What did we know, and when did we know it?
What did we know,
and when did we know it?
… And when did we forget it?
The Secret Wars of
the CIA: Former CIA case officer John Stockwell speaks out, June 1986, on The
Other Americas Radio
John
Stockwell was the highest-ranking CIA official ever to resign and become a
vocal critic of American covert and overt interventions throughout the world.
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
(1978), was an international best-seller. The transcript below is of a lecture
he gave in June, 1986.
He
gave another lecture three years later, with very similar content, at American
University on December 27, 1989. It can be viewed on C-SPAN at this link. Audio and video
files of this 1986 lecture (transcript below) appear to be lost to travelers of
the Internet while the transcript of the 1989 lecture appears to be
unobtainable, but the video lives on. In 1991, these lecture were put into book
format in the book The Praetorian Guard.
I
repost and recommend the 1986 lecture here because it is a valuable reminder of
how much had been achieved thirty years ago toward the creation of scholarly
literature and a counter-culture of resistance to the war machine. These forces
lived on past the 1960s and had even penetrated into the mainstream media and
mainstream awareness. In this case, John Stockwell, as a dissident former
high-ranking CIA officer, was interviewed on CBS’s 60 Minutes (in May 1978) and
he testified before Congress during the days of the Senate Church Committee—a
brief window of time when the power of the permanent state was challenged by
the people’s elected representatives.
John
Stockwell advised people to not merely trust his word but to refer to the large
volume of scholarly research and journalism that had been done throughout the
1970s and 1980s. He stressed the importance of reading books and looking beyond
the information one could get from television and newspapers. In the lecture
below, he recommended sixteen books, many of them authored by scholars and
journalists with a large body of work by that time. This lecture is worthwhile
just to be reminded of this large body of work that existed already thirty
years ago. And this list doesn’t even include the better-known dissident
writers like Noam Chomsky and Michael Parenti. The point is that John Stockwell’s
shocking revelations were well-known and well-studied at the time he spoke out.
From this fact comes the title of this essay: What did we know and when did we
know it? We knew it all a long time ago, but somehow the knowledge was
forgotten, or it wasn’t passed along, and now the younger generation has to
rediscover it for themselves. Many older people too have to snap out of their naïve
belief that the FBI and the Democratic Party are going to ride to the rescue on
a white horse and solve all problems by expelling Donald Trump from the White
House. The Democratic caucus in Congress is no longer what it was in the days
of the Church Committee.
Even
though these were the years of the Reagan and Bush I presidencies, it may be
that the 1980-1992 period was the high-water mark of the counter-culture. There
was tremendous pushback against plans to invade Nicaragua and there were
millions of people demanding nuclear disarmament, and these opposition
movements had a real impact on policy. But this is not to say that nothing has
been done since, or that there isn’t an older history of resistance to American
wars in the writings of Mark Twain (1835-1910), John Reed (1887-1920) and
General Smedley Butler (1881-1940), to name just a few.
In
the 1989 lecture, John Stockwell describes the military recruiting TV
commercial of the 1980s that showed a young soldier returning home after a tour
of duty in which he says to himself, “Maybe now Dad will be proud of me and
understand why I signed up.” This advertisement was a telling admission that
the father’s generation was so disillusioned by American wars that they didn’t
want their sons to have any part in them. The advertisement was a propaganda
achievement because it did in fact make people forget and get over this
“Vietnam syndrome.” A few years later, after a barrage of Hollywood
entertainments glorifying the military and the CIA, it was no longer necessary
to worry about anti-war parents persuading their children not to sign up.
In the 1990s, the corporate mass media was consolidated into ownership by just a few large conglomerates, and the distaste for war was eroded by the promotion of the concept of “humanitarian intervention,” “right to protect” (R2P), the “war on terror” and demonization of “rogue states.” An opposition movement came to life during the Bush II presidency, receded during the Obama presidency, then came back in its present mutated, body-snatched form as “the resistance” to Trump—a struggle which now stakes its hope in being rescued by the very institutions that John Stockwell decried in the 1980s.
