CIA Lectures 🇵🇸
CIA Lectures
In order to better understand how the United States empire covertly manufactures conflict, terror, and chaos in its
endeavors to dominate the globe, it is useful to "peek behind the curtain" of CIA operations. By examining how the
CIA has operated in the past, we can better understand the role they play today
in shaping outcomes by means of lies, violence, propaganda, and coercion both around the world and within the United
States.
The contents of this page reproduce the transcript of a two-part lecture given by former CIA officer John Stockwell in
October, 1987.
This transcript was copied from two archived webpages from the "Information Clearing House" -- here are links to the
source for part
1 and part
2.
If you prefer to watch and/or listen, Mr. Stockwell gives a similar version of this lecture at the American
University in December, 1989. The lecture is followed by a very lengthy and intriguing Q & A. The 2hr 48min video is
available on C-SPAN and YouTube.
John Stockwell, former CIA Station Chief in Angola in 1976, working for then Director of the CIA, George Bush. He
spent 13 years in the agency. He gives a short history of CIA covert operations. He is a very compelling speaker and
the highest level CIA officer to testify to the Congress about his actions. He estimates that over 6 million people
have died in CIA covert actions, and this was in the late 1980's.
THE SECRET WARS OF THE CIA:
by John Stockwell
A lecture given in October, 1987
Part I
John Stockwell is the highest-ranking CIA official ever to leave the agency and go public. He ran a CIA
intelligence-gathering post in Vietnam, was the task-force commander of the CIA's secret war in Angola in 1975 and
1976, and was awarded the Medal of Merit before he resigned. Stockwell's book In Search of Enemies, published by
W.W. Norton 1978, is an international best-seller.
"I did 13 years in the CIA altogether. I sat on a subcommittee of the NSC, so I was like a chief of staff, with the
GS-18s (like 3-star generals) Henry Kissinger, Bill Colby (the CIA director), the GS-18s and the CIA, making the
important decisions and my job was to put it all together and make it happen and run it, an interesting place from
which to watch a covert action being done...
I testified for days before the Congress, giving them chapter and verse, date and detail, proving specific lies.
They were asking if we had to do with S. Africa, that was fighting in the country. In fact we were coordinating this
operation so closely that our airplanes, full of arms from the states, would meet their airplanes in Kinshasa and
they would take our arms into Angola to distribute to our forces for us....
What I found with all of this study is that the subject, the problem, if you will, for the world, for the U.S. is
much, much, much graver, astronomically graver, than just Angola and Vietnam. I found that the Senate Church
committee has reported, in their study of covert actions, that the CIA ran several thousand covert actions since
1961, and that the heyday of covert action was before 1961; that we have run several hundred covert actions a year,
and the CIA has been in business for a total of 37 years.
What we're going to talk about tonight is the United States national security syndrome. We're going to talk about
how and why the U.S. manipulates the press. We're going to talk about how and why the U.S. is pouring money into El
Salvador, and preparing to invade Nicaragua; how all of this concerns us so directly. I'm going to try to explain to
you the other side of terrorism; that is, the other side of what Secretary of State Shultz talks about. In doing
this, we'll talk about the Korean war, the Vietnam war, and the Central American war.
Everything I'm going to talk to you about is represented, one way or another, already in the public records. You can
dig it all out for yourselves, without coming to hear me if you so chose. Books, based on information gotten out of
the CIA under the freedom of information act, testimony before the Congress, hearings before the Senate Church
committee, research by scholars, witness of people throughout the world who have been to these target areas that
we'll be talking about. I want to emphasize that my own background is profoundly conservative. We come from South
Texas, East Texas....
I was conditioned by my training, my marine corps training, and my background, to believe in everything they were
saying about the cold war, and I took the job with great enthusiasm (in the CIA) to join the best and the brightest
of the CIA, of our foreign service, to go out into the world, to join the struggle, to project American values and
save the world for our brand of democracy. And I believed this. I went out and worked hard....
What I really got out of these 6 years in Africa was a sense ... that nothing we were doing in fact defended U.S.
national security interests very much. We didn't have many national security interests in Bujumbura, Burundi, in the
heart of Africa. I concluded that I just couldn't see the point.
We were doing things it seemed because we were there, because it was our function, we were bribing people,
corrupting people, and not protecting the U.S. in any visible way. I had a chance to go drinking with this Larry
Devlin, a famous CIA case officer who had overthrown Patrice Lumumba, and had him killed in 1960, back in the Congo.
He was moving into the Africa division Chief. I talked to him in Addis Ababa at length one night, and he was giving
me an explanation - I was telling him frankly, 'sir, you know, this stuff doesn't make any sense, we're not saving
anybody from anything, and we are corrupting people, and everybody knows we're doing it, and that makes the U.S.
look bad'.
And he said I was getting too big for my britches. He said, 'you're trying to think like the people in the NSC back
in Washington who have the big picture, who know what's going on in the world, who have all the secret information,
and the experience to digest it. If they decide we should have someone in Bujumbura, Burundi, and that person should
be you, then you should do your job, and wait until you have more experience, and you work your way up to that
point, then you will understand national security, and you can make the big decisions. Now, get to work, and stop,
you know, this philosophizing.'
And I said, 'Aye-aye sir, sorry sir, a bit out of line sir'. It's a very powerful argument, our presidents use it on
us. President Reagan has used it on the American people, saying, 'if you knew what I know about the situation in
Central America, you would understand why it's necessary for us to intervene.'
I went back to Washington, however, and I found that others shared my concern. A formal study was done in the State
Department and published internally, highly classified, called the Macomber [sp?] report, concluding that the CIA
had no business being in Africa for anything it was known to be doing, that our presence there was not justified,
there were no national security interests that the CIA could address any better than the ambassador himself. We
didn't need to have bribery and corruption as a tool for doing business in Africa at that time.
