The leadership of CJA |
Only
hours after the Committee for Joint Action (CJA) issued a statement protesting
against the move to increase utility tariffs, the Public Utilities Regulatory
Commission announced the increases.
The Insight is shocked that the PURC and
Government have refused to listen to the protests of the CJA, AFAG, the
political parties and Civil Society groups.
The
fact is that the corruption and inefficiency in the utility sub-sector is
monumental.
Our position is that if Government deals
effectively with the inefficiency and corruption in the sub-sector these
increases will be completely needless.
When
will our governments listen to our cries?
MAHAMA
He Accuses NPP of Fishing In Supreme Court Case
President John Mahama |
By Ekow
Mensah
President
John Dramani Mahama has said that the election petition filed by Nana Akufo-
Addo and others at the Supreme Court was nothing more than a “fishing
expedition”.
He said
“Finally when they rolled out their evidence, it was obvious to all right
thinking persons that they had just been on a fishing expedition”.
He was
speaking in an extensive and exclusive interview with “Africa Watch”.
He said “ of
course, we had done enough work to ensure that we would win, and we were
confident that we would win. And so when these allegations came up, it was a
real worry. We were anxious to see what evidence the NPP was going to bring.
Indeed, at first I thought it was a bluff and that they were just going to huff
and puff for awhile and then let us get on with the business of running the
country”.
According to President Mahama “In any human
enterprise, there will be mistakes or errors. And I am sure that if you take
any election in this country since 1992 and go on a fishing expedition as the
NPP did, you will find the errors of the Presiding officers not signing one
form or other, you will find errors in tallying. You will find much of the same
evidence that the NPP eventually brought up in court.
“You will
find much of the same because elections are a human enterprise. In the
excitement of an election, a presiding officer might forget to sign his or her
signature. And in most of the examples adduced, party agents had signed as a
testament of the results. Must that invalidate the votes of hard working citizens
who had done their patriotic duty of queuing for hours to cast their votes?
Indeed, the request was absurd. To ask the Supreme Court to annul more than
four million of your compatriots’ votes (almost one third of the votes) in
order that someone can be president is clearly a back door route to the
presidency”.
Asked if the
court case had taken some shine off Ghana’s democratic credentials, he said” In
a way it has. Ghana has made a lot of progress and our democracy has matured.
Our electoral system has been touted as one of the best in Africa, and it is
unfortunate for us to have done this to ourselves.”
NITE OF TRIBUTE
Kofi Awoonor |
The Socialist
Forum of Ghana ( SFG) is organizing a Night of Tributes to Professor Kofi
Awoonor, former chairman of the Council of State who died in a terrorist attack
in Kenya.
The event
will take place at the Freedom Centre in Accra on Monday, September 30, 2013 at
6:00pm.
A statement
issued by the SFG invited all Socialists, Nkrumaists, progressives and
patriotic Ghanaians to attend.
It said the event is designed to honour a
committed Socialist and Pan-Africanist.
Professor
Awoonor was a patron of the Freedom Centre and participated in many activities
at the Centre.
He was also
an avid reader of “The Insight”.
The SFG says the event will feature poetry,
booking reading and live music.
CJA IS ANGRY
The Committee
for Joint Action (CJA) is angry over the move to increase utility tariffs by as
much as 150 per cent.
In a
statement released in Accra yesterday, the CJA said rather than increase
tariffs the Government and the Public Utility Regulatory Commission need to
focus on improving efficiency and curbing corruption in the utility sub-sector.
The CJA also
frayed the Government for its insistence on the continued supply of power to
the Volta Aluminum Company (VALCO), which does not have the capacity to pay its
bills.
VALCO is
currently indebted to the VRA to the tune of GH¢77 million and it owes the
Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG) GH¢10 million.
The full text
of the CJA statement is published below;
In the last few days, the
government, through the PURC, has been a flying a kite to the effect that there
is going to be a massive increase in utility tariffs, namely electricity and
water.
