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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
...
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....
, toughen you