I went from ... a tour in Washington to Vietnam. And there, my career, and my life, began to get a little bit more
serious. They assigned me a country. It was during the cease-fire, '73 to '75. There was no cease-fire. Young men
were being slaughtered. I saw a slaughter. 300 young men that the South Vietnamese army ambushed. Their bodies
brought in and laid out in a lot next to my compound. I was up-country in Tayninh. They were laid out next door,
until the families could come and claim them and take them away for burial.
I thought about this. I had to work with the sadistic police chief. When I reported that he liked to carve people
with knives in the CIA safe-house - when I reported this to my bosses, they said, '[1].
The post was too important
to close down. [2]. They weren't going to get the man transferred or fired because that
would make problems,
political problems, and he was very good at working with us in the operations he worked on. [3]. Therefore if I
didn't have the stomach for the job, that they could transfer me.'
But they hastened to point out, if I did demonstrate a lack of 'moral fiber' to handle working with the sadistic
police chief, that I wouldn't get another good job in the CIA, it would be a mark against
my career.
So I kept the job, I closed the safe-house down, I told my staff that I didn't approve of that kind of activity, and
I proceeded to work with him for the next 2 years, pretending that I had reformed him, and he didn't do this sort of
thing anymore. The parallel is obvious with El Salvador today, where the CIA, the state department, works with the
death squads.
They don't meet the death squads on the streets where they're actually chopping up people or laying them down on the
street and running trucks over their heads. The CIA people in San Salvador meet the police chiefs, and the people
who run the death squads, and they do liaise with them, they meet them beside the swimming pool of the villas. And
it's a sophisticated, civilized kind of relationship. And they talk about their children, who are going to school at
UCLA or Harvard and other schools, and they don't talk about the horrors of what's being done. They pretend like it
isn't true.
What I ran into in addition to that was a corruption in the CIA and the intelligence business that made me question
very seriously what it was all about, including what I was doing ... risking my life ... what I found was that the
CIA, us, the case officers, were not permitted to report about the corruption in the South Vietnamese army....
Now, the corruption was so bad, that the S. Vietnamese army was a skeleton army. Colonels would let the troops go
home if they would come in once a month and sign the pay vouchers so the colonel could pocket the money. Then he
could sell half of the uniforms and boots and M-16's to the communist forces - that was their major supply, just as
it is in El Salvador today. He could use half of the trucks to haul produce, half of the helicopters to haul heroin.
And the Army couldn't fight. And we lived with it, and we saw it, and there was no doubt - everybody talked about it
openly. We could provide all kinds of proof, and they wouldn't let us report it. Now this was a serious problem
because the south was attacked in the winter of 1975, and it collapsed like a big vase hit by a sledgehammer. And
the U.S. was humiliated, and that was the dramatic end of our long involvement in Vietnam....
I had been designated as the task-force commander that would run this secret war [in Angola in 1975 and 1976]....
and what I figured out was that in this job, I would sit on a sub-committee of the National Security Council, this
office that Larry Devlin has told me about where they had access to all the information about Angola, about the
whole world, and I would finally understand national security. And I couldn't resist the opportunity to know. I knew
the CIA was not a worthwhile organization, I had learned that the hard way. But the question was where did the U.S.
government fit into this thing, and I had a chance to see for myself in the next big secret war....
I wanted to know if wise men were making difficult decisions based on truly important, threatening information,
threatening to our national security interests. If that had been the case, I still planned to get out of the CIA,
but I would know that the system, the invisible government, our national security complex, was in fact justified and
worth while. And so I took the job.... Suffice it to say I wouldn't be standing in front of you tonight if I had
found these wise men making these tough decisions. What I found, quite frankly, was fat old men sleeping through
sub-committee meetings of the NSC in which we were making decisions that were killing people in Africa. I mean
literally. Senior ambassador Ed Mulcahy... would go to sleep in nearly every one of these meetings....
You can change the names in my book [about Angola] [13] and you've got Nicaragua.... the
basic structure, all the
way through including the mining of harbors, we addressed all of these issues. The point is that the U.S. led the
way at every step of the escalation of the fighting. We said it was the Soviets and the Cubans that were doing it.
It was the U.S. that was escalating the fighting. There would have been no war if we hadn't gone in first. We put
arms in, they put arms in. We put advisors in, they answered with advisors. We put in Zairian para-commando
battalions, they put in Cuban army troops. We brought in the S. African army, they brought in the Cuban army. And
they pushed us away. They blew us away because we were lying, we were covering ourselves with lies, and they were
telling the truth. And it was not a war that we could fight. We didn't have interests there that should have been
defended that way.
There was never a study run that evaluated the MPLA, FNLA and UNITA, the three movements in the country, to decide
which one was the better one. The assistant secretary of state for African affairs, Nathaniel Davis, no
bleeding-heart liberal (he was known by some people in the business as the butcher of Santiago), he said we should
stay out of the conflict and work with whoever eventually won, and that was obviously the MPLA. Our consul in
Luanda, Tom Killoran, vigorously argued that the MPLA was the best qualified to run the country and the friendliest
to the U.S.
We brushed these people aside, forced Matt Davis to resign, and proceeded with our war. The MPLA said they wanted to
be our friends, they didn't want to be pushed into the arms of the Soviet Union; they begged us not to fight them,
they wanted to work with us. We said they wanted a cheap victory, they wanted a walk-over, they wanted to be
un-opposed, that we wouldn't give them a cheap victory, we would make them earn it, so to speak. And we did. 10,000
Africans died and they won the victory that they were winning anyway.
