Los Angeles Times
     NATION & WORLD
     Tuesday, October 14, 1997

     By JAMES RISEN, Times Staff Writer

     Espionage: An effort to get secrets for Cuba was foiled, but
he got away before case against him could be made, officials say.
He denies charges.
 

     WASHINGTON -- It was an aggressive, even reckless bit of
espionage, allegedly committed by a man too well known for his
own good.

     CIA officials and other U.S. government sources charged that
Philip Agee, a former CIA officer, author and CIA critic, went
undercover as a spy for Cuba in late 1989 to try to pry secrets
out of a female staff member in the agency's Mexico City station.

     U.S. officials alleged that Agee was acting on behalf of
Cuba's intelligence service, which has long staked out Mexico as
a central espionage battleground with the CIA. Agee has denied
the charges.

     Agee, posing as a member of the CIA's inspector general's
staff, tried to convince the staff member that he needed
information about the Mexico City station as part of a secret
investigation, the officials charged. CIA sources said that Cuban
intelligence traditionally has targeted women staffers in their
espionage operations.

     The plot failed, U.S. officials said, when the CIA employee
reported the contact and brought two CIA case officers with her
to her second meeting with Agee. But one of the two case officers
told Agee that he recognized him, the officials said, and Agee
ended his efforts before enough evidence could be collected
against him to bring formal charges.

     The two CIA officers later were disciplined for their
failure to notify their superiors of Agee's alleged action early
enough for the FBI to launch a criminal investigation of whether
the former CIA agent had committed espionage against the United
States.

     Agee's alleged willingness to act as a field agent for the
Cubans astonished U.S. intelligence officials.

     They said they believe that Agee -- who quit the CIA during
the Vietnam War in 1968 and later was known for his willingness
to expose undercover CIA officers and operations through public
lectures, magazines and books -- has been working for Cuban
intelligence since the early 1970s.

     A high-ranking Cuban defector in 1992 told The Times that
Agee had repeatedly taken money that the Cuban intelligence
service had received from the Soviet KGB intelligence agency.

     But CIA officers said that they had never seen Agee work
openly as a field operative for the Cubans until his alleged
approach to the female CIA staff member in Mexico City -- an
incident that remains classified.

     In written responses to a series of questions from The
Times, Agee denied that he was involved in the Mexico City case.
He suggested that the story of his involvement in Mexico City had
been inspired by the CIA to counter a lawsuit in which he is
seeking damages for alleged illegal actions committed against him
by the CIA in the early 1970s.

     He stressed that he is not a Cuban agent.

     "The story is one more in a long line of false allegations
[inspired by the CIA] going back to the first mention of me in
the New York Times of July 4, 1974," Agee said in a faxed
response from his home in Hamburg, Germany.

     "As for Cuba, the CIA has for many years used the word
'agent' to characterize my relation with the revolution because
to them it means 'sold out,' 'controlled,' 'traitorous,' etc.
This is not the case, and I am no 'Cuban agent. . . . '

     "As is widely known, for more than 25 years I have been one
more American working in solidarity activities with Cuba and
against U.S. hostility, aggression, blockade, etc. etc. If this
makes me a 'Cuban agent,' then there are certainly a lot of us
out there."

     Agee was in Cuba in July at the invitation of the Cuban
Committee for Peace and the People's Sovereignty to attend an
international student festival. In an interview with the official
Chinese news agency, he alleged that the CIA had ordered the
death of Ernesto "Che" Guevara.

     Despite their belief that Agee has been a Cuban agent for
years, the CIA and FBI have long been frustrated by their failure
to gather enough evidence to prosecute him.

     Although the State Department revoked his passport in 1979
after Agee proposed solving the Iranian hostage crisis by
exchanging CIA files on Iran for American hostages, he apparently
has traveled in and out of the United States without difficulty
and has made numerous public appearances in this country.

     In college lectures and extensive interviews, he frequently
attacks the CIA as "criminal, immoral and against the interests
of all but a very few Americans."

     But most galling to CIA officers is their belief that he is
regarded as a legitimate critic of U.S. intelligence, not as a
foreign spy. "The media treats him like any other former CIA
officer with a point of view, but he is a traitor," complained
one former senior CIA officer.

     In a speech at CIA headquarters on Sept. 17 during
ceremonies marking the agency's 50th anniversary, former
President Bush, who served as CIA director in the mid-1970s,
singled out Agee for his ire.

     "Remember Phil Agee, who I consider a traitor to our
country?" Bush asked the crowd. "The guy encouraged the
publishing of names of those serving under cover, sacrificing
their lives."

     Agee established his reputation as a critic of the CIA with
the publication of his controversial 1975 book, "Inside the
Company: a CIA Diary." Published in 20 languages, the book
exposed CIA actions around the world. At the same time, he sought
to identify CIA undercover officers.

     "It was not enough simply to describe what the CIA does,"
Agee recalled in a recent television interview. "It was important
to neutralize . . . the effectiveness of everybody doing it. And
that's why I was involved after my first book came out in the
exposure of hundreds and hundreds of CIA people around the
world."

     His second book, "On the Run," published in 1987, described
what he alleged was a CIA campaign to harass and silence him,
especially during the years in which he was working on his first
book.

     More recently, he has been engaged in a legal battle with
former First Lady Barbara Bush. Agee filed a libel suit against
Mrs. Bush and her publisher for alleging, inaccurately, in her
autobiography that Agee was responsible for revealing the
identity of the CIA's Athens station chief in his first book,
just before the station chief was killed. The former first lady
ultimately agreed to remove the allegation from her book.

     But CIA officials said that Agee's alleged actions in Mexico
City took him far beyond the role of anti-CIA propagandist.

     The female staff member whom Agee was said to have
approached was apparently a member of the Mexico City station's
support staff and was not trained in espionage work. CIA sources
said that they believe Cuban intelligence operatives steered Agee
to her in hopes that she would not report his overtures.

     Yet, she promptly went to a case officer in the station to
report the contact, according to senior U.S. intelligence
sources. She agreed to a second meeting with Agee, and two case
officers went along.

     One of the two recognized Agee and, according to some
sources, told him that he knew who he was. Agee then quickly
slipped away, the sources said. Later, the female staffer also
identified Agee's picture from mug shots shown to her by CIA
officials.

     For failing to notify their superiors soon enough about the
incident, the two CIA case officers were not only reprimanded but
also briefly taken off the agency's promotion list. They were not
fired because they had previously been considered among the best
case officers in the Mexico City station.

     "If they had notified their station chief and headquarters,
we could have gotten the FBI involved for criminal investigation,
but we lost that opportunity," said one former senior CIA
official who was involved in handling the matter. "And Agee got
away."

     Copyright Los Angeles Times