THE SECRET WARS OF THE CIA

John Stockwell: The Third World War

THE SECRET WARS OF THE CIA:

part I

THE INNER WORKINGS OF THE NATIONAL SECURITY COUNCIL AND THE CIA’S COVERT ACTIONS IN ANGOLA, CENTRAL AMERICA AND VIETNAM

by John Stockwell

a lecture given in October, 1987

John Stockwell is the highest-ranking CIA official ever to leave the agency and go public. He ran a CIA intelligence-gathering post in Vietnam, was the task-force commander of the CIA’s secret war in Angola in 1975 and 1976, and was awarded the Medal of Merit before he resigned. Stockwell’s book In Search of Enemies, published by W.W. Norton 1978, is an international best-seller.

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"I did 13 years in the CIA altogether. I sat on a subcommittee of the NSC, so I was like a chief of staff, with the GS-18s (like 3-star generals) Henry Kissinger, Bill Colby (the CIA director), the GS-18s and the CIA, making the important decisions and my job was to put it all together and make it happen and run it, an interesting place from which to watch a covert action being done…

I testified for days before the Congress, giving them chapter and verse, date and detail, proving specific lies. They were asking if we had to do with S. Africa, that was fighting in the country. In fact we were coordinating this operation so closely that our airplanes, full of arms from the states, would meet their airplanes in Kinshasa and they would take our arms into Angola to distribute to our forces for us….

What I found with all of this study is that the subject, the problem, if you will, for the world, for the U.S. is much, much, much graver, astronomically graver, than just Angola and Vietnam. I found that the Senate Church committee has reported, in their study of covert actions, that the CIA ran several thousand covert actions since 1961, and that the heyday of covert action was before 1961; that we have run several hundred covert actions a year, and the CIA has been in business for a total of 37 years.

What we’re going to talk about tonight is the United States national security syndrome. We’re going to talk about how and why the U.S. manipulates the press. We’re going to talk about how and why the U.S. is pouring money into El Salvador, and preparing to invade Nicaragua; how all of this concerns us so directly. I’m going to try to explain to you the other side of terrorism; that is, the other side of what Secretary of State Shultz talks about. In doing this, we’ll talk about the Korean war, the Vietnam war, and the Central American war.

Everything I’m going to talk to you about is represented, one way or another, already in the public records. You can dig it all out for yourselves, without coming to hear me if you so chose. Books, based on information gotten out of the CIA under the freedom of information act, testimony before the Congress, hearings before the Senate Church committee, research by scholars, witness of people throughout the world who have been to these target areas that we’ll be talking about. I want to emphasize that my own background is profoundly conservative. We come from South Texas, East Texas….

I was conditioned by my training, my marine corps training, and my background, to believe in everything they were saying about the cold war, and I took the job with great enthusiasm (in the CIA) to join the best and the brightest of the CIA, of our foreign service, to go out into the world, to join the struggle, to project American values and save the world for our brand of democracy. And I believed this. I went out and worked hard….

What I really got out of these 6 years in Africa was a sense … that nothing we were doing in fact defended U.S. national security interests very much. We didn’t have many national security interests in Bujumbura, Burundi, in the heart of Africa. I concluded that I just couldn’t see the point.

We were doing things it seemed because we were there, because it was our function, we were bribing people, corrupting people, and not protecting the U.S. in any visible way. I had a chance to go drinking with this Larry Devlin, a famous CIA case officer who had overthrown Patrice Lumumba, and had him killed in 1960, back in the Congo. He was moving into the Africa division Chief. I talked to him in Addis Ababa at length one night, and he was giving me an explanation – I was telling him frankly, ‘sir, you know, this stuff doesn’t make any sense, we’re not saving anybody from anything, and we are corrupting people, and everybody knows we’re doing it, and that makes the U.S. look bad’.

And he said I was getting too big for my britches. He said, `you’re trying to think like the people in the NSC back in Washington who have the big picture, who know what’s going on in the world, who have all the secret information, and the experience to digest it. If they decide we should have someone in Bujumbura, Burundi, and that person should be you, then you should do your job, and wait until you have more experience, and you work your way up to that point, then you will understand national security, and you can make the big decisions. Now, get to work, and stop, you know, this philosophizing.’

And I said, `Aye-aye sir, sorry sir, a bit out of line sir’. It’s a very powerful argument, our presidents use it on us. President Reagan has used it on the American people, saying, `if you knew what I know about the situation in Central America, you would understand why it’s necessary for us to intervene.’

I went back to Washington, however, and I found that others shared my concern. A formal study was done in the State Department and published internally, highly classified, called the Macomber [sp?] report, concluding that the CIA had no business being in Africa for anything it was known to be doing, that our presence there was not justified, there were no national security interests that the CIA could address any better than the ambassador himself. We didn’t need to have bribery and corruption as a tool for doing business in Africa at that time.

I went from … a tour in Washington to Vietnam. And there, my career, and my life, began to get a little bit more serious. They assigned me a country. It was during the cease-fire, ’73 to ’75. There was no cease-fire. Young men were being slaughtered. I saw a slaughter. 300 young men that the South Vietnamese army ambushed. Their bodies brought in and laid out in a lot next to my compound. I was up-country in Tayninh. They were laid out next door, until the families could come and claim them and take them away for burial.

I thought about this. I had to work with the sadistic police chief. When I reported that he liked to carve people with knives in the CIA safe-house – when I reported this to my bosses, they said, `(1). The post was too important to close down. (2). They weren’t going to get the man transferred or fired because that would make problems, political problems, and he was very good at working with us in the operations he worked on. (3). Therefore if I didn’t have the stomach for the job, that they could transfer me.’

But they hastened to point out, if I did demonstrate a lack of `moral fiber’ to handle working with the sadistic police chief, that I wouldn’t get another good job in the CIA, it would be a mark against
my career.

So I kept the job, I closed the safe-house down, I told my staff that I didn’t approve of that kind of activity, and I proceeded to work with him for the next 2 years, pretending that I had reformed him, and he didn’t do this sort of thing anymore. The parallel is obvious with El Salvador today, where the CIA, the state department, works with the death squads.

They don’t meet the death squads on the streets where they’re actually chopping up people or laying them down on the street and running trucks over their heads. The CIA people in San Salvador meet the police chiefs, and the people who run the death squads, and they do liaise with them, they meet them beside the swimming pool of the villas. And it’s a sophisticated, civilized kind of relationship. And they talk about their children, who are going to school at UCLA or Harvard and other schools, and they don’t talk about the horrors of what’s being done. They pretend like it isn’t true.

What I ran into in addition to that was a corruption in the CIA and the intelligence business that made me question very seriously what it was all about, including what I was doing … risking my life … what I found was that the CIA, us, the case officers, were not permitted to report about the corruption in the South Vietnamese army….

Now, the corruption was so bad, that the S. Vietnamese army was a skeleton army. Colonels would let the troops go home if they would come in once a month and sign the pay vouchers so the colonel could pocket the money. Then he could sell half of the uniforms and boots and M-16’s to the communist forces – that was their major supply, just as it is in El Salvador today. He could use half of the trucks to haul produce, half of the helicopters to haul heroin.

And the Army couldn’t fight. And we lived with it, and we saw it, and there was no doubt – everybody talked about it openly. We could provide all kinds of proof, and they wouldn’t let us report it. Now this was a serious problem because the south was attacked in the winter of 1975, and it collapsed like a big vase hit by a sledgehammer. And the U.S. was humiliated, and that was the dramatic end of our long involvement in Vietnam….

I had been designated as the task-force commander that would run this secret war [in Angola in 1975 and 1976]…. and what I figured out was that in this job, I would sit on a sub-committee of the National Security Council, this office that Larry Devlin has told me about where they had access to all the information about Angola, about the whole world, and I would finally understand national security. And I couldn’t resist the opportunity to know. I knew the CIA was not a worthwhile organization, I had learned that the hard way. But the question was where did the U.S. government fit into this thing, and I had a chance to see for myself in the next big secret war….

I wanted to know if wise men were making difficult decisions based on truly important, threatening information, threatening to our national security interests. If that had been the case, I still planned to get out of the CIA, but I would know that the system, the invisible government, our national security complex, was in fact justified and worth while. And so I took the job…. Suffice it to say I wouldn’t be standing in front of you tonight if I had found these wise men making these tough decisions. What I found, quite frankly, was fat old men sleeping through sub-committee meetings of the NSC in which we were making decisions that were killing people in Africa. I mean literally. Senior ambassador Ed Mulcahy… would go to sleep in nearly every one of these meetings….

You can change the names in my book [about Angola] [13] and you’ve got Nicaragua…. the basic structure, all the way through including the mining of harbors, we addressed all of these issues. The point is that the U.S. led the way at every step of the escalation of the fighting. We said it was the Soviets and the Cubans that were doing it. It was the U.S. that was escalating the fighting. There would have been no war if we hadn’t gone in first. We put arms in, they put arms in. We put advisors in, they answered with advisors. We put in Zairian para-commando battalions, they put in Cuban army troops. We brought in the S. African army, they brought in the Cuban army. And
they pushed us away. They blew us away because we were lying, we were covering ourselves with lies, and they were telling the truth. And it was not a war that we could fight. We didn’t have interests there that should have been defended that way.

There was never a study run that evaluated the MPLA, FNLA and UNITA, the three movements in the country, to decide which one was the better one. The assistant secretary of state for African affairs, Nathaniel Davis, no bleeding-heart liberal (he was known by some people in the business as the butcher of Santiago), he said we should stay out of the conflict and work with whoever eventually won, and that was obviously the MPLA. Our consul in Luanda, Tom Killoran, vigorously argued that the MPLA was the best qualified to run the country and the friendliest to the U.S.

We brushed these people aside, forced Matt Davis to resign, and proceeded with our war. The MPLA said they wanted to be our friends, they didn’t want to be pushed into the arms of the Soviet Union; they begged us not to fight them, they wanted to work with us. We said they wanted a cheap victory, they wanted a walk-over, they wanted to be un-opposed, that we wouldn’t give them a cheap victory, we would make them earn it, so to speak. And we did. 10,000 Africans died and they won the victory that they were winning anyway.

Now, the most significant thing that I got out of all of this, in addition to the fact that our rationales were basically false, was that we lied. To just about everybody involved. One third of my staff in this task force that I put together in Washington, commanding this global operation, pulling strings all over the world to focus pressure onto Angola, and military activities into Angola, one third of my staff was propagandists, who were working, in every way they could to create this picture of Cubans raping Angolans, Cubans and Soviets introducing arms into the conflict, Cubans and Russians trying to take over the world.

Our ambassador to the United Nations, Patrick Moynihan, he read continuous statements of our position to the Security Council, the general assembly, and the press conferences, saying the Russians and Cubans were responsible for the conflict, and that we were staying out, and that we deplored the militarization of the conflict.

And every statement he made was false. And every statement he made was originated in the sub-committee of the NSC that I sat on as we managed this thing. The state department press person read these position papers daily to the press. We would write papers for him. Four paragraphs. We would call him on the phone and say, `call us 10 minutes before you go on, the situation could change overnight, we’ll tell you which paragraph to read. And all four paragraphs would be false. Nothing to do with the truth. Designed to play on events, to create this impression of Soviet and Cuban aggression in Angola. When they were in fact responding to our initiatives.

And the CIA director was required by law to brief the Congress. This CIA director Bill Colby – the same one that dumped our people in Vietnam – he gave 36 briefings of the Congress, the oversight committees, about what we were doing in Angola. And he lied. At 36 formal briefings. And such lies are perjury, and it’s a felony to lie to the Congress.

He lied about our relationship with South Africa. We were working closely with the South African army, giving them our arms, coordinating battles with them, giving them fuel for their tanks and armored cars. He said we were staying well away from them. They were concerned about these white mercenaries that were appearing in Angola, a very sensitive issue, hiring whites to go into a black African country, to help you impose your will on that black African country by killing the blacks, a very sensitive issue. The Congress was concerned we might be involved in that, and he assured them we had nothing to do with it.

We had in fact formed four little mercenary armies and delivered them into Angola to do this dirty business for the CIA. And he lied to them about that. They asked if we were putting arms into the conflict, and he said no, and we were. They asked if we had advisors inside the country, and he said `no, we had people going in to look at the situation and coming back out’. We had 24 people sleeping inside the country, training in the use of weapons, installing communications systems, planning battles, and he said, we didn’t have anybody inside the country.

In summary about Angola, without U.S. intervention, 10,000 people would be alive that were killed in the thing. The outcome might have been peaceful, or at least much less bloody. The MPLA was winning when we went in, and they went ahead and won, which was, according to our consul, the best thing for the country.

At the end of this thing the Cubans were entrenched in Angola, seen in the eyes of much of the world as being the heroes that saved these people from the CIA and S. African forces. We had allied the U.S. literally and in the eyes of the world with the S. African army, and that’s illegal, and it’s impolitic. We had hired white mercenaries and eventually been identified with them. And that’s illegal, and it’s impolitic. And our lies had been visible lies. We were caught out on those lies. And the world saw the U.S. as liars.

After it was over, you have to ask yourself, was it justified? What did the MPLA do after they had won? Were they lying when they said they wanted to be our friends? 3 weeks after we were shut down… the MPLA had Gulf oil back in Angola, pumping the Angolan oil from the oilfields, with U.S. gulf technicians protected by Cuban soldiers, protecting them from CIA mercenaries who were still mucking around in Northern Angola.

You can’t trust a communist, can you? They proceeded to buy five 737 jets from Boeing Aircraft in Seattle. And they brought in 52 U.S. technicians to install the radar systems to land and take-off those planes. They didn’t buy [the Soviet Union’s] Aeroflot…. David Rockefeller himself tours S. Africa and comes back and holds press conferences, in which he says that we have no problem doing business with the so-called radical states of Southern Africa.

I left the CIA, I decided that the American people needed to know what we’d done in Angola, what we’d done in Vietnam. I wrote my book. I was fortunate – I got it out. It was a best-seller. A lot of people read it. I was able to take my story to the American people. Got on 60 minutes, and lots and lots of other shows.

I testified to the Congress and then I began my education in earnest, after having been taught to fight communists all my life. I went to see what communists were all about. I went to Cuba to see if they do in fact eat babies for breakfast. And I found they don’t. I went to Budapest, a country that even national geographic admits is working nicely. I went to Jamaica to talk to Michael Manley about his theories of social democracy.

I went to Grenada and established a dialogue with Maurice Bishop and Bernard Cord and Phyllis Cord, to see – these were all educated people, and experienced people – and they had a theory, they had something they wanted to do, they had rationales and explanations – and I went repeatedly to hear them. And then of course I saw the U.S., the CIA mounting a covert action against them, I saw us orchestrating our plan to invade the country. 19 days before he was killed, I was in Grenada talking to Maurice Bishop about these things, these indicators, the statements in the press by Ronald Reagan, and he and I were both acknowledging that it was almost certain that the U.S. would invade Grenada in the near future.

I read as many books as I could find on the subject – book after book after book. I’ve got several hundred books on the shelf over my desk on the subject of U.S. national security interests. And by the way, I urge you to read. In television you get capsules of news that someone else puts together what they want you to hear about the news. In newspapers you get what the editors select to put in the newspaper. If you want to know about the world and understand, to educate yourself, you have to get out and dig, dig up books and articles for yourself. Read, and find out for yourselves. As you’ll see, the issues are very, very important.

I also was able to meet the players, the people who write, the people who have done studies, people who are leading different situations. I went to Nicaragua a total of 7 times. This was a major covert action. It lasted longer and evolved to be bigger than what we did in Angola. It gave me a chance, after running something from Washington, to go to a country that was under attack, to talk to the leadership, to talk to the people, to look and see what happens when you give white phosporous or grenades or bombs or bullets to people, and they go inside a country, to go and talk to the people, who have been shot, or hit, or blown up….

We’re talking about 10 to 20 thousand covert actions [the CIA has performed since 1961]. What I found was that lots and lots of people have been killed in these things…. Some of them are very, very bloody.

The Indonesian covert action of 1965, reported by Ralph McGehee, who was in that area division, and had documents on his desk, in his custody about that operation. He said that one of the documents concluded that this was a model operation that should be copied elsewhere in the world. Not only did it eliminate the effective communist party (Indonesian communist party), it also eliminated the entire segment of the population that tended to support the communist party – the ethnic Chinese, Indonesian Chinese. And the CIA’s report put the number of dead at 800,000 killed. And that was one covert action. We’re talking about 1 to 3 million people killed in these things.

Two of these things have led us directly into bloody wars. There was a covert action against China, destabilizing China, for many, many years, with a propaganda campaign to work up a mood, a feeling in this country, of the evils of communist China, and attacking them, as we’re doing in Nicaragua today, with an army that was being launched against them to parachute in and boat in and destabilize the country. And this led us directly into the Korean war.

U.S. intelligence officers worked over Vietnam for a total of 25 years, with greater and greater involvement, massive propaganda, deceiving the American people about what was happening. Panicking people in Vietnam to create migrations to the south so they could photograph it and show how people were fleeing communism. And on and on, until they got us into the Vietnam war, and 2,000,000 people were killed.

There is a mood, a sentiment in Washington, by our leadership today, for the past 4 years, that a good communist is a dead communist. If you’re killing 1 to 3 million communists, that’s great. President Reagan has gone public and said he would reduce the Soviet Union to a pile of ashes. The problem, though, is that these people killed by our national security activities are not communists. They’re not Russians, they’re not KGB. In the field we used to play chess with the KGB officers, and have drinks with them. It was like professional football players – we would knock heads on Sunday, maybe in an operation, and then Tuesday you’re at a banquet together drinking toasts and talking.

The people that are dying in these things are people of the third world. That’s the common denominator that you come up with. People of the third world. People that have the misfortune of being born in the Metumba mountains of the Congo, in the jungles of Southeast Asia, and now in the hills of northern Nicaragua. Far more Catholics than communists, far more Buddhists than communists. Most of them couldn’t give you an intelligent definition of communism, or of capitalism.

Central America has been a traditional target of U.S. dominion. If you want to get an easy-read of the history of our involvement in Central America, read Walter LaFeber’s book, Inevitable Revolutions. [8] We have dominated the area since 1820. We’ve had a policy of dominion, of excluding other countries, other industrial powers from Europe, from competing with us in the area.

Just to give you an example of how complete this is, and how military this has been, between 1900 and W.W. II, we had 5,000 marines in Nicaragua for a total of 28 years. We invaded the Dominican Republic 4 times. Haiti, we occupied it for 12 years. We put our troops into Cuba 4 times, Panama 6 times, Guatemala once, plus a CIA covert action to overthrow the democratic government there once. Honduras, 7 times. And by the way, we put 12,000 troops into the Soviet Union during that same period of time.

In the 1930’s there was public and international pressure about our marines in Nicaragua….

