regarding Agee,
I highly recommend “Inside the Company”.
Here’s a bunch of links…
FLASHBACK: Renegade CIA Officer Phillip Agee Calls Outing of Valerie Plame “Dirty Politics”
Former CIA Agent Phillip Agee On the Wilson Affair, the Iraq Invasion and Why Bush Sr. Calls Him A Traitor
Philip Agee Documentary at Cuba Film Fest

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Jan 11 2008 12:43 utc | 3

open hypothesis – one could possibly discern which wire services (reporters?) are [more / the most] spook-infiltrated through their coverage on agee’s death. the ap article the other day certainly beat out reuters. haven’t compared those to the others yet.

Posted by: b real | Jan 11 2008 16:00 utc | 5

Sir Ed as he is known in these parts was the distinguished ‘old boy” who was never invited to our school in my day there. His family were prominent conscientious objectors during WW2 – a direct result of Sir Ed’s father’s WW1 experiences.
Ed’s brothers were interned during the war, something Ed was spared firstly because he was in a protected occupation (bee keeping) and secondly because when NZ came under threat of invasion after the Japanese moved into South Pacific territories Ed volunteered for the Air Force where he worked as an AA gunner (I think) in the South Pacific until injured whilst playing around in boats.
That was enough for our school’s Old Boys Association to insist that Hillary not set foot in the place. I remember that there were plenty of people who claimed to ‘have no time’ for the bloke, probably because of his leftist egalitarian philosophy as much as his refusal to fight an english war which he didn’t see had much to do with him.
He always dunned the english somehow. On the Everest ‘assault’ Hillary and his partner Tensing Norgay (a Sherpa regarded as a servant by some members of the english led and funded Royal Geographical Society expedition) were meant to be the second string climbers. Despite the fact the pair were the strongest, by far the best high altitude climbers on the expedition, the first attempt was to be made by a couple of englishmen.
Hillary and Tensing were in a party given the task of setting up the final camp several hundred meters below the summit. They carried the supplies up with the rest of the group which included the first string pair and the team leader, all of whom were overcome with altitude sickness. Hillary persuaded the others to get back down so they could recuperate, then he and Tensing set off for the summit.
A few years later another British adventurer – Sir Vivian ‘Bunny” Fuchs (just the name sets my teeth on edge), planned an expedition across Antarctica. They were to be the first motorised journey to the South Pole.
Bunny Fuchs was going to set off from a base just south of Argentina and had hired Hillary to place fuel and food dumps on a route from New Zealand’s Scott Base which Hillary was in the process of establishing, out to just short of the South Pole. Fuch’s plan was to drive straight across from one side of Antarctica to the other. This was a long journey requiring a lot of fuel and food and spare parts to be taken along, more than his group could carry, so he needed some other team to put supplies in place for the second leg of the trip.
For whatever reason Fuchs and company got bogged down and made little progress on their leg, while Hillary made the dumps as planned with time to spare.
After sitting a few miles north of the South Pole for days while Fuchs fucked around and the Antarctic summer ran out, Hillary decided “Bugger it” he may as well do the job himself, so he drove to the South Pole, stuck the usual flags in the dirt (well snow) took photos and told the world.
To say Fuchs was not amused was an understatement. Hillary later said he was unaware just how much it meant for Fuchs to be the one to do it first (yeah right!) and that if he had known he would have thought differently about going ahead on his own, but after having a ‘good think’ he would have done it anyway. Heheheh
I had a bit of a falling out with my brothers over this a couple of Xmases back. They maintained that Everest and Antarctica demonstrated that Hillary was essentially a self promoter, but I didn’t believe so. He dedicated his life to building schools and hospitals for the poverty stricken Sherpas, and it was that poverty which he saw had been exploited by english colonialism that made him less than caring of the english way of doing things.
If either english team boss had been upfront and said: “Look. This is a pommie operation. We don’t want colonials or blackfellas stealing the glory, then Hillary may have listened, but they were never that straightforward.
Hillary’s family were just ordinary working kiwis, but most of the english on these expeditions were ‘gentleman sportsmen’, so called amateurs. This amateur thing was a typical pommie scam, played according to a set of unwritten and unspoken rules which everybody was expected to know. If they didn’t know them, the feeling was, they didn’t belong .
Hillary played their bullshit game back at them and beat them at it. The english “I’m a gentleman you’re not” scam has always depended upon the other ‘lesser’ people going along with the bullshit.
Going along because they had to. ie If ‘darkies’ didn’t fall into line, the ‘other’ english would appear, the less cultured ones who carried whips and guns. Or going along because they had been seduced by the life, and imagined they could be part of it. That was the category that the english ‘amateurs’ probably put Hillary into, although since he had no money they paid him a meagre salary, so maybe they did consider him to be just another servant.
It hardly matters, those who were foolish enough to believe they could ‘join the club’ usually copped a shock rejection, followed by contempt once they were no longer needed.
