderson that he obligingly printed, to the effect that I'm under some kind of Cuban-government control. Too bad about Anderson. You'd think he'd have wanted to help get my book published in the U. S., since his so-called CIA sources confirmed its accuracy to him. But it finally is getting published there. The CIA can't hide its crimes from the American public forever, and I'll bet other books will follow Marchetti's and mine.

[Q] Playboy: But doesn't the CIA have a legitimate bone to pick with you? For instance, like Daniel Ellsberg, you've been accused of violating a secrecy agreement. What do you say to that?

[A] Agee: I did violate the secrecy agreement. But I think it was worse to stay silent than to violate the agreement. The agreement itself was plain immoral--like criminals' swearing secrecy.

[Q] Playboy: Do you plan to go back to the U. S. and risk indictment?

[A] Agee: I don't know if I'm subject to indictment and neither do my lawyers. If it turns out I am subject to indictment, I may go back and fight it as a test case. I may not.

[Q] Playboy: Even if you don't go back to the U. S., you're going to publish your book there. Other than indirectly, as through the leaks to Anderson, do you think the CIA has tried to block it?

[A] Agee: The CIA let prospective publishers know that if they tried to publish it, they would face expensive litigation. But a lot has happened since Marchetti's book was published. If as much comes out as I expect, the CIA may look pretty silly if it tries to assume a posture of civic virtue in front of a magistrate. That's why I published the book first in England. I figured the CIA couldn't so easily stop publication there and I figured that once the truth was out somewhere in the world, it would be much harder to keep from the American people. And that's what I really care about. I wanted the book to be published in the United States because I wanted the American people to know what I know about the CIA, what the CIA has been doing all these years, all over the world, in their name.

[Q] Playboy: Many people agree with your aims but disagree strongly with your methods. They say that by revealing the names of CIA agents and exposing CIA procedures your book jeopardizes U. S. security. What is your answer to that?

[A] Agee: I think it's a little late in the day to pretend that what I've written puts the country in any danger. What I've written puts the CIA in danger. The CIA claims that secrecy is necessary to hide what it is doing from the enemies of the United States. I claim that the real reason for secrecy is to hide what the CIA is doing from the American people and from the people victimized by the CIA.

[Q] Playboy: But many people who dislike the CIA as much as you do have charged that by revealing the names and functions of individual officers and agents of the CIA, you have endangered the lives of your former colleagues, many of whom you yourself induced to become employees of The Company. Your accusers ask: Wasn't it unnecessary, wasn't it immoral, wasn't it, in fact, a crime to reveal those names?

[A] Agee: Absolutely not. Those people talk about the CIA as if it were an international charity of some sort and about me as if I'd done something horrible to a lot of decent, well-meaning Y.M.C.A. leaders. In fact, the CIA. in my opinion, is a criminal organization at least as nefarious as the Mafia and much, much more powerful. Even more than the Vietnam war, the CIA represents the destruction of our national ideals on the pretext of saving them. What you've got to understand is that in revealing the names of CIA operatives, I am revealing the names of people engaged in criminal activities. These people live by breaking the law. Every day of the week, CIA men break the laws of the countries they're stationed in. I don't know any country in which bugging or intercepting mail or bribing public officials is legal.

[A] At the same time, it's nonsense to say that by exposing the CIA officers and agents I knew, I have endangered their lives. I have exposed some to problems, but The Company can solve those problems for the indigenous agents in Latin America. As for the Company officers I've named, well, they can stay in Langley if they want to be safe.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think your book has disrupted CIA operations in Latin America?

[A] Agee: I hope so, and I think the disruptions I've caused will be followed by many more around the world. I think the fact that Marchetti and I have broken ranks and somehow survived is going to encourage a lot of other CIA men to come out of that poisonous log of secrecy they've been living in and tell their stories. There's a lot of soul-searching going on in the CIA now and I'm going to do all I can to help the people who decide to get out. If my book is a commercial success, I'll be able to support CIA men who want to talk.

[Q] Playboy: In your opinion, what will be the result of the CIA investigations in Washington?

[A] Agee: The Rockefeller Commission was never a real danger to the CIA. President Ford set it up to whitewash The Company. The House committee shows real promise and so does the one in the Senate. These committees have the chance right now to correct the mistake the Congress made almost 30 years ago in not making sure the CIA was closely controlled. I sure hope they do, and I would applaud anything they could do to restrict CIA-promoted repression, even though I think the CIA should be abolished.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think that's a serious possibility?

