Bill Christison, a former CIA agent who moved to Santa Fe 30 years ago and became a fierce critic of U.S. foreign policy, is dead.

Christison, 81, died Sunday. He suffered a "rapidly advancing neurological condition," his wife of 33 years said Tuesday.

The Boston-born Princeton graduate joined the Central Intelligence Agency in 1950 as an analyst. He worked on Soviet affairs and nuclear proliferation. In the 1970s, Christison was a principal adviser to the CIA director for Southeast Asia, South Asia and Africa. His final position was director of the agency's Office of Regional and Political Analysis.

He met his wife, who also worked for the CIA, during a tour in Saigon in the 1970s.

Kathy Christison said that when her husband was ready to retire, he was ready to leave Washington, D.C. — both to get away from the hot and humid summers and from the agency, which she said frequently tries to rope in retired employees for consulting work. Los Angeles was too smoggy and Arizona was too hot. They had friends — also ex-CIA — who lived in Santa Fe, so they bought a house and moved here in December 1979.

The political views of the couple began to change. "It was a slow evolution," said Kathy Christison, who said she voted for Ronald Reagan in the 1980s.

"Bill used to say that the end of the Cold War is what made him start thinking differently," she said. "There was supposed to be a 'peace dividend,' but that just never came to be. He just began to realize that the U.S. should not be the only superpower." The fall of the Soviet Union, she said, just prompted the U.S. to "essentially advance its imperial interests."

Kathy Christison said she owes her own changing views to moving to Santa Fe and "getting away from the politically elite."

She said, "I began to see what is really important — helping people to help themselves." Having worked seven years on Mideast issues in the CIA, she was interested in the plight of Palestinians in Israel. Both she and her husband became sharp critics of Israeli policies as well as this country's Mideast policy.

Both Bill and Kathy Christison began writing articles — both together and separately — for Counterpunch, an online "bi-weekly muckraking newsletter."

"Bill was a very inspiring presence," Alexander Cockburn, an editor of Counterpunch, said in a telephone interview Tuesday. He said he met the Christisons on a Nation magazine cruise. Some of Bill Christison's most important work, Cockburn said, came in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

In a March 4, 2002, Counterpunch article, Bill Christison wrote, "My number one root cause (of terrorism) is the support by the U.S. over recent years for the policies of Israel with respect to the Palestinians, and the belief among Arabs and Muslims that the United States is as much to blame as Israel itself for the continuing, almost 35-year-long Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip."

His belief that U.S. policies were responsible for terrorism caused some controversy in Santa Fe following 9/11. In October 2001, the Christisons resigned from the Council on International Relations after board members of CIR approached Kathy Christison before she spoke to a group of high school students about Palestine and told her to present a "balanced view."

Eventually, Bill Christison came to believe that the official account of the Sept. 11 attacks wasn't true — a view not shared by Cockburn. But Christison continued writing for Counterpunch, which last October published his article titled "Obama's Unjust Iran Policy."

The couple were active in the opposition to the war in Iraq. In March 2003 — just days before the invasion — the Christisons traveled to the region with a group of 10 people sponsored by a national organization called Voices in the Wilderness. They were supposed to go to Iraq, but when they got to Jordan encountered problems getting their visas approved by the Iraqi government. The other eight eventually got into Iraq. The Christisons instead went to the West Bank of Jerusalem, where they met with the late Yasir Arafat, president of the Palestinian National Authority, and Hanan Ashrawi, another Palestinian leader.

The Christisons together wrote Palestine in Pieces: Graphic Perspectives on the Israeli Occupation, published last August.

A memorial service for Bill Christison is scheduled for 2 p.m. Friday at Santa Fe Funeral Options, 417 E. Rodeo Road.

Contact Steve Terrell at 986-3037 or sterrell@sfnewmexican.com. Read his political blog at roundhouseroundup.com.