Conversations from the Cullman Center, LIVE from NYPL: A Drop of Treason: Jonathan Stevenson with Jean Strouse

Before Edward Snowden there was Philip Agee. Stevenson discusses his new biography of the first intelligence officer to publicly betray the CIA. 

Philip Agee’s life could have been imagined by John le Carré. He joined the CIA as a young idealist, became entrenched in the shadow world of intelligence, and then made himself a pariah in 1975 when he published his tell-all book, Inside the Company: CIA Diary, publicly blowing the covers of American spies. Agee’s lifelong political struggle resulted in his forty-year exile, as he allied himself with social movements of the global left. He traveled the world, enlisted the help of Gabriel García Márquez, married a ballerina, and fought for what he believed was right. Raised a conservative Jesuit in Tampa, he died a socialist expat in Havana. Stevenson examines Agee’s decision to turn, how he sustained it, and how his actions intersected with world events.

Jonathan Stevenson researched and wrote A Drop of Treason during his 2016–2017 Fellowship at the Library’s Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. He discusses his book with award-winning biographer and critic Jean Strouse.

Produced in partnership with The Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers.

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• Inside the Company: CIA Diary by Philip Agee — NYPL Catalog
• The Interrogator: An Education by Glenn L. Carle — NYPL Catalog ; Bookshare
• The Rise and Fall of the American Left by John Patrick Diggins — NYPL Catalog
• Morgan: American Financier by Jean Strouse — NYPL Catalog ; NYPL Talking Books ; Bookshare

Jonathan Stevenson is senior fellow for U.S. defense and managing editor of Survival at the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS). He was previously professor of strategic studies at the U.S. Naval War College, and he has served as director for political-military affairs, Middle East and North Africa, on the National Security Council. He is the author of several books, including Thinking Beyond the Unthinkable: Harnessing Doom from the Cold War to the Age of Terror and “We Wrecked the Place”: Contemplating and End to the Northern Irish Troubles.

Jean Strouse is the author of Morgan: American Financier and Alice James: A Biography, which won the Bancroft Prize in American History. Her essays and reviews have appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Architectural Digest, Vogue, and Slate. She has held fellowships from the MacArthur and Guggenheim Foundations and the National Endowment for the Humanities. A past president of the Society of American Historians, she served as director of the Cullman Center from 2003 to 2017. Currently she is writing a book about twelve portraits by John Singer Sargent of the family of Asher Wertheimer, a prominent London art dealer.

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The Cullman Center is made possible by a generous endowment from Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman in honor of Brooke Russell Astor, with major support provided by Mrs. John L. Weinberg, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, The Estate of Charles J. Liebman, The von der Heyden Family Foundation, John and Constance Birkelund, and The Samuel I. Newhouse Foundation, and with additional gifts from Helen and Roger Alcaly, The Rona Jaffe Foundation, The Arts and Letters Foundation Inc., William W. Karatz, Merilee and Roy Bostock, and Cullman Center Fellows.

LIVE from NYPL is made possible by the support of Library patrons and friends, as well as by the continuing generosity of Celeste Bartos, Mahnaz Ispahani Bartos and Adam Bartos, and the Margaret and Herman Sokol Public Education Endowment Fund.