> John Lacny wrote:
>
>>It recycles the long-discredited, contemptible lie that Philip Agee
>>exposed Richard Welch as CIA station chief in Greece in the 1970s.
>
> Who did then? Genuine question - I don't know the story.
>
> Doug
http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?emx=x&pid=30695 Outing CIA Agents By Steve Weissman
[...]
A young idealist with a Jesuit education, he had believed all the apple-pie myths of American democracy and had joined the CIA to do what he thought was right. After twelve years "inside the Company," he ended up loathing the dirty work he had seen and did, and so tried to disrupt the Agency's operations by blowing the cover of its operatives. This clearly put CIA officers at increased risk, but -- so he felt -- the more time they had to spend ensuring their own safety, the less time they would have to put other people elsewhere on Earth at risk.
Several journalists in London at the time -- and I was one of the most active -- joined Agee in publishing the names of large numbers of CIA officers in dozens of countries, often as lead stories in widely read newspapers and magazines. Contrary to media accounts, however, Agee did not provide the names, as he had already named everyone he knew. The identifications came from the U.S. government's Foreign Service Lists and its yearly Biographic Registers, using a time-consuming method that former State Department officer John Marks described in the November 1974 Washington Monthly. Marks called his method "How to Spot a Spook."
No midnight mail drops from the Soviet KGB. No whispered messages from some Cuban Mata Hari. Just the hard slog of journalistic investigation.
Then came the crisis. Two days before Christmas in 1975, assassins shot and killed Richard Welch, the CIA station chief in Athens. The agency quickly used the killing to escalate its attacks on Agee, even though he had never known Welch or identified him in his book (or anywhere else). No doubt Agee would have, but he played no part in the outing, as the CIA knew.
His only contact was peripheral. In January 1975, the American magazine CounterSpy identified Welch as the CIA station chief in Lima, and also carried an essay by Agee. But the magazine, which was funded by author Norman Mailer and his Organizing Committee for a Fifth Estate, had found Welch's identity in a Peruvian journal and then confirmed it with the spook-spotting techniques from the Washington Monthly.
Welch's name also appeared in the English-language Athens News in November 1975, along with nine other CIA officers working in Greece. Many months later, the press revealed that the killers had stalked Welch even before the list appeared. The CIA had reportedly warned him not to move into the house which the stalkers knew as the CIA chief's residence. For whatever reason, Welch refused to heed the warning.
But Agee's vindication came nearly twenty years later when former First Lady Barbara Bush repeated the old libel that he had played a role in Welch's death in her memoirs. Agee sued, and Mrs. Bush was forced to remove the passage from the paperback edition of the book. She also had to send him a letter of apology, acknowledging that her accusation had been false.
Now, with the outing of Valerie Plame, many pundits are again blaming Agee for revealing Welch's identity. No doubt, they will check the facts and send their apologies as well.
[...]