Now, the most significant thing that I got out of all of this, in addition to the fact that our rationales were
basically false, was that we lied. To just about everybody involved. One third of my staff in this task force that I
put together in Washington, commanding this global operation, pulling strings all over the world to focus pressure
onto Angola, and military activities into Angola, one third of my staff was propagandists, who were working, in
every way they could to create this picture of Cubans raping Angolans, Cubans and Soviets introducing arms into the
conflict, Cubans and Russians trying to take over the world.
Our ambassador to the United Nations, Patrick Moynihan, he read continuous statements of our position to the
Security Council, the general assembly, and the press conferences, saying the Russians and Cubans were responsible
for the conflict, and that we were staying out, and that we deplored the militarization of the conflict.
And every statement he made was false. And every statement he made was originated in the sub-committee of the NSC
that I sat on as we managed this thing. The state department press person read these position papers daily to the
press. We would write papers for him. Four paragraphs. We would call him on the phone and say, 'call us 10 minutes
before you go on, the situation could change overnight, we'll tell you which paragraph to read. And all four
paragraphs would be false. Nothing to do with the truth. Designed to play on events, to create this impression of
Soviet and Cuban aggression in Angola. When they were in fact responding to our initiatives.
And the CIA director was required by law to brief the Congress. This CIA director Bill Colby - the same one that
dumped our people in Vietnam - he gave 36 briefings of the Congress, the oversight committees, about what we were
doing in Angola. And he lied. At 36 formal briefings. And such lies are perjury, and it's a felony to lie to the
Congress.
He lied about our relationship with South Africa. We were working closely with the South African army, giving them
our arms, coordinating battles with them, giving them fuel for their tanks and armored cars. He said we were staying
well away from them. They were concerned about these white mercenaries that were appearing in Angola, a very
sensitive issue, hiring whites to go into a black African country, to help you impose your will on that black
African country by killing the blacks, a very sensitive issue. The Congress was concerned we might be involved in
that, and he assured them we had nothing to do with it.
We had in fact formed four little mercenary armies and delivered them into Angola to do this dirty business for the
CIA. And he lied to them about that. They asked if we were putting arms into the conflict, and he said no, and we
were. They asked if we had advisors inside the country, and he said 'no, we had people going in to look at the
situation and coming back out'. We had 24 people sleeping inside the country, training in the use of weapons,
installing communications systems, planning battles, and he said, we didn't have anybody inside the country.
In summary about Angola, without U.S. intervention, 10,000 people would be alive that were killed in the thing. The
outcome might have been peaceful, or at least much less bloody. The MPLA was winning when we went in, and they went
ahead and won, which was, according to our consul, the best thing for the country.
At the end of this thing the Cubans were entrenched in Angola, seen in the eyes of much of the world as being the
heroes that saved these people from the CIA and S. African forces. We had allied the U.S. literally and in the eyes
of the world with the S. African army, and that's illegal, and it's impolitic. We had hired white mercenaries and
eventually been identified with them. And that's illegal, and it's impolitic. And our lies had been visible lies. We
were caught out on those lies. And the world saw the U.S. as liars.
After it was over, you have to ask yourself, was it justified? What did the MPLA do after they had won? Were they
lying when they said they wanted to be our friends? 3 weeks after we were shut down... the MPLA had Gulf oil back in
Angola, pumping the Angolan oil from the oilfields, with U.S. gulf technicians protected by Cuban soldiers,
protecting them from CIA mercenaries who were still mucking around in Northern Angola.
You can't trust a communist, can you? They proceeded to buy five 737 jets from Boeing Aircraft in Seattle. And they
brought in 52 U.S. technicians to install the radar systems to land and take-off those planes. They didn't buy [the
Soviet Union's] Aeroflot.... David Rockefeller himself tours S. Africa and comes back and holds press conferences,
in which he says that we have no problem doing business with the so-called radical states of Southern Africa.
I left the CIA, I decided that the American people needed to know what we'd done in Angola, what we'd done in
Vietnam. I wrote my book. I was fortunate - I got it out. It was a best-seller. A lot of people read it. I was able
to take my story to the American people. Got on 60 minutes, and lots and lots of other shows.
I testified to the Congress and then I began my education in earnest, after having been taught to fight communists
all my life. I went to see what communists were all about. I went to Cuba to see if they do in fact eat babies for
breakfast. And I found they don't. I went to Budapest, a country that even national geographic admits is working
nicely. I went to Jamaica to talk to Michael Manley about his theories of social democracy.
I went to Grenada and established a dialogue with Maurice Bishop and Bernard Cord and Phyllis Cord, to see - these
were all educated people, and experienced people - and they had a theory, they had something they wanted to do, they
had rationales and explanations - and I went repeatedly to hear them. And then of course I saw the U.S., the CIA
mounting a covert action against them, I saw us orchestrating our plan to invade the country. 19 days before he was
killed, I was in Grenada talking to Maurice Bishop about these things, these indicators, the statements in the press
by Ronald Reagan, and he and I were both acknowledging that it was almost certain that the U.S. would invade Grenada
in the near future.
I read as many books as I could find on the subject - book after book after book. I've got several hundred books on
the shelf over my desk on the subject of U.S. national security interests. And by the way, I urge you to read. In
television you get capsules of news that someone else puts together what they want you to hear about the news. In
newspapers you get what the editors select to put in the newspaper. If you want to know about the world and
understand, to educate yourself, you have to get out and dig, dig up books and articles for yourself. Read, and find
out for yourselves. As you'll see, the issues are very, very important.