Over the years, the CJA has
expressed serious concern about astronomical increases in utility tariffs at
levels which we consider unjustifiable and unnecessary.
The CJA is aware that due to factors
such as rates of inflation and currency fluctuations, it sometimes becomes
necessary to adjust tariffs. We are also aware of the August 2012 disruption in the supply of gas from Nigeria
to power thermal plants, which resulted in the nations reliance on the
relatively more expensive petroleum sources.
However, these alone do not justify
the 150% increase that is being threatened. In the course of the recent PURC
consultation, the CJA expressed concern
about the high levels of maladministration, inefficiencies and corruption
within the electricity industry.
For example, we were able to show
that the Electricity Company of Ghana, after paying for the cost of generation
and transmission, spends up to 63% of the remaining revenue on salaries while
they devote a paltry 29% to maintenance. The lack of effective maintenance has
meant that the total level of energy losses by the ECG alone is about 40%.
We also drew attention to the fact
that the ECG has not been efficient in collecting tariffs from large corporate
bodies and government institutions. In effect, the ordinary consumer is
effectively left to bear the cost of power supplies to companies that make
private profits and to subsidise Government operations.
Thirdly, government continues to
insist that electricity is supplied to the unproductive VALCO, a company that
does not have the capacity to pay its bills.
As a result, by the end of 2012, VALCO was indebted to the VRA by GH¢77
million. In addition, VALCO owes GRIDCO over GH¢10 million.
The corruption in the ECG is exacerbated by that Company’s
refusal to abide by the Public Procurement Act in the award of contracts and
other purchases. Most contracts awarded by the ECG are done through sole
sourcing, which fuels suspicions of wrong doing.
We had thought that the government
and the PURC would have taken these into account, and bring sanity into the
management of the energy sector.
We are worried that the impending
increases are going to be done without any reference to these issues and the
ordinary household consumer would be left to shoulder a huge tariff burden
caused largely by maladministration and corruption within the energy sector.
It is in this regard that we condemn
the levels of increases being threatened. We call on the government to consider
the plight of the ordinary consumer and ensure that sanity prevails within the
utility sub-sector.
Kwesi Pratt Jnr.
For Convener
Guinea-Bissau
President Caught up in Arms for Drugs Conspiracy
By Sara Moreira,
By Sara Moreira,
Guinea-Bissau's
interim president is beating back allegations that he played a role in a doomed
arms for drugs deal that involved smuggling weapons for supposed Colombian FARC
rebels from Guinea-Bissau in exchange for cocaine.
U.S.
indictments against seven men, including Guinea-Bissau's former navy chief,
includes their testimony which mentions President Manuel Serifo Nhamadjo. The
men were arrested off the coast of Cape Verde last week.
According to
the documents, these men, now defendants, told U.S. undercover anti-narcotic
agents (who were pretending to be FARC rebels) that they were in contact with
the president over the cocaine and weapons smuggling deal. The evidence that
mentions Nhamadjo is found on page 7 of the indictment CC-1 (defendant) agreed
to a proposal to ship FARC cocaine to Guinea-Bissau for later distribution in
the United States and to procure weapons for FARC, including surface-to-air
missiles. CC-1 also stated that he would discuss the plan with the President of
Guinea-Bissau. CC-1 stated, The day after tomorrow I'll talk to the President
of the Republic.
Page 10 of the same document, talks about the
weapons order:
CS-1
(undercover agent) provided CC-5 (defendant) with a list of weapons that the
FARC were requesting, which included among other things, surface-to-air
missiles, AK-47 assault rifles, and machine guns. Mane (defendant) said that he
and CC-5 (defendant) would speak to the President and Prime Minister of Guinea-Bissau
about the weapons order for FARC.
The
government allegedly expected a percentage of the 4,000 kg of cocaine as a fee:
During the
meeting, CC-2 and CC-4 (defendants) agreed to facilitate the receipt of
approximately 4,000 kg of cocaine from the FARC in Guinea Bissau, approximately
500 kg of which would be later sent to customers in the United States and
Canada.