Other
writers, journalists, scholars and former government officials have continued
the work of people like John Stockwell and the authors he cited. They can now
be found on the internet in alternative media sources or in English language media
produced by America’s so-called adversarial and rival powers. They are labelled
by devotees of the mainstream as traitors or purveyors of “fake news,” or contributors
to “conspiracy sites.” It’s an open question as to whether these marginalized voices
can influence the wider public to do something to restrain the American compulsion to wage war throughout the
world. Perhaps dissidence was more effective when it had at least some foothold
in mainstream society, when it was welcomed briefly on 60 Minutes and in
Congressional testimony.
__________
The original transcript
was prepared by The Other Americas Radio, Programs & News on Latin America.
The previous version of transcript is posted here and here. The revised transcript
that follows was edited slightly to correct syntax errors and to better
translate the spoken lecture into a format suitable for an audience of readers.
Content and the speaker’s intended meaning were carefully preserved, but punctuation
was changed, sentence fragments were corrected, and spelling errors were fixed.
The original transcript had a few errors in its references to authors and book
titles. These were also corrected. Section headings were added to this revision
in order to help readers refer to specific topics covered in this long
12,000-word text.
__________
The Secret Wars of
the CIA: Former CIA case officer John Stockwell speaks out, June 1986, on The
Other Americas Radio
Table of Contents
1. Introduction
2. Early Career
3. Other
Assignments
4. Angola
5. Leaving the CIA
6. The Death Toll
7. Covert Actions
Leading to Wars
8. The Long History
of Central American Interventions
9. Interrogation
and Torture
10.
Decapitalization
11. Nicaragua and
Global Destabilization
12. Censorship and
Suppression of Whistleblowers in the United States
13. Pre-empting
Acts of Terrorism
14. Covert
Operations and Destabilization in Central America, CIA Manipulation of the
Press, CIA Experimentation on the U.S. Public
15. The CIA and the
Drug Trade
16. Responsibility
for Terrorism
17. Other Sources
of Information on These Topics
18. Training Local
Cops on the Beat
19. The United
States Deterred by Nuclear Arsenals
20. Domestic
Operations
21. CIA Influence
on the Media
22. More on
Censorship
23. Preparations
for More War
24. Chickenhawks
25. Nuclear Recklessness
26. Why Keep the
World Hostile and Unstable?
27. Conclusion:
What is to be done?
TRANSCRIPT:
1.
Introduction
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. It was 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 anything to do with South
Africa, that was fighting in the country. In fact we were coordinating this
operation so closely that our airplanes, full of arms from the United 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 choose. 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 testimonies 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.
2.
Early Career
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 (in
the CIA) with great enthusiasm 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 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 position of 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 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.
3.
Other Assignments
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, 1973 to 1975. 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 were brought in and laid out in a lot next to my
compound. I was up-country in Tay-ninh. 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 that if I did demonstrate a lack of “moral fiber” to handle working with
the sadistic police chief, 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
and the State Department work 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.
The
corruption was so bad that the South 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. 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.
4.
Angola
I
had been designated as the taskforce 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 had 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 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 worthwhile. 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 that 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 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, then they put arms
in. We put advisors in, then they answered with advisors. We put in Zairian
para-commando battalions, then they put in Cuban army troops. We brought in the
South African army, then 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), 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 Nat 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, that they wanted a
walk-over, that they wanted to be un-opposed, and 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.
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 were propagandists, who were working, in every way they could think
of, to get stories into the U.S. press, the world press, 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, 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—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. It was 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 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
South African forces. We had allied the U.S. literally and in the eyes of the
world with the South 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 had 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 South 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.
5.
Leaving the CIA
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. I got on 60 Minutes, and lots and lots of
other shows.
I
testified to 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
Coard and Phyllis Coard—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 of 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 it, 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 phosphorous 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.
6.
The Death Toll
We’re
talking about is 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.
7.
Covert Actions Leading to Wars
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 them 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 Mitumba 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.
8.
