The CIA had previously experienced damaging and embarrassing leaks, but these were droplets compared to the torrent that poured out of CovertAction Information Bulletin, a publication dedicated to using disclosures of secret information to cripple America's capacity for conducting intelligence operations. For a time it was surprisingly successful.
A low-budget magazine with an erratic publishing schedule, CovertAction wasn't much to look at, but it packed a punch. Its power came from exposing the identities of CIA officers and operatives, and describing some of the agency's most sensitive operations. CovertAction also educated its readers around the world about CIA tradecraft, provided lessons on spotting spooks, as well as detecting and evading electronic surveillance, and encouraged citizens to apply this knowledge to mount vigilante attacks on American spies and their operations.
The CIA viewed CovertAction and books published by its staff as an existential threat.
Ronald Reagan's CIA director, William Casey, told Congress that the individuals who produced CovertAction “understand correctly that secrecy is the life blood of an intelligence organization and that disclosures of the identities of the individuals whose intelligence affiliation is deliberately concealed can disrupt, discredit and—they hope—ultimately destroy an agency such as the CIA.”1
While its raison d’être was exposing secrets, CovertAction held tightly onto its most important secret: its founder's close collaboration with communist intelligence services.
CovertAction was created by Philip Agee, a renegade former CIA officer who was devoted to destroying the institution he had once served. It was secretly supported by the Dirección General de Inteligencia (DGI), Cuba's intelligence service, and by the KGB, which considered the publication one of its most effective “active measures” against the United States.2
The pages of CovertAction and books produced by its staff disclosed the identities of over two thousand undercover CIA officers, impairing and in some cases destroying their ability to collect intelligence or conduct secret operations. Along with publishing accurate depictions of CIA activities, including some that many Americans would find abhorrent, such as the subversion of democratically elected governments and complicity in torture, the magazine also served as a conduit for Soviet propaganda and disinformation.
According to the CIA, while they were working for CounterSpy, a precursor of CovertAction, the magazine's staff published revelations that directly led to the murder of a CIA station chief in Athens. The CIA also blamed CovertAction for an attack on the top CIA officer in Jamaica. Agee and CovertAction's staff denied that they inspired either incident.
Agee also denied any connection to communist intelligence services.
Like anything viewed through the rearview mirror of history, the competition between the United States and the USSR seems to shrink in importance over time, especially as living connections to the Soviet Union pass away. But as he looked out into the world in 1957, when he joined the CIA, all Agee could see was the Cold War and the proxy hot wars it inspired. He was an uncritical supporter of American foreign policy at a time when all other goals were subordinate to containing and rolling back communism.
For a dozen years Agee recruited agents and ran covert operations in Ecuador, Uruguay, and Mexico. He witnessed and participated in the CIA's incitement of armed uprisings, plotting of coups, subversion of elections, and tainting of the media with propaganda. Agee came to believe, much like Smedley Butler four decades earlier, that American activities in Latin America were not intended to promote democracy but rather to advance the financial interests of American capitalists. Echoing Butler's disillusionment, Agee later wrote that the CIA was “nothing more than the secret police of American capitalism, plugging leaks in the political dam night and day so that shareholders of US companies operating in poor countries can continue enjoying the rip-off.”3
Searching for explanations for the economic inequality and poverty he witnessed, Agee, who had been educated by Jesuits, shed his Catholicism and adopted Marxism. The failure of his marriage may have contributed to his crisis of faith. In 1968, while stationed in Mexico City, he submitted his resignation to the CIA, effective early the next year. Agee remained in Mexico City and, seeking an outlet for his anger, and an instrument of retribution against the CIA, started writing a book about his experiences. Agee contacted publishers in New York seeking a contract and advance, but was rebuffed by editors who wanted a spectacular exposé, not the Marxist treatise he pitched.4
Undeterred, Agee traveled to Havana in May 1971 determined to write his book. He later acknowledged that he had received assistance from Cuban officials in researching his book in exchange for pledges that it would be “politically acceptable to the Cubans.”5 Given the de facto state of war between the DGI and CIA, it is inconceivable that he would have been able to enter Cuba, or to retain his freedom there, without collaborating with its intelligence service.
