Philip Agee (KGB code name: Pont), former CIA operations officer was the CIA's first ideological defector.
He had been forced to resign from CIA in 1968 after complaints at his heavy drinking, poor financial management and attempts to proposition wives of American diplomats.
He remained in the West.
In 1973 he approached the KGB residency in Mexico City and offered information about CIA operations. The suspicious KGB resident, however, found Agee's offer too good to be true, concluded that he was part of a CIA plot and turned him away.
Agee then went to the Cubans, who welcomed him with open arms.Agee himself acknowledged: "Representatives of the Communist Party of Cuba gave important encouragement at a time when I doubted that I would be able to find the additional information I needed."
In his book "Inside the Company: CIA Diary," published in 1975 he identified approximately 250 CIA officers and agents.
While Agee was writing his book in Britain he maintained contact with the KGB.
On November 16, 1976 Agee was served a deportation order that required him to leave England.
KGB and the Left tried to stop the deportation but Agee was eventually forced to leave England for Holland on June 3, 1977. He later moved to Germany.
In 1978 Agee and a small group of supporters began publishing the Covert Action Information Bulletin in order to promote what Agee called "a worldwide campaign to destabilize the CIA through exposure of its operations and personnel."
During the Iran hostage crisis in 1979,
Agee offered to exchange CIA documents about Iran for the Americans held
at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. Soon after, the State Department revoked
his passport on national security grounds.
He traveled on passports issued by,
successively, Maurice Bishop's Marxist-Leninist regime in Grenada, the
Sandinista government in Nicaragua and an official German identification
document normally given to war refugees.
After years of living in Hamburg, Germany Agee has decided to make Cuba his home and the seat of his new business.
Agee resurfaced in Havana in 2000, where he started what he says is the island's first independent travel business in 40 years.