Philip Agee, born on this day in 1935, was an ex-CIA officer who became a prominent critic of CIA policies, detailing his experiences in the text "Inside the Company: CIA Diary". Agee ultimately defected to Cuba, dying there in 2008.

Philip Agee (1935 - 2008) served as a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer for eight years, joining the organization in 1960. He was assigned posts in Montevideo, Mexico City, and Quito, Ecuador.

Agee resigned from the CIA in 1968 following the Tlatelolco massacre in Mexico City, in which the U.S.-supported government engaged in mass shootings and arrests of a crowd of more than ten thousand protesters. The same massacre also played a role in the political radicalization of Subcomandante Marcos of the Zapatistas.

Agee moved to London and published "Inside the Company", a tell-all text that, among other things, detailed his work in spying on diplomats, engaging in illegal activity to force a diplomatic break between Ecuador and Cuba, naming President José Figueres Ferrer of Costa Rica, President Luis Echeverría Álvarez of Mexico, and President Alfonso López Michelsen of Colombia as CIA collaborators, and exposing the identities of dozens of CIA agents.

For the exposure of agents, Agee was expelled from the United Kingdom. Agee was also eventually expelled from the Netherlands, France, West Germany and Italy, and was compelled to live under a series of socialist governments - Grenada under Maurice Bishop, then Nicaragua under the Sandinistas, and finally Cuba under Castro. Agee died in Cuba in January 2008.

"I don't think we have ever had real democracy in this country. Anyone who studies adoption of the constitution will understand quite clearly that; democracy - as we understand that on today; was the last thing the founding fathers had in mind when they wrote the constitution....it was: to establish strong central authority responding the elitist interests in United States.

That's private property. And those men who wrote the constitution were representatives of the elites. They were the lawyers, bankers, merchants, the land owners, slave owners and so forth. And they write the constitution for their own private interest$. That is how government has served ever since. And that is why we have so little democracy in United States."

- Philip Agee