The next three leaders of Guatemala [after the CIA installed the puppet, Colonel Armaz in a coup] died violent deaths, and Amnesty International tells us that the governments we’ve supported in power there since then, have killed 80,000 people. You can read about that one in the book Bitter Fruit, by Schlesinger and Kinzer. [5] Kinzer’s a New York Times Journalist… or Jonathan Kwitny, the Wall Street Journal reporter, his book Endless Enemies [7] – all discuss this….

However, the money, the millions and millions of dollars we put into this program [helping Central America] inevitably went to the rich, and not to the people of the countries involved. And while we were doing this, while we were trying, at least saying we were trying, to correct the problems of Central and Latin America, the CIA was doing its thing, too. The CIA was in fact forming the police units that are today the death squads in El Salvador. With the leaders on the CIA’s payroll, trained by the CIA and the United States.

We had the `public safety program’ going throughout Central and Latin America for 26 years, in which we taught them to break up subversion by interrogating people. Interrogation, including torture, the way the CIA taught it. Dan Metrione, the famous exponent of these things, did 7 years in Brazil and 3 in Uruguay, teaching interrogation, teaching torture. He was supposed to be the master of the business, how to apply the right amount of pain, at just the right times, in order to get the response you want from the individual.

They developed a wire. They gave them crank generators, with `U.S. AID’ written on the side, so the people even knew where these things came from. They developed a wire that was strong enough to carry the current and fine enough to fit between the teeth, so you could put one wire between the teeth and the other one in or around the genitals and you could crank and submit the individual to the greatest amount of pain, supposedly, that the human body can register.

Now how do you teach torture? Dan Metrione: `I can teach you about torture, but sooner or later you’ll have to get involved. You’ll have to lay on your hands and try it yourselves.’

…. All they [the guinea pigs, beggars from off the streets] could do was lie there and scream. And when they would collapse, they would bring in doctors and shoot them up with vitamin B and rest them up for the next class. And when they would die, they would mutilate the bodies and throw them out on the streets, to terrify the population so they would be afraid of the police and the government.

And this is what the CIA was teaching them to do. And one of the women who was in this program for 2 years – tortured in Brazil for 2 years – she testified internationally when she eventually got out. She said, `The most horrible thing about it was in fact, that the people doing the torture were not raving psychopaths.’ She couldn’t break mental contact with them the way you could if they were psychopath. They were very ordinary people….

There’s a lesson in all of this. And the lesson is that it isn’t only Gestapo maniacs, or KGB maniacs, that do inhuman things to other people, it’s people that do inhuman things to other people. And we are responsible for doing these things, on a massive basis, to people of the world today. And we do it in a way that gives us this plausible denial to our own consciences; we create a CIA, a secret police, we give them a vast budget, and we let them go and run these programs in our name, and we pretend like we don’t know it’s going on, although the information is there for us to know; and we pretend like it’s ok because we’re fighting some vague communist threat. And we’re just as responsible for these 1 to 3 million people we’ve slaughtered and for all the people we’ve tortured and made miserable, as the Gestapo was the people that they’ve slaughtered and killed. Genocide is genocide!

Now we’re pouring money into El Salvador. A billion dollars or so. And it’s a documented fact that the… 14 families there that own 60% of the country are taking out between 2 to 5 billion dollars – it’s called de-capitalization – and putting it in banks in Miami and Switzerland. Mort Halper, in testifying to a committee of the Congress, he suggested we could simplify the whole thing politically just by investing our money directly in the Miami banks in their names and just stay out of El Salvador altogether. And the people would be better off.

Nicaragua. What’s happening in Nicaragua today is covert action. It’s a classic de-stabilization program. In November 16, 1981, President Reagan allocated 19 million dollars to form an army, a force of contras, they’re called, ex-Somoza national guards, the monsters who were doing the torture and terror in Nicaragua that made the Nicaraguan people rise up and throw out the dictator, and throw out the guard. We went back to create an army of these people. We are killing, and killing, and terrorizing people. Not only in Nicaragua but the Congress has leaked to the press – reported in the New York Times, that there are 50 covert actions going around the world today, CIA covert actions going on around the world today.

You have to be asking yourself, why are we destabilizing 50 corners of the troubled world? Why are we about to go to war in Nicaragua, the Central American war? It is the function, I suggest, of the CIA, with its 50 de-stabilization programs going around the world today, to keep the world unstable, and to propagandize the American people to hate, so we will let the establishment spend any amount of money on arms….

The Victor Marquetti ruling of the Supreme Court gave the government the right to prepublication censorship of books. They challenged 360 items in his 360 page book. He fought it in court, and eventually they deleted some 60 odd items in his book.

The Frank Snep ruling of the Supreme Court gave the government the right to sue a government employee for damages. If s/he writes an unauthorized account of the government – which means the people who are involved in corruption in the government, who see it, who witness it, like Frank Snep did, like I did – if they try to go public they can now be punished in civil court. The government took $90,000 away from Frank Snep, his profits from his book, and they’ve seized the
profits from my own book….

[Reagan passed] the Intelligence Identities Protection act, which makes it a felony to write articles revealing the identities of secret agents or to write about their activities in a way that would reveal their identities. Now, what does this mean? In a debate in Congress – this is very controversial – the supporters of this bill made it clear…. If agents Smith and Jones came on this campus, in an MK-ultra-type experiment, and blew your fiance’s head away with LSD, it would now be a felony to publish an article in your local paper saying, `watch out for these 2 turkeys, they’re federal agents and they blew my loved one’s head away with LSD’. It would not be a felony what they had done because that’s national security and none of them were ever punished for those activities.

Efforts to muzzle government employees. President Reagan has been banging away at this one ever since. Proposing that every government employee, for the rest of his or her life, would have to submit anything they wrote to 6 committees of the government for censorship, for the rest of their lives. To keep the scandals from leaking out… to keep the American people from knowing what the government is really doing.

Then it starts getting heavy. The `Pre-emptive Strikes’ bill. President Reagan, working through the Secretary of State Shultz… almost 2 years ago, submitted the bill that would provide them with the authority to strike at terrorists before terrorists can do their terrorism. But this bill… provides that they would be able to do this in this country as well as overseas. It provides that the secretary of state would put together a list of people that he considers to be terrorist, or terrorist supporters, or terrorist sympathizers. And if your name, or your organization, is put on this list, they could kick down your door and haul you away, or kill you, without any due process of the law and search warrants and trial by jury, and all of that, with impunity.

Now, there was a tremendous outcry on the part of jurists. The New York Times columns and other newspapers saying, `this is no different from Hitler’s "night in fog" program’, where the government had the authority to haul people off at night. And they did so by the thousands. And President Reagan and Secretary Shultz have persisted…. Shultz has said, `Yes, we will have to take action on the basis of information that would never stand up in a court. And yes, innocent people will have to be killed in the process. But, we must have this law because of the threat of international terrorism’.

Think a minute. What is `the threat of international terrorism’? These things catch a lot of attention. But how many Americans died in terrorist actions last year? According to Secretary Shultz, 79. Now, obviously that’s terrible but we killed 55,000 people on our highways with drunken driving; we kill 2,500 people in far nastier, bloodier, mutilating, gang-raping ways in Nicaragua last year alone ourselves. Obviously 79 peoples’ death is not enough reason to take away the protection of American citizens, of due process of the law.

But they’re pressing for this. The special actions teams that will do the pre-emptive striking have already been created, and trained in the defense department.

They’re building detention centers. There were 8 kept as mothballs under the McLaren act after World War II, to detain aliens and dissidents in the next war, as was done in the next war, as was done with the Japanese people during World War II. They’re building 10 more, and army camps, and the… executive memos about these things say it’s for aliens and dissidents in the next national emergency….

FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, headed by Loius Guiffrida, a friend of Ed Meese’s…. He’s going about the country lobbying and demanding that he be given authority, in the times of national emergency, to declare martial law, and establish a curfew, and gun down people who violate the curfew… in the United States.

And then there’s Ed Meese, as I said. The highest law enforcement officer in the land, President Reagan’s closest friend, going around telling us that the constitution never did guarantee freedom of speech and press, and due process of the law, and assembly.

What they are planning for this society, and this is why they’re determined to take us into a war if we’ll permit it… is the Reagan revolution…. So he’s getting himself some laws so when he puts in
the troops in Nicaragua, he can take charge of the American people, and put people in jail, and kick in their doors, and kill them if they don’t like what he’s doing….

The question is, `Are we going to permit our leaders to take away our freedoms because they have a charming smile and they were nice movie stars one day, or are we going to stand up and fight, and insist on our freedoms?’ It’s up to us – you and I can watch this history play in the next year and 2 and 3 years.

*****

[1] Reed Brody.
Contra Terror.
??, .

[2] Christopher Dickey.
With the Contras.
??, .

[3] Dugger, Ronnie.
On Reagan: The Man and the Presidency.
McGraw-Hill, 1983.

[4] Eich, Dieter.
The Contras: Interviews with Anti-Sandinistas.
Synthesis, 1985.

[5] Kinzer, Stephan and Stephen Schlesinger.
Bitter Fruit: The Untold Story of the American Coup in
Guatemala.
Doubleday, 1983.

[6] Godswood, Roy (editor).
Covert Actions: 35 Years of Deception.
Transaction, 1980.

[7] Kwitny, Jonathon.
Endless Enemies: America’s Worldwide War Against It’s Own Best
Interests.
Congdon and Weed, 1984.

[8] LaFeber, Walter.
Inevitable Revolutions; The United States in Central America.
Norton, 1984.

[9] McGehee, Ralph.
Deadly Deceits: My Twenty-Five Years in the CIA.
Sheridan Square, 1983.

[10] Melman, Seymour.
The Permanent War Complex.
Simon and Shuster, 1974.

[11] Mills, C. Wright.
The Power Elite.
Oxford, 1956.

[12] ??
The Book of Quotes.
McGraw-Hill, 1979.

[13] Stockwell, John.
In Search of Enemies.
Norton, 1978.

[14] Stone, I.F.
Hidden History of the Korean War.
Monthly Review, 1969.

[15] The Americas Watch.
The Violations of War on Both Sides.

*****

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THE SECRET WARS OF THE CIA:

part II

CIA COVERT OPERATIONS IN CENTRAL AMERICA, CIA MANIPULATION OF THE PRESS, CIA EXPERIMENTATION ON THE U.S. PUBLIC

by John Stockwell

a lecture given in October, 1987

*****

I just got my latest book back from the CIA censors. If I had not submitted it to them, I would have gone to jail, without trial – blow off juries and all that sort of thing – for having violated our censorship laws….

In that job [Angola] I sat on a sub-committee of the NSC, so I was like a chief of staff, with the GS-18s (like 3-star generals) Henry Kissinger, Bill Colby (the CIA director), the GS-18s and the CIA, making important decisions and my job was to put it all together and make it happen and run it, an interesting place from which to watch a covert action being done….

When the world’s gotten blocked up before, like a monopoly game where everything’s owned and nobody can make any progress, the way they erased the board and started over has been to have big world wars, and erase countries and bomb cities and bomb banks and then start from scratch again. This is not an option to us now because of all these 52,000 nuclear weapons….

The United States CIA is running 50 covert actions, destabilizing further almost one third of the countries in the world today….

By the way, everything I’m sharing with you tonight is in the public record. The 50 covert actions – these are secret, but that has been leaked to us by members of the oversight committee of the Congress. I urge you not to take my word for anything. I’m going to stand here and tell you and give you examples of how our leaders lie. Obviously I could be lying. The only way you can figure it out for yourself is to educate yourselves. The French have a saying, `them that don’t do politics will be done’. If you don’t fill your mind eagerly with the truth, dig it out from the records, go and see for yourself, then your mind remains blank and your adrenaline pumps, and you can be mobilized and excited to do things that are not in your interest to do….

Nicaragua is not the biggest covert action, it is the most famous one. Afghanistan is, we spent several hundred million dollars in Afghanistan. We’ve spent somewhat less than that, but close, in Nicaragua….

[When the U.S. doesn’t like a government], they send the CIA in, with its resources and activists, hiring people, hiring agents, to tear apart the social and economic fabric of the country, as a technique for putting pressure on the government, hoping that they can make the government come to the U.S.’s terms, or the government will collapse altogether and they can engineer a coup d’etat, and have the thing wind up with their own choice of people in power.

Now ripping apart the economic and social fabric of course is fairly textbook-ish. What we’re talking about is going in and deliberately creating conditions where the farmer can’t get his produce to market, where children can’t go to school, where women are terrified inside their homes as well as outside their homes, where government administration and programs grind to a complete halt, where the hospitals are treating wounded people instead of sick people, where international capital is scared away and the country goes bankrupt. If you ask the state department today what is their official explanation of the purpose of the Contras, they say it’s to attack economic targets, meaning, break up the economy of the country. Of course, they’re attacking a lot more.

To destabilize Nicaragua beginning in 1981, we began funding this force of Somoza’s ex-national guardsmen, calling them the contras (the counter-revolutionaries). We created this force, it did not exist until we allocated money. We’ve armed them, put uniforms on their backs, boots on their feet, given them camps in Honduras to live in, medical supplies, doctors, training, leadership, direction, as we’ve sent them in to de-stabilize Nicaragua. Under our direction they have systematically been blowing up graineries, saw mills, bridges, government offices, schools, health centers. They ambush trucks so the produce can’t get to market. They raid farms and villages. The farmer has to carry a gun while he tries to plow, if he can plow at all.

If you want one example of hard proof of the CIA’s involvement in this, and their approach to it, dig up `The Sabotage Manual’, that they were circulating throughout Nicaragua, a comic-book type of a paper, with visual explanations of what you can do to bring a society to a halt, how you can gum up typewriters, what you can pour in a gas tank to burn up engines, what you can stuff in a sewage to stop up the sewage so it won’t work, things you can do to make a society simply cease to function.

Systematically, the contras have been assassinating religious workers, teachers, health workers, elected officials, government administrators. You remember the assassination manual? that surfaced in 1984. It caused such a stir that President Reagan had to address it himself in the presidential debates with Walter Mondale. They use terror. This is a technique that they’re using to traumatize the society so that it can’t function.

I don’t mean to abuse you with verbal violence, but you have to understand what your government and its agents are doing. They go into villages, they haul out families. With the children forced to watch they castrate the father, they peel the skin off his face, they put a grenade in his mouth and pull the pin. With the children forced to watch they gang-rape the mother, and slash her breasts off. And sometimes for variety, they make the parents watch while they do these
things to the children.

This is nobody’s propaganda. There have been over 100,000 American witnesses for peace who have gone down there and they have filmed and photographed and witnessed these atrocities immediately after they’ve happened, and documented 13,000 people killed this way, mostly women and children. These are the activities done by these contras. The contras are the people president Reagan calls `freedom fighters’. He says they’re the moral equivalent of our founding fathers. And the whole world gasps at this confession of his family traditions.

Read Contra Terror by Reed Brodie [1], former assistant Attorney General of New York State. Read The Contras by Dieter Eich. [4] Read With the Contras by Christopher Dickey. [2] This is a main-line journalist, down there on a grant with the Council on Foreign Relations, a slightly to the right of the middle of the road organization. He writes a book that sets a pox on both your houses, and then he accounts about going in on patrol with the contras, and describes their activities. Read Witness for Peace: What We have Seen and Heard. Read the Lawyer’s Commission on Human Rights. Read The Violations of War on Both Sides by the Americas Watch. [15] And there are many, many more documentations of details, of names, of the incidents that have happened.

Part of a de-stabilization is propaganda, to dis-credit the targeted government. This one actually began under Jimmy Carter. He authorized the CIA to go in and try to make the Sandinistas look to be evil. So in 1979 [when] they came in to power, immediately we were trying to cast them as totalitarian, evil, threatening Marxists. While they abolished the death sentence, while they released 8,000 national guardsmen that they had in their custody that they could have kept in prison, they said `no. Unless we have evidence of individual crimes, we’re not going to hold someone in prison just because they were associated with the former administration.’ While they set out to launch a literacy campaign to teach the people to read and write, which is something that the dictator Somoza, and us supporting him, had never bothered to get around to doing. While they set out to build 2,500 clinics to give the country something resembling a public health policy, and access to medicines, we began to label them as totalitarian dictators, and to attack them in the press, and to work with this newspaper `La Prensa’, which – it’s finally come out and been admitted, in Washington – the U.S. government is funding: a propaganda arm.

[Reagan and the State dept. have] been claiming they’re building a war machine that threatens the stability of Central America. Now the truth is, this small, poor country has been attacked by the world’s richest country under conditions of war, for the last 5 years. Us and our army – the death they have sustained, the action they have suffered – it makes it a larger war proportionally than the Vietnam war was to the U.S. In addition to the contra activities, we’ve had U.S. Navy ships supervising the mining of harbors, we’ve sent planes in and bombed the capital, we’ve had U.S. military planes flying wing-tip to wing-tip over the country, photographing it, aerial reconnaissance. They don’t have any missiles or jets they can send up to chase us off. We are at war with them. They have not retaliated yet with any kind of war action against us, but we do not give them credit with having the right to defend themselves. So we claim that the force they built up, which is obviously purely defensive, is an aggressive force that threatens the stability of all of Central America.

We claim the justification for this is the arms that are flowing from Nicaragua to El Salvador, and yet in 5 years of this activity, there is no evidence of any arms flowing from Nicaragua into El Salvador.

We launched a campaign to discredit their elections. International observer teams said these were the fairest elections they have witnessed in Central America in many years. We said they were fraudulent, they were rigged, because it was a totalitarian system. Instead we said, the elections that were held in El Salvador were models of democracy to be copied elsewhere in the world. And then the truth came out about that one. And we learned that the CIA had spent 2.2 million dollars to make sure that their choice of candidates – Duarte – would win. They did everything, we’re told, by one of their spokesmen, indirectly, but stuff the ballot boxes….

I’ll make a footnote that when I speak out, he [Senator Jesse Helmes] calls me a traitor, but when something happens he doesn’t like, he doesn’t hesitate to go public and reveal the secrets and embarrass the U.S.

We claim the Sandinistas are smuggling drugs as a technique to finance their revolution. This doesn’t make sense. We’re at war with them, we’re dying to catch them getting arms from the Soviet Union, flying things back and forth to Cuba. We have airplanes and picket ships watching everything that flies out of that country, and into it. How are they going to have a steady flow of drug-smuggling planes into the U.S.? Not likely! However, there are Nicaraguans, on these bases in Honduras, that have planes flying into CIA training camps in Florida, Alabama, Louisiana, several times a week.

Now, obviously i’m not going to stand in front of you and say that the CIA might be involved in drug trafficking, am I? READ THE BOOK. Read The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia. For 20 years the CIA was helping the Kuomantang to finance itself and then to get rich smuggling heroin. When we took over from the French in 1954 their intelligence service had been financing itself by smuggling the heroin out of Laos. We replaced them – we put Air America, the CIA subsidiary – it would fly in with crates marked humanitarian aid, which were arms, and it would fly back out with heroin. And the first target, market, of this heroin was the U.S. GI’s in Vietnam. If anybody in Nicaragua is smuggling drugs, it’s the contras. Now i’ve been saying that since the state department started waving this red herring around a couple of years ago, and the other day you notice President Reagan said that the Nicaraguans, the Sandinistas, were smuggling drugs, and the DEA said, `it ain’t true, the contras are smuggling drugs’.

