Name: Inside the Company
ISBN: 9780883730287

Inside the Company

"The CIA is the most powerful secret police force in the world. Its hand has been seen in many incidents, sometimes with reason, sometimes more dubiously: the Bay of Pigs, the Greek coup, the death of Che Guevara, the fall of Allende and countless other incidents have been seen as evidence of the CIA's work. Philip Agee worked for the CIA for twelve years, in three different countries. He began by accepting the 'Company's' views and aims, but as time went by he came to see it as a bureaucracy designed not to help those in whose countries it works, but simply as an arm of American interests. He has spent the last three years writing a careful diary of his experiences. In doing so he describes the structure of the CIA, how it recruits, reveals a large number of international organizations founded by the CIA, names many agents and describes, with deadly accuracy, exactly what this vast, sleazy organization does. The picture that emerges is not glamorous; but it is convincing"--P. [4] of cover.

What Hacker News says

webdoodleMay 2023

I highly recommend "Inside the Company: CIA Diary" by Philip Agee. Agee, a former South American CIA Station Chief, lost heart in the CIA after witnessing years of similar abuses by the U.S.

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wrpOct 2022

The article makes no mention of the two most influential exposés by CIA insiders, Philip Agee's Inside the Company: CIA Diary (1975) and Frank Snepp's Decent Interval (1978). Either book would give a better illustration of conditions inside the CIA than any book the article mentions. Those two accounts made a deep impression on my cohorts and contributed to our feeling that the CIA was exceptionally incompetent among the various US intelligence operations.

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rurbanApr 2019

Naive patsy then.

Ecuador's governments have always been blackmailed by the US via the CIA. Moreno was just an intermediate for them, like Chavez, Allende or Lua, to get over with eventually. In the end there's always either a fascist putsch or electorial takeover. Philip Agee's book "Inside the Company: CIA Diary" explains all the gory details.

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rurbanJun 2022

The problem is the continued fascist interventions (driven by US fascist interests) in Latin American countries, with almost 80% control over the latest decades. Now with a short-time non-fascist in the lead of one of their major countries, he took the step forward to come up with a better representation of their interests. Which does include Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Cuba. This goes on since the 60ies.

But the CIA aligned countries do have the majority, so it will not lead to anything. Philip Agee "Inside the Company: CIA Diary"

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rurbanDec 2020

A similar book is Philip Agee's book "Inside the Company: CIA Diary" (1975), just not about Vietnam, but about Latin America.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Agee#Leaving_the_CIA

He also wrote books about the CIA in Europe (similar to Ganser's classic Gladio book "Secret Armies: Operation GLADIO and Terrorism in Western Europe") and Africa.

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pvgFeb 2020

agee was a mere case officer and knew about minerva, wrote about it in the book he published in the 70s.

Agee was higher up in the intelligence hierarchy than Snowden and the MINERVA secret, while a fairly big deal, is not nearly as big of a deal as 'NSA can break some kinds of modern crypto' would be.

More importantly, I think you're misreading what the new writeups on this story say about Agee's knowledge. He doesn't mention MINERVA and didn't know anything about the BND-CIA joint infiltration of the company. Here's what he writes in Inside the Company:

The National Security Agency cannot break this code system mathematically but they can do so if sensitive recordings can be obtained of the vibrations of the encrypting machine when the discs clack to a stop. The recordings are processed through an oscilloscope and other machines which reveal the disc settings. Knowing the settings, NSA can put the encoded messages, which are intercepted through the commercial companies, into their own identical machines with identical settings, and the clear text message comes out. Although the Swiss manufacturer when selling the machine emphasizes the need to use it inside a sound-proof room on a table isolated by foam rubber, we hope this particular code clerk is careless. If we can discover the settings on this machine in Montevideo, NSA will be able to read the encrypted UAR messages on the entire circuit to which their Montevideo Embassy pertains.

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