Philip Agee

The Telegraph (2:08am GMT 10/01/2008, Philip Agee) has this obituary:

Philip Agee, who died in Havana on Monday aged 72, turned from being a CIA agent into the most notorious of its "ideological defectors"; after leaving the agency in 1969, he made a career out of exposing the names of CIA personnel and attacking its methods.

Agee established his reputation as a critic of the CIA with Inside the Company: A CIA Diary, published in Britain in 1975 prior to its release in America. The book identified approximately 250 Agency officers and agents and claimed that "millions of people all over the world had been killed or had their lives destroyed by the CIA and the institutions it supports".

According to the British and American security services, the book led directly to the deaths of several agents. "It was not enough simply to describe what the CIA does," Agee recalled. "It was important to neutralise the effectiveness of everybody doing it."

In 1975, after requests from the American government as well as an MI6 report that blamed Agee's work for the execution of two of its agents in Poland, an order was issued to deport Agee from Britain, where he had been living....

...Agee's version was that it was his Roman Catholic conscience that had persuaded him to leave the CIA, and he certainly succeeded in presenting himself as a principled critic of US intelligence. In 1978 he and a small group of his supporters began publishing the Covert Action Information Bulletin, a platform for his campaign to "expose" the workings of the CIA. In 1978-79 Agee published two volumes of Dirty Work, which exposed more than 2,000 covert CIA agents in western Europe and Africa as well as details about their activities....

...The son of a Florida businessman, Philip Burnett Franklin Agee was born on July 19 1935. He joined the CIA straight out of college in 1957 and worked as a case officer in several Latin American countries. He described himself as being politically "naive" in his youth, and colleagues recalled him as Right-wing; he argued against the minimum wage, saying that it would bankrupt small businessmen such as his father, who ran a laundry and uniform rental service in Tampa.

By his own account Agee became increasingly disillusioned with the way in which the CIA was supporting the traditional power structures in Latin America, where wealth was in very few hands. "We call this the 'free world'," he wrote, "but the only freedom under these circumstances is the rich people's freedom to exploit the poor."....

...Agee, who was twice married and had two sons, was described after his death by the Cuban Communist Party newspaper Granma as a "loyal friend of Cuba and staunch defender of the people's struggle for a better world".