Philip Agee, YM"S, Traitor, 72

[Hail Columbia]

http://www.nypost.com/seven/01142008/postopinion/editorials/death_of_a_traitor_639490.htm

January 14, 2008 -- When Philip Agee, the rogue ex-CIA agent, died last week at 72, most of the published obituaries used terms like "renegade" and "whistle-blower," saying he'd simply become "disillusioned" with US foreign policy.

Few, if any, used the one word that best described him:

Traitor.

In the 1970s, Agee - who'd left the CIA in 1969 after a 12-year career as a covert agent - began exposing the identities of US intelligence agents around the globe.

Nearly 1,000 had to be hurriedly withdrawn from their assignments, their usefulness as covert agents forever destroyed.

And those were the lucky ones - though Agee long denied it, the CIA insisted that some agents he'd named were murdered before they could flee.

Not surprisingly, his one-man crusade to demolish the CIA by exposing its field agents was widely hailed on the left - which, in other contexts, never has much sympathy for people who "name names."

Agee himself claimed his actions were in the "long and honorable tradition" of political dissent.

Nonsense.

He was fortunate that the feds could never prosecute him because no laws then covered what he'd done. In response, Congress passed the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, making it a crime to intentionally unmask a covert agent. (That law much later sparked the probe into who had disclosed Valerie Plame's identity.)

Oleg Kalugin, a former Soviet KGB official, said Agee worked with Cuban intelligence in the early '70s, divulging information on CIA activities in Latin America that was passed on to Moscow; he called Agee "a valuable source."

Fortunately, Agee spent much of the rest of his life on the run: Expelled from several European nations, he found refuge in Marxist Grenada until the 1983 US invasion, then moved to Sandinista-controlled Nicaragua.

He died in his last safe haven - Fidel Castro's Cuba - after surgery for perforated ulcers.

Hmm. Maybe Michael Moore will make a movie about the medical care that killed him.