I also was able to meet the players, the people who write, the people who have done studies, people who are leading
different situations. I went to Nicaragua a total of 7 times. This was a major covert action. It lasted longer and
evolved to be bigger than what we did in Angola. It gave me a chance, after running something from Washington, to go
to a country that was under attack, to talk to the leadership, to talk to the people, to look and see what happens
when you give white phosporous or grenades or bombs or bullets to people, and they go inside a country, to go and
talk to the people, who have been shot, or hit, or blown up....
We're talking about 10 to 20 thousand covert actions [the CIA has performed since 1961]. What I found was that lots
and lots of people have been killed in these things.... Some of them are very, very bloody.
The Indonesian covert action of 1965, reported by Ralph McGehee, who was in that area division, and had documents on
his desk, in his custody about that operation. He said that one of the documents concluded that this was a model
operation that should be copied elsewhere in the world. Not only did it eliminate the effective communist party
(Indonesian communist party), it also eliminated the entire segment of the population that tended to support the
communist party - the ethnic Chinese, Indonesian Chinese. And the CIA's report put the number of dead at 800,000
killed. And that was one covert action. We're talking about 1 to 3 million people killed in these things.
Two of these things have led us directly into bloody wars. There was a covert action against China, destabilizing
China, for many, many years, with a propaganda campaign to work up a mood, a feeling in this country, of the evils
of communist China, and attacking them, as we're doing in Nicaragua today, with an army that was being launched
against them to parachute in and boat in and destabilize the country. And this led us directly into the Korean war.
U.S. intelligence officers worked over Vietnam for a total of 25 years, with greater and greater involvement,
massive propaganda, deceiving the American people about what was happening. Panicking people in Vietnam to create
migrations to the south so they could photograph it and show how people were fleeing communism. And on and on, until
they got us into the Vietnam war, and 2,000,000 people were killed.
There is a mood, a sentiment in Washington, by our leadership today, for the past 4 years, that a good communist is
a dead communist. If you're killing 1 to 3 million communists, that's great. President Reagan has gone public and
said he would reduce the Soviet Union to a pile of ashes. The problem, though, is that these people killed by our
national security activities are not communists. They're not Russians, they're not KGB. In the field we used to play
chess with the KGB officers, and have drinks with them. It was like professional football players - we would knock
heads on Sunday, maybe in an operation, and then Tuesday you're at a banquet together drinking toasts and talking.
The people that are dying in these things are people of the third world. That's the common denominator that you come
up with. People of the third world. People that have the misfortune of being born in the Metumba mountains of the
Congo, in the jungles of Southeast Asia, and now in the hills of northern Nicaragua. Far more Catholics than
communists, far more Buddhists than communists. Most of them couldn't give you an intelligent definition of
communism, or of capitalism.
Central America has been a traditional target of U.S. dominion. If you want to get an easy-read of the history of
our involvement in Central America, read Walter LaFeber's book, Inevitable Revolutions. [8] We have dominated the
area since 1820. We've had a policy of dominion, of excluding other countries, other industrial powers from Europe,
from competing with us in the area.
Just to give you an example of how complete this is, and how military this has been, between 1900 and W.W. II, we
had 5,000 marines in Nicaragua for a total of 28 years. We invaded the Dominican Republic 4 times. Haiti, we
occupied it for 12 years. We put our troops into Cuba 4 times, Panama 6 times, Guatemala once, plus a CIA covert
action to overthrow the democratic government there once. Honduras, 7 times. And by the way, we put 12,000 troops
into the Soviet Union during that same period of time.
In the 1930's there was public and international pressure about our marines in Nicaragua....
The next three leaders of Guatemala [after the CIA installed the puppet, Colonel Armaz in a coup] died violent
deaths, and Amnesty International tells us that the governments we've supported in power there since then, have
killed 80,000 people. You can read about that one in the book Bitter Fruit, by Schlesinger and Kinzer. [5] Kinzer's
a New York Times Journalist... or Jonathan Kwitny, the Wall Street Journal reporter, his book Endless Enemies [7] -
all discuss this....
However, the money, the millions and millions of dollars we put into this program [helping Central America]
inevitably went to the rich, and not to the people of the countries involved. And while we were doing this, while we
were trying, at least saying we were trying, to correct the problems of Central and Latin America, the CIA was doing
its thing, too. The CIA was in fact forming the police units that are today the death squads in El Salvador. With
the leaders on the CIA's payroll, trained by the CIA and the United States.
We had the 'public safety program' going throughout Central and Latin America for 26 years, in which we taught them
to break up subversion by interrogating people. Interrogation, including torture, the way the CIA taught it. Dan
Metrione, the famous exponent of these things, did 7 years in Brazil and 3 in Uruguay, teaching interrogation,
teaching torture. He was supposed to be the master of the business, how to apply the right amount of pain, at just
the right times, in order to get the response you want from the individual.
They developed a wire. They gave them crank generators, with 'U.S. AID' written on the side, so the people even knew
where these things came from. They developed a wire that was strong enough to carry the current and fine enough to
fit between the teeth, so you could put one wire between the teeth and the other one in or around the genitals and
you could crank and submit the individual to the greatest amount of pain, supposedly, that the human body can
register.
Now how do you teach torture? Dan Metrione: 'I can teach you about torture, but sooner or later you'll have to get
involved. You'll have to lay on your hands and try it yourselves.'
.... All they [the guinea pigs, beggars from off the streets] could do was lie there and scream. And when they would
collapse, they would bring in doctors and shoot them up with vitamin B and rest them up for the next class. And when
they would die, they would mutilate the bodies and throw them out on the streets, to terrify the population so they
would be afraid of the police and the government.
And this is what the CIA was teaching them to do. And one of the women who was in this program for 2 years -
tortured in Brazil for 2 years - she testified internationally when she eventually got out. She said, 'The most
horrible thing about it was in fact, that the people doing the torture were not raving psychopaths.' She couldn't
break mental contact with them the way you could if they were psychopath. They were very ordinary people....