We claim the Sandinistas are responsible for the terrorism that’s happening anywhere in the world. `The country club of terrorism’ we call it. There’s an incident in Rome, and Ed Meese goes on television and says, `that country club in Nicaragua is training terrorists’. We blame the Sandinistas for the misery that exists in Nicaragua today, and there is misery, because the world’s richest nation has set out to create conditions of misery, and obviously we’re bound to have some effect. The misery is not the fault of the Sandinistas, it’s the result of our destabilization program. And despite that, and despite some grumbling in the country, the Sandinistas in their elections got a much higher percentage of the vote than President Reagan did, who’s supposed to be so popular in this country. And all observers are saying that people are still hanging together, with the Sandinistas.

Now it gets tricky. We’re saying that the justification for more aid, possibly for an invasion of the country – and mind you, president Reagan has begun to talk about this, and the Secretary of Defense Weinberger began to say that it’s inevitable – we claim that the justification is that the Soviet Union now has invested 500 million dollars in arms in military to make it its big client state, the Soviet bastion in this hemisphere. And that’s true. They do have a lot of arms in there now. But the question is, how did they get invited in? You have to ask yourself, what’s the purpose of this destabilization program? For this I direct you back to the Newsweek article in Sept. 1981, where they announce the fact that the CIA was beginning to put together this force of Somoza’s ex-guard. Newsweek described it as `the only truly evil, totally unacceptable factor in
the Nicaraguan equation’. They noted that neither the white house nor the CIA pretended it ever could have a chance of winning. So then they asked, rhetorically, `what’s the point?’ and they concluded that the point is that by attacking the country, you can force the Sandinistas into a more radical position, from which you have more ammunition to attack them.

And that’s what we’ve accomplished now. They’ve had to get Soviet aid to defend themselves from the attack from the world’s richest country, and now we can stand up to the American people and say, `see? they have all the Soviet aid’. Make no doubt of it, it’s the game plan of the Reagan Administration to have a war in Nicaragua, they have been working on this since 1981, they have been stopped by the will of the American people so far, but they’re working harder than ever to engineer their war there.

Now, CIA destabilizations are nothing new, they didn’t begin with Nicaragua. We’ve done it before, once or twice. Like the Church committee, investigating CIA covert action in 1975, found that we had run several hundred a year, and we’d been in the business of running covert actions, the CIA has, for 4 decades. You’re talking about 10 to 20 thousand covert actions.

CIA apologists leap up and say, `well, most of these things are not so bloody’. And that’s true. You’re giving a politician some money so he’ll throw his party in this direction or that one, or make false speeches on your behalf, or something like that. It may be non-violent, but it’s still illegal intervention in other countries’ affairs, raising the question of whether or not we are going to have a
world in which law, rules of behaviour, are respected, or is it going to be a world of bullies, where the strongest can violate and brutalize the weakest, and ignore the laws?

But many of these things are very bloody indeed, and we know a lot about a lot of them. Investigations by the Congress, testimony by CIA directors, testimony by CIA case officers, books written by CIA case officers, documents gotten out of the government under the freedom of information act, books that are written by by pulitzer-prize-winning journalists who’ve documented their cases. And you can go and read from these things, classic CIA operations that we know about, some of them very bloody indeed. Guatemala 1954, Brazil, Guyana, Chile, the Congo, Iran, Panama, Peru, Bolivia, Equador, Uruguay – the CIA organized the overthrow of constitutional democracies. Read the book Covert Action: 35 years of Deception by the journalist Godswood. [6]

Remember the Henry Kissinger quote before the Congress when he was being grilled to explain what they had done to overthrow the democratic government in Chile, in which the President, Salvador Allende had been killed. And he said, `The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves’.

We had covert actions against China, very much like what we’re doing against Nicaragua today, that led us directly into the Korean war, where we fought China in Korea. We had a long covert action in Vietnam, very much like the one that we’re running in Nicaragua today, that tracked us directly into the Vietnam war. Read the book, The Hidden History of the Korean War by I. F. Stone. [14] Read Deadly Deceits by Ralph McGehee [9] for the Vietnam story. In Thailand, the Congo, Laos, Vietnam, Taiwan, and Honduras, the CIA put together large standing armies. In Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, the Congo, Iran, Nicaragua, and Sri Lanka, the CIA armed and encouraged ethnic minorities to rise up and fight. The first thing we began doing in Nicaragua, 1981 was to fund an element of the Mesquite indians, to give them money and training and arms, so they could rise up and fight against the government in Managua. In El Salvador, Vietnam, Korea, Iran, Uganda and the Congo, the CIA helped form and train the death
squads.

In El Salvador specifically, under the `Alliance for Progress’ in the early 1960’s, the CIA helped put together the treasury police. These are the people that haul people out at night today, and run trucks over their heads. These are the people that the Catholic church tells us, have killed something over 50,000 civilians in the last 5 years. And we have testimony before our Congress that as late as 1982, leaders of the treasury police were still on the CIA payroll.

Then you have the `Public Safety Program.’ I have to take just a minute on this one because it’s a very important principle involved that we must understand, if we’re to understand ourselves and the world that we live in. In this one, the CIA was working with policeforces throughout Latin America for about 26 years, teaching them how to wrap up subversive networks by capturing someone and interrogating them, torturing them, and then getting names and arresting the others and going from there. Now, this was such a brutal and such a bloody operation, that Amnesty International began to complain and publish reports. Then there were United Nations hearings. Then eventually our Congress was forced to yield to international pressure and investigate it, and they found the horror that was being done, and by law they forced it to stop. You can read these reports — the Amnesty International findings, and our own Congressional hearings.

These things kill people. 800,000 in Indonesia alone according to CIA’s estimate, 12,000 in Nicaragua, 10,000 in the Angolan operation that I was sitting on in Washington, managing the task force. They add up. We’ll never know how many people have been killed in them. Obviously a lot. Obviously at least a million. 800,000 in Indonesia alone. Undoubtedly the minimum figure has to be 3 million. Then you add in a million people killed in Korea, 2 million people killed in the Vietnam war, and you’re obviously getting into gross millions of people…

We do not parachute teams into the Soviet Union to haul families out at night and castrate the father with the children watching, because they have the Bomb, and a big army, and they would parachute teams right back into our country and do the same thing to us – they’re not scared of us. For slightly different reasons, but also obvious reasons, we don’t do these things in England, or France, or Germany, or Sweden, or Italy, or Japan. What comes out at you immediately is that these 1 to 3 million direct victims, the dead, and in these other wars, they’re people of the third world. They’re people of the Metumba mountains of the Congo, and the jungles of Southeast Asia, and now the hills of northern Nicaragua – 12,000 peasants. We have not killed KGB or Russian army advisors in Nicaragua. We are not killing Cuban advisors. We’re not killing very many Sandinistas. The 12,000 that we have killed in Nicaragua are peasants, who have the misfortune of living in a CIA’s chosen battlefield. Mostly women and children. Communists? Far, far, far more Catholics than anything else.

Now case officers that do these things in places in Nicaragua, they do not come back to the U.S. and click their heels and suddenly become responsible citizens. They see themselves – they have been functioning above the laws, of God, and the laws of man – they’ve come back to this country, and they’ve continued their operations as far as they can get by with them. And we have abundant documentation of that as well. The MH-Chaos program, exposed in the late 60’s and shut down, re-activated by President Reagan to a degree – we don’t have the details yet – in which they were spending a billion dollars to manipulate U.S. student, and labor organizations. The MK-ultra program. For 20 years, working through over 200 medical schools and mental hospitals, including Harvard medical school, Georgetown, some of the biggest places we’ve got, to experiment on American citizens with disease, and drugs.

They dragged a barge through San Francisco bay, leaking a virus, to measure this technique for crippling a city. They launched a whooping cough epidemic in a Long Island suburb, to see what it would do to the community if all the kids had whooping cough. Tough shit about the 2 or 3 with weak constitutions that might die in the process. They put light bulbs in the subways in Manhattan, that would create vertigo – make people have double vision, so you couldn’t see straight – and hid
cameras in the walls – to see what would happen at rush hour when the trains are zipping past – if everybody has vertigo and they can’t see straight and they’re bumping into each other.

Colonel White – oh yes, and I can’t not mention the disease experimentations – the use of deadly diseases. We launched – when we were destabilizing Cuba for 7 years – we launched the swine fever epidemic, in the hog population, trying to kill out all of the pigs – a virus. We experimented in Haiti on the people with viruses.

I’m not saying, I do not have the slightest shred of evidence, that there is any truth or indication to the rumor that the CIA and its experimentations were responsible for AIDS. But we do have it documented that the CIA has been experimenting on people, with viruses. And now we have some deadly, killer viruses running around in society. And it has to make you wonder, and it has to make you worry.

Colonel White wrote from retirement – he was the man who was in charge of this macabre program – he wrote, `I toiled whole-heartedly in the vineyards because it was fun, fun fun. Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape and pillage with the blessings of the all highest?’ Now that program, the MK-ultra program, was eventually exposed by the press in 1972, investigated by the Congress, and shut down by the Congress. You can dig up the Congressional record and read it for yourself.

There’s one book called `In Search of the Manchurian Candidate’. It’s written by John Marks, based on 14,000 documents gotten out of the government under the Freedom of Information Act. Read for yourselves. The thing was shut down but not one CIA case officer who was involved was in any way punished. Not one case officer involved in these experimentations on the American public, lost a single paycheck for what they had done.

The Church committee found that the CIA had co-opted several hundred journalists, including some of the biggest names in the business. The latest flap or scandal we had about that was a year and a half ago. Lesley Gelb, the heavyweight with the New York Times, was exposed for having
been working covertly with the CIA in 1978 to recruit journalists in Europe, who would introduce stories, print stories that would create sympathy for the neutron bomb.

The Church committee found that they had published over 1,000 books, paying someone to write a book, the CIA puts its propaganda lines in it, the professor or the scholar gets credit for the book and gets the royalties. The latest flap we had about that was last year. A professor at Harvard was exposed for accepting 105,000 dollars from the CIA to write a book about the Middle East. Several thousand professors and graduate students co-opted by the CIA to run its operations on campuses and build files on students.

And then we have evidence – now, which has been hard to collect in the past but we knew it was happening – of CIA agents participating, trying to manipulate, our elections. FDN, Contra commanders, traveling this country on CIA plane tickets, going on television and pin-pointing a Congressional and saying, `That man is soft on Communism. That man is a Sandinista lover.’ A CIA agent going on television, trying to manipulate our elections.

All of this, to keep America safe for freedom and democracy.

In Nicaragua the objective is to stop the Cuban and Soviet take-over, we say. Another big operation in which we said the same thing was Angola, 1975, my little war. We were saying exactly the same thing – Cubans and Soviets.

Now I will not going into great detail about this one tonight because I wrote a book about it, I detailed it. And you can get a copy of that book and read it for yourselves. I have to urge you, however – please do not rush out and buy a copy of that book because the CIA sued me. All of my profits go to the CIA, so if you buy a copy of the book you’ll be donating 65 cents to the CIA. So check it out from your library!

If you have to buy a copy, well buy one copy and share it with all your friends. If your bookstore is doing real well and you want to just sort of put a copy down in your belt…

I don’t know what the solution is when a society gets into censorship, government censorship, but that’s what we’re in now. Do the rules change? I just got my book back, my latest book back from the CIA censors. If I had not submitted it to them, I would have gone to jail, without trial – blow off juries and all that sort of thing – for having violated our censorship laws….

So now we have the CIA running the operation in Nicaragua, lying to us, running 50 covert actions, and gearing us up for our next war, the Central American war. Let there be no doubt about it, President Reagan has a fixation on Nicaragua. He came into office saying that we shouldn’t be afraid of war, saying we have to face and erase the scars of the Vietnam war. He said in 1983, `We will do whatever is necessary to defeat the Sandinistas. Admiral LaRoque, at the Center for Defense Information in Washington, says this is the most elaborately prepared invasion that the U.S. has ever done. At least that he’s witnessed in his 40 years of association with our military.

We have rehearsed the invasion of Nicaragua in operations Big Pine I, Big Pine II, Ocean Venture, Grenada, Big Pine III. We have troops right now in Honduras preparing. We’ve built 12 bases, including 8 airstrips. Obviously we don’t need 8 airstrips in Honduras for any purpose, except to support the invasion of Nicaragua. We’ve built radar stations around, to survey and watch. Some of these ventures have been huge ones. Hundreds of airplanes, 30,000 troops, rehearsing
the invasion of Nicaragua.

And of course, Americans are being given this negative view of these evil Communist dictators in Managua, just two days drive from Harlington, Texas. (They drive faster than I do by the way). I saw an ad on TV just two days ago in which they said that it was just two hours from Managua to Texas. All of this getting us ready for the invasion of Nicaragua, for our next war.

Most of the people – 75% of the people – are polled as being against this action. However, President Eisenhower said, `The people of the world genuinely want peace. Someday the leadership of the world are going to have to give in and give it to them’. But to date, the leaders never have, they’ve always been able to outwit the people, us, and get us into the wars when they’ve chosen to do so.

People ask, how is this possible? I get this all the time…. Americans are decent people. They are nice people. And they’re insulated in the worlds that they live in, and they don’t understand
and we don’t read our history. History is the history of war. Of leaders of countries finding reasons and rationales to send the young men off to fight.

In our country we talk about peace. But look at our own record. We have over 200 incidents in which we put our troops into other countries to force them to our will. Now we’re being prepared to hate the Sandinistas. The leaders are doing exactly what they have done time and again throughout history. In the past we were taught to hate and fight the Seminole Indians, after the leaders decided to annex Florida. To hate and fight the Cherokee Indians after they found gold
in Georgia. To hate and fight Mexico twice. We annexed Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, part of Colorado, and California.

In each of these wars the leaders have worked to organize, to orchestrate public opinion. And then when they got people worked up, they had a trigger that would flash, that would make people angry enough that we could go in and do….

We have a feeling that the Vietnam war was the first one in which the people resisted. But once again, we haven’t read our history. Kate Richards-O’Hare. In 1915, she said about WW I, `The Women of the U.S. are nothing but brutesalles, producing sons to be put in the army, to be made into fertilizer’. She was jailed for 5 years for anti-war talk.

The lessons of the Vietnam war for the American people is that it was a tragic mistake…. 58,000 of our own young people were killed, 2 million Vietnamese were killed. We withdrew, and our position wound up actually stronger in the Pacific basin.

You look around this society today to see if there’s any evidence of our preparations for war, and it hits you in the face….

‘Join the Army. Be all that you can be’. Now if there was truth in advertising, obviously those commercials would show a few seconds of young men with their legs blown off at the knees, young men with their intestines wrapped around their necks because that’s what war is really all about.

If there was honesty on the part of the army and the government, they would tell about the Vietnam veterans. More of whom died violent deaths from suicide after they came back from Vietnam then died in the fighting itself.

Then you have President Reagan…. He talks about the glory of war, but you have to ask yourself, where was he when wars were being fought that he was young enough to fight in them? World War II, and the Korean war. Where he was was in Hollywood, making films, where the blood was catsup, and you could wash it off and go out to dinner afterwards….

Where was Gordon Liddy when he was young enough to go and fight in a war? He was hiding out in the U.S. running sloppy, illegal, un-professional breaking and entering operations. Now you’ll forgive my egotism, at that time I was running professional breaking and entering operations….

What about Rambo himself? Sylvester Stallone. Where was Sylvester Stallone during the Vietnam war? He got a draft deferment for a physical disability, and taught physical education in a girls’ school in Switzerland during the war.

Getting back to President Reagan. He really did say that `you can always call cruise missiles back’…. Now, you can call back a B-52, and you can call back a submarine, but a cruise missile is different…. When it lands, it goes boom!. And I would prefer that the man with the finger on the button could understand the difference. This is the man that calls the MX a peace-maker. This is the man who’s gone on television and told us that nuclear war could be winnable. This is the man who’s gone on television and proposed that we might want to drop demonstration [atom] bombs in Europe to show people that we’re serious people. This is the man who likens the Contras to the moral equivalents of our own founding fathers. This is the man who says South Africa is making progress on racial equality. This is the man who says that the Sandinistas are hunting down and hounding and persecuting Jews in Nicaragua. And the Jewish leaders go on TV the next day in this country and say there are 5 Jewish families in Nicaragua, and they’re not having any problems at all. This is the man who says that they’re financing their revolution by smuggling drugs into the U.S. And the DEA says, `It ain’t true, it’s president Reagan’s Contras that are doing it’….

[When Reagan was governor of California, Reagan] said `If there has to be a bloodbath then let’s get it over with’. Now you have to think about this a minute. A leader of the U.S. seriously proposing a bloodbath of our own youth. There was an outcry of the press, so 3 days later he said it again to make sure no one had misunderstood him.

Read. You have to read to inform yourselves. Read The Book of Quotes [12]. Read On Reagan: The Man and the Presidency [3] by Ronnie Dugger. It gets heavy. Dugger concludes in his last chapter that President Reagan has a fixation on Armageddon. The Village Voice 18 months ago published an article citing the 11 times that President Reagan publicly has talked about the fact that we are all living out Armageddon today….

[Reagan] has Jerry Falwell into the White House. This is the man that preaches that we should get on our knees and beg for God to send the rapture down. Hell’s fires on earth so the chosen can go up on high and all the other people can burn in hell’s fires on earth. President Reagan sees himself as playing the role of the greatest leader of all times forever. Leading us into Armageddon. As he goes out at the end of his long life, we’ll all go out with him….

Why does the CIA run 10,000 brutal covert actions? Why are we destabilizing a third of the countries in the world today when there’s so much instability and misery already?

What you have to understand is the politics of paranoia. The easiest… buttons to punch are the buttons of macho, aggression, paranoia, hate, anger, and fear. The Communists are in Managua and that’s just 2 hours from San Diego, CA. This gets people excited, they don’t think. It’s the pep-rally, the football pep-rally factor. When you get people worked up to hate, they’ll let you spend huge amounts of money on arms.

Read The Power Elite by C. Wright Mills. [11] Read The Permanent War Complex by Seymour Melman. [10] CIA covert actions have the function of keeping the world hostile and unstable….

We can’t take care of the poor, we can’t take care of the old, but we can spend millions, hundreds of millions of dollars to destabilize Nicaragua….

Why arms instead of schools? …. They can make gigantic profits off the nuclear arms race because of the hysteria, and the paranoia, and the secrecy. And that’s why they’re committed to building more and more and more weapons, is because they’re committed to making a profit. And that’s what the propaganda, and that’s what the hysteria is all about. Now people say, `What can I do?’….