The president
has lashed back at the allegations, calling them criminal.
Political and
military instability have been a constant feature of life in Guinea-Bissau, a
country which has never seen an elected president reach the end of their
mandate since its independence from colonial Portugal in 1974. The latest coup
d'etat on April 12, 2012, a few days after the second round of presidential elections,
saw Nhamadjo appointed transitional president as part of a deal made between
military commanders and political, religious, and civic leaders.
indictment-GB-US
US indictment.
Journalist
Helena Ferro de Gouveia wrote [pt] on her blog about what it would mean for
Guinea-Bissau if the allegations were true:
A
confirmar-se o envolvimento do presidente de transinum esquema de tr¡fico de
cocana e armas, milmetros separam o pas do abismo.
If the
involvement of the transitional president in a scheme of cocaine and weapons
trafficking is confirmed, millimeters separate the country from the abyss.
Even before
the coup, connections between certain elites, military figures, and drug
traffickers have long been an open secret in Guinea-Bissau. In the last decade,
the country has become one of the main transit points for cocaine smuggling
from South America into Europe.
Before the
news of the president's alleged involvement in the drug and arms smuggling
scheme, Nobel Peace Prize winner and former President of East Timor, Jos
Ramos-Horta, who has led the United Nations Integrated Peace-Building Office in
Guinea-Bissau since February 2013, said that Guinea-Bissau faces an existential
threat, as a State, as a nation and hoped that the political and military
elites will conduct an introspection, a self-examination on the anniversary of
the coup.
At the end of
March as the anniversary of the country's coup drew near, he described [pt] on
his blog Guinea-Bissau's role in the world's drug trafficking:
A
Guine-Bissau nao produz droga e o consumo e baixo. Ha sim grupos que funcionam
como correio e pelo trabalho recebem umas migalhas e j¡ ficam muito contentes.
Individuos de outras nacionalidades Colombianos, Bolivianos, Peruanos, Libaneses,
Marroquinos e Nigerians os profissionais do negocio. Face a eles, o
Bissau-Guineense e um amador que se contenta com migalhas mas que fica com a
fama!
Guinea-Bissau
does not produce drugs and the consumption is low. There are however groups
that work as courier and receive for the work a few crumbs and with that they
become very happy. Individuals of other nationalities Colombians, Bolivians, Peruvians, Lebanese,
Moroccans and Nigerians the business
professionals. Comparing to them, the Bissau-Guinean is an amateur who is
satisfied with the crumbs but gets all the fame instead!
Confirming
Ramos-Horta's point is accused drug kingpin Real Admiral Bubo Na Tchuto's
amusingly amateur blog-autobiography [pt]. Na Tchuto, former head of the navy,
is now under arrest in New York. He had been released from prison on orders of
Guinea-Bissau's army chief in June, 2012, after serving a few months due to
accusations of leading the coup attempt of December 2011.
Earlier in
March, Guilherme Dias from Lusomonitor blog summarized [pt] a Der Spiegel
reporter's experience looking into the drug traffic in the Bija islands
alongside an underfunded prosecutor:
As drogas
chegam em carregamentos de 600 ou 1.200 quilos e são armazenadas em três
depósitos, de onde são enviadas para a Europa. Dois paÃses europeus têm
satélites apontados à região e os investigadores internacionais sabem
que um destes depósitos está numa zona militar. “Eu at sei que um voo vai
aterrar esta semana no sulâ€, afirma
Biague, sem dinheiro para qualquer operação de apreensão. Com um custo
estimado de 115 euros, o repórter decidiu financiar. No final, foi um
fracasso.
Drugs arrive
in shipments of 600-1,200kg and are stored in three warehouses, from where they
are sent to Europe. Two European countries have satellites pointed to the
region and international investigators know that one of these warehouses is in
a military area. I even know that a flight is landing this week, says Biague
[Director of Police Investigation in Guinea-Bissau], without any money for a
drug bust. With an estimated cost of €115, the reporter decided to finance
the trip. In the end, it was a failure.