Agee maintained a low profile and apparently stayed off the CIA's radar until October 1971, when a newspaper in Montevideo published a letter to the editor he had sent from Havana. It warned that the CIA was likely to mount covert operations to prevent a leftist party from winning Uruguay's upcoming national elections. Publication of the letter tipped off the CIA that Agee had turned against it, sparking an investigation that revealed his plans to write a book about the agency. By the time the CIA started looking for him, Agee had traveled to Paris. CIA agents posing as leftists befriended him and tried to obtain a copy of his manuscript. To help the agency keep tabs on Agee, they lent him a typewriter in which he found a concealed microphone and transmitter. The CIA pressured Agee's family to entice him to return the United States, presumably so that he could be arrested, but he stayed in Europe. Decades later, Agee claimed he had evidence that the CIA was so anxious to quash his book that it had plotted to kill him before it could be published.6
Inside the Company: CIA Diary was published in Britain in April 1975 and was an immediate sensation. The public, and especially journalists, were fascinated by firsthand accounts of the agency's use of bribery, forgery, bugging, wiretapping, and blackmail throughout Latin America. And they were appalled to learn that the CIA was abetting torture.
In one of the most dramatic passages, Agee described how he and his colleagues had come up with a scheme to drive a wedge between the government of Uruguay and the Soviet Union. It involved fabricating a plot by four Soviet diplomats to conspire with leftist labor unions to overthrow the government. As part of the operation, Agee recommended that the police place a young labor leader named Oscar Bonaudi in protective detention. A few days later, on December 12, 1965, Agee was visiting a police station when he heard agonized screams emanating from a nearby cell. Agee immediately suspected that it was Bonaudi, the man he had falsely accused. A few days later he learned that this was correct, and that the torture had continued for three days.7
The horror, Agee asserted, went far beyond the CIA abetting the brutalizing innocent individuals. CIA subversion, he wrote, was directly responsible for the seizure of power across Latin America by corrupt, authoritarian dictators who oppressed and impoverished millions of people.
To the extreme consternation of his former employer, unlike previous books that criticized the CIA, Agee's made no attempt to mask the identities of intelligence officers or their agents. Inside the Company featured an appendix that named 250 CIA officers and provided detailed information about government officials and private citizens they had recruited. For example, Agee accused the future president of Costa Rica, Jose Figueres, of being a “front man for CIA operations.” The book listed hundreds of organizations from newspapers to labor unions that, Agee claimed, had been penetrated or coopted by the CIA.
Published in the United States six months after its release in London, Inside the Company was a bestseller.
The CIA assumed that Agee, who had spent considerable periods in Havana, must have been in touch with the DGI. It also suspected he was cooperating with the KGB. For decades, however, there was no evidence to support these suspicions. The first confirmation came from a remarkable source—notes secreted from the Lubyanka by a former KGB employee named Vasili Mitrokhin.
The journey that brought those notes to the CIA's attention started in 1956, when Mitrokhin was a foreign intelligence officer. He participated in a discussion at work about Nikita Khrushchev's famous speech revealing Stalin's crimes. While his colleagues denounced Stalin, Mitrokhin asked, “Where was Khrushchev when all these crimes were taking place?”8 This impertinent question helped derail his career as a spy. The young skeptic was relegated to working in the service's dusty archives, where having learned his lesson, he kept his growing disillusionment with the KGB and the Soviet Union to himself. In 1972 Mitrokhin was put in charge of moving 300,000 foreign intelligence files from the Lubyanka in downtown Moscow to a new building in the suburbs. He spent his days alone in the archives and hatched an audacious plan: At tremendous risk, over a decade the archivist took detailed notes and smuggled them out of KGB offices. He hid them under the mattress in his apartment, and on weekends took them to his family's dacha, stuffed them into containers, and buried them beneath the floorboards. His plan was to find a way to alert the world to the KGB's actions—especially its crimes.
