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14 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Well-Intentioned Blunder, January 20, 2008
Philip Agee's INSIDE THE COMPANY: A CIA DIARY, is a classic example of a work written by an idealistic, well-intentioned man which tragically undercut the very thing he wanted to achieve: the success of mid-nineteen-seventies Congressional hearings into the crimes of the CIA. Agee was an intelligence officer from 1957 to 1969, working in Latin America. His book gives us vital "insider" knowledge of the CIA, for instance the meaning of CIA cryptograms-- and presents a picture of a man who was genuinely concerned for the welfare of the people of the region he was assigned to. His disillusionment came when he realized that the clandestine operations of the CIA, all aimed at repressing Leftist opposition to right-wing governments in Latin America, were doing nothing to better the basic living conditions of the people. He sees clearly that such methods could well be brought home, as they were to some extent in his time and even more so today, in order to undermine American democracy (pp. 578, 650). But he fails in the end to grasp the terrible structural change that the CIA has brought in the system of government designed by the Founding Fathers, eliminating checks and balances and replacing government by elected officials by a government of unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats. By failing to see that the CIA's worst offense was not against social justice but DEMOCRACY, he lost his moral edge and undermined the Congressional fight against it. It would be understandable if someone reading Agee's book came away thinking that eliminating the CIA would mean more governments like that of Fidel Casto, which gives people social justice but no freedom. In order to eliminate the CIA and its legacy, we must strip of its mask as defender of freedom and expose it for what it has always been: the foremost defender of totalitarianism in the world.
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3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
One of the first detailed expose of the CIA, February 5, 2000
Philip Agee was recruited by the CIA so he could fight for the American Dream. Unfortunately for them, he became disgusted by following State policy and supporting foreign regimes whose main aim was to fill their own pockets and pay lip service to democracy.Agee's book is massive and detailed with tidbits about CIA operations during his period with them. The problem I have is that he uses a diary format to tell his story and that you can easily get lost amongst the various Codenames for CIA agents/operations. The lack of a index doesn't make life easier. Apart from that, a very good expose of the working life of anyone who works for the spooks.
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3 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
As thorough as they get, February 28, 2000
Phil adopted the diary format because the editor wanted it that way. He wrote the book by going through newspaper microfiches, reading what the regular press had said about some events, recalling what really happened based on his own recollection, and putting it back together. I think most of the "how I wrote Inside the Company" is detailed in his follow-up book "On the Run," which is also a fascinating read. One thing to note about Phil is that his experiences have affected him and biased his judgement in some ways. He was there, and everything he writes is true, but he is an extremist, and often sees things in a bitterly stilted fashion, and sometimes does things that leads to the murder of US officials. One may argue that these officials engaged in oppresive operations and large scale murder are deserving of death themselves, as Agee does, but his "deserving of death" label has perhaps become a little too incompassionate.
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