Prometheus 6   

This is right interesting

The Laws of the Father Are Visited Upon the Son
Elder Bush urged legislation cited in White House-CIA probe
By Philip Agee

October 3, 2003

The current brouhaha over the outing of an undercover CIA officer brings to mind vivid memories and comic ironies. The 1982 law that now threatens Karl Rove, or whoever it was who leaked the officer's name, is the Intelligence Identities Protection Act -- and it was adopted to silence me.

I was a CIA agent for 11 years in Latin America, but I quit in 1969 and wrote a book that told the true story of my life in the agency.

In the 1970s, some colleagues and I followed up with a campaign of "guerrilla journalism" to expose the CIA's operations and personnel around the world because we thought we could combat the agency's role in support of so many murderous dictatorships at that time, including those in Vietnam, Greece, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil. The Intelligence Identities Protection Act, which makes it a felony to expose a covert intelligence agent, was designed to stop us.

Here's the first irony: It was President George H.W. Bush who fought to get that law passed when he was CIA director in 1976-1977 and later as vice president.

To justify the law's restriction of 1st Amendment rights, Bush the elder and other CIA officials repeated the same lie many times over: That by publicly identifying Richard Welch, the CIA chief in Athens who was assassinated by terrorists in December 1975, I was responsible for his death.

Bush repeated that lie long after Congress passed the law, during his term as president and even afterward. His wife, Barbara, also repeated it in her 1994 autobiography -- and I sued her for libel. As part of the legal settlement, she sent me a letter of apology containing the admission that I had not identified Welch.

In fact, I'd never met Welch, didn't know he was in Athens and had never published his name or given it to anyone.