[A] Agee: I think that for the time being, we will have some kind of intelligence collection for early warning and monitoring of agreements with the Soviets. But this can be preserved under the military services. Perhaps also the analytical work done by the nonclandestine part of the CIA will be continued. But it could be continued in a wholly different kind of organization, with a different name and without any of the kinds of overseas operations that I engaged in. Imagine the fear and suspicion and resentment that would be eliminated on the part of other governments if the CIA were abolished or at least if its overseas operations were. And we might avoid those future Vietnams that are germinating wherever The Company is supporting repressive governments.

[Q] Playboy: In your book, you support socialist revolution. Don't you think that will turn a lot of people off to what you have to say?

[A] Agee: It's just the opposite: I couldn't answer all the letters of support I'd gotten--even before the book had come out in the U. S.

[Q] Playboy: Couching the world picture in your terms, those of class warfare, is the CIA winning or losing?

[A] Agee: The question should be whether people, not the CIA, are winning or losing. In the Third World, the poor are beginning to win, in my opinion. In an era of expensive energy, the U. S. no longer has the money to protect its foreign investments at all costs and to repress every socialist movement. More and more, we're going to have to learn to live within our own resources. The CIA can still do a lot of harm, but its palmy days are over--unless we really go fascist, and with a depression coming on. that's a live possibility. In the United States, though, it seems to me the poor are not yet winning. The system that's been exploiting the rest of the world is also exploiting Americans. The difference is that other people are more aware of it.

[Q] Playboy: Aren't you being doctrinaire? The American worker you consider exploited is said to have the world's highest standard of living.

[A] Agee: Poverty and prosperity are relative as well as absolute measurements. Have you read the 1974 Report of the Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs? This report, written before unemployment soared, stated that 40,000,000 Americans, 20 percent of the population, are living in poverty--in fact, are sinking deeper into poverty every year. On the average, they were hungrier and needier in 1974 than they had been five years earlier. The report also pointed out that in the last 45 years--all through the New Deal, the Fair Deal and the biggest economic boom in U. S. history--the proportion of the national income received by the 20 percent at the bottom of the income scale had not changed one iota. And get this: The Senate committee discovered that the richest one percent of the U. S. population not only has more wealth than the poorest 50 percent of the population--it has eight times more! And we've supposedly had 40 years of liberal reform.

[A] If we want social and economic justice, we're going to have to scrap capitalism as we know it. Already in the space of three short generations, a third of the world's population has done this. Are we going to be the last? We should realize that socialist societies are built on national traditions--for better or for worse--and that we can build socialism and at the same time preserve our special tradition of civil liberties and right to dissent. But right now, unless someone's really rich, he's demoralized by the fear that there won't be enough to go around unless he screws the other guy. We're so goddamn alone, everybody guarding his own pile, however small. Property separates people from one another. But we're so tranquilized by sex and beer and football and the chance to play a small hand in the game of success that we don't even know we're being exploited. I suggest it's time we noticed how badly we've been had and began to stand up for ourselves. I suggest that if we want to, we can make sure that whatever there is to go around goes around fairly. But that's socialism. And remember: New systems can develop only when people are ready for them and want them--if imposed by foreign peoples or brute force, they fail.

[Q] Playboy: We all agree that the free-enterprise system has faults. But no socialist system that has been set up so far provides the sort of idealistic paradise you envision, with everything fairly distributed. The point at issue here is the CIA--whether it does more good than harm, whether the world would be better served by its existence as is, by its reform or by its destruction.

[A] Agee: I leave it to you to decide. I promise you that the CIA now knows who you are and is undoubtedly at this moment running you through its computers. Have you ever been arrested? Are your tax returns up to date? Did you ever fail to pay a bill? Have you ever been to an analyst? Did you ever knock a girl up? Are you strictly heterosexual? Do you sometimes blow a little grass? And, by the way, when you leave the hotel, glance over your shoulder. Somebody may be following you.

Because of the subject's importance, we are accompanying this month's Playboy Interview of ex--CIA officer Philip Agee with statements on other aspects of the agency's functions by three experts in their fields: John Marks, co-author of The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence, who discusses the CIA's vast empire of proprietary business firms; Fred Branfman, co-director of the Indochina Resource Center, who has conducted extensive research on the CIA-directed secret war in Laos; and Kenneth Barton Osborn, former military-intelligence operative in Vietnam, who cooperated with the CIA's Phoenix program of authorized political assassinations.