Taking advantage of the chaos following the breakup of the Soviet Union, Mitrokhin contacted representatives of British intelligence in late 1991, and a year later he, his family, and his extraordinary notes were “exfiltrated”—surreptitiously moved—to Britain. The British shared the information with the CIA.9
Among the many revelations buried in the exhumed notes are excerpts from files indicating that Agee worked closely with the DGI in researching and writing Inside the Company. Furthermore, Mitrokhin's records indicate that the KGB played a major role in the project. An internal KGB memo took full credit for the book, claiming that it was “prepared by Service A, together with the Cubans.”10 Service A was the KGB's “active measures” department.
One of Mitrokhin's conditions for turning over his treasure trove to British intelligence was that the information would be released to the public. The Sword and the Shield, the first of two books based on the files, was published in 1999. It described Agee's collaboration with the DGI and KGB. Later, Mitrokhin's raw notes were made available to the public.
In 1994, prior to publication of the Sword and the Shield or any other public discussion of Mitrokhin's allegations about Agee, the former KGB general Oleg Kalugin published a memoir that included a description of the provenance of Inside the Company. Kalugin, who headed KGB counterintelligence during the time that Agee was completing his book, reported that the CIA defector initially approached the KGB in Mexico City offering damaging information about the CIA. He was turned away by officers who thought he was a “dangle,” or false defector.
The threat of dangles wasn't hypothetical, as Agee knew. While he was working for the CIA, Agee learned that an American master sergeant had been dangled to the KGB in Mexico City in 1968. The soldier met with twenty-six KGB case officers over eight years in Mexico, West Germany, Switzerland, Japan, and Austria, giving the United States tremendous insight into KGB operations and, presumably, opportunities to feed its rival disinformation. The operation lasted until 1976, when Agee tipped off the KGB.11
The KGB approached Agee only after reviewing secrets he'd spilled to the Cubans and realizing that his defection was genuine. “The Cubans shared Agee's information with us. But as I sat in my office in Moscow reading reports about the growing list of revelations coming from Agee, I cursed our officers for turning away such a prize,” Kalugin wrote.12 While Agee was finishing his manuscript, the KGB kept in touch with him through Edgar Anatolyevich Cheporov, the London correspondent of the Novosti news agency and of the Soviet literary weekly Literaturnaya Gazeta. Agee complied with a request from Cheporov to remove references in his manuscript to the CIA's penetration of Latin American communist parties. This information presumably would have tarnished the parties’ reputations.13
A review in a CIA journal concluded that Inside the Company “will affect the CIA as a severe body blow does any living organism: some parts obviously will be affected more than others, but the health of the whole is bound to suffer.”14 Agee and his backers in the DGI and KGB must have been pleased by the impact. They were, however, aiming for more than a body blow.
The next punch was thrown in August 1978 at the Eleventh World Festival of Youth and Students in Havana. Agee and a small group of supporters distributed copies of a new book, Dirty Work, which identified seven hundred CIA staff who were at the time or had previously been stationed in Western Europe. Agee had never been posted to Europe, so the information must have come either from research he and his collaborators conducted, from the KGB, or a mix of the two.
