http://infomanage.com/caribbean/cuba/cia_cuba_1.html
Thursday February 24 11:17 AM ET
CIA Whistle-Blower Launches Cuba Internet Service
By Andrew Cawthorne
HAVANA (Reuters) - Former CIA whistle-blower Philip Agee, whose crusade to expose agents made him a hero of the left in the 1970s but won him many enemies in Washington, has launched a new Web site in Havana promoting tourism to communist-run Cuba.
Agee, founder and director of the venture, described it as the first independent, American-owned business established on the Caribbean island under communist rule, and therefore an open act of defiance of Washington's long-standing economic embargo on Havana.
``My feeling in doing this is that it is a way to carry out the exhortation of the Pope, a way to help Cuba open to the world, and the world to Cuba,'' Agee, 65, told Reuters, in a reference to the now famous public plea from Pope John Paul II during his January 1998 visit to Cuba.
``Another motive is to make a small break in the embargo wall they built to isolate Cuba,'' the former intelligence agent and sympathizer of President Fidel Castro's rule, said in an interview late Wednesday from his new Havana office.
Agee quit the Central Intelligence Agency during the Vietnam War in 1968 and later exposed undercover agency officers and operations around the world through lectures and writings, including a 1975 book,
``Inside the Company: A CIA Diary.''
His exposure of a CIA station chief, Richard Welch, has been blamed by some U.S. officials for leading to Welch's 1977 assassination in Athens by leftist extremists.
U.S. officials regard Agee as a traitor and some believe he worked for Cuban intelligence starting in the early 1970s. A high-ranking Cuban defector in 1992 told The Los Angeles Times that Agee repeatedly took money from Castro's intelligence service.
``They always say that. It's totally false. My connection with Cuba has been just political solidarity,'' he added in the interview, when asked about those charges. Agee said he travels on a German passport and still has American citizenship although his U.S. passport was revoked.
Agee's new tourism company, ``Cubalinda.com Inter-Active Trabel'' (available at www.cubalinda.com), offers information and reservation services for travel to Cuba.
It has been set up, in partnership with Cuban state company Cubatur, at a time when tourism is booming on the island and helping bring its economy out of the recession it plunged into after the collapse of the former Soviet bloc a decade ago.
Agee, who divides his time between Germany and Cuba, would not specify how much money the project has cost to start. ``It's too high, I'm too scared to mention it. It's all venture capital, and I can only say it's in the six figures.''
He said the venture was commercially motivated first but should also provide a moral example to other U.S. businessmen not to bow to the ``terrorist mafia'' and ``fanatics'' in Florida.
That terminology is the same as Castro's own description of hard-line anti-communist Cuban exile groups, considered by Havana as having a stranglehold on Washington's Cuba policy.
The embargo, which Havana calls a ``blockade,'' was intended to oust Castro from power or force him to change his one-party system, which is widely criticized abroad. But the sanctions have been his biggest nationalist rallying cry over the years.
Agee said Cuban authorities had an ``extremely positive'' reaction to the Cubalinda venture, which employs 12 staff people at its office in Havana's Vedado district. ``They are fascinated with the idea of a virtual travel agency,'' he said.
Agee has been visiting Cuba since January 1957, just prior to starting his CIA career, and only weeks after rebel chief Castro and his insurgents landed on their Granma yacht to begin a guerrilla war that lead to their 1959 takeover.
