The American publishers were partially correct. CIA Diary is a boring and poorly-written book, but it is also a saddening and ultimately enraging book. In its matter-of-fact listing of CIA activities it reveals the raw first of American power, the bulldozer that has slashed, torn and crushed not only nations, but entire continents, to make them "safe for democracy." You have to wade through some 600 pages of this book to grasp what it is saying: that the United States maintains its "allies" through massive bribery, extortion and assassination; that shorn of its exotic mythology, spying is a disgusting business, that the CIA is responsible for murdering hundreds of thousands of flesh and blood human beings whose only crime was to seek independence from the United States.

Sudan Guatemala, Greece, Bolivia, Chana, Indonesia, Iran, Syria, Ecuador, Uruguay, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, Chile... all these countries are now ruled by dictatorships imposed through CIA-supported coups. It makes one wonder who to blame.

Philip Agee thinks we all are. He insists that the CIA follows Presidential orders when it overthrows a government. Agee himself has come full circle since his student days at Notre Dame--by 1975 he is a self-avowed socialist revolutionary.

Agee believes that the CIA exists as "the secret police force of American capitalism." In a recent interview in Playboy magazine he defends publishing the names of the 200 agents saying. "I am revealing the names of people engaged in criminal activities. These people live by breaking the law." Perhaps more important than the illegality of these CIA agents' activities is the fact that many Latin Americans have no idea who their officials really work for. It is time we all found out.

Agee's analysis of the CIA as a secret police force for capitalism is simplistic, but the net effect of CIA activities in the last decade supports it. Every military coup has been followed by a rise in American investment and economic aid. Nowhere has there been a corresponding rise in the incomes of even the near-majority of the people in these countries blessed with CIA-imposed governments.

In the past it has been common for deposed Latin American leaders to blame the CIA for their fall from power. It has been equally common for the U.S. government to deny the charges and hint that the Latin Americans are always seeking a scapegoat to cover their own political ineptness. With the publication of CIA Diary it will be all but impossible to believe future American denials of CIA involvement in Latin American affairs. Agee has shown that involvement to be too pervasive and long-standing to ever be denied again.

It is fair to ask if all that Agee has published is true. It is also fair to question his motives in publishing it. But regardless of his motivation, if only half of what Agee has written is true, it could stand alone as a devastating indictment of the dictatorial use of American power in the ostensible pursuit of an elusive "freedom" that has only brought increased oppression.

The CIA has attempted to discredit Agee, charging that he is a possible Soviet agent, but all in all the CIA has proved nothing and disproved even less. Agee says he wrote CIA Diary to permit the American people to see for themselves what their government does abroad in their name. The American people might also consider what happens when CIA agents who regularly subvert democratic processes in other countries return to the United States to serve in the government or in private corporations. Maybe we have more in common with Latin America than we think; maybe the CIA is subverting us.