The co-author of Dirty Work was Louis Wolf. A Quaker and conscientious objector to the Vietnam War, Wolf had become radicalized while performing alternative service in Laos where, he believed, the CIA had turned him into an unwittingly pawn in its clandestine war against communists.15
In addition to rolling out Dirty Work, Agee and his comrades used the festival to announce the launch of CovertAction. As with Inside the Company, the KGB privately took credit, claiming in an internal memo that the magazine was founded “on the initiative of the KGB.”16
The inaugural issue of CovertAction included a Naming Names column. The magazine explained that as a “service to our readers, and to progressive people around the world, we will continue to expose high-ranking CIA officials whenever and wherever we find them.” It apologized for including only one name, Dean J. Almy, the CIA chief of station in Jamaica, and promised to provide longer lists in future issues.17
The lead article, written by Agee and Wolf, presented CovertAction's philosophy. It called the CIA the “Gestapo and SS of our time” and asserted that “exposure of its secret operations—and secret operatives—remains the most effective way to reduce the suffering they cause.” Agee and Wolf proposed a “novel form of international cooperation” in which opponents of the CIA would scour lists of Americans working as diplomats or on aid projects, identify likely CIA operatives using techniques described in a chapter in Dirty Work called “How to Spot a Spook,” then send the information to CovertAction. The magazine promised to check the research and publish all the information it could confirm. It estimated that the CIA had about five thousand officers experienced in running clandestine operations and suggested that it should be possible to identify almost all of those who had ever worked under diplomatic cover. The article concluded with a call to action: “We can all aid this struggle, together with the struggle for socialism in the United States itself.”18
After the youth festival, Agee returned to London. While he was listed on the masthead and contributed articles, most of the work of producing CovertAction was undertaken by Wolf; Ellen Ray, a journalist; and Bill Schaap, a lawyer. Newspaper and magazine articles about CovertAction and its staff invariably highlighted its location in the Press Building, a setting that had clearly been chosen to bolster its claim to protection under the First Amendment to the US Constitution. A profile of Wolf distributed by the New York Times news service described a “miasma of suspicion about the office” and stated that “Wolf believes the telephones are tapped by the National Security Agency on behalf of the CIA.”19
Another article about the CovertAction team, printed in the Village Voice, set the scene by reporting that it was based on an interview the author had conducted in the Press Club bar with Ray, Schaap, and Wolf. It described how the turmoil of the ’60s, and especially the Vietnam War, shaped the outlook of CovertAction's staff. While Wolf was working with peasants in Laos, Schaap and Ray were in Okinawa, “organizing workers at the big air base and helping GI's get out of going to Vietnam,” the Village Voice reported. And, the story continued, “they had these kites…these kites to bring down B-52s, kites with tinfoil stringing from them that they'd fly right up there in front of these huge jets loaded with 10,000-pound bombs lofting off the runways of Okinawa on another run to the Mekong Valley. Bill and Ellen, standing there at the end of the runway with their kites, trying to lasso a goddamn B-52!”20
There is no evidence that Wolf, Ray, Schaap, or anyone else connected with CovertAction wittingly collaborated with intelligence services, or that they were aware of Agee's connections to the DGI and KGB. It didn't take much imagination, however, to guess where Agee obtained the secret CIA documents and biographies of undercover CIA officers he provided to the magazine. Like Agee, Wolf, Ray, and Schaap were driven by a visceral hatred for American covert operations, affinity for the Soviet Union—at least their fantasy of the Soviet Union—and a fervent desire to help socialism triumph over capitalism.
The denunciations of human rights abuses in the pages of CovertAction never extended to those committed by the Soviet Union, China, or their allies. The magazine trained a spotlight on government surveillance activities but failed to aim it at East Germany's Stasi, which was tapping, bugging, and spying on its population. And CovertAction's sympathy for the plight of the oppressed didn't extend to the millions of innocent people whose lives were destroyed in the Soviet prison camps or their analogues in China, North Korea, and other workers’ paradises.