The youth did rise up and stop the Vietnam war….

We have to join hands with the people in England, and France, and Germany, and Israel, and the Soviet Union, and China, and India – the countries that have the bomb, and the others that are trying to get it. And give our leaders no choice. They have to find some other way to do business other than to motivate us through hate and paranoia and anger and killing, or we’ll find other leaders to run the country.

Now, Helen Caldicott, at the end of her lectures, I’ve heard her say, very effectively, `Tell people to get out and get to work on the problem…. You’ll feel better’….

‘What can I do?’…. If you can travel, go to Nicaragua and see for yourself. Go to the Nevada test site and see for yourself. Go to Pantex on Hiroshima day this summer, and see the vigil there. The place where we make 10 nose-cones a day, 70 a week, year in and year out. He [Admiral LaRock] said, `I’d tell them, if they feel comfortable lying down in front of trucks with bombs on them, to lie down in front of trucks with bombs on them.’ But he said, `I’d tell them that they can’t wait. They’ve got to start tomorrow, today, and do it, what they can, every day of their lives’.

*****

[1] Reed Brody.
Contra Terror.
??, .

[15] The Americas Watch.
The Violations of War on Both Sides.

*****

The Other Americas Radio
Programs & News on Latin America.
KCSB-FM, Box 85
Santa Barbara, CA 93102

The Praetorian Guard

by John Stockwell

former CIA agent

The Reagan Revolution

from the book

The Praetorian Guard

by John Stockwell

[The] revolution may have been misunderstood and underestimated by many Americans. President Reagan and his revolutionaries were not mincing words. They intended to effect a permanent revolutionary change to the U.S. system of government. They planned to catch the pendulum as it swung to the right and weld it in place, where it could never swing back to the left. Like committed revolutionaries, they were profoundly irreverent of sacred institutions.

Reagan’s first term in office was deliberately provocative. He preached that nuclear war was survivable; that we might drop "demonstration" weapons on Europe to intimidate the Soviets. He joked (once accidentally, on a live radio show) that he had already launched U.S. missiles against the Soviet Union. Jerry Falwell, who preached that nuclear Armageddon might be God’s instrument for taking his chosen up on high, was a regular visitor to the White House. Reagan was openly contemptuous of environmental concerns: "If you’ve seen one redwood you’ve seen them all." He appointed James Watt, who systematically opened millions of acres of government land to commercial exploitation, to the Interior Department and Ann Burford, who used the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to protect corporations that were dumping and poisoning.

Reagan willfully assaulted the human services infrastructure in the United States, boasting that he had eliminated over 1000 programs that served lower income groups. He proposed that ketchup and pickle relish would suffice for vegetables in school lunches. He raised taxes for the poor and middle class while slashing them by 60 percent for the ultra-rich.

He put Elliott Abrams into the Human Rights Division of the State Department with orders to dismantle it. The Reagan administration sent the files of confidential testimonials that Pat Derian, under President Jimmy Carter, had accumulated from refugees from repressive countries to the police in those countries. Then the Immigration and Naturalization Services deported the refugees to countries where brutal police were waiting for them at the airports.

President Reagan and his attorney general, Edwin Meese III, whose personal corruption came under investigation, ridiculed the plight of the poor and challenged the Constitution itself, saying that it was only a piece of paper. Meese repeatedly asserted the principle that arrested people were to be considered guilty until proven otherwise. Reagan put his and Meese’s California friend Luis Guiffrida in charge of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which laid plans to suspend the Constitution, declare martial law, and intern several hundred thousand people without due process. Secretary of State George Shultz lobbied vigorously (with indirect success) for a pre-emptive strikes bill that would give him authority to list "known and suspected terrorists" within the United States who could be attacked and killed by government agents with impunity. Shultz admitted (in a public address in October 25, 1984) that the strikes would take place on the basis of information that would never stand up in a court of law and that innocent people would be killed in the process. He insisted, however, that people listed would not be permitted to sue in court to have their names taken off that list.

Many other laws were passed in favor of the national security complex at the expense of civil liberties. By the end of his eight years in office, President Reagan was also boasting that he had appointed 45 percent of the sitting federal judges. He tacitly encouraged the corruption and irresponsibility that eventually led to the Savings and Loan scandal and to 200 of Reagan’s officials being indicted, investigated, or fired for corruption.

Only Ronald Reagan, the "Great Communicator" (also called, by the Washington Post, the "Great Prevaricator") could have been such an effective point man for an irresponsible "revolution" that assaulted and violated the most profound U.S. traditions and institutions.

My Story

excerptd from the book

The Praetorian Guard

by John Stockwell

former CIA agent

This was at the end of the 10-year war that followed a previous decade of CIA activity in Vietnam. Two million people- had been killed. The equivalent of one 500-pound bomb had been dropped on the country [Vietnam] for every citizen. Ninety-thousand tons of carcinogenic and toxic materials had been dropped on the country, some of which would poison it for decades to come. We were returning to the "World," to continue our lives, while leaving our Vietnamese cohorts behind.

***

In the meetings of the National Security Council, busy, _ important men come together to make decisions about U.S. policy on various problems all over the world. The Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, Vice-President, sometimes the President, the CIA Director, people like that, with enormous responsibilities and power. They are aware of their power. The etiquette is that they do not keep each other waiting. They try not to show up 30 minutes late to those meetings, because the other people are powerful and busy too-and they really are busy. That is one thing I noticed about people in those positions: they do work hard, long hours, long days, lots of meetings, keeping a lot of balls in the air.

In the first briefings on the Angola operation, the CIA Director, William Colby, with an aide with a flip chart, literally said, "Gentleman, this is a map of Africa. Here is Angola. Now, there are three factions in Angola. The FNLA (National Front for the Liberation of Angola), they are the Good Guys; we have been working with them for fourteen years." And then he described the FNLA, and Holden Roberto, our rebarbative ally. Then he said, "The MPLA (Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola), they are the Bad Guys, led by the drunken psychotic poet"-that was what we had written into the briefing material-"Augustino Neto." And he used those words-"Good Guys" and "Bad Guys"-so these busy men would not be confused about the issues, and proceeded to brief them.

One day Henry Kissinger came to the meeting late, and everyone had to wait. Now mind you, this is not a meeting of the Supreme Court, where law prescribes where everybody sits, according to seniority. The National Security Council, at least at that time, met in an office in the White House, wit-in an oak table and some drapes and some maps, but no electronic flashing boards or anything like that. People sat around the great big table, with the staffers sitting in an outer ring of chairs so they could lean forward to advise their individual masters. Often staffers were not present when sensitive decisions were being made.

The Secretary of Defense plopped down in a chair to talk to somebody while we waited for Kissinger, and then Kissinger came steaming in and he told the Secretary of Defense, "I am here. We can go to work. Move down to your chair." To which the Secretary of Defense replied, "Well, I am all spread out here. You sit there today." And Kissinger said, "No, I am the Secretary of State, this is my chair. You sit down there." They proceeded to argue like five-year-olds for about five minutes. Eventually the Secretary of Defense would not move, and Kissinger had to go sit down at the far end of the table, but he turned his back on the briefings and sulked. He wouldn’t pay attention to what we were saying that day because he couldn’t have his chair-and we were making decisions that were getting people killed in Angola. I am not exaggerating that incident one bit.

When the operation was formally launched by the National Security Council in January 1975, Angola was moving toward peaceful elections as it gained its independence. The CIA introduced fighting forces into the country, forcing a violent, undemocratic solution instead. (See the Angola section of the next chapter for a summary of the entire fiasco.) The program was stopped by the U.S. Congress in the winter of 1975-76.

I spent six months reviewing the files and then resigned from the agency. After publishing a letter in the Washington Post on April 10, 1977, I testified for five days to congressional committees, eschewing the protections of the Fifth Amendment, while I gave them chapter and verse of what we had done in the misguided Angola operation. I gave them the numbers, dates and texts of cables and memoranda that proved we had broken laws and then lied about breaking them. I gave them the combinations to the safes where the documents were stored, and told them where in CIA headquarters those safes could be found. I challenged them to investigate thoroughly and do their duty.

They did nothing. The hearings had been conducted in secret, and after the Watergate scandal, the ouster of President Nixon, and the defeat in Vietnam, they were not willing to tackle another big scandal that might oblige them to put Henry Kissinger and the CIA Director in jail. I proceeded to write my first book, In Search of Enemies, to make the public aware of what had happened so they could judge for themselves. It remains today the only insider’s account of a major CIA operation.

A year later, when Congress had had abundant time to investigate the secret scandal and prosecute the felons involved, In Search of Enemies was published. Without claiming that the book revealed any sensitive secrets, the CIA sued me and succeeded in seizing all future earnings. They also placed me under a court order which requires that all future writings for publication be submitted to the CIA Publications Review Board for censorship.

Since then, I have been on the greatest human adventure imaginable, of growth and of learning all the things about the world that they did not teach us in college. I began to read book after book about the United States and world security problems, and to meet the authors of some of them and talk to them about their findings. I travelled to countries that had been the targets of CIA destabilizations, including Grenada, Jamaica, Cuba, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras, Panama, and Vietnam. In my travels I met people like Carl Sagan, Admiral Gene LaRocque Admiral Gene Carroll, Jr., Director of the Center for Defense Information, anti-nuclear activist Helen Caldicott, Daniel Ortega, the martyred Grenadan leaderMaunce Bishop, and numerous other authorities on national security and the nuclear arms race. I was invited to lecture and have addressed over 600 audiences, learning much from them in return. I have enjoyed the experience more than I could ever have imagined.

Much of this learning process was very personal. In March 1963 I was in Grenada for the anniversary celebration of the New Jewel Movement’s takeover. At a cocktail party in a garden overlooking the Caribbean we received the news that President Reagan had given a speech announcing that Grenada was a threat to U.S. national security. The Minister of Education, Jacqueline Creft joked that they had been caught on the eve of their attack on the United States. She said their armies were about to take Washington and New York (Grenada is a small island, about 8 by 16 miles, with 80,000 people, and at the time had two poorly trained and equipped parapolice companies in its armed forces). They would sweep west and capture Chicago by the early summer and then launch their march on California. Everyone laughed, but I pointed out that President Reagan’s speech wasn’t really funny. If, out of all the million important things he could mention in a public address, he focusses on a country like Grenada and asserts that it is a threat to the "national security" it means that he is drawing attention to it in preparation for attacking it. Creft flared back at me, noting that I didn’t need to lecture them about U.S. policy. They had been living under the wing and talon of the U.S. eagle for centuries; they knew its dangerous ways too well. But she was glad I was beginning to understand.

As I learned more and more about the history and cynicism of the CIA’s so-called secret wars, I also became more concerned about other major problems of world security, including the nuclear arms race, drug smuggling, the abuse of the environment, and the coming world economic crisis. Until we learn to control human behavior at the level of covert destabilizations against countries like Nicaragua, for example, I doubt seriously whether we shall be safe from the planet-threatening aspects of the nuclear arms race.

Secret Third World Wars

excerpts from the book

The Praetorian Guard

by John Stockwell

former CIA agent

ANGOLA

… In April 1974, the [Angolan] army rebelled in a coup in Portugal, making it clear that the colony of Angola, where a prolonged independence struggle had been fought, would be granted its freedom. The superpowers quickly chose sides between the three competing factions. The United States automatically sided with the FNLA (Front for the National Liberation of Angola), with whose leader, Holden Roberto, it had maintained contact over the years. In fact, Roberto was close to the Zairian President Mobutu Sese Seku, whom the CIA had installed and maintained in power since 1961. Historically the Soviet Union had generally sided with the MPLA (Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola), although contact had been disrupted in the years preceding 1974. Reacting to Soviet policy, Communist China sent 400 tons of arms to the FNLA, and over 100 advisors. A third movement, UNITA (the National Union for the Independence of Angola), was left without a major sponsor. Led by Jonas Savimbi, it was historically the most radical of the three parties having received aid from China, North Korea, South Africa, and others over the years.

In January 1975, leaders of the three movements met under Portuguese arbitration and signed the Alvor Accord in which they agreed to compete peacefully in elections that would be held in October. November 11 was fixed as the anticipated date of independence.

Within a week, the National Security Council met in Washington D.C. and allocated $300,000 for the FNLA’s use in the political campaign. The FNLA had sufficient arms from the Chinese and from Zaire and a record of bloody violence against the Portuguese and the MPLA. The CIA station chief in Kinshasa urged Roberto to move his FNLA forces inside Angola. His men went in armed and soon attacked and killed a team of MPLA organizers. At that moment the Alvor Accord was effectively sabotaged and the fate of Angola sealed in blood.

During the spring all of the factions scrambled to organize, obtain arms, and establish control over whatever territory they could. The MPLA was by far the most successful. By mid-summer, it controlled 13 of the 15 provinces. The National Security Council, which was dominated by Henry Kissinger, demanded a paper outlining possible options from the CIA. This was July 1975, just three months after the last helicopter had left the embassy rooftop in Saigon, marking the decisive end of the Vietnam War. Many, including CIA Director William Colby were surprised that the CIA would move so quickly into another adventure.

The CIA’s paper offered four options: one for $600,000 which would provide political support for the FNLA, one for $6 millionwhichwould include some military support, one for $14 million which would involve substantial military; and one for $40 million. The $40 million, it was estimated, would equal anything the Soviet Union was likely to try in Angola. These options and the estimate of the Soviet reaction were not the result of a massive study. The CIA’s Africa Division chief and his staff plucked the figures out of a round table discussion, and Colby relayed them to Henry Kissinger as authoritative. It must be noted that neither the Africa Division chief nor his deputy had any substantive experience in Africa. One had spent his career in Europe, the other in the Pacific Basin. Only the deputy had any substantive experience in managing paramilitary activity: he had been part of the programs that had just dramatically failed in Southeast Asia, and had never set foot in Africa.

A fifth option, staying out of the conflict and letting Angola make its own way toward independence, was not included in the paper. Was this a viable option? The Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, Ambassador Nathaniel Davis, firmly believed so. Of the proposed CIA program, he said, "It’s the wrong game for a great nation, and the players we’ve got are losers." The U.S. Consul General in the Angolan capital of Luanda, Tom Killoran, who was the only senior American diplomat who had worked with all three Angolan movements, firmly believed that the MPLA was in fact the best organized, the most likely to prevail, and ultimately the friendliest to U.S. interests.

Kissinger picked the second option, then decided $6 million didn’t sound impressive and cabled Langley from a Paris trip authorizing $14 million. The CIA quickly mobilized to support the FNLA, fighting the MPLA.

Just returned from the evacuation of Saigon, I was ordered to put the CIA’s task force together and manage the secret war under the supervision of the CIA’s Africa Division chief in Langley and the National Security Council’s Interagency Working Group on Angola. One month after we were formally committed to the secret war, I was sent inside Angola to assess the competing forces. I found that Roberto’s forces were disorganized and numbered one-hundredth as many as he told us. Savimbi’s UNITA forces seemed determined and he was scrupulously honest in the counts and estimates he gave us. We decided to co-opt him into our program.

It should be noted that, at this point, I was skeptical of the CIA and of covert action in general. What I had seen in Vietnam had amounted to a debacle. However I had spent my career out in the field. I couldn’t resist the opportunity to see for myself how these operations worked from the level of the National Security Council. I truly hoped I would find that they were better reasoned and managed than they had seemed. I quickly abandoned this forlorn soldier’s dream

Throughout the fall of 1975, arms were jammed into Angola, mercenaries were hired, battles were fought, and several thousand people were killed and wounded. The United States actively discouraged United Nations and other formal efforts to mediate. Our budget eventually totalled $31.7 million, a good part of which was siphoned off into corruption. We encouraged South African forces to support our Good Guys, while Cuban soldiers joined the MPLA Baddies.

By winter, the program was thoroughly exposed and the Congress mercifully passed the Tunney Amendment to the FY 76 Defense Appropriation Bill that ordered our operation closed down. In the field, our forces had been routed and the MPLA effectively controlled all of the provinces. We had given Jonas Savimbi the wherewithal to keep the Benguela Railroad closed, which was our client-state Zaire’s only economically viable egress to the sea for its copper.

We had lied to nearly everyone, lies that were quickly exposed. Some of those lies to the U.S. Congress, covering up what we had done, amounted to perjury and could have been prosecuted as such. We had allied the United States with South Africa in military activities, which was illegal and impolitic. We had delivered white mercenaries into Angola to kill blacks as a technique of imposing our policies on that black African country. Meanwhile, we-not the "Communists"-had interfered with U.S. commercial interests. We had withdrawn Boeing Aircraft Corportion’s licenses to sell five jetliners to the Angolan airlines, and we had blackmailed Gulf Oil Company into putting its $100 million payments in escrow instead of delivering them to the Bank of Angola. We had poisoned the missionaries’ efforts to run vital schools and hospitals.

Our experience with Gulf Qil Company and Boeing Aircraft Corporation left me with an initial misperception of the CIA’s involvement with multinational corporations. These two companies were frustrated and inconvenienced by the CIA’s secret war in Angola. It cost them money. George Wilson, the President of Boeing, flew to Washington to protest and clear the licenses to sell his airliners to the Angolan government. In my first lectures after leaving the government, I reported that the CIA and the big corporations were, in my own experience, out of step with each other. Later I realized that they may argue about details of strategy-a small war here or there. However, both are vigorously committed to supporting the system. Corporate leaders fight amongst themselves like people m any human endeavor. They raid and hostilely take over each other’s companies. Losers have been known to commit suicide. However, they firmly believe in the capitalist system. In two short meetings in Washington, we managed to turn the Boeing President George Wilson around to the point where he sent a letter that we had drafted to the new government of Angola, warning them that the price of crossing the U.S. (secret) government was the loss of access to U.S. technology.

In sum, we had severely damaged U.S. national security interests and nailed our own country with another defeat on the heels of Vietnam.

In one of the classic, ironic follies of intelligence charades, Gulf Oil Company employees returned immediately to resume pumping the Angolan oil-protected militarily by Cuban soldiers from CIA mercenaries who were still marauding and destabilizing the countryside. Nor did the Angola tragedy end with the CIA’s defeat in the winter of 1976. Under President Reagan, congressional restraints were lifted and the CLA resumed its support of Jonas Savimbi and his UNITA forces. Over the years the continued destabilization has taken a horrendous toll: the Red Cross counts over 20,000 walking-maimed in Angola today and the central part of the country, which used to be its bread basket, is now a recognized zone of famine.

*****

NICARAGUA

… The first year of the Nicaraguan operation was almost eerily like the one in Angola. There were three competing factions in each: the leaders in the north, Holden Roberto of the FNLA (in Angola) and Adolfo Calero of UNO (in Nicaragua) were rebarbative characters, while the leaders of the southern movements in each country, Jonas Savimbi (in Angola) and Eden Pastora (in Nicaragua) were remarkably charismatic. In each country, the CIA purchased SWIFT attack launches for coastal operations and put together ragtag air-transport proprietaries. After a couple of years, the Nicaraguan operation began to manifest a substantially different personality. For one thing it became a major artery in drug smuggling, which was not a factor in Angola.