Meanwhile,
another mainstream media article, this time by Portuguese daily Público [pt],
revealed the heroic efforts of two women, Lucinda Barbosa Ahucari and Carmelita
Dias, to enforce the rule of law in Guinea-Bissau. Barbosa Ahucari, the
country's ex-director of police investigation, told blico that captured drug
kingpin Bubo Na Tchuto threatened her, accusing her of feeding information to
US investigators.
Source:Ocnus.net
2013
Eavesdropping on the Planet
By William Blum
In the course
of his professional life in the world of national security Edward Snowden must
have gone through numerous probing interviews, lie detector examinations, and
exceedingly detailed background checks, as well as filling out endless forms
carefully designed to catch any kind of falsehood or inconsistency. The Washington
Post (June 10)
reported that “several officials said the CIA will now undoubtedly begin
reviewing the process by which Snowden may have been hired, seeking to
determine whether there were any missed signs that he might one day betray
national secrets.”
Yes, there
was a sign they missed – Edward Snowden had something inside him shaped like a
conscience, just waiting for a cause.
It was the
same with me. I went to work at the State Department, planning to become a
Foreign Service Officer, with the best – the most patriotic – of intentions,
going to do my best to slay the beast of the International Communist
Conspiracy. But then the horror, on a daily basis, of what the United States
was doing to the people of Vietnam was brought home to me in every form of
media; it was making me sick at heart. My conscience had found its cause, and
nothing that I could have been asked in a pre-employment interview would have
alerted my interrogators of the possible danger I posed because I didn’t know
of the danger myself. No questioning of my friends and relatives could have
turned up the slightest hint of the radical anti-war activist I was to become.
My friends and relatives were to be as surprised as I was to be. There was
simply no way for the State Department security office to know that I should
not be hired and given a Secret Clearance. 1
So what is a
poor National Security State to do? Well, they might consider behaving
themselves. Stop doing all the terrible things that grieve people like me and
Edward Snowden and Bradley Manning and so many others. Stop the bombings, the
invasions, the endless wars, the torture, the sanctions, the overthrows, the
support of dictatorships, the unmitigated support of Israel; stop all the things
that make the United States so hated, that create all the anti-American
terrorists, that compel the National Security State – in pure self defense – to
spy on the entire world.
Eavesdropping
on the planet
The above is
the title of an essay that I wrote in 2000 that appeared as a chapter in my
book Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower.
Here are some excerpts that may help to put the current revelations surrounding
Edward Snowden into perspective …
Can people in
the 21st century imagine a greater invasion of privacy on all of earth, in all
of history? If so, they merely have to wait for technology to catch up with
their imagination.
Like a
mammoth vacuum cleaner in the sky, the National Security Agency (NSA) sucks it
all up: home phone, office phone, cellular phone, email, fax, telex … satellite
transmissions, fiber-optic communications traffic, microwave links … voice,
text, images … captured by satellites continuously orbiting the earth, then
processed by high-powered computers … if it runs on electromagnetic energy, NSA
is there, with high high tech. Twenty-four hours a day. Perhaps billions of
messages sucked up each day. No one escapes. Not presidents, prime ministers,
the UN Secretary-General, the pope, the Queen of England, embassies,
transnational corporation CEOs, friend, foe, your Aunt Lena … if God has a
phone, it’s being monitored … maybe your dog isn’t being tapped. The oceans
will not protect you. American submarines have been attaching tapping pods to
deep underwater cables for decades.
Under a
system codenamed ECHELON, launched in the 1970s, the NSA and its junior
partners in Britain, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada operate a network of
massive, highly automated interception stations, covering the globe amongst
them. Any of the partners can ask any of the others to intercept its own
domestic communications. It can then truthfully say it does not spy on its own
citizens.