There's a lesson in all of this. And the lesson is that it isn't only Gestapo maniacs, or KGB maniacs, that do
inhuman things to other people, it's people that do inhuman things to other people. And we are responsible for doing
these things, on a massive basis, to people of the world today. And we do it in a way that gives us this plausible
denial to our own consciences; we create a CIA, a secret police, we give them a vast budget, and we let them go and
run these programs in our name, and we pretend like we don't know it's going on, although the information is there
for us to know; and we pretend like it's ok because we're fighting some vague communist threat. And we're just as
responsible for these 1 to 3 million people we've slaughtered and for all the people we've tortured and made
miserable, as the Gestapo was the people that they've slaughtered and killed. Genocide is genocide!
Now we're pouring money into El Salvador. A billion dollars or so. And it's a documented fact that the... 14
families there that own 60% of the country are taking out between 2 to 5 billion dollars - it's called
de-capitalization - and putting it in banks in Miami and Switzerland. Mort Halper, in testifying to a committee of
the Congress, he suggested we could simplify the whole thing politically just by investing our money directly in the
Miami banks in their names and just stay out of El Salvador altogether. And the people would be better off.
Nicaragua. What's happening in Nicaragua today is covert action. It's a classic de-stabilization program. In
November 16, 1981, President Reagan allocated 19 million dollars to form an army, a force of contras, they're
called, ex-Somoza national guards, the monsters who were doing the torture and terror in Nicaragua that made the
Nicaraguan people rise up and throw out the dictator, and throw out the guard. We went back to create an army of
these people. We are killing, and killing, and terrorizing people. Not only in Nicaragua but the Congress has leaked
to the press - reported in the New York Times, that there are 50 covert actions going around the world today, CIA
covert actions going on around the world today.
You have to be asking yourself, why are we destabilizing 50 corners of the troubled world? Why are we about to go to
war in Nicaragua, the Central American war? It is the function, I suggest, of the CIA, with its 50 de-stabilization
programs going around the world today, to keep the world unstable, and to propagandize the American people to hate,
so we will let the establishment spend any amount of money on arms....
The Victor Marquetti ruling of the Supreme Court gave the government the right to prepublication censorship of
books. They challenged 360 items in his 360 page book. He fought it in court, and eventually they deleted some 60
odd items in his book.
The Frank Snep ruling of the Supreme Court gave the government the right to sue a government employee for damages.
If s/he writes an unauthorized account of the government - which means the people who are involved in corruption in
the government, who see it, who witness it, like Frank Snep did, like I did - if they try to go public they can now
be punished in civil court. The government took $90,000 away from Frank Snep, his profits from his book, and they've
seized the profits from my own book....
[Reagan passed] the Intelligence Identities Protection act, which makes it a felony to write articles revealing the
identities of secret agents or to write about their activities in a way that would reveal their identities. Now,
what does this mean? In a debate in Congress - this is very controversial - the supporters of this bill made it
clear.... If agents Smith and Jones came on this campus, in an MK-ultra-type experiment, and blew your fiance's head
away with LSD, it would now be a felony to publish an article in your local paper saying, 'watch out for these 2
turkeys, they're federal agents and they blew my loved one's head away with LSD'. It would not be a felony what they
had done because that's national security and none of them were ever punished for those activities.
Efforts to muzzle government employees. President Reagan has been banging away at this one ever since. Proposing
that every government employee, for the rest of his or her life, would have to submit anything they wrote to 6
committees of the government for censorship, for the rest of their lives. To keep the scandals from leaking out...
to keep the American people from knowing what the government is really doing.
Then it starts getting heavy. The 'Pre-emptive Strikes' bill. President Reagan, working through the Secretary of
State Shultz... almost 2 years ago, submitted the bill that would provide them with the authority to strike at
terrorists before terrorists can do their terrorism. But this bill... provides that they would be able to do this in
this country as well as overseas. It provides that the secretary of state would put together a list of people that
he considers to be terrorist, or terrorist supporters, or terrorist sympathizers. And if your name, or your
organization, is put on this list, they could kick down your door and haul you away, or kill you, without any due
process of the law and search warrants and trial by jury, and all of that, with impunity.
Now, there was a tremendous outcry on the part of jurists. The New York Times columns and other newspapers saying,
'this is no different from Hitler's "night in fog" program', where the government had the authority to haul people
off at night. And they did so by the thousands. And President Reagan and Secretary Shultz have persisted.... Shultz
has said, 'Yes, we will have to take action on the basis of information that would never stand up in a court. And
yes, innocent people will have to be killed in the process. But, we must have this law because of the threat of
international terrorism'.
Think a minute. What is 'the threat of international terrorism'? These things catch a lot of attention. But how many
Americans died in terrorist actions last year? According to Secretary Shultz, 79. Now, obviously that's terrible but
we killed 55,000 people on our highways with drunken driving; we kill 2,500 people in far nastier, bloodier,
mutilating, gang-raping ways in Nicaragua last year alone ourselves. Obviously 79 peoples' death is not enough
reason to take away the protection of American citizens, of due process of the law.
But they're pressing for this. The special actions teams that will do the pre-emptive striking have already been
created, and trained in the defense department.
They're building detention centers. There were 8 kept as mothballs under the McLaren act after World War II, to
detain aliens and dissidents in the next war, as was done in the next war, as was done with the Japanese people
during World War II. They're building 10 more, and army camps, and the... executive memos about these things say
it's for aliens and dissidents in the next national emergency....
FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, headed by Loius Guiffrida, a friend of Ed Meese's.... He's going
about the country lobbying and demanding that he be given authority, in the times of national emergency, to declare
martial law, and establish a curfew, and gun down people who violate the curfew... in the United States.