Inside the second issue of CovertAction there was an account by a former CIA finance officer, James Wilcott, of techniques the CIA used to target and recruit foreign diplomats. Wilcott and his wife, Elsie, a former CIA secretary, were advisors and frequent contributors to CovertAction. Wilcott's article was accompanied by a guide to identifying CIA officers working undercover as diplomats, an interview with a Cuban intelligence officer who claimed he had infiltrated the CIA for ten years, and the Naming Names column revealing the identifies of CIA personnel in France, Italy, India, Venezuela, El Salvador, and Jordan.21
The KGB created a task force dedicated to supplying CovertAction with material that would harm the CIA. In addition to providing names of agency officers, Soviet intelligence gave the magazine classified documents. For example, in 1979 the KGB provided CovertAction with “Director of Central Intelligence: Perspectives for Intelligence, 1976–1981,” a classified document that had been mailed anonymously to the KGB's Washington rezident.22
Also in 1979, according to Mitrokhin's notes, two KGB officers “met Agee in Cuba and gave him a list of CIA officers working on the African continent.” Some of this information was featured in the fourth issue of CovertAction, which provided extensive information about CIA activities in Africa, including a Naming Names column with the identities of sixteen CIA station or base chiefs on the continent.23
CovertAction's coverage of Africa was expanded into a book, Dirty Work 2: The CIA in Africa. In the introduction Agee addressed critics who had called out the one-sided nature of the CovertAction team's reporting. “There is no pretense of trying to ‘balance’ this book by describing similar, or different, activities of socialist nations,” Agee wrote.24 He argued that although the USSR and its allies “may well employ clandestine operations, the frequency and depth of such activities have been modest in comparison with secret intervention by Western powers.” Assistance to African countries from the Soviet bloc “tends to be public, well-known, and without the stigma attached to political support, overt or covert, from the US and the former colonial powers,” Agee claimed.
CovertAction got its hands on a manual used in CIA training called “The Principles of Deep Cover,” and reproduced the ten-page document in its August 1980 issue. While the magazine presented the manual as a contemporary document, it had actually been written in 1961. Despite its vintage, the insights were relevant twenty years later and remain so today.25
The manual described the lengthy, detailed planning that went into establishing “deep cover,” defined as the ability of intelligence officers to live “as legitimate private citizens with such authenticity that their intelligence sponsorship would not be disclosed even by an intensive and determined investigation.”26 It advised that CIA officers consider employing “natural cover,” by recruiting individuals who were working for a private company and teaching them to be intelligence officers. “Some companies are willing to furnish information on all the young men they recruit for their foreign branches and to make those selected as potential agents available for training with reasonable assurances that they will eventually be assigned where the service wants them.”
The manual also explained why elaborate measures to create and maintain deep cover were necessary. “The simplest and therefore the most used device an intelligence service has for getting its unwelcome officers covertly into other countries is to assign them to cover jobs in its government's diplomatic missions, consulates, and other official representations there,” it explained. While simple, this practice, which the Soviets called “legal” and Western intelligence services called “official” cover, has the “disadvantage that the disguise is a pretty shabby one. It requires no Herculean counterintelligence effort to determine which foreign officials probably have intelligence connections; they can be kept deniable, but not really secret.”27
Peeling off the thin layer of subterfuge covering CIA officers posted under official cover was one of CovertAction's core activities. While it wasn't difficult for the KGB or other sophisticated intelligence service's to spot CIA officers working abroad under official cover, their jobs became far more difficult when their identities had been made public. The KGB, fearing reciprocal unmasking by the CIA of its officers working under legal cover, rarely did this. Kalugin and his comrades were delighted, however, to help Agee and Wolf make the lives of CIA officers miserable. This happened when a newspaper, say in Ouagadougou, ran a story based on data from CovertAction pointing out that a local US Agency for International Development representative was a spook. This often led to demonstrations in front of the outed agents’ homes, threats to their families, and the disruption of their ability to recruit and run agents.