Apart from
specifically-targeted individuals and institutions, the ECHELON system works by
indiscriminately intercepting huge quantities of communications and using
computers to identify and extract messages of interest from the mass of
unwanted ones. Every intercepted message – all the embassy cables, the business
deals, the sex talk, the birthday greetings – is searched for keywords, which
could be anything the searchers think might be of interest. All it takes to
flag a communication is for one of the parties to use a couple or so of the key
words in the ECHELON “dictionary” – “He lives in a lovely old white
house on Bush Street, right near me. I can shoot over there in two minutes.” Within
limitations, computers can “listen” to telephone calls and recognize when
keywords are spoken. Those calls are extracted and recorded separately, to be
listened to in full by humans. The list of specific targets at any given time
is undoubtedly wide ranging, at one point including the likes of Amnesty
International and Christian Aid.
ECHELON is
carried out without official acknowledgment of its existence, let alone any
democratic oversight or public or legislative debate as to whether it serves a
decent purpose. The extensiveness of the ECHELON global network is a product of
decades of intense Cold War activity. Yet with the end of the Cold War, its
budget – far from being greatly reduced – was increased, and the network has
grown in both power and reach; yet another piece of evidence that the Cold War
was not a battle against something called “the international communist
conspiracy”.
The European
Parliament in the late 1990s began to wake up to this intrusion into the
continent’s affairs. The parliament’s Civil Liberties Committee commissioned a
report, which appeared in 1998 and recommended a variety of measures for
dealing with the increasing power of the technologies of surveillance. It
bluntly advised: “The European Parliament should reject proposals from the
United States for making private messages via the global communications network
[Internet] accessible to US intelligence agencies.” The report denounced
Britain’s role as a double-agent, spying on its own European partners.
Despite these
concerns the US has continued to expand ECHELON surveillance in Europe, partly
because of heightened interest in commercial espionage – to uncover industrial
information that would provide American corporations with an advantage over
foreign rivals.
German
security experts discovered several years ago that ECHELON was engaged in heavy
commercial spying in Europe. Victims included such German firms as the wind
generator manufacturer Enercon. In 1998, Enercon developed what it thought was
a secret invention, enabling it to generate electricity from wind power at a
far cheaper rate than before.
However, when the company tried to market its
invention in the United States, it was confronted by its American rival,
Kenetech, which announced that it had already patented a near-identical
development. Kenetech then brought a court order against Enercon to ban the
sale of its equipment in the US. In a rare public disclosure, an NSA employee,
who refused to be named, agreed to appear in silhouette on German television to
reveal how he had stolen Enercon’s secrets by tapping the telephone and
computer link lines that ran between Enercon’s research laboratory and its
production unit some 12 miles away. Detailed plans of the company’s invention
were then passed on to Kenetech.
In 1994,
Thomson S.A., located in Paris, and Airbus Industrie, based in Blagnac Cedex,
France, also lost lucrative contracts, snatched away by American rivals aided
by information covertly collected by NSA and CIA. The same agencies also
eavesdropped on Japanese representatives during negotiations with the United
States in 1995 over auto parts trade.
German
industry has complained that it is in a particularly vulnerable position because
the government forbids its security services from conducting similar industrial
espionage. “German politicians still support the rather naive idea that
political allies should not spy on each other’s businesses. The Americans and
the British do not have such illusions,” said journalist Udo Ulfkotte, a
specialist in European industrial espionage, in 1999.
That same
year, Germany demanded that the United States recall three CIA operatives for
their activities in Germany involving economic espionage. The news report
stated that the Germans “have long been suspicious of the eavesdropping
capabilities of the enormous U.S. radar and communications complex at Bad
Aibling, near Munich”, which is in fact an NSA intercept station. “The
Americans tell us it is used solely to monitor communications by potential
enemies, but how can we be entirely sure that they are not picking up pieces of
information that we think should remain completely secret?” asked a senior
German official. Japanese officials most likely have been told a similar story
by Washington about the more than a dozen signals intelligence bases which
Japan has allowed to be located on its territory.