And then there's Ed Meese, as I said. The highest law enforcement officer in the land, President Reagan's closest
friend, going around telling us that the constitution never did guarantee freedom of speech and press, and due
process of the law, and assembly.
What they are planning for this society, and this is why they're determined to take us into a war if we'll permit
it... is the Reagan revolution.... So he's getting himself some laws so when he puts in
the troops in Nicaragua, he can take charge of the American people, and put people in jail, and kick in their doors,
and kill them if they don't like what he's doing....
The question is, 'Are we going to permit our leaders to take away our freedoms because they have a charming smile
and they were nice movie stars one day, or are we going to stand up and fight, and insist on our freedoms?' It's up
to us - you and I can watch this history play in the next year and 2 and 3 years.
THE SECRET WARS OF THE CIA:
by John Stockwell
A lecture given in October, 1987
Part II
I just got my latest book back from the CIA censors. If I had not submitted it to them, I would have gone to jail,
without trial - blow off juries and all that sort of thing - for having violated our censorship laws....
In that job [Angola] I sat on a sub-committee of the NSC, so I was like a chief of staff, with the GS-18s (like
3-star generals) Henry Kissinger, Bill Colby (the CIA director), the GS-18s and the CIA, making important decisions
and my job was to put it all together and make it happen and run it, an interesting place from which to watch a
covert action being done....
When the world's gotten blocked up before, like a monopoly game where everything's owned and nobody can make any
progress, the way they erased the board and started over has been to have big world wars, and erase countries and
bomb cities and bomb banks and then start from scratch again. This is not an option to us now because of all these
52,000 nuclear weapons....
The United States CIA is running 50 covert actions, destabilizing further almost one third of the countries in the
world today....
By the way, everything I'm sharing with you tonight is in the public record. The 50 covert actions - these are
secret, but that has been leaked to us by members of the oversight committee of the Congress. I urge you not to take
my word for anything. I'm going to stand here and tell you and give you examples of how our leaders lie. Obviously I
could be lying. The only way you can figure it out for yourself is to educate yourselves. The French have a saying,
'them that don't do politics will be done'. If you don't fill your mind eagerly with the truth, dig it out from the
records, go and see for yourself, then your mind remains blank and your adrenaline pumps, and you can be mobilized
and excited to do things that are not in your interest to do....
Nicaragua is not the biggest covert action, it is the most famous one. Afghanistan is, we spent several hundred
million dollars in Afghanistan. We've spent somewhat less than that, but close, in Nicaragua....
[When the U.S. doesn't like a government], they send the CIA in, with its resources and activists, hiring people,
hiring agents, to tear apart the social and economic fabric of the country, as a technique for putting pressure on
the government, hoping that they can make the government come to the U.S.'s terms, or the government will collapse
altogether and they can engineer a coup d'etat, and have the thing wind up with their own choice of people in power.
Now ripping apart the economic and social fabric of course is fairly textbook-ish. What we're talking about is going
in and deliberately creating conditions where the farmer can't get his produce to market, where children can't go to
school, where women are terrified inside their homes as well as outside their homes, where government administration
and programs grind to a complete halt, where the hospitals are treating wounded people instead of sick people, where
international capital is scared away and the country goes bankrupt. If you ask the state department today what is
their official explanation of the purpose of the Contras, they say it's to attack economic targets, meaning, break
up the economy of the country. Of course, they're attacking a lot more.
To destabilize Nicaragua beginning in 1981, we began funding this force of Somoza's ex-national guardsmen, calling
them the contras (the counter-revolutionaries). We created this force, it did not exist until we allocated money.
We've armed them, put uniforms on their backs, boots on their feet, given them camps in Honduras to live in, medical
supplies, doctors, training, leadership, direction, as we've sent them in to de-stabilize Nicaragua. Under our
direction they have systematically been blowing up graineries, saw mills, bridges, government offices, schools,
health centers. They ambush trucks so the produce can't get to market. They raid farms and villages. The farmer has
to carry a gun while he tries to plow, if he can plow at all.
If you want one example of hard proof of the CIA's involvement in this, and their approach to it, dig up 'The
Sabotage Manual', that they were circulating throughout Nicaragua, a comic-book type of a paper, with visual
explanations of what you can do to bring a society to a halt, how you can gum up typewriters, what you can pour in a
gas tank to burn up engines, what you can stuff in a sewage to stop up the sewage so it won't work, things you can
do to make a society simply cease to function.
Systematically, the contras have been assassinating religious workers, teachers, health workers, elected officials,
government administrators. You remember the assassination manual? that surfaced in 1984. It caused such a stir that
President Reagan had to address it himself in the presidential debates with Walter Mondale. They use terror. This is
a technique that they're using to traumatize the society so that it can't function.
I don't mean to abuse you with verbal violence, but you have to understand what your government and its agents are
doing. They go into villages, they haul out families. With the children forced to watch they castrate the father,
they peel the skin off his face, they put a grenade in his mouth and pull the pin. With the children forced to watch
they gang-rape the mother, and slash her breasts off. And sometimes for variety, they make the parents watch while
they do these things to the children.
This is nobody's propaganda. There have been over 100,000 American witnesses for peace who have gone down there and
they have filmed and photographed and witnessed these atrocities immediately after they've happened, and documented
13,000 people killed this way, mostly women and children. These are the activities done by these contras. The
contras are the people president Reagan calls 'freedom fighters'. He says they're the moral equivalent of our
founding fathers. And the whole world gasps at this confession of his family traditions.
