UK: Agee let back after 18 years
01 November 1995
Philip Agee, author of the world-wide best-selling Inside the Company: CIA Diary, was finally allowed to return to the UK after being deported in 1977 as a threat to "national security". Agee served as a CIA operative in Latin America but resigned after the 1968 Mexico Olympics. He decided to write a book about the CIA's subversion of democracy in Latin America and its support for military dictatorships and repressive regimes.
Agee completed the book in the UK and it was published by Penguin in 1975. He then worked with investigative journalists in the UK to expose the CIA's operations in Europe and the UK's involvement. High-level US pressure, including a clandestine visit by Henry Kissinger, US Secretary of State, coincided with a visit by Agee to Jamaica (in the UK's "sphere of influence") where he accused the "CIA of trying to subvert the progressive government of Michael Manley". In June 1977 he was deported after the Labour government Home Secretary issued a deportation order on the grounds that he had been "involved in disseminating information harmful to the security of the United Kingdom". Unable to return to the US for fear of prosecution and with his US passport revoked in 1979 he was refused entry to the Netherlands, Germany, France and Italy. He subsequently was allowed to remain in Germany where he now teaches at the University of Hamburg on the CIA and the resurgence of fascism and racism.
He went back to the US in 1987 but repeated attempts by his lawyer Larry Grant to have the deportation order from the UK lifted failed. In March this year a request to the Home Office to allow him to come to the UK for 72 hours was not answered until August when he was told, out of the blue, that the order had been lifted.
At a press conference on 2 November Agee said it was ironic that he had been let into the UK, when the US was closing doors everywhere, under the Heath Conservative government. Then he was deported by a Labour government, and let in again by a Conservative one.
During the campaign against Agee deportation two Time Out journalists, Crispin Aubrey and Duncan Campbell, were arrested under the Official Secrets Act, together with John Berry who had served, many years before, in a branch of the UK's eavesdropping organisation GCHQ. After 21 months the ABC three walked free with the mildest of sentences.
Press conference, House of Commons, 2.11.95; Tribune, 27.10.95; for the background to the deportation and the subsequent ABC Official Secrets case see, Who's watching you?, Crispin Aubrey, Penguin, 1981 and State Research bulletin, 1977-1981.