The Long History of Central American Interventions
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. 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 WW 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 Armas, 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 Kinzer and Schlesinger. Kinzer’s a New York Times journalist. Or read Jonathan Kwitny, the Wall Street Journal reporter. His book Endless Enemies discusses 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.
9.
Interrogation and Torture
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. This interrogation, including torture, was done the way the CIA taught
it. Dan Mitrione, 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. He taught 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.
How
do you teach torture? Dan Mitrione: “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 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—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 psychopaths. 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 for the people that they slaughtered and
killed. Genocide is genocide!
10.
Decapitalization
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 Halperin, testifying to a
committee of Congress, 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.
11.
Nicaragua and Global Destabilization
What’s
happening in Nicaragua today is covert action. It’s a classic de-stabilization
program. On 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 CIA
actions going 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 on 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.
12.
Censorship and Suppression of Whistleblowers in the United States
The
Victor Marchetti ruling of the Supreme Court gave the government the right to
pre-publication 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 Snepp ruling of the Supreme Court gave the government the right to sue a
government employee for damages. If he or she 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 Snepp 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 Snepp, 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. 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 fiancé’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.”
What they had done would not be a felony because it’s a matter of 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.
13.
Pre-empting Acts of Terrorism
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 terrorists, 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.
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
and 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. Obviously, that’s terrible, but we killed
55,000 people on our highways with drunken driving. We killed 2,500 people in
far nastier, bloodier, mutilating, gang-raping ways in Nicaragua last year
alone ourselves. Obviously 79 peoples’ deaths 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 mothballed under the McCarran Act after World War II, to detain aliens and dissidents 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, is 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, is 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 out in the next year and 2 and 3 years.
14.
Covert Operations and Destabilization in Central America, CIA Manipulation of
the Press, CIA Experimentation on the U.S. Public
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, without juries and all that
sort of thing, for having violated our censorship laws.
In
that job in 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. It was 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 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 are secret, but the information has been leaked to us by
members of the Oversight Committee of 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 the
biggest one. 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.
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 for their official explanation of the purpose of the
Contras, they say it’s to attack economic targets, meaning the breaking 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 granaries, saw mills, bridges,
government offices, schools, and 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 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, and 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 Brody, former assistant Attorney General of New
York State. Read The Contras by Dieter Eich. Read With the Contras
by Christopher Dickey. This is a mainline 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 gives accounts about going 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 Americas Watch. And there are many, many
more documentations of details, of names, of the incidents that have happened.
Part
of a destabilization is propaganda, to discredit the targeted government. This
one actually began under Jimmy Carter. He authorized the CIA to go in and try
to make the Sandinistas look 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.” This was 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 we 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: it is a propaganda arm.
Reagan
and the State Department have been claiming the Sandinistas are building a war
machine that threatens the stability of Central America. The truth is that this
small, poor country has been attacked by the world’s richest country under
conditions of war, for the last 5 years. That’s by us and our army. The death
they have sustained and the action they have suffered make 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, doing 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, President Reagan hasn’t been
able to show the world one shred of 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 and 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, Senator Jesse Helms 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.
15.
The CIA and the Drug Trade
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 and Louisiana, several times a week.
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 The Politics of Heroin in Southeast
Asia. For 20 years the CIA was helping the Kuomintang to finance itself,
and then to get rich, by smuggling heroin. When we took over from the French in
1954, their intelligence service had been financing itself by smuggling heroin
out of Laos. We replaced them. We made 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. 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 noticed President Reagan said that the
Nicaraguans, the Sandinistas, were smuggling drugs, and the DEA said, “It ain’t
true. The Contras are smuggling drugs.”
16.
Responsibility for Terrorism
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 is possibly 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 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 the
purpose of this destabilization program is. For this I direct you back to the Newsweek
article, in September 1981, where they announced 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 this 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.
CIA destabilizations are nothing new. They didn’t begin with Nicaragua. We’ve done it before, once or twice. 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 and rules of behavior are respected, or whether it is
going to be a world of bullies, where the strongest can violate and brutalize
the weakest, and ignore the laws.
17.