In some cases, CovertAction didn't restrict itself to “naming names” in print. It actively publicized the identities of CIA employees and tried to get them run out of town. In the most dramatic incident, Wolf traveled to Kingston, the capital of Jamaica, and on July 2, 1980, read out the names of fifteen reputed CIA officers at a press conference. He also provided their home addresses, telephone numbers, and car license-plate numbers. In case anyone missed the press conference, which was televised live in Jamaica and later rebroadcast, Prime Minister Michael Manley's party printed the information on handbills.28
The performance was intended, according to Wolf, to counteract a destabilization campaign that the CIA was running against Manley's socialist government.29
Two days later, at 2:30 a.m. on the night of July 4, the home of the CIA chief of station, Richard Kinsman, was raked by machine-gun bullets. A small bomb exploded on his front lawn. The bullets missed the bedroom where Kinsman was sleeping; his family was traveling outside of Jamaica. American newspapers immediately blamed Wolf and CovertAction.
Wolf issued a press release and held a press conference denying any responsibility for provoking the violence. He suggested that it had been staged by the CIA to smear CovertAction and revive stalled efforts to pass legislation criminalizing the disclosure of the identities of intelligence officers.
The CIA seized the opportunity. On July 8 deputy director Frank Carlucci sent a package of press clippings about the attack to members of congressional intelligence committees and the Senate and House leadership. “The incident exemplifies most vividly the potential for harm which flows from activities of organizations like CovertAction Information Bulletin, and why I continue to believe such activities should be restricted under the law,” he wrote in a cover letter. “I further believe we can ill afford to wait until another member of a US overseas mission comes home in a casket before the Congress addresses this pressing problem.”30
Publicity about the attack revived interest in the Intelligence Identities Protection Act (IIPA), a bill that had been first introduced in 1975 after the murder of Richard Welch, the CIA chief of station in Athens. As in case of the 1980 incident in Jamaica, the CIA and its supporters attributed Welch's murder to an article in CounterSpy, the Washington-based magazine that was launched and had folded prior to the establishment of CovertAction. Agee, Ray, and Schaap, who all worked for CounterSpy at the time, blamed CIA security lapses, not their disclosure of his identity, for Welch's assassination.
The IIPA, widely referred to as the “get Agee bill,” stalled over objections that it would be impossible to outlaw the outing of CIA staff without violating the First Amendment's guarantee of freedom of speech. These objections were based in part on the fact that official cover could be breached without access to classified information, simply by using the tools of journalism. Wolf or anyone else who had been trained to detect the tracks of a covert CIA career could dive into the National Archives, immerse themselves in obscure government documents, and emerge with lists of putative CIA officers.
Wolf and his comrades tried to persuade American journalists that an attack on CovertAction was an attack on the right of all publications to report about intelligence operations. The IIPA, according to Wolf, was a “serious threat, not only to the Bulletin, but also to freedom of the press, investigative journalism, and reform of government abuses here in the United States.”31
Whatever sympathy mainstream news media had for this view was blasted away by Agee's and CovertAction's pro-Soviet orientation, the joy they took in naming names, and their indiscriminate disruption of CIA operations. After the shooting and bombing of Kinsman's home, the New York Times and Washington Post editorial pages endorsed the need for legislation to protect the identities of intelligence officers. They also pushed for limitations that would not restrict what they considered legitimate journalism.
The Post excoriated Wolf and those who emulated his practice of naming names of CIA operatives: “Though they work with a pen rather than a gun, they are terrorists in spirit, and their true purpose is to destroy democracy.”32
Responding to the Post editorial, Wolf, Ray, and Schaap called themselves “journalists in the traditional sense, with good faith, just as much as your reporters are, and there is no way a law can distinguish between us.” They challenged the Post's accusation that they sought to destroy democracy with the assertion that the “CIA represents the least democratic aspect of the entire US government.”33
The Times branded Agee a “villain for all seasons” and wrote that he had “abused his former access to intelligence methods by systematically publicizing the names of those he knows or suspects to be secret operatives.”34 Its editorial board wrote that imposing harsh penalties on “those who so callously violate their oaths of secrecy” wasn't sufficient:
Mr. Agee is contagious. He has inspired Louis Wolf and others who never worked for the CIA to spot the names of US agents and to name them in publications like Mr. Wolf's CovertAction Information Bulletin. They have a common purpose: to blow the agents’ cover and thus destroy vital intelligence functions. They are indifferent to the safety of the agents. They don't even pretend to distinguish between useful and questionable spy projects.35
The Times nonetheless urged caution, noting that “several of the bills aimed at Mr. Wolf would punish the publication even of widely known facts.”36 Proposals to require prosecutors to prove a sinister intent provided little reassurance, it added: “Since Government is all too quick to equate criticism with treason, and to consider all public discussion of intelligence as harmful, the requirement to prove a hostile intent may be no protection whatever.” The self-appointed voice of mainstream journalism concluded, “Congress should pass only the most tightly drawn identities bill and then get on with more pressing matters: the quiet but smart management of the spy service, for instance.”
