Fun and Fidel : An alienated CIA man touts his ideological tours of Cuba.(Philip Agee)(Brief Article)

If nothing else, Philip Agee knows how to turn ideology into a quick buck. The product of an affluent Tampa, Florida, family, Agee wrote a best- selling 1975 memoir about his 12-year career as a CIA agent and then spent the succeeding years railing against the perceived evils of U.S. imperialism. These days Agee, 67, and his wife, Giselle, live in a dingy Havana apartment building, hustling to make a buck in the tourism business. Three years ago he launched an interactive travel agency, cubalinda.com, to market affordable excursion packages to Americans and other foreigners intrigued by the prospect of a vacation in Fidel Castro's Cuba. But his new endeavor is not limited to the mere pursuit of profit. As his Web site puts it, Agee aims to continue "solidarity activities with the revolution by presenting Cuban realities to the world" and "help to correct the many years of lies and distortions fomented by the U.S. government." When September 11 put a crimp on international travel, he came up with a new line. Agee began pitching Cuba as "the safest country in the world," where foreigners needn't worry about street crime, terrorism or any of the other assorted ills of early-21st-century life.

Not exactly the stuff of a Madison Avenue advertising campaign, but the approach seems to be working. This year Agee expects to draw more than 2,000 foreign tourists to the island nation, nearly 10 times the number who came to Cuba during his company's first full year of operations in 2000. Upwards of 80 percent of his clientele is American, and Agee is generating enough business to keep 13 full-time employees on a $4,000 monthly payroll.

His life story has been one long, strange trip from the day he quit the CIA in 1969 and began exposing its agents and methods for destabilizing unfriendly Third World countries. The publication of his first book, "Inside the Company: CIA Diary," outraged the Ford administration and prompted the then Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to pressure the government of British Prime Minister James Callaghan into expelling Agee, who was then living in Cambridge. Over the ensuing years Agee was tossed out of four more European countries, had his U.S. passport revoked and made do with passports issued by Grenada, Sandinista-ruled Nicaragua and Castro's Cuba. The self-described man without a country moved to Havana with Giselle Roberge, a former classical-ballet dancer, in 1998 and gets around the world on a German travel document. Agee's experiences provided the basic plotline for a late-1970s film titled ...