Other Sources of Information on These Topics
But
many of these things are very bloody indeed, and we know a lot about a lot of
them from investigations by 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, and books written 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, Ecuador, Uruguay. The CIA organized the overthrow of constitutional
democracies. Read the book Under Cover: 35 Years of CIA Deception by the
journalist Darrell Garwood. Remember the Henry Kissinger quote before 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.
Read Deadly Deceits by Ralph McGehee 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 in 1981 was to
fund an element of the Miskito 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 has 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.
18.
Training Local Cops on the Beat
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 police forces 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. 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 the 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 It’s a lot. Obviously it’s 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.
19.
The United States Deterred by Nuclear Arsenals
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, are
people of the Third World. They’re citizens of countries that are too small to
defend themselves from United States’ brutality and aggression. They’re people
of the Mitumba 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 the CIA’s chosen battlefield.
Mostly women and children. Communists? Far, far, far more Catholics than
anything else.
20.
Domestic Operations
Case
officers that do these things in places in Nicaragua do not come back to the
U.S. and click their heels and suddenly become responsible citizens. 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 away
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 diseases 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 they couldn’t see straight. And
they hid cameras in the walls to see what would happen at rush hour when the
trains are zipping past and everybody has vertigo, and they can’t see straight,
and they’re bumping into each other.
And
Colonel White. 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 all of
the pigs with a virus. We experimented in Haiti on the people with viruses.
I
do not have the slightest shred of evidence that there is any truth or
indication of truth 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?” 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.
21.
CIA Influence on the Media
The
Church committee found that the CIA had co-opted several hundred journalists,
including some of the biggest names in the business, to pump its propaganda
stories into our media, to teach us to hate Fidel Castro, and Ho Chi Minh, and
the Chinese, and whomever. The latest flap or scandal we had about that was a
year and a half ago. Leslie 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 and 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, then 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 were co-opted by the CIA to run its operations
on campuses and build files on students.
We
have evidence now of something which has been hard to collect in the past but
we knew was happening: CIA agents trying to manipulate our elections. FDN,
Contra commanders, traveling this country on CIA plane tickets, going on
television and pin-pointing a Congressional district and saying, “That man is
soft on Communism. That man is a Sandinista lover.” CIA agents were going on
television, trying to manipulate our elections. All
of this was done 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.
I
will not go 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, to please 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...
22.
More on Censorship
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, my latest book, back from the CIA censors. If I had not submitted it to
them, I would have gone to jail, without trial—no 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 reverse the situation in Nicaragua,” meaning get rid
of the Sandinistas. Admiral LaRocque, 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, Grenedara, 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 it, to survey and watch. Some of
these ventures have been huge—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 2 days’ drive from Harlingen, 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 2 hours from Managua to Texas. All of this is 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 and get us into the wars when they’ve chosen to do so.
People
ask how this is 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
we don’t understand and read our history. History is the history of war, of
leaders, of countries finding reasons and rationales to send 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 follow
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. We were taught 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 what had
been planned.
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. In 1915, Kate Richards-O’Hare said
about WW I, “The Women of the U.S. are nothing but brutes salles [literally:
dirty brutes, figuratively: beasts of burden], producing sons to be put in the
army, to be made into fertilizer.” She was jailed for 5 years for anti-war
talk.
The
lesson of the Vietnam war for the American people is that it was a tragic
mistake. 58,000 of our own young people were killed, and 2 million Vietnamese
were killed. We withdrew, and our position wound up actually stronger in the
Pacific Basin.
23.
Preparations for More War
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.” 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 were 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 than died in the fighting itself.
24.
Chicken Hawks
Then
you have President Reagan. He talks about the glory of war, but you have to ask
yourself where he was when wars were being fought that he was young enough to
fight in—World War II, and the Korean war. He 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. Forgive my egotism, but 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.
25.
Nuclear Recklessness
Getting
back to President Reagan. He really did say, “You can always call cruise
missiles back.” 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, he said, “If there has to be a bloodbath
then let’s get it over with.” You have to think about this a minute—the leader
of the U.S. seriously proposing a bloodbath of our own youth. There was an
outcry in 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 on
Reagan: The Man and the Presidency 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.