For analytical purposes, the Nicaraguan operation will remain one of the best historical examples because the target country was closer to the United States culturally and geographically, and because the Nicaraguan destabilization was quite open on both ends, i.e., in Washington and in Managua.

Usually these activities are closed-they are secret. In most cases our government covers them and hides them to the greatest degree it can, and the country we are attacking becomes hostile and seals its borders to us. Nicaragua, until quite recently, had a policy of remaining open. Anyone from the United States who wanted to go down and have a look could do so without a visa. Meanwhile in Washington the program was debated quite openly as the administration battled for funds and operational details were discussed publicly. Throughout the 1980s, I traveled back and forth from Washington to Nicaragua and elsewhere, informing myself, witnessing and analyzing the operation, and also discussing it in hundreds of lectures.

Nicaragua is unlike Angola in that there never was a chance in Angola that we would make it into another Vietnam, by putting in U.S. troops, whereas this was a very real possibility in Nicaragua during the mid-1980s. The United States has had a fixation on Nicaragua since the mid-l800s. It has long been the ideal site of a possible second canal, better than the Panama canal, connecting the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, and the target of military intervention. The United States put the Marines into the country half a dozen times early in this century to occupy it, to dominate it, to force elections, to control business interests in that country.

The Marines were eventually withdrawn in 1933 as a result of international pressure, of the international peace movement, and the United States switched to a more subtle form of control than gunboat diplomacy. We created and left behind a National Guard with officers trained in the United States who would be loyal to our interests. This arrangement was the decisive feature of the new era of neocolonialism.

With a brief interruption during World War II, the creation l of military oligarchies became a standard U.S. policy of control. We set up schools and eventually trained tens of thousands of military and police officers in countries all over Latin and Central America, in Africa in three cases (Zaire, Ethiopia, and to a lesser extent in Uganda), and in Asia. We put them through our military and police academies, armed them, directly or indirectly paid their salaries when they returned home, and created an international military fraternity of people in power in these countries who were more closely identified with our own military, and hence U.S. national interests and capitalist values, than they were with the people of their own countries.

Meanwhile the cat-and-mouse game that we played with Nicaragua starting in 1981 isle classic case of "destabilization". The strategy, according to the State Department, was to "attack the country’s economy." Note how indifferent that sounds from "brutal wreckage" and perhaps you can understand how those people in Washington, most of whom are perfectly decent human beings, can manage activities that cause so much human suffering. It is the magic of rationalization. After all, attacking a Communist country’s economy was something every patriotic citizen of the United States was expected to applaud every morning before breakfast.

The point of a destabilization is to put pressure on the targeted government by ripping apart the social and economic fabric of the country. These are only words, "social and economic fabric," but what they mean is making the people suffer as much as you can until the country plunges into chaos, until at some point you can step in and impose your choice of government on that country a strategy that was ultimately successful in the Nicaraguan elections when the people of that country "cried uncle" and voted for the CIA collaborator, Violeta Chamorro.9 The rationales we used in Nicaragua were classic Cold War slogans: we were "fighting Communism" in the interests of our "national security"; they were a "Marxist bastion in our ownbackyard"; etc. More specifically, our leaders said at first that the purpose of this program was to "interdict the alleged flow of arms from Nicaragua to the rebels in El Salvador." Unable to prove any flow of arms whatsoever from Nicaragua into El Salvador, the Reagan team, followed eventually by George Bush, developed the propaganda line that they were "returning Nicaragua to democracy." When it was pointed out that Nicaragua had never had a democracy-certainly not under the brutal Somoza dictatorship-they began to speak of the "democratization of Nicaragua," ignoring the fact that Nicaragua had held elections in 1984 that were demonstrably more democratic than the elections that we have in our own Republic.

We will never know exactly what the Sandinistas would have done with Nicaragua if we had left them alone to tackle the country’s staggering problems (many of which were the legacy of the Somoza regime) according to their own interests and ideology and compulsions. Everything they did after taking power in 1979 had been in the shadow of U.S. manipulations and covert military attacks on their country. We do know however that there was no blood bath when they took over. They abolished the death sentence at exactly the same time the United States was reinstituting it. The maximum penalty in their courts is 30 years in jail. They released thousands of the hated National Guardsmen that they had in their custody, saying that they would not jail anyone just for having belonged to an organization; the Guardsmen would have to be convicted of individual crimes. This contrasts dramatically with Cuba: when Castro triumphed in 1959, there were a number of executions, generally following trials and sentencing. Of course, the Sandinistas’ generosity cost them: many of the Guardsmen they released joined the contras in attacking the country.

The Sandinistas launched a literacy campaign to teach every Nicaraguan to read and write and they set out to build 2,500 clinics so Nicaraguans would have access to some kind of medical treatment. These are things that Somoza, the dictator backed by the United States, had not gotten around to doing, and in fact were openly scorned by the dictator and his family.

The first official action taken by the Sandinistas was to establish a ministry of the environment to tackle the damage done under Somoza, who had permitted commercial interests to dump toxic wastes in and thereby "kill" the country’s two huge, beautiful lakes. The Sandinistas then launched the most ambitious land reform campaign in the history of Central America. They did this by maintaining a free-enterprise economy with less governmental interference and corruption than Mexico, Peru, or Brazil. Private businessmen could obtain permits, rent an office, install a telephone, and open a business. They could buy land and farm it. If you owned land and you were working it, you kept it. They expropriated the lands that Somoza and his family, and the people who fled, had earned or stolen or taken, and they turned those lands back to the people in cooperatives and different programs, feeling their way, making mistakes as they went, trying this solution and that one, but with the purpose of getting the land back to the people so farmers would own the land, relate to the land, and profit from the land that they worked on in their own country.

In the first four years after the revolution, Nicaragua had the greatest rate of growth of any Latin American country.

The Sandinistas insisted that the church should be a church of the people, the church of the poor-not another tool of the oligarchy and the rich and the wealthy. I visited Tomas gorge’s office, the Minister of the Interior, and counted the 25 Catholic icon collector items that he had mounted on the wall.

During the Somoza years, Borge was imprisoned and tortured. His wife was imprisoned, raped, tortured, and killed. As Minister of the Interior, he had the men responsible in his power but he did not take revenge on them.

In the 10-year continuous attack-"war" is what the World Court called it-that the United States waged on Nicaragua, Nicaragua did not commit one act of war against the United States. But instead of joining them in building the healthiest, most dynamic, most enthusiastic country in Central America, the U.S. spent over $1 billion to attack and destabilize the country. We set out systematically to create conditions where farmers could not get their produce to market, where children could not go to school, where women were terrified of being attacked, inside their homes as well as outside, where the hospitals were treating wounded people instead of sick people, where government administration ground to a halt, where the trucks didn’t run, the bridges were blown up, the salaries weren’t paid, and the infrastructure broke down. Eventually, of course, international capital was scared away and the country plunged into chaos and bankruptcy.

We created the contra program beginning in about 1981. Here we go again, said Newsweek in November 1982, we have done this before; it has been a mistake before; once again we are supporting the wrong side. We had elected to support the only "truly evil, totally unacceptable faction in the Nicaraguan equation"-the remnants of Somoza’s hated Guardia Nacional (National Guard). Using Argentine trainers at first, and then eventually CIA mercenaries, we armed and directed this small army from bases mostly in Honduras to attack inside Nicaragua and destabilize the country. They systematically blew up granaries, sawmills, bridges, government offices, schools, health centers, mines. They mined roads, ambushed trucks, and raided farms and villages. There is massive documentation of all this- because, as I said, the country was kept open for foreign witnesses to record what was happening.

For the first few years, CBS, NBC, ABC, BBC, CBC all had crews in Managua, and when there would be atrocities they would rush to film them. We also had what eventually totaled thousands of witnesses for peace from this country, Canada, Europe, and Australia, going down and visiting or even living right in the Nicaraguan towns and villages with the people, and when there were atrocities they filmed and photographed and documented them.

There was also direct U.S. military involvement in mining harbors, overflying the country, and blowing up installations in the ports. There were assassinations of hundreds of religious leaders, teachers, health workers, elected officials, and government administrators by U.S.-backed contrast CBS, NBC, and others have footage of all of this; Americas Watch and Witness for Peace have documented it. There was the admission by President Ronald Reagan in his national television debate with Walter Mondale in 1984 that the famous "assassination manual," used to train the contras, was the work of the CIA Station Chief in Tegucigalpa. On national television, Reagan acknowledged the CIA’s involvement with the contras and in the plotting of assassinations.

After that faux pas, the media asked for clarification from the White House on the President’s policies. Did President Reagan in fact approve of assassinations, which had been declared at least officially taboo by President Gerald Ford in 1974? In an exercise of doublespeak, the White House said that the word "assassination" only applied to world leaders and chiefs of state. Murdering regional officials was not assassination. The policy, they said was unchanged.

Terror has been a part of this program, terror as raw as anything that happens in the Middle East or elsewhere. The contras habitually went into villages and hauled families out of their homes. They forced children to watch while they castrated and killed their fathers, while they raped their mothers and slashed off their breasts, or they forced parents to watch while they mutilated the children.

The New York Times has cited 45,000 as the number of people killed and wounded in this destabilization. This is nobody’s propaganda. It was all documented and condemned by the World Court, by the Presbyterian Church, by the Methodist Church, by broad segments of the Catholic Church, and by thousands of witnesses who went down from other countries to see for themselves.

Throughout, President Reagan remained unapologetic for this grotesque activity and President Bush continued the same policies. Reagan took pride in saying, "I am a contra. " He took pride in saying that these people were the moral equivalent of his founding fathers. And of course George Bush has never missed a chance to identify himself with the contras.

Destabilization has required a relentless propaganda program to discredit the Sandinistas and label them as totalitarian dictators. At first, we were told that they were flying arms into El Salvador. Then, when the Sandinistas put together a military machine to defend their country from the U.S. attack, we were told that they were building a war machine that "threatened the stability of all of Central America. " It was never mentioned that the Nicaraguans did not have strategic weapons and did not have tanks or an air force that could attack other countries, although El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, and Panama had been given jet fighter-bombers by the United States.

We charged them with censorship after they closed down the La Prensa newspaper. In time it came out that La Prensa had been financed by the National Endowment for Democracy and the CIA. This newspaper was owned by the Chamorro family, which means that Violeta Chamorro, victorious in the 1990 elections and supported by George Bush, was a funded collaborator of the CIA during the period when the CIA was directing the brutalization of her country.

Obviously, the United States would never put up with activity like that of La Prensa inside its own borders, especially during a war. In fact, there are laws carefully governing our press on the sensitive issues of capitalism. It is very much against the law, for example, for journalists deliberately to print stories that would cause fluctuations on Wall Street, or even to use "insider" information they obtain in their journalistic research to profit from the exchange. Editors of the Wall StreetJournal have been disciplined for this infraction during the same years that the United States was funding and directing La Prensa to create panics inside Nicaragua and castigating the Sandinistas for "censorship."

In 1984, we launched a vigorous campaign to discredit the Nicaraguan elections, elections that were supervised and witnessed by the United Nations and other groups who said that they were as fair as any elections they had seen in Central America in many years. These elections were quite an embarrassment to Ronald Reagan, who was then the champion of the contra program, and I am sure to George Bush today, because they were quite a bit more democratic than the elections that we held in this country during the same year, or in 1988. They had seven parties with candidates running for election; the United States had two. They turned out 75.4 percent of the vote; we turned out 53 percent. They voted directly; we voted for electors who selected our leaders. They passed a law that every legitimate party would have an equal subsidy of funds to spend for campaign purposes; in this country if you can raise more money you can buy more television time and you have a much better chance of the winning the election.

Another element of the propaganda program was the claim that they were smuggling drugs to finance their revolution. The CIA staged scenes with the pilot Barry Seales, plea-bargaining a deal with him to land a plane in Panama, to kick some bales of marijuana out on the runway that could be photographed by satellite so President Reagan could put pictures on television saying that it proved the Sandinistas were smuggling drugs. The record, however, proves that the contrasand their CIA managers were smuggling drugs. There was a massive flow of drugs through the CIA/contra aircraft into the United States, where they had clearances to land at Air Force and National Guard bases without being inspected by customs. Senator Kerry’s investigation revealed this and there are dozens of cases where people in the contra program, including Adolfo Calero’s brother-in-law, were caught smuggling cocaine into this country, using informal "national security" passes or telephone numbers from the White House to get themselves cleared when FBI or Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) officers caught them. This is nothing new. DEA records have been made public revealing that the CIA intervened on behalf of drug dealers at least two dozen times during the 1970s.

The United States also claimed the Sandinistas were responsible for terrorism in Central America, but this case, too, falls flat. The Sandinistas were not involved in terrorist acts- any crimes committed by their soldiers were punished with trials and severe sentences-but the United States has been and still are, slaughtering people in countries like El Salvador and Guatemala. Using the magic of words, U.S. spokespersons like UN Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick found a way out. It wasn’t "terrorism" if the people responsible for the violence were wearing uniforms provided by U.S. aid.

The United States blamed the Sandinistas for misery in Nicaragua, and the country was (and is) in fact miserable that was exactly the stated purpose of the U.S. destabilization. The words in Nicaragua are, "No hay," "There isn’t any." There are shortages of everything. The country is suffering; its people are suffering. But U.S. Congressional representatives would go down to Managua and have a look and come back and go on television and say, "You won’t believe that place; it is the most miserable country I have ever visited. The Sandinistas have not been able to manage it. Look what happens when you have a Marxist government…." To be honest, obviously they would have said, "Our stated purpose back since 1982 was to break the Nicaraguan economy; we spent a billion dollars destabilizing the country to break its economy. Now here are my snapshots of the results of our successful program." Of course, they do not do that because they are playing propaganda. The country is muserable and it was never the fault of the Sandinistas; misery was the stated purpose of the U.S. contra destabilization program. One can only imagine what schools and clinics and irrigation projects could have been built with $1 billion.

And then there was "the Soviet threat." For years, President Reagan said that in Nicaragua we had the Soviets and Cubans in our own backyard. He said there were Russians flying airplanes in this hemisphere meaning into Nicaragua-for the first time in all of history. And like much of what Reagan said-he was never a stickler for accuracy-this was not true. Aeroflot had been flying into Canada, into Mexico, into Latin America, into New York City, for 30 or 40 years on a daily basis, not to mention flying in and out of Cuba continuously.

In the end, the Nicaraguan operation was a bittersweet success for Ronald Reagan. He swore, and failed in this promise, that the Sandinistas would be out of office before he was (after his second term ending in 1989). The Sandinistas were eventually ousted, but under President Bush’s watch, after Reagan had retired. Meanwhile, Reagan had seen his presidency virtually destroyed in the Iran/contra scandal of 1986.

Moreover, President Reagan had failed in his broader goal. He campaigned his way into office in 1980 by advocating war in many of his speeches. He had assured the nation during and after the 1960s that he would have managed the Vietnam War differently. He promised to restore the nation’s confidence in its ability to wage war and win. After the invasion of Grenada in October 1983, his constituents sported bumper stickers proclaiming "Nicaragua Next ". "America Feeling Great Again" became the slogan of his 1984 presidential campaign. Meanwhile, the National Guard rehearsed constantly for the invasion of Nicaragua. By the fall of 1986, many respected observers in Washington believed that the date for the invasion had been set for February 1987. There were many indicators. The Pentagon was stirring.

Then, in October 1986, the Iran/contra scandal struck. The Reagan administration suffered a number of serious blows: the downing of the Hasenfus plane over Nicaragua, exposure of illegal arms sales to Iran (which had held Americans hostage off and on since the Carter presidency, and quite possibly a decision by the nation’s nonpolitical financial managers that an invasion of Nicaragua would have disastrous repercussions throughout Latin America. President Reagan was effectively crippled. He may narrowly have escaped impeachment. Certainly, he no longer had the clout to sell a war to the nation and to a reluctant military establishment.

Still, the national security establishment will record the U.S. destabilization of Nicaragua as a success. In the 1990 elections, Violeta Chamorro, George Bush’s friend and longtime CIA collaborator, won. It was a little-publicized fact that the CIA spent about $20 million on those elections to make the people vote to join their tormenters, a pittance after $1 billion that had already been spent to destabilize the country.

Recall the principle of oligarchy through which countries are controlled since overt colonialism became passe. In order to bring countries(like Nicaragua into the loops of international finance, you must have people like Chamorro,who will represent the interest of New York bankers, in power. For this to work, the leaders of the oligarchies have to see some real money themselves. This is why people like the Shah in Iran, Mobutu Sese in Zaire, and Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines have been permitted to steal billions of dollars from the aid and trade that flows through their countries.

That’s why the U.S. establishment is so adamantly against agrarian reform in Third World countries. If you invested $1 billion in a real land reform program in any country, say El Salvador, it would pay off in huge dividends for the people and perhaps return in ten years or so in the form of improved productivity. But if you loan the same $1 billion to the corrupt oligarchy it comes back to you immediately.

In the early 1980s, Morton Halperin of the Center for National Security Studies testified to congressional committees about the decapitalization of El Salvador. For every few million dollars the United States was giving the country in aid, the so-called 14 families were investing a like amount in Miami banks. He quipped that we could save time and effort simply by depositing our aid directly in the rich Salvadorans’ Miami bank accounts. The congressmen laughed, but they also voted for more aid to the Salvadoran oligarchy.

*****

INDONESIA

… in 1965 the CIA organized an operation to discredit the Communist party in Indonesia. Their strategy was to make the party appear to be secretly planning a violent takeover of Indonesian society. The truth was that the Indonesian Communist Party was doing quite well to obtain representation in the Indonesian government through the democratic process. That was what made it so threatening to the United States. They simply could not have an example of legitimate and successful participation by the Communists in the democratic process.

The techniques of the Indonesian destabilization were classic: CIA agents planted caches of arms that would then be "found" by Indonesian police under the watchful eye of the alerted media. Along with the arms would be all kinds of forged documents proving that the Communists were fomenting a violent uprising. Propaganda agents planted stories in the media, inflaming the mistrust of the Communists. Others gave speeches. The situation heated up until some generals in the Indonesian army were killed, and the boil of tension burst. The Indonesian army went after the Communists and the people they felt traditionally supported the Communists. The result was a bloodbath that the New York Times described in terms half a million to a million and a half dead. The Australian secret service, closer to Indonesia, put the figure at closer to two million-the rivers were clogged with the bodies of the dead.

In the summer of 1990, the U.S. State Department acknowledged that it had indeed delivered lists of names, of people who were subsequently killed, to the Indonesian government.

