CIA Foe Agee Back in U.S., Lacks Passport

Philip Agee, a former CIA agent and agency foe who lives in self-exile in Spain, has returned to the United States and said Wednesday that he plans to remain for another few weeks despite the risk of prosecution.

Agee, whose U.S. passport was lifted in 1979 after he disclosed the names of CIA employees abroad, said he has been in the United States since Sunday and entered the country from Canada. He spoke on the street outside a Manhattan television studio after appearing on a news program to promote his new book, “On the Run.”

Agee said he had entered the country without any understandings about whether he would be arrested for traveling without a U.S. passport and was “going about my activity in normal fashion.”

Visits Parents

He visited his parents, whom he had not seen in seven years, in North Carolina, he said.

Agee said he would return to his wife in Spain eventually but did not detail his schedule here.

A State Department press officer, Ruth van Heuven, said Agee’s return to the United States without a U.S. passport violates no laws.

“As a U.S. citizen, he has a right to return whenever he wishes. He knows that,” she said.

Agee, 52, has written several books about CIA activities since announcing in 1974 that he would work against the CIA by exposing agency operatives and doing what he could to drive them from countries where they were stationed.