Havana ? Philip Agee, the renegade former CIA agent best known for blowing the covers of more than 1,000 colleagues, takes a certain satisfaction in watching the political storm brewing over the White House.

Agee is the reason for the law that makes it a federal crime to reveal the identities of covert operatives. His best-selling 1975 memoir, “Inside the Company: CIA Diary,” and a subsequent radical magazine he helped launch exposed CIA agents around the world in an effort to thwart U.S. intelligence activities.

Former President George H.W. Bush, who became CIA director a year after Agee’s book was published, was so incensed by his betrayal and the potential threat to agents in the field that he campaigned for the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, which passed in 1982.

Now the tides of history have turned. The law intended to silence Agee and would-be copycats is at the center of a thorny investigation hanging over George W. Bush’s White House: what role senior aide Karl Rove played in the leaking of the identity of covert agent Valerie Plame, the wife of former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, an opponent of the Iraq war.

‘So ironic’

A special prosecutor was appointed in 2003 to determine whether White House officials violated the law and exposed Plame’s name in a campaign to discredit Wilson after he wrote an opinion piece in The New York Times criticizing the Bush administration’s decision to go to war.

“It is so ironic that the White House itself might be the first violator of this law, which, my name is attached to,” said the soft-spoken Agee who at 70 looks more like a retired banker than a former man of mystery.

Actually, the little-known law has been used once before to prosecute a CIA clerk in Ghana who pleaded guilty to charges of revealing the identities of covert agents to her boyfriend.

Agee, who at 70 looks more like a retired banker than a former man of mystery, admits he has not been following “Rovegate” closely and is a little surprised to see his name back in newspapers.

These days he divides his time between homes in Havana and Hamburg, Germany, where his wife works as a ballet teacher.

From CIA to Cuba

After an 11-year career with the CIA during which he worked to penetrate Cuban embassies in Ecuador and Uruguay, Agee has become an outspoken admirer of Fidel Castro’s socialist revolution and is on friendly terms with some of the island’s top officials.

His apartment building in the Vedado district is aging and disheveled like most of Havana. But inside, his home is an oasis of comfort above the city’s gritty bustle.

One room is devoted to www.cubalinda.com, the online travel agency Agee founded in 1999 to entice Americans to visit Cuba. The Web site offers package deals, fishing trips and tours to Ernest Hemingway’s Havana hangouts. But despite initial interest, business is slow.

Due partly to the Bush administration’s tightened restrictions on the U.S. travel embargo, Agee said, he only books about 30 tourists a month, mostly non-Americans.

He is also at work on a book to “expose and denounce” alleged U.S. intervention against Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. For Agee, an icon of the left and pariah of the right, it is a return to the so-called “guerrilla journalism” that characterized his first book.

Controversial book

“Inside the Company: CIA Diary” caused a furor when it was published. It described CIA activities in such detail that many accused Agee of researching the book while still in the CIA – a charge he denies.

When Richard Welch, the CIA station chief in Athens, was killed by a Greek terrorist group in 1975, Agee was blamed for his death even though he had not named him in his book. In 1978 he helped found the “Covert Action Information Bulletin,” a quarterly magazine that also unmasked agents’ identities.

Reviled as a traitor, Agee’s U.S. passport was revoked a year later and he was banned from five NATO countries.

In a 1991 speech, former president Bush said he would “never forgive Philip Agee and those like him who want only to sacrifice the lives of intelligence officers.”

No regrets

Today Agee says he has no regrets about publishing the names.

“Through all these years there have been accusations that it hurt people. But in actual fact I never knew of any case,” he said. “The only case they could ever accuse me of was the Welch case, but that was totally false.”

Agee seems somewhat indifferent to the outcome of the Rove/Plame case. Because the law is tightly written he says he doubts Rove can be charged under it.

“I’m not really interested in the case other than the way it might affect the law,” Agee said.