The CIA’s own internal reporting estimated that 800,000 people had been killed. The organization published a cover story through the Library of Congress that the Communist Party had supported a classic insurrection, which the army had put down. However, internal CIA reports cited the operation as a classic success in which they had targeted the world’s thirdlargest Communist Party and aided the Indonesian army by providing thousands of names of suspected individuals and completely eliminated from the face of the earth not only the party, but the ethnic Chinese in Indonesia who tended to support the Communists. Simply put, this is a classic case of genocide that was engineered by the CIA and cited as a model to be copied elsewhere….

*****

CHILE

Twice in the 1960s, the CIA spent large sums of money to influence the outcome of elections in Chile and to install a president of the United States’ choosing. Eventually it failed and democracy prevailed in the election of President Salvador Allende Gossens. Under the direction of President Nixon, the CIA organized the famous Track I and Track II destabilization of Chile in order to oust Allende. CIA Deputy Director for Operations, Richard Helms (who later became CIA Director) testified before the congressional Oversight Committee and lied. He was later indicted for lying to the Congress about the Chilean operation and plea-bargained a suspended sentence and a fine, which the association of CIA exes paid for him. Finally, he offered a copy of the notes he had made in the National Security Council meeting in the White House where he was ordered to mount the Chilean operation. He had jotted down the following instructions: "Make the Chilean economy scream." He testified that when he return to CIA headquarters at Langley to give his staff their marching orders, even they were dumfounded at the cynicism of the operation. Helms told them, "Gentlemen, let’s not sit around wringing our hands. We’ve been given a job to do."

With the help of the U.S. military, which had solid connections with the Chilean military through the American-sponsored international military fraternity, and with the help of certain multinational corporations like ITT, the CIA mounted the successful operation to oustthe democratically-elected president of Chile, who was killed in the process. At one point prior to the coup, General Rene Schneider, the pro-U.S. head of the Chilean military, was an obstacle because he was stubbornly supporting democracy and the constitutional process. So they killed him too and installed the monster Pinochet in power. About 30,000 people were killed by Pinochet, whose secret police were so violent that they even engineered bombings in our own nation’s capital. It took the best effort of the Chilean people, eventually with diplomatic help from the United States, to undo the damage and return the country to a democratic process 16 years later.

When Henry Kissinger was grilled by the Congress about the Chilean operation, he had this to say: "Yes, the issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves."

*****

Coming to grips with these U.S./CIA activities in broad numbers and figuring out how many people have been killed in the jungles of Laos or the hills of Nicaragua is very difficult. But, adding them up as best we can, we come up with a figure of six million people killed-and this is a minimum figure. Included are: one million killed in the Korean War, two million killed in the Vietnam War, 800,000 killed in Indonesia, one million in Cambodia, 20,000 killed in Angola … and 22,000 killed in Nicaragua. These people would not have died if U.S. tax dollars had not been spent by the CIA to inflame tensions, finance covert political and military activities and destabilize societies.

Certainly, there are other local, regional, national and international factors in many of these operations, but if the CIA were tried fairly in a U.S. court, under U.S. law, the principle of complicity, incitment, riot, and mayhem would clearly apply. In the United States, if you hire someone to commit a murder your sentence may be approximately the same as that of the murderer himself.

Who are these six million people we have killed in the interest of American national security? Conservatives tell us, "It’s a dangerous world. Our enemies have to die so we can be safe and secure." Some of them say, "I’m sorry, but that’s the way the world is. We have to accept this reality and defend ourselves, to make our nation safe and insure our way of life."

Since 1954, however, we have not parachuted teams into the Soviet Union – our number one enemy – to destabilize that country… Neither do we run these violent operations in England, France, Sweden, Norway, Belgium, or Switzerland. Since the mid-1950s they have all been conducted in Third World countries where governments do not have the power to force the United States to stop its brutal and destabilizing campaigns.

One might call this the "Third World War." It is a war that has been fought by the United States against the Third World. Others call it the Cold War and focus on the anti-Communist and anti-Soviet rationales, but the dead are not Soviets; they are people of the Third World. It might also be called the Forty-Year War, like the Thirty-Year and Hundred-Year Wars in Europe, for this one began when the CIA was founded in 1947 and continues today. Altogether, perhaps twenty million people died in the Cold War. As wars go, it has been the second or third most destructive of human life in all of history, after World War I and World War II.

The six million people the CIA has helped to kill are people of the Mitumba Mountains of the Congo, the jungles of Southeast Asia, and the hills of northern Nicaragua. They are people without ICBMs or armies or navies, incapable of doing physical damage to the United States the 22,000 killed in Nicaragua, for example, are not Russians; they are not Cuban soldiers or advisors; they are not even mostly Sandinistas. A majority are rag-poor peasants, including large numbers of women and children.

Communists? Hardly, since the dead Nicaraguans are predominantly Roman Catholics. Enemies of the United States? That description doesn’t fit either, because the thousands of witnesses who have lived in Nicaraguan villages with the people since 1979 testify that the Nicaraguans are the warmest people on the face of the earth, that they love people from the United States, and they simply cannot understand why our leaders would want to spend $1 billion on a contra force designed to murder people and wreck the country.

John Stockwell quotations

excerpts from the book

The Praetorian Guard

by John Stockwell

former CIA agent

[The Roman praetors were first established in 367 B.C.. They evolved into the Praetorian Guard that came to exercise great power, making and unmaking emperors and allowing political and military action outside of the law. What rules that were observed were announced by the issuance of edicts. The Guard was characterized by corruption and political venality and was closed down by Constantine in 312 A. D..]

*****

Short, successful military adventures are as effective as the Super Bowl in diverting people’s attention from unpleasant truths.

***

Two million people had been killed [in Vietnam]. The equivalent of a 500-pound bomb had been dropped on the country for every citizen. Ninety-thousand tons of carcinogenic and toxic materials had been dropped on the country, some of which would poison it for decades to come. We were returning to the "World" to continue our lives, while leaving our Vietnamese cohorts behind

***

The CIA and the big corporations were, in my experience, in step with each other. Later I realized that they may argue about details of strategy – a small war here or there. However, both are vigorously committed to supporting the system.

***

We created and left behind [in Nicaragua] a National Guard with officers trained in the United States who would be loyal to our interests. This arrangement was the decisive feature of the new era of neocolonialism.

***

The major function of secrecy in Washington is to keep the U.S. people and U.S. Congress from knowing what the nation’s leaders are doing.

***

…the Cambodian people knew that they were being bombed; it was no secret to them. Unfortunately, there was nothing they could do to stop the bombing. However, the people of the United Stares could stop the bombing, or at least raise an effective protest of it. Hence, it was vital to President Nixon that the bombing remain secret here at home.

***

… the CIA had been running thousands of operations over the years… there have been about 3,000 major covert operations and over 10,000 minor operations… all designed to disrupt, destabilize, or modify the activities of other countries… But they are all illegal and they all disrupt the normal functioning, often the democratic functioning, of other societies. They raise serious questions about the moral responsibility of the United States in the international society of nations.

***

…the CIA has overthrown functioning democracies in over 20 countries.

***

…stirring up deadly ethnic and racial strife has been a standard technique used by the CIA.

***

Nothing illustrates the power to rationalize cynicism as well as the Public Safety Program, also called the Office of Public Safety. For about twenty-five years, the CIA, working through the Agency for International Development, trained and organized police and paramilitary officers from around the world in techniques of population control, repression, and torture. Schools were set up in the United States, Panama, and Asia, from which tens of thousands graduated. In some cases, former Nazi officers from Hitler’s Third Reich were used as instructors.

***

The major economic impetus behind the Third World War … is the production of arms. Every day $3 billion worth of weapons is bought and sold. So-called defense corporations are making 20-25 percent profit. In the 1980s, the United States spent a total of $2.5 trillion (at least those were the announced figures, the total was probably much greater) on the largest arms buildup perhaps in the history of the world and certainly of any country during peacetime.

***

The U.S. taxpayer is now carrying a gigantic burden. Nearly one-third of the nation’s budget goes to the military. According to studies published in the Washington Post, 53 cents of every tax dollar goes to the military to pay for arms, salaries, facilities, overhead, and debts from Vietnam and other wars.

***

This was the continuation of a post-World War II system, dominated by what President Eisenhower called the "military-industrial complex." The U.S. taxpayer is now carrying a gigantic burden. Nearly one-third of the nation’s budget goes to the military. According to studies published in the Washington Post, 53 cents of every dollar goes to the military to pay for arms, salaries, facilities, overhead, and debts from Vietnam and other wars.

***

Taking smoothly over from the arcade games, which are nearly all violent, our society feeds its youth on the great military conditioning program of football, complete with the captain (coach), the sergeant (quarterback), and troops.

***

The lesson of the runaway arms race, with its giant expenditures on the military, is that the nation has gone deeply, irreversibly into debt, and every conceivable social service is being sacrificed. We cannot afford guns and butter. To pay for the arms race the nation has to cut thousands of social programs, … The nation cannot go wild on military expenditures and also afford to care for old people, poor people, disabled people, farmers, or students.

***

… the United States has plummeted, relative to the rest of the industrialized world, from its pinnacle of wealth and economic strength. Twenty-five percent of the people in this country are now functionally illiterate. We are sixth in the world in terms of the percentage of children in school; seventh in life expectancy; tenth in quality of education; tenth in quality of life standards; and twentieth in infant mortality.

***

Enemies are necessary for the wheels of the U.S. military machine to turn.

***

Conservative intellectuals admit the harshness of U.S. counter-revolutionary activities but argue that they are necessary…. They know that people die by the thousands in these activities, but claim that they are nevertheless necessary to maintain U.S. security and the U.S. standard of living.

***

The First Amendment does not require anyone to publish the truth.

***

The owners of the Washington Post long ago acknowledged that the Post is the government’s voice to the people. In 1981, Katherine Graham, who owns the Post and Newsweek announced that her editors would "cooperate with the national security interests." National security in this context means "CIA."

*****

… the CIA [has] been running thousands of operations over the years. … there have been about 3,000 major covert operations and over 10,000 minor operations-all illegal, and all designed to disrupt, destabilize, or modify the activities of other countries.

***

The major function of secrecy in Washington is to keep the U.S. people and U.S. Congress from knowing what the nation’s leaders are doing. Secrecy is power. Secrecy is license. Secrecy covers up mistakes. Secrecy covers up corruption.

***

The current War on Drugs, with its broad rationales for aggressive response, police action, and stringent new laws, has quickly replaced the old anti-Christ of Communism in the hearts and minds of the national security establishment.

***

The so-called "defense" corporations are multinational conglomerates that have no great loyalty to the United States; they are in fact no longer U.S. corporations but transnational entities loyal only to themselves.

***

Now more clearly than ever, the CIA, with its related institutions, is exposed as an agency of destabilization and repression. Throughout its history, it has organized secret wars that killed millions of people in the Third World who had no capability of doing physical harm to the United States.

***

… the United States [is] cast in the role of Praetorian Guard, protecting the interests of the global financial order against fractious elements in the Third World.

***

The military has … seen its budget restored, to an all-time high, and it has …new rationales for continued dominance of U.S. society. The Third World is the new enemy, effectively replacing the Cold War rationales for militarism.

***

As the Praetorian Guard, fighting wars for multinational interests while also paying for such adventures, our relative economic stability, domestic social and material infrastructure, and the freedom and liberties of the American people may all be forfeited.

***

Coming to grips with these U.S./CIA activities in broad numbers and figuring out how many people have been killed in the jungles of Laos or the hills of Nicaragua is very difficult. But, adding them up as best we can, we come up with a figure of six million people killed-and this is a minimum figure. Included are: one million killed in the Korean War, two million killed in the Vietnam War, 800,000 killed in Indonesia, one million in Cambodia, 20,000 killed in Angola … and 22,000 killed in Nicaragua. These people would not have died if U.S. tax dollars had not been spent by the CIA to inflame tensions, finance covert political and military activities and destabilize societies.

Certainly, there are other local, regional, national and international factors in many of these operations, but if the CIA were tried fairly in a U.S. court, under U.S. law, the principle of complicity, incitement, riot, and mayhem would clearly apply. In the United States, if you hire someone to commit a murder your sentence may be approximately the same as that of the murderer himself.

Who are these six million people we have killed in the interest of American national security? Conservatives tell us, "It’s a dangerous world. Our enemies have to die so we can be safe and secure." Some of them say, "I’m sorry, but that’s the way the world is. We have to accept this reality and defend ourselves, to make our nation safe and insure our way of life."

Since 1954, however, we have not parachuted teams into the Soviet Union – our number one enemy – to destabilize that country… Neither do we run these violent operations in England, France, Sweden, Norway, Belgium, or Switzerland. Since the mid-1950s they have all been conducted in Third World countries where governments do not have the power to force the United States to stop its brutal and destabilizing campaigns.

One might call this the "Third World War." It is a war that has been fought by the United States against the Third World. Others call it the Cold War and focus on the anti-Communist and anti-Soviet rationales, but the dead are not Soviets; they are people of the Third World. It might also be called the Forty-Year War, like the Thirty-Year and Hundred-Year Wars in Europe, for this one began when the CIA was founded in 1947 and continues today. Altogether, perhaps twenty million people died in the Cold War. As wars go, it has been the second or third most destructive of human life in all of history, after World War I and World War II.

The six million people the CIA has helped to kill are people of the Mitumba Mountains of the Congo, the jungles of Southeast Asia, and the hills of northern Nicaragua. They are people without ICBMs or armies or navies, incapable of doing physical damage to the United States the 22,000 killed in Nicaragua, for example, are not Russians; they are not Cuban soldiers or advisors; they are not even mostly Sandinistas. A majority are rag-poor peasants, including large numbers of women and children.

Communists? Hardly, since the dead Nicaraguans are predominantly Roman Catholics. Enemies of the United States? That description doesn’t fit either, because the thousands of witnesses who have lived in Nicaraguan villages with the people since 1979 testify that the Nicaraguans are the warmest people on the face of the earth, that they love people from the United States, and they simply cannot understand why our leaders would want to spend $1 billion on a contra force designed to murder people and wreck the country.

In Search of Enemies

by John Stockwell

W.W. Norton, 1978

p9
Author’s Note

In December i976 I advised my boss in the CIA’s Africa Division of my intention to resign. For his own reasons, he urged me to take several months leave to reconsider. Making it clear I would not change my mind, I accepted his offer of several more pay checks and took three months sick leave.

I did not tell anyone I planned to write a book. In fact, I had no great confidence in my ability to write. I had been an operations officer-an activist-for the past dozen years in the CIA.

What about the oath of secrecy I signed when I joined the CIA in 1964? I cannot be bound by it for four reasons: First, my oath was illegally, fraudulently obtained. My CIA recruiters lied to me about the clandestine services as they swore me in. They insisted the CIA functioned to gather intelligence. It did not kill, use drugs, or damage people’s lives, they assured me. These lies were perpetuated in the following year of training courses. It was not until the disclosures of the Church and Pike Committees in 1975 that I learned the full, shocking truth about my employers.

I do not mean to suggest that I was a puritan or out of step with the moral norms of modern times; nor had I been squeamish about my CIA activities. To the contrary, I had participated in operations which stretched the boundaries of anyone’s conscience. But the congressional committees disclosed CIA activities which had previously been concealed, which I could not rationalize.

The disclosures about the plot to poison Patrice Lumumba struck me personally in two ways. First, men I had worked with had been involved. Beyond that, Lumumba had been baptized into the Methodist Church in 1937, the same year I was baptized a Presbyterian. He had attended a Methodist mission school at Wembo Nyama in the Kasai Province of the Belgian Congo (Zaire), while I attended the Presbyterian school in Lubondai in the same province. The two church communities overlapped. My parents sometimes drove to Wembo Nyama to buy rice for our schools. American Methodist children were my classmates in Lubondai. Lumumba was not, in 1961, the Methodists’ favorite son, but he was a member of the missionary community in which my parents had spent most of their adult lives, and in which I grew up.

There were other disclosures which appalled me: kinky, slightly depraved, drug/sex experiments involving unwitting Americans, who were secretly filmed by the CIA for later viewing by pseudoscientists of the CIA’s Technical Services Division.

For years I had defended the CIA to my parents and to our friends. "Take it from me, a CIA insider," I had always sworn, "the CIA simply does not assassinate or use drugs . . ."

But worse was to come. A few short months after the CIA’s shameful performance in Vietnam, of which I was part, I was assigned to a managerial position in the CIA’s covert Angola program. Under the leadership of the CIA director we lied to Congress and to the 40 Committee, which supervised the CIA’s Angola program. We entered into joint activities with South Africa. And we actively propagandized the American public, with cruel results-Americans, misguided by our agents’ propaganda, went to fight in Angola in suicidal circumstances. One died, leaving a widow and four children behind. Our secrecy was designed to keep the American public and press from knowing what we were doing-we fully expected an outcry should they find us out.

The CIA’s oath of secrecy has been desecrated in recent years, not by authors-Philip Agee, Joe Smith, Victor Marchetti, and Frank Snepp-but by the CIA directors who led the CIA into scandalous, absurd operations. At best, the oath was used to protect those directors from exposure by their underlings, although the directors themselves freely leaked information to further their operational or political ploys.

Their cynicism about the oath, and their arrogance toward the United States’ constitutional process, were exposed in 1977, when former director Richard Helms was convicted of perjury for lying to a Senate committee about an operation in Chile. Helms plea-bargained a light sentence-the prosecutors were allegedly apprehensive that in his trial many secrets would be revealed, blowing operations and embarrassing establishment figures. After receiving a suspended sentence, Helms stood with his attorney before television cameras, while the latter gloated that Helms would wear the conviction as a "badge of honor." Helms was proud of having lied to the Senate to protect a questionable CIA operation, but to protect his own person, secrets would have been exposed.

Faced with a similar choice in the Angolan program-my loyalty to the CIA or my responsibilities to the United States’ Constitution -I chose the latter. The CIA’s oaths and honor codes must never take precedence over allegiance to our country. That is my second reason for disregarding the oath.

Even with those two reasons, I would not have undertaken to expose the clandestine services if I felt they were essential to our national security. I am persuaded they are not. That is what this book is about.

In discussing our foreign intelligence organ, we consistently confuse two very different offices, referring to both as "CIA." The one, technically called the Central Intelligence Agency’s Deputy Directorate of Information, fulfills the mission outlined in the National Security Act of 1947, of centralizing all of the raw intelligence available to our government, collating it, analyzing it for meaning and importance, and relaying finished reports to the appropriate offices. Had such an office existed in 1941 we would have been forewarned of Pearl Harbor. The DDI is overt-its employees are openly "CIA" to friends, relatives, neighbors, and creditors; it is passive; and it is benign, without aggressive activity which can harm anyone.

Otherwise, we say "CIA" meaning the clandestine services of the Deputy Directorate of Operations. This organization of about 4,500 employees is also housed in the CIA headquarters building in Langley, Virginia. Anything but benign, its operatives have for thirty years recruited agents (spies) and engineered covert action operations in virtually every corner of the globe.