In their
quest to gain access to more and more private information, the NSA, the FBI,
and other components of the US national security establishment have been
engaged for years in a campaign to require American telecommunications
manufacturers and carriers to design their equipment and networks to optimize
the authorities’ wiretapping ability. Some industry insiders say they believe
that some US machines approved for export contain NSA “back doors” (also called
“trap doors”).
The United
States has been trying to persuade European Union countries as well to allow it
“back-door” access to encryption programs, claiming that this was to serve the
needs of law-enforcement agencies. However, a report released by the European
Parliament in May 1999 asserted that Washington’s plans for controlling
encryption software in Europe had nothing to do with law enforcement and
everything to do with US industrial espionage. The NSA has also dispatched FBI
agents on break-in missions to snatch code books from foreign facilities in the
United States, and CIA officers to recruit foreign communications clerks abroad
and buy their code secrets, according to veteran intelligence officials.
For decades,
beginning in the 1950s, the Swiss company Crypto AG sold the world’s most
sophisticated and secure encryption technology. The firm staked its reputation
and the security concerns of its clients on its neutrality in the Cold War or
any other war. The purchasing nations, some 120 of them – including prime US
intelligence targets such as Iran, Iraq, Libya and Yugoslavia – confident that
their communications were protected, sent messages from their capitals to their
embassies, military missions, trade offices, and espionage dens around the
world, via telex, radio, and fax. And all the while, because of a secret
agreement between the company and NSA, these governments might as well have been
hand delivering the messages to Washington, uncoded. For their Crypto AG
machines had been rigged before being sold to them, so that when they used them
the random encryption key could be automatically and clandestinely transmitted
along with the enciphered message. NSA analysts could read the messages as
easily as they could the morning newspaper.
In 1986,
because of US public statements concerning the La Belle disco bombing in West
Berlin, the Libyans began to suspect that something was rotten with Crypto AG’s
machines and switched to another Swiss firm, Gretag Data Systems AG. But it
appears that NSA had that base covered as well. In 1992, after a series of
suspicious circumstances over the previous few years, Iran came to a conclusion
similar to Libya’s, and arrested a Crypto AG employee who was in Iran on a
business trip. He was eventually ransomed, but the incident became well known
and the scam began to unravel in earnest.
In September
1999 it was revealed that NSA had arranged with Microsoft to insert special
“keys” into Windows software, in all versions from 95-OSR2 onwards. An American
computer scientist, Andrew Fernandez of Cryptonym in North Carolina, had
disassembled parts of the Windows instruction code and found the smoking gun –
Microsoft’s developers had failed to remove the debugging symbols used to test
this software before they released it. Inside the code were the labels for two
keys. One was called “KEY”. The other was called “NSAKEY”. Fernandez presented
his finding at a conference at which some Windows developers were also in
attendance. The developers did not deny that the NSA key was built into their
software, but they refused to talk about what the key did, or why it had been
put there without users’ knowledge. Fernandez says that NSA’s “back door” in
the world’s most commonly used operating system makes it “orders of magnitude
easier for the US government to access your computer.”
In February
2000, it was disclosed that the Strategic Affairs Delegation (DAS), the
intelligence arm of the French Defense Ministry, had prepared a report in 1999
which also asserted that NSA had helped to install secret programs in Microsoft
software. According to the DAS report, “it would seem that the creation of
Microsoft was largely supported, not least financially, by the NSA, and that
IBM was made to accept the [Microsoft] MS-DOS operating system by the same
administration.” The report stated that there had been a “strong suspicion of a
lack of security fed by insistent rumors about the existence of spy programs on
Microsoft, and by the presence of NSA personnel in Bill Gates’ development
teams.” The Pentagon, said the report, was Microsoft’s biggest client in the
world.
Recent years
have seen disclosures that in the countdown to their invasion of Iraq in 2003,
the United States had listened in on UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, UN
weapons inspectors in Iraq, and all the members of the UN Security Council
during a period when they were deliberating about what action to take in Iraq.
