Obituaries : David Atlee Phillips; Spy and CIA Defender

David Atlee Phillips, a veteran undercover agent for the CIA who spent the last 13 years of his life defending that organization, has died at his home in Bethesda, Md., his nephew announced Wednesday.

Shawn Phillips said in Los Angeles that his uncle, who spent 25 years trying to convince his seven children that he was either a “businessman” or in the Foreign Service, was 65 when he died last Thursday. He had been suffering from cancer.

Phillips, who was also well-known as an author and lecturer, became a leading voice for the CIA after retiring in 1975. Those were dark days for the spy organization, created in 1947 by President Harry S. Truman supposedly to ensure that there would never be another Pearl Harbor.

There was the CIA-supported campaign to prevent the election of Salvador Allende as president of Chile; the charges of illegal domestic spying on the heels of Watergate, and the lingering aura of ineptness that surrounded the nation’s intelligence-gathering forces after the Bay of Pigs debacle.

Phillips became a visible and vocal defender of the CIA, prompting suspicions that he had not really retired but was acting as a paid CIA lobbyist under the guise of retirement, charges that he strongly denied.

He formed a group called the Assn. of Former Intelligence Officers, a loose-knit body of former agents who “came in from the cold” to explain publicly what it meant to be a spy.

And Phillips himself went before a Senate panel investigating alleged over-aggressiveness by the CIA to urge that covert operations should be put under a separate agency.

Phillips’ concerns grew out of his own involvement at the highest level of covert activities. The distinguished-looking Phillips had entered his 20s wanting to be an actor but instead found himself as an Air Force gunner in World War II. He was shot down over Europe but managed to escape from a German prison camp and made his way to freedom. After the war he went to Chile, where he published an English-language newspaper. There he was recruited by the CIA and went to work for the spy agency full-time in 1950.

He was in Guatemala when the U.S. government toppled the regime of Jacobo Arbenz. He worked in Havana and Lebanon before going to Washington in 1960 as a planner for a Guatemala-type operation against Cuba. It failed on the shore of the Bay of Pigs. He later served as station chief in Rio de Janeiro and in the Dominican Republic. His last position was as head of the CIA’s Western Hemisphere unit.

Phillips was the author of several books, among them “Careers in Secret Operations” and “The Night Watch, 25 Years of Peculiar Service.”