26.
Why Keep the World Hostile and Unstable?
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? Why are our leaders now taking us into another war? Why are we
systematically taught to hate and fight other people?
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, California.”
This gets people excited, so 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. Read The Permanent War Economy by Seymour Melman. 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.
27.
Conclusion: What is to be done?
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 they’re committed
to building more and more and more weapons because they’re committed to making
a profit. And that’s what the propaganda and the hysteria are all about. People
ask, “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.
Helen
Caldicott, at the end of her lectures, has said 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. It’s the place where we make 10 nose-cones a
day, 70 a week, year in and year out. Admiral LaRocque 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.”
Bibliography
(books mentioned in the Lecture, alphabetical by first author’s last name)
Reed
Brody, Contra Terror in Nicaragua: Report of a Fact-finding Mission:
September 1984-January 1985 (South End Press, 1985).
Christopher
Dickey, With the Contras: A Reporter in the Wilds of Nicaragua (Simon
& Schuster, 1986).
Ronnie
Dugger, On Reagan: The Man and the Presidency (McGraw-Hill, 1983).
Dieter
Eich, The Contras: Interviews with Anti-Sandinistas (Praeger, 1985).
Darrell
Garwood, Under Cover: Thirty-five Years of CIA Deception (Grove Press,
1986).
Carolyn
Gill and Richard Taylor (compilers), What We Have Seen and Heard: The
Effects of the Contra War Against Nicaragua Paperback (Witness for Peace
Documentation Project, 1985).
Stephen
Kinzer and Stephen Schlesinger, Bitter Fruit: The Story of the American Coup
in Guatemala (David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies,1982).
Jonathan
Kwitny, Endless Enemies: America’s Worldwide War Against Its Own Best
Interests (Contemporary Books, 1970).
Walter
LaFeber, Inevitable Revolutions: the United States in Central America
(W. W. Norton, 1984).
Victor
Marchetti and John D. Marks, The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence (Alfred
A. Knopf, 1974).
John
D. Marks, The Search for the “Manchurian Candidate”: The CIA and Mind
Control and The Secret History of the Behavioral Sciences (W. W. Norton
& Company, 1979).
Ralph
McGehee, Deadly Deceits: My 25 Years in the CIA (Sheridan Square
Publications, 1983).
Alfred
W. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia (Chicago Review
Press, 1972).
Seymour
Melman, The Permanent War Economy: American Capitalism in Decline
(Touchstone, 1985).
C.
Wright Mills, The Power Elite (Oxford University Press, 1956, 2000).
Frank
Snepp, Decent Interval: An Insider's Account of Saigon's Indecent End Told
by the CIA's Chief Strategy Analyst in Vietnam (University Press of Kansas,
1977, 2002).
John
Stockwell, In Search of Enemies: A CIA Story (W.W. Norton, 1978).
John
Stockwell, The Praetorian Guard (South End Press, 1991).
I.
F. Stone, The Hidden History of the Korean War, 1950-1951: A Nonconformist
History of Our Times (Little Brown & Co, 1988).
__________
The original transcript
was prepared by The Other Americas Radio, Programs & News on Latin America.
The previous version of transcript is posted here and here. The revised transcript
above was edited slightly to correct syntax errors and to better translate the
spoken lecture into a format suitable for an audience of readers. Content and
the speaker’s intended meaning were carefully preserved, but punctuation was
changed, sentence fragments were corrected, and spelling errors were fixed. The
original transcript had a few errors in its references to authors and book
titles. These were also corrected. Section headings were added to this revision
in order to help readers refer to specific topics covered in this long
12,000-word text.
__________
Other sources
John Stockwell’s
speech from 1991/10/22, Toronto (Hosted by CIUT
Radio,
University of Toronto community radio).
“The CIA, John
Stockwell, and A Tale of Two Speeches,” Northwest Research & Covert Book
Report, January 19, 2018.
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