Read Contra Terror by Reed Brodie [1], former assistant Attorney General of New York
State. Read The Contras by
Dieter Eich. [4] Read With the Contras by Christopher Dickey. [2] This is a main-line journalist, down there on a
grant with the Council on Foreign Relations, a slightly to the right of the middle of the road organization. He
writes a book that sets a pox on both your houses, and then he accounts about going in on patrol with the contras,
and describes their activities. Read Witness for Peace: What We have Seen and Heard. Read the Lawyer's Commission on
Human Rights. Read The Violations of War on Both Sides by the Americas Watch. [15] And
there are many, many more
documentations of details, of names, of the incidents that have happened.
Part of a de-stabilization is propaganda, to dis-credit the targeted government. This one actually began under Jimmy
Carter. He authorized the CIA to go in and try to make the Sandinistas look to be evil. So in 1979 [when] they came
in to power, immediately we were trying to cast them as totalitarian, evil, threatening Marxists. While they
abolished the death sentence, while they released 8,000 national guardsmen that they had in their custody that they
could have kept in prison, they said 'no. Unless we have evidence of individual crimes, we're not going to hold
someone in prison just because they were associated with the former administration.' While they set out to launch a
literacy campaign to teach the people to read and write, which is something that the dictator Somoza, and us
supporting him, had never bothered to get around to doing. While they set out to build 2,500 clinics to give the
country something resembling a public health policy, and access to medicines, we began to label them as totalitarian
dictators, and to attack them in the press, and to work with this newspaper 'La Prensa', which - it's finally come
out and been admitted, in Washington - the U.S. government is funding: a propaganda arm.
[Reagan and the State dept. have] been claiming they're building a war machine that threatens the stability of
Central America. Now the truth is, this small, poor country has been attacked by the world's richest country under
conditions of war, for the last 5 years. Us and our army - the death they have sustained, the action they have
suffered - it makes it a larger war proportionally than the Vietnam war was to the U.S. In addition to the contra
activities, we've had U.S. Navy ships supervising the mining of harbors, we've sent planes in and bombed the
capital, we've had U.S. military planes flying wing-tip to wing-tip over the country, photographing it, aerial
reconnaissance. They don't have any missiles or jets they can send up to chase us off. We are at war with them. They
have not retaliated yet with any kind of war action against us, but we do not give them credit with having the right
to defend themselves. So we claim that the force they built up, which is obviously purely defensive, is an
aggressive force that threatens the stability of all of Central America.
We claim the justification for this is the arms that are flowing from Nicaragua to El Salvador, and yet in 5 years
of this activity, there is no evidence of any arms flowing from Nicaragua into El Salvador.
We launched a campaign to discredit their elections. International observer teams said these were the fairest
elections they have witnessed in Central America in many years. We said they were fraudulent, they were rigged,
because it was a totalitarian system. Instead we said, the elections that were held in El Salvador were models of
democracy to be copied elsewhere in the world. And then the truth came out about that one. And we learned that the
CIA had spent 2.2 million dollars to make sure that their choice of candidates - Duarte - would win. They did
everything, we're told, by one of their spokesmen, indirectly, but stuff the ballot boxes....
I'll make a footnote that when I speak out, he [Senator Jesse Helmes] calls me a traitor, but when something happens
he doesn't like, he doesn't hesitate to go public and reveal the secrets and embarrass the U.S.
We claim the Sandinistas are smuggling drugs as a technique to finance their revolution. This doesn't make sense.
We're at war with them, we're dying to catch them getting arms from the Soviet Union, flying things back and forth
to Cuba. We have airplanes and picket ships watching everything that flies out of that country, and into it. How are
they going to have a steady flow of drug-smuggling planes into the U.S.? Not likely! However, there are Nicaraguans,
on these bases in Honduras, that have planes flying into CIA training camps in Florida, Alabama, Louisiana, several
times a week.
Now, obviously i'm not going to stand in front of you and say that the CIA might be involved in drug trafficking, am
I? READ THE BOOK. Read The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia. For 20 years the CIA was helping the Kuomantang to
finance itself and then to get rich smuggling heroin. When we took over from the French in 1954 their intelligence
service had been financing itself by smuggling the heroin out of Laos. We replaced them - we put Air America, the
CIA subsidiary - it would fly in with crates marked humanitarian aid, which were arms, and it would fly back out
with heroin. And the first target, market, of this heroin was the U.S. GI's in Vietnam. If anybody in Nicaragua is
smuggling drugs, it's the contras. Now i've been saying that since the state department started waving this red
herring around a couple of years ago, and the other day you notice President Reagan said that the Nicaraguans, the
Sandinistas, were smuggling drugs, and the DEA said, 'it ain't true, the contras are smuggling drugs'.
We claim the Sandinistas are responsible for the terrorism that's happening anywhere in the world. 'The country club
of terrorism' we call it. There's an incident in Rome, and Ed Meese goes on television and says, 'that country club
in Nicaragua is training terrorists'. We blame the Sandinistas for the misery that exists in Nicaragua today, and
there is misery, because the world's richest nation has set out to create conditions of misery, and obviously we're
bound to have some effect. The misery is not the fault of the Sandinistas, it's the result of our destabilization
program. And despite that, and despite some grumbling in the country, the Sandinistas in their elections got a much
higher percentage of the vote than President Reagan did, who's supposed to be so popular in this country. And all
observers are saying that people are still hanging together, with the Sandinistas.
