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The extent of their duties also varies widely. In Hong Kong and Taiwan, the CIA operatives are all ears but no hands, their activities confined to monitoring radio broadcasts from the mainland, interviewing refugees and other information gathering.
By his own less than impartial account, Agee's main function for the CIA was to recruit agents in Latin America. In nearly every case, he says, the lure was money. He describes the CIA method of snaring an agent: "You start out by giving him money for his organization—lots of it—knowing that he will eventually take some for himself. When he gets dependent on it, you move in." Once hooked, the recruit is given a lie detector test to discover his weaknesses. Continues Agee: "Then it all hangs out. He can go on serving you as a spy for the rest of his life."
Americans usually learn of the agency's covert actions only when they fail so spectacularly that they cannot be kept secret. Examples: the U-2 incident in 1960, when the Soviets shot down the spy plane piloted by Francis Gary Powers; the CIA-directed invasion of Cuba in 1961; the Chilean operation. Over the years, there were successes for the CIA as well: the 1953 coup that deposed Premier Mohammed Mossadegh (who had nationalized a British-owned oil company and was believed to be in league with Iran's Communist Party) and kept pro-American Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi on the throne of Iran; the 1954 revolution that overthrew the Communist-dominated government of President Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala. The CIA has been suspected of participating in the 1967 military coup in Greece, the capture and killing in 1967 of Cuban Revolutionary Che Guevara in Bolivia, and the 1970 overthrow of Prince Norodom Sihanouk of Cambodia.
The CIA was deeply involved in the war in Southeast Asia. Starting in 1962, it organized and equipped an army in Laos to fight the Communist Pathet Lao. The army, which grew to 30,000 men, costs the U.S. at least $300 million a year, but Colby credits it with having prevented a Communist takeover.
Prison Camps. The chief justification for CIA operations is that the other side is doing the same—and more. Communist powers have an advantage over Western democracies. Communist parties can be directed from Moscow or other Communist centers (although in recent years many have become more independent) but take the guise of local political movements. Moreover, Communist dictatorships without inquisitive legislatures or press can organize and finance secret operations in other countries in a way that no open society can. Unlike American leaders, Communist leaders never acknowledge such activities. The Soviet Union's KGB, headed by Yuri Andropov, regularly runs what the Russian bureaucrats call aktivniye meropriyatiye (literal translation: active measures). The KGB's budget is unknown, but it has about 300,000 employees, many of them assigned to domestic duties like operating the vast network of prison camps. Overseas, a majority of the Soviet embassy personnel are KGB officers.
As with the CIA, the KGB's failures are better known than its successes. The organization apparently no longer commits political assassinations abroad, but it