Hillary may have sensed that if he went along with Sir John Hunt’s program and allowed his obvious physical superiority to be used just as they demanded, that after a couple of gentleman climbers had been carried to the top, he (Hillary) would soon be cast aside, thanked in a couple of speeches then dismissed as “our robust antipodean” or some other similarly patronising dismissal.
Some of the english attitude is betrayed in the awarding of Hillary’s knighthood. The successful ascent was achieved the day before Elizabeth II’s coronation and was presented by the expeditions organisers as ‘a gift to our beautiful young Queen”, so the Windsor/Battenburg/Hapsburg mob responded by knighting the expedition leader John Hunt and first whitefella, Edmund Hillary.
Nobody thought to ask Hillary whose egalitarian beliefs didn’t go for titles whether he wanted a knighthood. The first that Hillary heard about it was when the expedition were walking out of the Himalayas back towards Kathmandu when he got a letter addressed to Sir Edmund Hillary. It was from some royal ass-licker telling him he had been knighted.
Hillary has never claimed to be a perfect person and may have accepted it anyway, certainly in 1953 the notion of sending an ‘honour’ back the aristos, along with a note telling em where to shove it was a bit ‘out there’.
There are lessons and pitfalls for all activists in Hillary’s approach. Just because we may consider ourselves to be fighting for what’s ‘right’ or ‘just’ we can’t achieve that if we are the nicest people in the stoush.
On the other hand the end doesn’t justify the means, whatever good Joe Stalin did for Russia and Russians will always be diminished by the awfulness of mass racial and ethnic ‘exiles’. Stalin’s method’s, which admittedly, often had sound strategic thinking behind them, meant that Russia is still short of the revolution it has needed the most. The one that recognises the humanity in us all.
Hillary has been considered a ‘world figure’ from time to time. Certainly his death has made the fishwraps in a lot of places and even if that is due to a relatively slow news week it does show that his name has some recognition.
I mention this because Hillary knew that the best way for him to do things and be successful was to ‘keep it small’. He could have politicked and founded or joined some huge aid organisation forever raising money to keep the megalith floating. Instead he worked school by school, hospital by hospital. His group, the NZ end made up of family and friends, the Nepalese comprised of Sherpas, saw each project from go to whoa.
I confess to considering the Hillary method when working with remote area, traditional aboriginal people in northern Australia. Get to know the people at a personal level. Understand the community and the various social forces within it, make it plain that resources are available for programs but never make a ‘gift’ of them.
That is don’t foist some idea that you may think to be good on an unsuspecting community. If they trust you they may accept the proposal since it came from you. However that doesn’t mean the idea will be supported after you go back to where you came from. Ensure the various leaders within a community aware of some options that they hadn’t considered, but always leave that process of consideration entirely in the hands of the community.
All of Hillary’s schools and hospitals in the Solu Khumbu district of Nepal are still being used for educating and healing. Tensing Norgay was illiterate, a fact which caused him a number of problems once he became famous and this was what Hillary said had got him thinking about schools for Sherpa children. Then when a village headman told Hillary that they wanted a school, that was the beginning of his real work in the Himalayas.
Hillary was concerned he was doing more harm than good, that the best thing for the Sherpas was to leave them alone but he also understood that Everest climbing had become an industry and that the destruction of their traditional ways of living were inevitable. The Sherpas wanted their children to be educated. Hillary found a way to do that in a monarchial, almost feudal society, that didn’t leave the people in debt to some absentee landlord/money lender or having to fight and spill blood to get it.
The assholes whose antecedents fought to keep Sir Ed away from our school prize-givings, royal visitations etc are now lining up to praise the old bugger and cop front row seats to his funeral.
His death is the death of the old egalitarian kiwi way of life. The assholes have succeeded in imposing their neoliberal dog eat dog way of life on us all for the moment but Hillary didn’t let it get to him. Whenever he was out in public people queued up to get his autograph on the kiwi five dollar bill which carries his portrait. He knew half of them would be rushing off to auction it on Ebay or the NZ equivalent as soon as he left, but he always treated each request with good grace and signed the damn things. In a way he had become that which those english amateurs had just pretended to be, a true gentleman.
He behaved as if he knew that the blackness of the current period of humanity would eventually pass and he wasn’t going to succumb to the selfishness of contemporary thinking. We will miss the old bugger.

Posted by: Debs is dead | Jan 12 2008 0:31 utc | 7

I saw SEH speak when he first came back from Nepal, forty years ago.
Then by coincidence again ten years ago, selling ‘Clean Green’ soap.
Paraphrasing that bake sale joke, why couldn’t that’ve been McCain?
Why couldn’t McCain be a has-been soap salesman, and SEH a Senator??

Posted by: Mythof Sysiphus | Jan 12 2008 3:21 utc | 9

Debs … thank you.
A few years ago I read a fascinating book by Tenzing Norgay’s son, Jamling Tenzing Norgay, Touching My Father’s Soul and it’s a wonderful account from the Sherpa’s side.

Posted by: Siun | Jan 12 2008 7:55 utc | 11