The Forgotten Story of the Julian Assange of the 1970s

[ffr]

This isn’t the first time the U.S. has faced these kinds of questions. Four decades ago, CIA defector Philip Agee and his comrades went about leaking government secrets in books and in a magazine called CovertAction Information Bulletin—with remarkable similarities to the case of Assange and WikiLeaks.

Like Assange, Agee claimed First Amendment protections while disseminating classified information. He and his associates made no effort to hide their dedication to destroying American intelligence agencies’ ability to spy on or disrupt adversaries. Agee was seen by many Americans as a threat to national security, yet there was widespread fear that any attempt to stop him—and especially his associates who had never held government jobs—from publishing secrets would erode the independence of the press. He was accused of having close ties to foreign intelligence services. And just as Assange and WikiLeaks have conspicuously failed to target the abuses of Russia’s intelligence services, Agee and CovertAction ignored atrocities and human rights violations committed by communist governments.
<snip>

There are important differences between Assange and Agee. Unlike Agee, Assange never worked for an intelligence agency and has not signed secrecy pledges. Agee said he was motivated by a midlife conversion to Marxism, while Assange hasn’t attributed his actions to an ideology. - Politico

[UTUSN]

1. K&R ya beat me to it!1

[dalton99a]

2. Most important paragraphs:

Information that leaked from the KGB after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, including notes smuggled out by KGB archivist Vasili Mitrokhin and the memoirs of former KGB General Oleg Kalugin, indicate that Agee operated in concert with—and, in many cases, at the direction of—both the KGB and Cuban intelligence. The KGB took credit for CovertAction, claiming in an internal memo Mitrokhin saw that the magazine was founded “on the initiative of the KGB.”

The KGB created a task force dedicated to supplying CovertAction with material that would harm the CIA. For example, in 1979, according to Mitrokhin’s notes, two KGB officers “met Agee in Cuba and gave him a list of CIA officers working on the African continent.” Some of this information was featured in CovertAction, including the identities of 16 CIA station or base chiefs on the continent. In addition to providing names of agency officers, Soviet intelligence gave the magazine a stream of classified documents that exposed CIA activities around the world.