Wolf, Schaap, and Ray responded to the Times by asking: who made you the arbiter of what disclosures are acceptable? The staff of CovertAction and their supporters, including the American Civil Liberties Union, wondered aloud why newspapers, including some like the Times that had long histories of collaboration with the CIA, should be permitted to decide that publication of the Pentagon Papers was in the public interest while details of CIA operations published in CovertAction were not.
By September 1981 the IIPA was advancing and the Times and other newspapers were concerned that in trying to suppress disclosures by individuals who mined their scoops from open sources, Congress would violate the First Amendment and chill legitimate journalism. By “outlawing what Louis Wolf does,” a version of the bill under consideration in the House “strikes at every reporter and scholar who would publish facts that Government prefers to keep concealed,” the Gray Lady warned. The paper's complaint was language subjecting a publisher to criminal penalties if it “had reason to believe” disclosure would harm national security.37
Congress eventually convinced itself that it had threaded the needle. The final version of the IIPA makes unauthorized intentional disclosure of information identifying a covert agent a crime if the person responsible for the disclosure knows that the United States is trying to conceal the agent's association with American intelligence. Disclosures by individuals who did not have access to classified information can be punished only if the perpetrator participated in a pattern of activity designed to discover and reveal the identities of covert agents with the intent to harm US intelligence operations. President Ronald Reagan signed the bill into law on June 23, 1982, at a ceremony at CIA headquarters.38
Wolf and his collaborators had seen the writing on the wall. “Because of the imminent passage of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, this will be our last Naming Names column until such time as the constitutionality of the Act has been decided by the courts,” CovertAction announced in its October 1981 issue.39 Realizing that judges and juries were unlikely to be sympathetic to activists promoting a worldwide socialist revolution, they decided to wait for someone else to challenge the law in court. The magazine vowed, however, “to continue our struggle against covert operations and US secret intervention around the world.” It went out with a bang, listing the identities and biographical details of sixty-nine CIA officers in forty-five countries, from Bangladesh to Zambia.
While CovertAction was waging war on the CIA from the National Press Building, the CIA was keeping Agee on the move. CIA pressure prompted the United Kingdom, France, and the Netherlands to deport Agee. He eventually found refuge in Germany. In 1979 the US State Department revoked Agee's passport. The decision was provoked by reports that Ayatollah Khomeini's revolutionary government had invited him to travel to Iran to serve on a tribunal judging American actions in the country. There were also news reports that he had been asked to help student militants who were holding fifty-two American diplomats hostage prove that they were CIA spies. Agee publicly said that he'd recommended to the Iranian government that it demand complete CIA documents on the agency's operations in Iran as a condition for releasing the hostages. Agee also said that he would not travel to Iran until the hostages were released.40
Agee sued in US courts to recover the right to use his passport. The case made its way to the Supreme Court. In agreeing to consider the case, the court stated that the “right to hold a passport is subordinate to national security and foreign policy considerations, and is subject to reasonable governmental regulation.”41 In 1981, the Supreme Court ruled against Agee. Revoking his passport was legal because he had “jeopardized the security of the United States” and endangered the interests of other countries, according to the decision. Grenada and Nicaragua provided him passports until communist regimes in those countries were overthrown. Agee ended up with a German passport, granted because he was married to a German citizen. The US government never charged him with a crime and Agee eventually traveled to the United States several times without incident.
