Friday, July 26, 2013

The Role of Anti-Communism in CIA Operations




Phillip Agee and Edgar Chamorro are introduced by Bill Schaap at the Harvard Conference on Anti Communism, 1988. Bill Schaap is co-founder of the Institute for Media Analysis, the organization that organized the Harvard conference.


Phillip Agee was the first person who ever left the CIA and talked about it. He was stationed in Africa and Latin America. His Roman Catholic social conscience had made him increasingly uncomfortable with his work. By the late 1960s his disillusionment with the CIA and its support for authoritarian governments in Latin America lead to his resignation from "the company" His book, Inside the Company: CIA Diary, details his experiences as a CIA officer.

Edgar Chamorro, a member of a prominent Nicaraguan family, was an agent for the CIA in Nicaragua. He had been a Jesuit priest in the Bronx and a dean at UCA in Managua. He had fled the country after the Sandinista victory and was recruited to become a spokesperson for the Contras.  However he soon saw the moral problems of what the CIA was doing in Central America and decided to speak out.

 

John Mack introduces George Perkovich, Bernie Lown and Rita Rogers at the Harvard conference on The History and Consequences of Anti-Communism.