It’s as if
the American national security establishment feels that it has an inalienable
right to listen in;
as if there had been a constitutional amendment, applicable to the entire
world, stating that “Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of the
government to intercept the personal communications of anyone.” And the Fourth
Amendment had been changed to read: “Persons shall be secure in their persons,
houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, except
in cases of national security, real or alleged.” 2
The leading
whistleblower of all time: Philip Agee
Before there
was Edward Snowden, William Binney and Thomas Drake … before there was Bradley
Manning, Sibel Edmonds and Jesselyn Radack … there was Philip Agee. What Agee
revealed is still the most startling and important information about US foreign
policy that any American government whistleblower has ever revealed.
Philip Agee
spent 12 years (1957-69) as a CIA case officer, most of it in Latin America.
His first book, Inside the Company: CIA Diary,
published in 1974 – a pioneering work on the Agency’s methods and their
devastating consequences – appeared in about 30 languages around the world and
was a best seller in many countries; it included a 23-page appendix with the
names of hundreds of undercover Agency operatives and organizations.
Under CIA
manipulation, direction and, usually, their payroll, were past and present
presidents of Mexico, Colombia, Uruguay, and Costa Rica, “our minister of
labor”, “our vice-president”, “my police”, journalists, labor leaders, student
leaders, diplomats, and many others. If the Agency wished to disseminate
anti-communist propaganda, cause dissension in leftist ranks, or have Communist
embassy personnel expelled, it need only prepare some phoney documents, present
them to the appropriate government ministers and journalists, and – presto! –
instant scandal.
Agee’s goal
in naming all these individuals, quite simply, was to make it as difficult as he
could for the CIA to continue doing its dirty work.
A common
Agency tactic was writing editorials and phoney news stories to be knowingly
published by Latin American media with no indication of the CIA authorship or
CIA payment to the media. The propaganda value of such a “news” item might be
multiplied by being picked up by other CIA stations in Latin America who would
disseminate it through a CIA-owned news agency or a CIA-owned radio station.
Some of these stories made their way back to the United States to be read or
heard by unknowing North Americans.
Wooing the
working class came in for special treatment. Labor organizations by the dozen,
sometimes hardly more than names on stationery, were created, altered,
combined, liquidated, and new ones created again, in an almost frenzied attempt
to find the right combination to compete with existing left-oriented unions and
take national leadership away from them.
In 1975 these
revelations were new and shocking; for many readers it was the first hint that
American foreign policy was not quite what their high-school textbooks had told
them nor what theNew York Times had reported.
“As complete
an account of spy work as is likely to be published anywhere, an authentic
account of how an ordinary American or British ‘case officer’ operates … All of
it … presented with deadly accuracy,” wrote Miles Copeland, a former CIA
station chief, and ardent foe of Agee. (There’s no former CIA officer more
hated by members of the intelligence establishment than Agee; no one’s even
close; due in part to his traveling to Cuba and having long-term contact with
Cuban intelligence.)
In contrast
to Agee, WikiLeaks withheld the names of hundreds of informants from the nearly
400,000 Iraq war documents it released.
In 1969, Agee
resigned from the CIA (and colleagues who “long ago ceased to believe in what
they are doing”).
While on the
run from the CIA as he was writing Inside the Company – at times literally running for his
life – Agee was expelled from, or refused admittance to, Italy, Britain,
France, West Germany, the Netherlands, and Norway. (West Germany eventually
gave him asylum because his wife was a leading ballerina in the country.)
Agee’s account of his period on the run can be found detailed in his book On
the Run (1987). It’s
an exciting read.
Notes
To read about my State
Department and other adventures, see my book West-Bloc
Dissident: A Cold war Memoir (2002) ↩See Rogue
State: A Guide to the World’s Only
Superpower, chapter 21, for the
notes for the above.
No comments:
Post a Comment