With CovertAction shorn of its ability to name names, the frisson of excitement that accompanied publication of each new issue dissipated. Its stories detailing the CIA's paramilitary attacks on communist regimes throughout the developing world rippled across the mainstream media, but they didn't stir of waves of outrage. The magazine became more polemical, and even more obviously pro-Soviet. Mirroring the KGB's and the Kremlin's darkest fantasies, CovertAction continually warned its readers that the United States was on the verge of launching an unprovoked nuclear war. It also distributed Soviet disinformation that was so crude that no other American publication would touch it.
CovertAction falsely accused the CIA of responsibility for a Cuban outbreak of dengue fever, saying it was “only the latest in a long line of outrageous, immoral and illegal CBW [chemical and biological warfare] attacks against Cuba.”42 It repeated old, discredited allegations that the United States had dropped “germ bombs” on North Korea during the Korean War, and repeated phony Soviet stories that the United States. was spreading dengue and yellow fever in Afghanistan under cover of malaria-eradication efforts.43
Of all of the Soviet propaganda CovertAction regurgitated, perhaps the most pernicious was dissemination of lies about the origins and nature of AIDS. It ran lengthy articles presenting pseudoscientific theories about AIDS, many of them involving nefarious plots by the American government. These stories laid out numerous ways in which AIDS could have been an intentional or inadvertent product of American CBW activities. CovertAction's preferred theory was that the CIA had plotted to contaminate pig vaccines in order to impoverish Third World peasants, that something had gone wrong with the vaccine, and that the mistake somehow inadvertently led to the worldwide AIDS epidemic. CovertAction suggested that its readers take seriously the views of Peter Duesberg, a UCLA researcher whose denial that HIV is pathogenic had influenced South Africa's President Thabo Mbeki to reject drugs that could have saved millions of lives.44
In 1988, summing up the morass of nonsense about AIDS it had served up in series of stories, CovertAction stated that “one conclusion is clear: Western institutions—military, governmental, corporate and especially medical—played a major role in the origin and spread of AIDS. This was probably more through their ‘normal’ functioning than by a specific CBW ‘conspiracy,’ though that cannot be ruled out.”45
The editors of CovertAction did not applaud the demise of the Soviet Union. Searching for explanations for what it clearly considered a catastrophe, the magazine constructed an elaborate conspiracy in which the National Endowment for Democracy, a private, US government-financed foundation, was the tip of the spear for “one of the largest coordinated covert operations ever set in motion.” It pointed to the endowment's leader, Allen Weinstein, a historian then little-known outside academe, as the mastermind behind the plot. Boris Yeltsin's rise to power was not a democratic revolution, CovertAction informed its readers, but rather a “victory in a new kind of warfare.” Anticipating arguments adopted by Yeltsin's successor, Vladimir Putin, CovertAction warned its readers that the success of America's project to destroy the USSR by promoting democracy “is bound to be reproduced and exported around the world.”46
The shuttering in 2005 of CovertAction, by then a fringe publication that hadn't made the leap into cyberspace, was little noticed. The debates it provoked in the first half-dozen years of its existence, however, are as relevant today as they were in the final decade of the Cold War. The CovertAction experience foreshadowed the way governments and society have responded to dumps of classified data by WikiLeaks, disclosures of the former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, and reporting on emails associated with Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign. Like CovertAction's naming of names, these events raised questions about the definition of journalism, and the responsibilities of reporters and publications to their readers and to society. They also challenged governments to defend the ethics and legality of covert intelligence operations, and revived old concerns about the ability of open societies to protect themselves against attempted subversion by totalitarian states.