Traitor Phillip Agee Dies, Called a ‘Whistleblower’ by Reuters

Sometimes they just blurt out their bias:

CIA whistle-blower  Philip Agee dies in Cuba
By Anthony Boadle
Wednesday, January 9 05:14 pm

HAVANA (Reuters) – Philip Agee, a former CIA spy who exposed its undercover operations in Latin America in a 1975 book, died in Havana, the Cuban Communist Party newspaper Granma said on Wednesday.

Agee, 72, died on Monday night, the newspaper said, calling him a “loyal friend of Cuba and staunch defender of the people’s struggle for a better world.”

His widow, German ballet dancer Giselle Roberge, told friends he had been in hospital since December 15 and did not survive surgery for perforated ulcers.

Agee worked for the Central Intelligence Agency for 12 years in Washington, Ecuador, Uruguay and Mexico. He resigned in 1968 in disagreement with U.S. support for military dictatorships in Latin America and became one of the first to blow the whistle on the CIA’s activities around the world.

His book “Inside the Company: CIA Diary” revealed the names of agents in Latin America and was published in 27 languages.

Agee said working as a case officer in South America opened his eyes to the CIA’s Cold War goal in the region: to prop up traditional elites against perceived leftist threats through political repression and torture.

“It was a time in the 70s when the worst imaginable horrors were going on in Latin America — Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Guatemala, El Salvador — they were military dictatorships with death squads, all with the backing of the CIA and the U.S. government,” he wrote.

“That was what motivated me to name all the names and work with journalists who were interested in knowing just who the CIA were in their countries,” he said.

The U.S. government called him a traitor and said some of the agents he exposed were later murdered, an allegation Agee rejected.

Agee went to live in London but was deported by Britain in 1976 at the request of then secretary of state Henry Kissinger. The U.S. government revoked his passport three years later.

……Agee, a German citizen through marriage, settled in Cuba in the 1980s after several European countries denied him residence.

In 2000, Agee set up an online travel agency catering to Americans willing to defy a U.S. travel ban and visit the Communist-run island. The business folded due to tighter enforcement of sanctions by President George W. Bush.

(Reporting by Anthony Boadle; editing by Stuart Grudgings)
Link: http://uk.news.yahoo.com/rtrs/20080109/tpl-uk-cuba-usa-spy-43a8d4f.html

After Reuter was inundated with angry e-mails:

Several readers objected to the “whistle-blower” headline, making a fair point.

They responded with this:

We subsequently change the headline to:

Ex-CIA spy who exposed agents dies in Cuba GBU Editor
Link: http://blogs.reuters.com/gbu/2008/01/11/whistle-blower/

Notice they still don’t use the appropriate description of TRAITOR.

Boadle does a fine job whitewashing Agee’s treason and subsequent responsibility for the murder of CIA operatives.
He was an avowed Marxist-Leninist who defected to Cuba for the same reasons Kim Philby defected to the Soviet Union; he was rewarded with safe haven by his communist benefactors for passing secrets that damaged the security of the free world.

Another fact that Reuters forgot to mention is that the CIA was battling the brutal tactics of the KGB; an agency well versed in the the “worst imaginable horrors” going on throughout Latin America. Who the hell did he think taught the communists, including Sandinista Daniel Ortega, the fine art of erradicating the Miskito Indians and anyone else opposed to his vision of a peasant “utopia”? The good news is, he lived long enough to see his beloved communism collapse like dominos across Russia and Eastern Europe.

Newsflash, Reuters: The internet is your worst nightmare. You can’t get away with presenting the “facts” as you see fit.