Philip Agee  CIA agent turned whistleblower branded a traitor by
Bush "Why did I leave the CIA?" the former agent Philip Agee,
who died this week aged 72, once asked himself at a public
meeting. "I fell in love with a woman who thought Che Guevara
was the most wonderful man in the world."  It was this mixture
of commitment and romance that was to characterise the man who
was denounced as a traitor by George Bush senior, threatened
with death by his former agency colleagues and deported from
Britain as a threat to the security of the state.  Agee had left
the CIA in 1969 after 12 years working mainly in Latin America,
where he gradually became disgusted by the agency's collusion
with military dictators in the region and decided to blow the
whistle on their activities. The Mexico City massacre of student
protesters in 1968 also stiffened his resolve. His 1975 book,
Inside the Company: CIA Diary, spilled the beans on his former
employers and enraged the US government, not least because it
named CIA operatives.