I was a field case officer of the clandestine services, and by December 1976, when I announced my resignation, I was persuaded that at the very least those services needed a major reform.

Before I decided to resign and write a book I considered the options for working within the CIA for reforms. The prospects were not encouraging. The isolation of the intelligence business provides management with extraordinary leverage over the rank and file. While the CIA benevolently protected and supported officers who had been rendered ineffective by life’s tragedies, it had little tolerance of the outspoken individual, the reformist. An officer could play the game and rise, or keep his peace and have security, or he could resign. I had, through the years made positive recommendations for reform both verbally and in writing, to my Africa Division bosses and on occasion to Colby himself, without result. The inspector general’s office was competent to handle petty problems, but as an instrument of the director’s managerial system, it could not address matters of reform. And I had found the "club" of CIA managers arrogantly resistant to criticism of their own ranks-when I spoke out about the most flagrant mismanagement that I knew about which occurred during the evacuation of Vietnam, I was politely and gently admonished. The culprit was given a position of authority, vindicated by the support of his colleagues, and I was informed I had better keep my peace. Only in the forum of public debate, outside the CIA, could effective leverage be had to correct the agency’s wrongs.

After resigning I testified for five days to Senate committees, giving them full details about such agency activities as are covered in this book. Had I been reassured that they would take effective corrective action, I would have considered abandoning my own plans to write. Unfortunately, the Senate intelligence committees in Washington are unable to dominate and discipline the agency. Some senators even seem dedicated to covering up its abuses. Once again, I concluded that only an informed American public can bring effective pressure to bear on the CIA.

Others had reached the same conclusion. Philip Agee used his book, Inside the Company: A CIA Diary, as a sword to slash at the agency, to put it out of business in Latin America. Deeply offended by the CIA’s clandestine activities, Agee attacked individual operations and agents, publishing every name he could remember. Although he made an effort to explain how and why he became disillusioned, he did not illuminate the CIA "mind." Marchetti and Snepp contributed valuable information to the public’s knowledge of the CIA. The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence includes a vast store of information about the agency, drawn from Marchetti’s experience in the DDI and in the office of the director of central intelligence. Snepp, for six years an analyst in the CIA’s Saigon station, chronicles the intelligence failure and betrayals of the CIA evacuation of South Vietnam in April 1975.

My objective in writing this book is to give the American public a candid glimpse inside the clandestine mind, behind the last veils of secrecy. The vehicle I chose is the Angola paramilitary program of 1975-1976. The anecdotes I relate all happened as described. Dates and details are drawn from the public record and from voluminous notes I took during the Angola operation. In most cases there were other witnesses and often enough secret files to corroborate them. However, for reasons of security, I was not able to interview key individuals or return to the CIA for further research as I wrote. I urge the CIA to supplement my observations by opening its Angola files-the official files as well as the abundant "soft" files we kept- so the public can have the fullest, most detailed truth.

Our libel laws restrict an author’s freedom to relate much of human foible. Nevertheless I have managed to include enough anecdotes to give the reader a full taste of the things we did, the people we were. But this is not so much a story of individual eccentricities and strange behavior, though I mention some. I have no desire to expose or hurt individuals and I reject Agee’s approach. As a case officer for twelve years I was both victim and villain in CIA operations. In both roles I was keenly sympathetic for the people we ensnarled in our activities. Perhaps they are responsible according to the principles of Nuremburg and Watergate which judged lesser employees individually responsible and put them in jail-but I prefer to address the issues at a broader level. Since my resignation I have revealed no covert CIA employee or agent’s name, and I stonewalled the Senate and FBI on that subject when they questioned me.

My sympathy does not extend to the CIA managers who led the CIA to such depths, but in this book I have used actual names only for such managers as had previously been declared as "CIA": Director William Colby; Deputy Director of Operations William Nelson; Bill Welles, who replaced Nelson; and Africa Division Chief James Potts. And myself. The other names of CIA personnel-Carl Bantam, Victor St. Martin, Paul Foster, et al.-are pseudonyms which I invented. (Any resemblance those names might have to the true names of individuals within and without the CIA is purely coincidental.) In the field, Holden Roberto and Jonas Savimbi were well known to be our allies. Bob Denard and Colonel Santos y Castro were also public figures, widely known to be involved on the side of Roberto, Savimbi, and the CIA. "Timothe Makala" is a name I invented (makala means "charcoal" in the Bantu dialect, Tshiluba). On occasion I used CIA cryptonyms, but in most cases they, too, have been altered to protect the individuals from any conceivable exposure.

On April l0, 1977, after my resignation was final, I published an open letter to CIA Director Stansfield Turner in the Outlook section of the Washington Post. It outlined the reasons for my disillusionment. (The letter is reprinted in the Appendix of this book.) Director Turner subsequently initiated a house-cleaning of the clandestine services, proposing to fire four hundred people, to make the clandestine services "lean and efficient." In December 1977 Turner admitted to David Binder of the New York Times that this housecleaning had been triggered by my letter.

In January 1978, President Carter announced a reorganization of the intelligence community, which in fact has the effect of strengthening the CIA; and Admiral Turner has reached an understanding with Congress (of which I am skeptical-the Congress has neither the will nor the means to control the CIA). Now Turner has intensified his campaign for tighter controls over CIA employees. He is lobbying vigorously for legislation that would jail anyone who threatens the CIA by disclosing its secrets. It makes him fighting mad, he blusters, when anyone leaks classified information. Such people are violating the "code of intelligence," he charges. It is the CIA’s "unequivocal right" to censor all publications by CIA people, he claims. "Why do Americans automatically presume the worst of their public servants?" he asks-a remarkable question in the wake of Watergate, FBI, and CIA revelations.

Director Turner and President Carter have it backwards. It is the American people’s unequivocal right to know what their leaders are doing in America’s name and with our tax dollars. My third reason.

For my fourth reason, I reclaim my constitutional right of freedom of speech. The Constitution of the United States does not read that all citizens shall have freedom of speech except those that have signed CIA oaths. Until there is such an amendment of the Constitution, ratified by the appropriate number of states, the Marchetti ruling rests as bad law, an unfortunate relic of the Nixon administration’s bullishness. If the CIA and its "secrets game" cannot live with our fundamental constitutional rights, there can be no question, the Constitution must prevail.

But if the present administration has its way, stories such as this one would be suppressed and covered up. And the author would be punished. I invite the reader to judge which is more important: CIA misadventures such as this one, or our fundamental right to know the truth about our public servants’ activities and to keep them honest?

p34

Because of my mission background, my recruiters and I discussed the CIA’s "true nature." They had been unequivocal in reassuring me-the CIA was an intelligence-gathering institution, and a benevolent one. Coups were engineered only to alter circumstances which jeopardized national security. I would be a better person through association with the CIA. My naïveté was shared by most of my forty-two classmates in our year-long training program. Our instructors hammered the message at us: the CIA was good, its mission was to make the world a better place, to save the world from communism.

p43

Carl insisted that it was Kissinger who was pushing the agency into the covert operation in Angola. Kissinger saw the Angolan conflict solely in terms of global politics and was determined the Soviets should not be permitted to make a move in any remote part of the world without being confronted militarily by the United States. Superficially, his opposition to the Soviet presence was being rationalized in terms of Angola’s strategic location on the South Atlantic, near the shipping lanes of the giant tankers which bring oil from the Middle East around the horn of Africa to the United States. This argument was not profound. Soviet bases in Somalia had much better control of our shipping lanes, and any military move by the Soviets against our oil supplies would trigger a reaction so vigorous that a Soviet base in Angola would be a trivial factor. In fact, Angola had little plausible importance to American national security and little economic importance beyond the robusta coffee it sold to American markets and the relatively small amounts of petroleum Gulf Oil pumped from the Cabindan fields.

No. Uncomfortable with recent historic events, and frustrated by our humiliation in Vietnam, Kissinger was seeking opportunities to challenge the Soviets.

p44
(footnote)
The Central Intelligence Agency’s authority to run covert operations was for twenty-seven years solely dependent on a vague phrase in the National Security Act of 1947 which read: "to perform such other functions and duties related to intelligence affecting the national security as the National Security Council may from time to time direct." In 1975 Clark Clifford testified that the drafters of this act intended only to give the president authority to undertake operations in the rare instances that the national security was truly threatened. In fact, the CIA used the vaguely worded charter to launch thousands of covert actions in every corner of the world. Most of them had dubious justification in terms of the United States security. (See the Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Government Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities [also called the Church Committee Report], April z6, 1976.) The Hughes-Ryan Amendment to the National Assistance Act of 1974 required that no funds be expended by or on behalf of the CIA for operations abroad, other than activities designed to obtain necessary intelligence, unless two conditions are met: (a) the president must make a finding that such operation is important to the national security of the United States; and (b) the president must report in a timely fashion a description of such operation and its scope to congressional committees. Theoretically the Senate has controlled the agency budget since 1947 but CIA funds were buried in the Department of Defense budget, and without detailed knowledge of CIA activities, the Senate could make little practical use of this power. *The CIA has a special arrangement which permits any employee who has three years of overseas duty to retire at age fifty, with as much as $20,000 per year in retirement pay. The stresses that shorten case officers’ lives are not what one might guess, certainly not those of James Bond-like danger and intrigue. Most case officers work under official (State Department) cover, and circulate after hours in the world of cocktail and dinner parties. They become accustomed to a life-style of rich food, alcohol, and little exercise. At work they are subject to bureaucratic stresses comparable to a sales office or a newsroom, with publishing deadlines and competitive pressures to produce recruitments.

p47
… CIA case officers are … almost entirely dependent on CIA material for knowledge of their areas of operation, perpetuating CIA biases and superficial observations. It is exceedingly rare that CIA officers, including even the analysts of the Directorate of Information, will read the books and articles which the academic world publishes about their areas of interest.

p49
Essentially a conservative organization, the CIA maintains secret liaison with local security services wherever it operates. Its stations are universally part of the official communities of the host countries. Case officers live comfortable lives among the economic elite; even "outside" or "deep cover" case officers are part of that elite. They become conditioned to the mentality of the authoritarian figures, the police chiefs, with whom they work and socialize, and eventually share their resentment of revolutionaries who threaten the status quo. They are ill at ease with democracies and popular movements-too fickle and hard to predict.

p50
… the Portuguese role in Angola was historically one of exploitation and brutal suppression. Beginning in 1498 it conquered and subjugated the three dominant tribal kingdoms-the Bakongo, Mbumdu, and Ovimbundu-and exported over three million slaves, leaving vast reaches of the colony under-populated. The colonial society was segregated into six racial categories defined by the portion of white blood in each, with two categories of pure blacks at the bottom of the scale. Citizenship, economic and legal privilege accrued only to the 600,000 whites, mulattos, and assimilados or blacks who were legally accepted among the elite of the society. The go percent of the population classified as indigenas suffered every form of discrimination-including forced labor, beatings, arbitrary imprisonment, and execution. without trial-at the hands of the colonial administrators.

In 1958 there were 203 doctors in all of Angola, statistically one for every 22,400 Angolans, although most of those two hundred served only European, mulatto, or assimilado patients, while a handful tended the 6,000,000 Angolan indigenas. Less than 1 percent of the indigenas had as much as three years of schooling.

John Marcum, an American scholar who visited the interior of Angola in the early I960s, walking eight hundred miles into the FNLA guerrilla camps in northern Angola, reports that at the time rebellion erupted in 196l, 2,000,000 Angolan natives were displaced from their historic social and geographic surroundings: 800,000 were subject to rural forced labor; 350,000 faced underemployment in the slums of the urban areas; and about l,000,000 were emigres in the Congo, Rhodesia, and South Africa. "The disintegration of traditional society had led to widespread disorientation, despair, and preparations for violent protest." By I96I Angola was a black powder keg with the three major ethnic groups organized for revolt.

On March 15,196I, FNLA guerrillas mounted a so-pronged attack across the Congo border along a 400-mile front, killing African and Portuguese men, women, and children alike.

Portuguese air force planes immediately brought in military reinforcements using NATO arms intended for the defense of the North Atlantic area, and began striking back with indiscriminate wrath, even bombing and strafing areas that had not been affected by the nationalist uprising. Portuguese police seized nationalists, Protestants, communists, and systematically eliminated black leaders by execution and terrorism. By overreacting and flaying out indiscriminately, the Portuguese helped to insure the insurrection would not be localized or quashed.

President Kennedy made a tentative gesture of support to the revolutionaries by voting with the majority of 73 to 2 (South Africa and Spain opposing) on United Nations General Assembly Resolution 15I4, April 20, 1961, which called for reforms in Angola. The United States also cut a planned military assistance program from $25 million to $3 million and imposed a ban on the commercial sale of arms to Portugal.

But the Portuguese held a very high card-the Azores air bases that refueled up to forty U.S. Air Force transports a day. We could not do without them and our agreement for their use was due to expire December 31,196Z, only eighteen months away. By renegotiating the agreement on a year-by-year basis, the Portuguese were able to stymie further pressure from Washington and obtain extensive military loans and financial credits.

Even as American bombs and napalm fell on the Angolan nationalists, and the U.S. voted the conservative line at the UN, Portugal’s air force chief of staff, General Tiago Mina Delgado, was honored in Washington, receiving the American Legion of Merit from the U.S. Air Force chief of staff, Curtis Lemay, and a citation from Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara for his contribution to U.S.-Portuguese friendship. Strategic realities dominated policy.

Lisbon attributed the war in northern Angola to Congolese "invaders" and "outside agitators" acting with a rabble of hemp-smoking indigenas and for years thereafter, while the rebellion sputtered and flared, the United States ignored Angolan revolutionary movements. With the advent of the Nixon administration in 1969, a major review of American policy toward Southern Africa, the "tar baby" report (NSSM 39), concluded that African insurgent movements were ineffectual, not "realistic or supportable" alternatives to continued colonial rule. The interdepartmental policy review, commissioned by then White House advisor, Henry Kissinger, questioned "the depth and permanence of black resolve" and "ruled out a black victory at any stage." Events soon proved this to be a basic miscalculation.

p182
… we searched the world for allies who could provide qualified advisors to put into the conflict, or better yet, regular army units to crush the MPLA and deliver the country to Roberto and Savimbi. We canvassed moderate friends-Brazil, Morocco, South Korea, Belgium, Great Britain, France, and even Portugal, without success. South Africa eventually came to UNITA’s rescue, but the Zairian commando battalions in northern Angola were only slightly better than the FNLA forces they joined.

Mercenaries seemed to be the answer, preferably Europeans with the requisite military skills and perhaps experience in Africa. As long as they were not Americans, the 40 Committee approved. We began an exhaustive search for suitable candidates, a search which brought me in conflict with my bosses and kept me at odds with them even into March 1976, months after the Senate had ordered a halt to the Angola program. The conduct of European and South African mercenaries in previous African civil wars had left them with a murderous reputation, and the use of white mercenaries at the crest of the era of black nationalism was a blunder, I felt, which could only damage United States credibility in the Third World. In addition, the mercenaries who have appeared in previous African wars have been a mixed bag, more often self-serving, ineffective, unmilitary. Potts, Bantam, Nelson, St. Martin, Foster-all lacked enough experience in Africa to know that. They tended to idealize mercenaries and exaggerate their capabilities. And they lacked sensitivity for the disgust the word "mercenary" stirs in the hearts of black Africans. Nor did Colby know Africa, although perhaps he was in a class by himself. The mild, likable, church-going, master case officer who had commanded the PHOENIX program in Vietnam would hardly have qualms about a few mercenaries fighting blacks in Africa.

I spoke out in staff meetings and in Potts’s office every time the subject of mercenaries came up. Whenever a memo or buckslip or cable about mercenaries circulated the office I added my own critical comment in the margins, and I did have some effect. After several weeks of my pressure, the word "mercenary" became taboo at headquarters. Potts forbade its use in cables, memoranda, and files, at headquarters and in the field. Thereafter the mercenaries who were hired and sent to Angola were to be called "foreign military advisors."

And so we proceeded to search the world for acceptable "foreign military advisors." We began the search with no leads whatsoever- astonishingly, we found that nowhere in the CIA, not even the Special Operations Group, with all its experiences in Southeast Asia, was there a file, reference list, or computer run of individuals who might be recruited as advisors. Anti-Castro Cubans, such as had been used in the Congo, the Bay of Pigs, and Watergate, were ruled out because they carried United States green resident alien cards and hence would fall under the 40 Committee’s restrictions against using Americans. South Vietnamese refugees were approached, but they were busy rebuilding their lives in the new world, and were unanimously wary of a CIA adventure in black Africa. They too carried green cards. The British refused to help. South Koreans were excluded because of language and cultural problems. Biafrans and other Africans were rejected out of political considerations, and because they wouldn’t have the impact of whites. Finally, five sources seemed to be available: Portuguese, French, Brazilians, Filipinos, and South Africans.

Portuguese were already being recruited in small numbers by the FNLA, Colonel Castro, Captain Bento, and their men. We decided to expand this effort by recruiting three hundred Portuguese Angolans to support the FNLA. But for UNITA we needed two dozen technicians, and Savimbi wouldn’t accept Portuguese.

France would not give us regular army troops, but it had no hesitation concerning mercenaries. The French intelligence service introduced CIA case officers to onetime Congo mercenary Bob Denard, and for $500,000 cash-paid in advance he agreed to provide twenty French mercenaries who would "advise" UNITA on short-term contracts. Denard was encrypted UNROBIN/I and this mercenary program was UNHOOD. To the waggish the twenty Frenchmen were "Robin’s Hoods" or the "French Hoods" for the duration of the program.

Brazil seemed also to offer a good source of manpower. Savimbi and Roberto both thought they could work comfortably with black Brazilians, who had the advantage of speaking Portuguese. General Walters, the CIA deputy director, felt sure he could influence the Brazilian military command to help us recruit. Walters had served as defense and army attaché in Brazil in the mid-l960s and was still somewhat euphoric about that experience. We sent a cable instructing the chief of station, Brasilia, to query the Brazilians about the general’s desire to visit, but the polite answer came back that Brazil could not at that time entertain the (highly visible) CIA deputy director. In Walters’s place Dick Sampson, the chief of Latin America Division, went and returned, empty-handed. The Brazilians politely declined to permit the recruitment of mercenaries in their country.

In Vietnam, Filipinos had provided the CIA with extensive help, keeping radios, vehicles, and air conditioners running, managing warehouses and tending bar at cocktail parties-all the things that highly paid CIA staffers could not be expected to do with much enthusiasm. This support had been managed through a Philippine company, ECCOI, and, naturally enough, headquarters remembered and sought the same help for Angola. For five months, beginning in August, we sent repetitive cables to the Manila station asking it to query ECCOI, but the response was so slow as to amount to rejection. Supporting black liberation movements inside Angola on short-term CIA contracts in a controversial, clandestine program was not attractive to the Filipinos. Possibly they remembered the evacuation of Vietnam a few months before: the CIA had left Z50 of its Filipino employees behind at the mercy of the communists.

