Dangerous Wrecking Operation

About the surest way to get your name in the foreign press these days, or so it seems, is to join the CIA.

In the past 15 months, several hundred agents in Stockholm, Athens, Lisbon, Madrid, Mexico City, London and Paris have had their covers blown, mostly by leftist papers. Last week the leftist French daily Liberation, founded by Philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, disclosed on two successive days the names of 44 CIA people in the Paris embassy, including the home addresses and telephone numbers of the top officers. In London, a trendy weekly social and entertainment guide called Time Out named three new CIA employees in the U.S. embassy (in 1975 Time Out printed the names of 62 CIA people with a chart of their embassy offices). At week's end a new Italian daily, la Republica, front-paged the names of seven CIA agents in Rome. Just two weeks ago, the newsweekly Cambio 16, one of Spain's leading magazines, fingered seven CIA agents in the American embassy in Madrid. Washington fears that CIA operatives in West Germany will be uncovered next. It has reached the point, a U.S. diplomat at the Paris Embassy sarcastically suggests, where the CIA and the U.S. Information Service swap offices, since "it's the CIA that seems to be generating all the publicity nowadays."

Embarrassing Exposure. American intelligence officials profess not to be concerned that the disclosures will help the Russians since, they suspect, the KGB already knows who most of their CIA agents are anyway—and vice versa. But officials say that CIA contacts with businessmen, journalists and government officials have been damaged by the embarrassment of exposure. Worse, says one White House official, the unmasking makes "agents particularly vulnerable to terrorist acts." Many point to the murder of Station Chief Richard Welch by assassins in Athens in December just a month after his name appeared in the Athens News, an English-language daily. As a result, the U.S. has placed round-the-clock bodyguards on high-level officials in Greece. In Paris, CIA staff have reportedly taken to toting guns and traveling in unmarked. rented cars. But in most other capitals, the exposure created little excitement, and special security measures were soon dropped. Nonetheless, said Senator Frank Church, "I don't think former officials of the CIA ought to release the names of current agents of the CIA. I think that is contemptible." Suggests Columnist Anthony Lewis, the "wholesale publication of agents' names [seems] hard to justify—and likely to be a wrecking operation."

The agency lists began appearing after Philip Agee, 40, an ex-CIA spy who now lives in Cambridge, England, published Inside the Company: CIA Diary last year. The book identified nearly 250 CIA men and women round the world.

Says Agee, who apparently aided the printing of at least several of the lists:

"The point of all this is to change the CIA policy of clandestine involvement in the internal affairs of other countries [and] to undermine the agency's work."