In following the Plame Affair updates this morning I was reading the comments following a post (about evil Bob Novak) at Kevin Drum’s site.
One comment mentioned the Philip Agee story. I don’t know much about it, but it may have inspired the law that was allegedly broken from within the White House, and it seems to have stirred up the queen mother and retired presidential dad at the time. Here’s Mitchell Freeman’s take:
[T]he ex-CIA agent Agee … defends himself by saying [of] Richard Welch, the CIA station chief in Greece he identified in Counterspy magazine a few months before Greek terrorists killed Welch in 1975 (these terrorists also killed Greek officials during the then-military dictatorship in Greece), [that]
- [He] lived in the same house as the previous station chief, who was already known in political circles as CIA;
- And … really was known in many Greek circles to be CIA before Agee identified him in his new magazine.
Ironically, Agee sued Barbara Bush in the early 1990s because her autobiography named Agee as a reason Welch was killed. And did Barbara fight this traitor, as most Republican insiders still call Agee? Nope. SHE INSTEAD AGREED TO REMOVE THE CHARGE FROM HER BOOK.
I’ve trimmed away the Novakula material and only left in the Bar Bush stuff because excising it would reverse the spin (reaccusing Agee), when I know nothing of the details, except that the Heinleiners online have taken to asking why the lefties suddenly care about national security blah blah blah and where were they when Phil Agee blah blah blah.
OK, this is not the place for politics. However, this did all remind me of one of my favorite Don DeLillo books, The Names. I don’t want to give away the plot and so much of the story and the setting and the descriptions and the imagery is so detailed and fine that I merely recommend the book to anyone who hasn’t read it and say to those who have, isn’t it great?
Oh, and the plot vaguely resembles some parts of the Welch story above. Did everyone else already know that but me?