Was Phillip Agee a Traitor?

[ModerateMiddle]

Was Daniel Ellsberg? I read on this forum in the last couple of days someone talking about Agee as being a traitor. I liken him and his actions to what Ellsberg did, and I certainly don't consider him to be a traitor. Ellsberg is credited with the beginning of the end of both the Vietnam war and the Nixon Imperial Presidency.

What do you think?

Here is an interview with Agee:

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=03/10/02/159258

AMY GOODMAN: Good to have you with us. Why don't we start off with Larry Johnson's comment with what the Bush's alleged, and your response to this whole scandal that is brewing in Washington.

PHILLIP AGEE: Well, Mr. Johnson is repeating a story put about by the C.I.A. beginning with the Welch assassination in Athens in 1975.

From the moment of that event the C.I.A. tried to put the blame on me because at that time I was involved with quite a lot of other people in a guerrilla journalism campaign to expose the C.I.A.'s operations and its people, especially in western Europe at that time.

George Bush's father came in as C.I.A. director the month following the Welch assassination. As director he presided over the agency as they mounted a campaign throughout western Europe trying to make me appear to be a security threat, a traitor, a Soviet agent, a Cuban agent. All those sorts of things which led to my expulsion from five different NATO countries in the late 1970's.

In fact it was in all based on lies, and to think that I was responsible for the death of any C.I.A. people for their exposures is absolutely false. No one as far as I know of all those people who were exposed as C.I.A. people along with their operations was ever even harassed or threatened. What happened was, their operations were disrupted and that was the purpose of what we were doing.

We were right to do it then, because the U.S. policy at the time executed by the C.I.A. was to support murderous dictatorships around the world, in Greece, Chile, Uruguay, Brazil. That's only to name a few, and we oppose that use of the U.S. intelligence service for those dirty operations.

I'm talking about regimes now that tortured and disappeared people by the thousands.