[4] Former Central Intelligence Agency personnel Victor Marchetti, Philip Agee, and Stanley Sheinbaum joined CounterSpy's advisory board aimed at mitigating some of the pressure being exerted by the magazine towards the CIA.
[3] By April 1979, Philip Agee was no longer associated with CounterSpy in any capacity, his only institutional relationship at that point being with CovertAction Information Bulletin.
Agee urged the "neutralization of its [CIA] people working abroad" by publicizing their names so that they could no longer operate clandestinely.
However, the 1975 murder of Richard Welch, the CIA Station Chief in Greece, by Revolutionary Organization 17 November was blamed by some on disclosures in magazines such as CounterSpy.
[citation needed] Congress cited the Welch assassination as the principal justification for passing the Intelligence Identities Protection Act in 1982 making the willful identification of a CIA officer a criminal offense.