South Africa was a different matter. It came into the conflict cautiously at first, watching the expanding U.S. program and timing their steps to the CIA’s. In September the South Africans began to provide arms and training to UNITA and FNLA soldiers at Runtu on the Angolan/South-West African border. First two, then twelve, then forty advisors appeared with UNITA forces near Silva Porto. Eventually the South African armored column-regular soldiers, far better than mercenaries-teamed with UNITA to make the most effective military strike force ever seen in black Africa, exploding through the MPLA/Cuban ranks in a blitzkreig, which in November almost won the war.

South Africa in 1975 was in a dangerously beleaguered position. Its blacks were increasingly restive, its whites emigrating, the white buffer states of Rhodesia, Mozambique, and Angola were threatened, and its economy was sagging. The Arab states’ oil embargo had pushed up the cost of fuel despite continued supplies from Iran. South Africa’s policies of sharing economic and technical resources with its northern neighbors, had seemed enlightened and effective. By 1975, however, it was clear they had not stemmed the tide of resentment against the white redoubt’s apartheid policies.

The 1974 coup in Portugal had exposed South Africa to fresh, chill winds of black nationalism, as Mozambique and Angola threatened to succumb to Soviet-sponsored, radical, black movements, which promised increased pressure on Rhodesia, Namibia, and South Africa itself. The white buffer concept was no longer viable. The South African fall-back position was to attempt to create in Mozambique and Angola moderate states which, like Malawi and Botswana, would be friendly or at least not hostile to South Africa.

The South African government attacked the threat in Mozambique with impeccably correct diplomacy and generous economic concessions. In Angola, however, it felt there were sound reasons for military intervention. There were masses of Angolan refugees to succor. The million-dollar hydroelectric plant it was building at Cunene in southern Angola required protection. SWAPO (South West African People’s Organization) guerrilla bases in Angola could be destroyed. Most important, of course, was the temptation to influence the outcome of the Angolan civil war in favor of Savimbi, who was considered the most likely to establish a government in Luanda which would cooperate with South Africa.

The South Africans had some encouragement to go into Angola. Savimbi invited them, after conferring with Mobutu, Kaunda, Felix Houphouet-Boigny of the Ivory Coast, and Leopold Senghor of Senegal, all of whom favored a moderate, pro-West government in Angola. I saw no evidence that the United States formally encouraged them to join the conflict.

The South Africans hoped to gain sympathy from the West by supporting the same side as the Zairians, Zambians, and United States in the Angolan conflict. They felt that their troops, even though white, would be more acceptable to most African leaders than the non-African Cubans. They also expected to be successful, understanding that the Ford administration would obtain U.S congressional support for an effective Angola program. On all three points they were disastrously wrong.

Eschewing hawkish plans for a decisive military strike, South African Prime Minister John Vorster opted for a small, covert task force. Only light armor and artillery would be used; there would be no tanks, infantry, or fighter bomber aircraft. Posing as mercenaries and remaining behind the UNITA troops, the soldiers would remain invisible. A curtain of silence in Pretoria would further protect them. The task force would do the job and withdraw quickly, before the November 11 independence date.

The South African government was playing a dangerous game. With scarcely a friend in the world, it was inviting further condemnation by intervening in a black African country. And it was forced to run its program covertly, like the CIA, concealing it from its own people. Only recently, in March 1975, had it withdrawn its forces from Rhodesia, and racist whites would question why their sons were now fighting for black freedom in Angola. Still, South Africa entered the war, watching the United States program closely and hoping for an overt nod of recognition and camaraderie.

To the CIA, the South Africans were the ideal solution for central Angola. Potts, St. Martin, and the COS’s of Pretoria and Lusaka welcomed their arrival in the war. Especially in the field, CIA officers liked the South Africans, who tended to be bluff, aggressive men without guile. They admired South African efficiency. Quietly South African planes and trucks turned up throughout Angola with just the gasoline or ammunition needed for an impending operation. On October 20, after a flurry of cables between headquarters and Kinshasa, two South African C-l30 airplanes, similar to those used by the Israelis in their raid on Entebbe, feathered into Ndjili Airport at night to meet a CIA C-141 flight and whisk its load of arms down to Silva Porto. CIA officers and BOSS representatives met the planes at Ndjili and jointly supervised the transloading. At the same time St. Martin requested and received headquarters’ permission to meet BOSS representatives on a regular basis in Kinshasa. Other CIA officers clamored for permission to visit South African bases in SouthWest Africa. On two occasions the BOSS director visited Washington and held secret meetings with Jim Potts. On another, he met with the CIA station chief in Paris. The COS, Pretoria, was ordered to brief BOSS about lAFEATURE, and nearly all CIA intelligence reports on the subject were relayed to Pretoria so his briefings would be accurate and up to date.

The CIA has traditionally sympathized with South Africa and enjoyed its close liaison with BOSS. The two organizations share a violent antipathy toward communism and in the early sixties the South Africans had facilitated the agency’s development of a mercenary army to suppress the Congo rebellion. BOSS, however, tolerates little clandestine nonsense inside the country and the CIA had always restricted its Pretoria station’s activity to maintaining the liaison with BOSS. That is, until 1974, when it yielded to intense pressures in Washington and expanded the Pretoria station’s responsibilities to include covert operations to gather intelligence about the South African nuclear project. In the summer of 1975 BOSS rolled up this effort and quietly expelled those CIA personnel directly involved. The agency did not complain, as the effort was acknowledged to have been clumsy and obvious. The agency continued its cordial relationship with BOSS.

Thus, without any memos being written at CIA headquarters saying "Let’s coordinate with the South Africans," coordination was effected at all CIA levels and the South Africans escalated their involvement in step with our own.

The South African question led me into another confrontation with Potts. South African racial policies had of course become a hated symbol to blacks, civil libertarians, and world minorities-the focal point of centuries-old resentment of racism, colonialism, and white domination. Did Potts not see that the South Africans were attempting to draw closer to the United States, in preparation for future confrontations with the blacks in southern Africa? If he did, he was not troubled by the prospect. Potts viewed South Africa pragmatically, as a friend of the CIA and a potential ally of the United States. After all, twenty major American companies have interests in South Africa and the United States maintains a valuable NASA tracking station not far from Pretoria. Eventually Potts concluded, in one of our conversations, that blacks were "irrational" on the subject of South Africa. This term caught on. It even crept into the cable traffic when the South African presence became known and the Nigerians, Tanzanians, and Ugandans reacted vigorously.

Escalation was a game the CIA and South Africa played very well together. In October the South Africans requested, through the CIA station chief in Pretoria, ammunition for their 155 mm. howitzers. It was not clear whether they intended to use this ammunition in Angola. At about the same time the CIA was seeking funds for another shipload of arms and worrying about how to get those arms into Angola efficiently. Our experience with the American Champion had us all dreading the thought of working another shipload of arms through the congested Matadi port and attempting to fly them into Angola with our ragtag little air force. The thought of putting the next shipload of arms into Walvis Bay in South-West Africa, where South African efficiency would rush them by C-l30 to the fighting fronts, was irresistible to Jim Potts.

At the same time, Savimbi and Roberto were both running short of petrol. The South Africans had delivered small amounts in their C-l30s, but they could not be expected to fuel the entire war, not with an Arab boycott on the sale of oil to South Africa. The MPLA’s fuel problems had been solved when a tanker put into Luanda in September, and Potts, in frustration, began to consider having a tanker follow the second arms shipload to Walvis Bay.

When Potts proposed this to the working group, he met firm opposition: He was told by Ambassador Mulcahy that the sale or delivery of arms to South Africa was prohibited by a long-standing U.S. law. Never easily discouraged, Potts sent one of his aides to the CIA library, and in the next working group meeting triumphantly read to the working group the text of the thirteen-year-old "law."

"You see, gentlemen," he concluded with obvious satisfaction. "It isn’t a law. It’s a policy decision made under the Kennedy administration. Times have now changed and, given our present problems, we should have no difficulty modifying this policy." He meant that a few technical strings could be pulled on the hill, Kissinger could wave his hand over a piece of paper, and a planeload of arms could leave for South Africa the next day.

p250
The CIA was casting about for the next war, amoral, ruthless, eager to do its thing. Its thing being covert little games where the action was secret and no one kept score.

But history increasingly keeps score, and the CIA’s operations are never secret for long. Inevitably they are exposed, by our press, by whistleblowers in our government, by our healthy compulsion to know the truth. Covert operations are incompatible with our system of government and we do them badly. Nevertheless, a succession of presidents and Henry Kissingers have been lured into questionable adventures for which, they are promised by the CIA, they will never be held accountable. Generally they are not, they move on to sinecures before the operations are fully exposed. Our country is left to face the consequences.

Claiming to be our Horatio at the shadowy bridges of the international underworld, the CIA maintains three thousand staff operatives overseas. Approximately equal to the State Department in numbers of staff employees overseas, the CIA extends its influence by hiring dozens of thousands of paid agents. Operationally its case officers "publish or perish"-an officer who does not generate operations does not get promoted. The officers energetically go about seeking opportunities to defend our national security.

The CIA’s function is to provide the aggressive option in foreign affairs. The 40 Committee papers for the Angolan operation, written by the CIA did not list a peaceful option, although the State Department African Affairs Bureau and the U.S. consul general in Luanda had firmly recommended noninvolvement. In 1959 the CIA did not recommend to President Eisenhower that we befriend Fidel Castro and learn to live with him in Cuba. No, it presented the violent option, noting that it had the essential ingredients for a covert action: angry Cuban exiles, a haven in Guatemala, a beach in the Bay of Pigs, intelligence (later proven inaccurate) that the people of Cuba would rise up in support of an invasion. Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy were persuaded. The operation was run, and it was bungled. Today we are still haunted by it.

At the end of World War II, we were militarily dominant, economically dominant, and we enjoyed a remarkable international credibility. With a modicum of restraint and self-confidence we could have laid the foundations of lasting world peace. Instead, we panicked, exaggerating the challenge of a Soviet Union which had just lost 70,000 villages, I,7l0 towns, 4.7 million houses, and 20 million people in the war. We set its dread KGB as a model for our own alter ego in foreign affairs. In the words of the Hoover Commission report of 1954:

There are no rules in such a game. Hitherto acceptable norms of human conduct do not apply. If the U.S. is to survive, long-standing American concepts of "fair play" must be reconsidered. We must develop effective espionage and counterespionage services. We must learn to subvert, sabotage and destroy our enemies by more clever, more sophisticated and more effective methods than those used against us. It may become necessary that the American people be acquainted with, understand and support this fundamentally repugnant philosophy.

It was a tragic, fallacious thesis. Our survival as a free people has obviously not been dependent on the fumbling activities of the clandestine services of the CIA, but on the dynamism of our economic system and the competitive energies of our people. Nor was Hoover’s philosophy "fundamentally repugnant." Rather, it was irresistible, for it created an exhilarating new game where all social and legal restraints were dissolved. Cast as super-patriots, there were no rules, no controls, no laws, no moral restraints, and no civil rights for the CIA game-players. No individual in the world would be immune to their depradations, friends could be shafted and enemies destroyed, without compunction. It was an experiment in amorality, a real-life fantasy island, to which presidents, legislators, and the American people could escape, vicariously.

Not surprisingly, the mortals of the CIA were unable to cope with such responsibility. Over the years, a profound, arrogant, moral corruption set in. Incompetence became the rule. The clandestine services, established a solid record of failure: failure to produce good intelligence; failure to run successful covert operations; and failure to keep its operatives covert. And its directors also failed to respect the sacred responsibility they were given of extra-constitutional, covert license. Eventually, like any secret police, they became abusive of the people: they drugged American citizens; opened private mail; infiltrated the media with secret propaganda and disinformation; lied to our elected representatives; and set themselves above the law and the Constitution.

But our attachment to the CIA’s clandestine services nevertheless seems to be unshaken. We still argue that, no matter what it does, the CIA is essential to our national security.

Where is the ancient American skepticism, the "show-me" attitude for which our pioneer forefathers were famous? We only need the CIA if it contributes positively to our national interests. Obviously, our nation needs broad intelligence coverage, and we have been getting it. It comes through the Directorate of Information of the CIA, the central intelligence office which collates, analyses, and disseminates information from all sources. Our presidents receive the DDI reports and briefings and, with some misgivings about their quality, insist that they are essential to the wise functioning of that office. But even presidents forget to distinguish between the Directorate of Information and the clandestine services, quite possibly not realizing how little of the DDI’s information actually comes from the covert human agents of its shadowy alter ego. The bulk of all raw intelligence, including vital strategic information, comes from overt sources and from the enormously expensive technical collection systems. The human agents, the spies, contribute less than l0 percent, a trivial part of the information which is reliable and of national security importance. Good agent penetrations of the "hard targets," individual spies who have confirmed access to strategic information, who are reliable, and who manage to report on a timely basis, are extremely rare. It is a shocking truth that the clandestine services have failed to recruit good agents in Moscow (Pentkovsky and Popov walked in on the British service which shared them with the CIA). It has failed completely in China-not even a walk-in. In Pyongyang, North Korea-not one Korean agent. And CIA case officers are literally afraid of the Mafia, the Chinese Tongs, and the international drug runners. They have recruited scores of thousands of Third World politicians, rebels, and European businessmen, whose voluminous reporting scarcely justifies the clandestine services’ existence.

In March 1976 President Ford reorganized the National Security Council, renaming the 40 Committee, calling it the Operations Advisory Group. At that time he expanded the CIA charter, authorizing it to intervene even in countries which are friendly to the United States, and in those which are not threatened by internal subversion.

In January T977, at the crest of two years of exposure of its shortcomings, misdeeds, and depraved behavior, President Carter announced a reorganization of the intelligence community, which was based on the hypothesis that the clandestine services are essential to our national security. He elevated the position of the director of central intelligence and increased its powers. The offices that have traditionally been responsible for supervising the CIA were renamed. The Congress was reassured that it will receive briefings on CIA activities. Director Turner initiated a housecleaning, dismissing four hundred people, so the Directorate of Operations will be "lean and efficient."

The scope of CIA operations is not being reduced, and its overall effectiveness, including the cover of its operatives overseas is only being upgraded to a slight degree. The clandestine services still have their charter to do covert action. Only thirteen overseas positions are being cut; forty stations and bases will still function in Africa alone, from Nairobi to Ouagadougou, with case officers energetically seeking opportunities to protect our national security.

Not Horatio. The clandestine service is an unfortunate relic of the Cold War, entrenched in our government, protected by our self-indulgent, nostalgic commitment to its existence. The CIA presence in American foreign affairs will be judged by history as a surrender to the darker side of human nature.

Already we are paying dearly for indulging ourselves. As we have succeeded in making ourselves more like our enemies, more like the KGB, the world has taken note. Throughout Africa, Latin America, and Asia, at least, every legitimate American businessman, teacher, and official is suspiciously viewed as a probable CIA operative, capable of dangerous betrayals. The world knows that, in fact, numbers of actual CIA case officers are posing as just such people, while they recruit agents, bribe officials, and support covert adventures. The positive contribution of such activity to our national security is dubious. But mounting numbers of victims, the millions of people whose lives have been trampled or splattered by CIA operations are increasingly cynical of America. Because of the CIA the world is a more dangerous place. Americans have reduced credibility. Worst of all, by retaining the CIA we are accepting ourselves as a harsh and ruthless people. It’s the wrong game for a great nation. And the players we’ve got are losers.

Etiketlendi:AGENT, CIA, john stockwell

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CIA FILES /// THE SECRET WARS OF THE CIA *** John Stockwell page /// former CIA agent

The Praetorian Guard

by John Stockwell

former CIA agent

The Reagan Revolution

from the book

The Praetorian Guard

by John Stockwell

Only Ronald Reagan, the "Great Communicator" (also called, by the Washington Post, the "Great Prevaricator") could have been such an effective point man for an irresponsible "revolution" that assaulted and violated the most profound U.S. traditions and institutions.

My Story

excerptd from the book

The Praetorian Guard

by John Stockwell

former CIA agent

***

John Stockwell quotations

excerpts from the book

The Praetorian Guard

by John Stockwell

former CIA agent

*****

Short, successful military adventures are as effective as the Super Bowl in diverting people’s attention from unpleasant truths.

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The CIA and the big corporations were, in my experience, in step with each other. Later I realized that they may argue about details of strategy – a small war here or there. However, both are vigorously committed to supporting the system.

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We created and left behind [in Nicaragua] a National Guard with officers trained in the United States who would be loyal to our interests. This arrangement was the decisive feature of the new era of neocolonialism.

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The major function of secrecy in Washington is to keep the U.S. people and U.S. Congress from knowing what the nation’s leaders are doing.

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…the CIA has overthrown functioning democracies in over 20 countries.

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…stirring up deadly ethnic and racial strife has been a standard technique used by the CIA.

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Taking smoothly over from the arcade games, which are nearly all violent, our society feeds its youth on the great military conditioning program of football, complete with the captain (coach), the sergeant (quarterback), and troops.

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Enemies are necessary for the wheels of the U.S. military machine to turn.

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Conservative intellectuals admit the harshness of U.S. counter-revolutionary activities but argue that they are necessary…. They know that people die by the thousands in these activities, but claim that they are nevertheless necessary to maintain U.S. security and the U.S. standard of living.

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The First Amendment does not require anyone to publish the truth.

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… the CIA [has] been running thousands of operations over the years. … there have been about 3,000 major covert operations and over 10,000 minor operations-all illegal, and all designed to disrupt, destabilize, or modify the activities of other countries.

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The major function of secrecy in Washington is to keep the U.S. people and U.S. Congress from knowing what the nation’s leaders are doing. Secrecy is power. Secrecy is license. Secrecy covers up mistakes. Secrecy covers up corruption.

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The current War on Drugs, with its broad rationales for aggressive response, police action, and stringent new laws, has quickly replaced the old anti-Christ of Communism in the hearts and minds of the national security establishment.

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The so-called "defense" corporations are multinational conglomerates that have no great loyalty to the United States; they are in fact no longer U.S. corporations but transnational entities loyal only to themselves.

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Now more clearly than ever, the CIA, with its related institutions, is exposed as an agency of destabilization and repression. Throughout its history, it has organized secret wars that killed millions of people in the Third World who had no capability of doing physical harm to the United States.

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… the United States [is] cast in the role of Praetorian Guard, protecting the interests of the global financial order against fractious elements in the Third World.

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The military has … seen its budget restored, to an all-time high, and it has …new rationales for continued dominance of U.S. society. The Third World is the new enemy, effectively replacing the Cold War rationales for militarism.

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As the Praetorian Guard, fighting wars for multinational interests while also paying for such adventures, our relative economic stability, domestic social and material infrastructure, and the freedom and liberties of the American people may all be forfeited.

***

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