Now it gets tricky. We're saying that the justification for more aid, possibly for an invasion of the country - and
mind you, president Reagan has begun to talk about this, and the Secretary of Defense Weinberger began to say that
it's inevitable - we claim that the justification is that the Soviet Union now has invested 500 million dollars in
arms in military to make it its big client state, the Soviet bastion in this hemisphere. And that's true. They do
have a lot of arms in there now. But the question is, how did they get invited in? You have to ask yourself, what's
the purpose of this destabilization program? For this I direct you back to the Newsweek article in Sept. 1981, where
they announce the fact that the CIA was beginning to put together this force of Somoza's ex-guard. Newsweek
described it as 'the only truly evil, totally unacceptable factor in
the Nicaraguan equation'. They noted that neither the white house nor the CIA pretended it ever could have a chance
of winning. So then they asked, rhetorically, 'what's the point?' and they concluded that the point is that by
attacking the country, you can force the Sandinistas into a more radical position, from which you have more
ammunition to attack them.
And that's what we've accomplished now. They've had to get Soviet aid to defend themselves from the attack from the
world's richest country, and now we can stand up to the American people and say, 'see? they have all the Soviet
aid'. Make no doubt of it, it's the game plan of the Reagan Administration to have a war in Nicaragua, they have
been working on this since 1981, they have been stopped by the will of the American people so far, but they're
working harder than ever to engineer their war there.
Now, CIA destabilizations are nothing new, they didn't begin with Nicaragua. We've done it before, once or twice.
Like the Church committee, investigating CIA covert action in 1975, found that we had run several hundred a year,
and we'd been in the business of running covert actions, the CIA has, for 4 decades. You're talking about 10 to 20
thousand covert actions.
CIA apologists leap up and say, 'well, most of these things are not so bloody'. And that's true. You're giving a
politician some money so he'll throw his party in this direction or that one, or make false speeches on your behalf,
or something like that. It may be non-violent, but it's still illegal intervention in other countries' affairs,
raising the question of whether or not we are going to have a
world in which law, rules of behaviour, are respected, or is it going to be a world of bullies, where the strongest
can violate and brutalize the weakest, and ignore the laws?
But many of these things are very bloody indeed, and we know a lot about a lot of them. Investigations by the
Congress, testimony by CIA directors, testimony by CIA case officers, books written by CIA case officers, documents
gotten out of the government under the freedom of information act, books that are written by by
pulitzer-prize-winning journalists who've documented their cases. And you can go and read from these things, classic
CIA operations that we know about, some of them very bloody indeed. Guatemala 1954, Brazil, Guyana, Chile, the
Congo, Iran, Panama, Peru, Bolivia, Equador, Uruguay - the CIA organized the overthrow of constitutional
democracies. Read the book Covert Action: 35 years of Deception by the journalist Godswood. [6]
Remember the Henry Kissinger quote before the Congress when he was being grilled to explain what they had done to
overthrow the democratic government in Chile, in which the President, Salvador Allende had been killed. And he said,
'The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves'.
We had covert actions against China, very much like what we're doing against Nicaragua today, that led us directly
into the Korean war, where we fought China in Korea. We had a long covert action in Vietnam, very much like the one
that we're running in Nicaragua today, that tracked us directly into the Vietnam war. Read the book, The Hidden
History of the Korean War by I. F. Stone. [14] Read Deadly Deceits by Ralph McGehee [9] for the Vietnam story. In
Thailand, the Congo, Laos, Vietnam, Taiwan, and Honduras, the CIA put together large standing armies. In Vietnam,
Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, the Congo, Iran, Nicaragua, and Sri Lanka, the CIA armed and encouraged ethnic minorities
to rise up and fight. The first thing we began doing in Nicaragua, 1981 was to fund an element of the Mesquite
indians, to give them money and training and arms, so they could rise up and fight against the government in
Managua. In El Salvador, Vietnam, Korea, Iran, Uganda and the Congo, the CIA helped form and train the death
squads.
In El Salvador specifically, under the 'Alliance for Progress' in the early 1960's, the CIA helped put together the
treasury police. These are the people that haul people out at night today, and run trucks over their heads. These
are the people that the Catholic church tells us, have killed something over 50,000 civilians in the last 5 years.
And we have testimony before our Congress that as late as 1982, leaders of the treasury police were still on the CIA
payroll.
Then you have the 'Public Safety Program.' I have to take just a minute on this one because it's a very important
principle involved that we must understand, if we're to understand ourselves and the world that we live in. In this
one, the CIA was working with policeforces throughout Latin America for about 26 years, teaching them how to wrap up
subversive networks by capturing someone and interrogating them, torturing them, and then getting names and
arresting the others and going from there. Now, this was such a brutal and such a bloody operation, that Amnesty
International began to complain and publish reports. Then there were United Nations hearings. Then eventually our
Congress was forced to yield to international pressure and investigate it, and they found the horror that was being
done, and by law they forced it to stop. You can read these reports -- the Amnesty International findings, and our
own Congressional hearings.
These things kill people. 800,000 in Indonesia alone according to CIA's estimate, 12,000 in Nicaragua, 10,000 in the
Angolan operation that I was sitting on in Washington, managing the task force. They add up. We'll never know how
many people have been killed in them. Obviously a lot. Obviously at least a million. 800,000 in Indonesia alone.
Undoubtedly the minimum figure has to be 3 million. Then you add in a million people killed in Korea, 2 million
people killed in the Vietnam war, and you're obviously getting into gross millions of people...
We do not parachute teams into the Soviet Union to haul families out at night and castrate the father with the
children watching, because they have the Bomb, and a big army, and they would parachute teams right back into our
country and do the same thing to us - they're not scared of us. For slightly different reasons, but also obvious
reasons, we don't do these things in England, or France, or Germany, or Sweden, or Italy, or Japan. What comes out
at you immediately is that these 1 to 3 million direct victims, the dead, and in these other wars, they're people of
the third world. They're people of the Metumba mountains of the Congo, and the jungles of Southeast Asia, and now
the hills of northern Nicaragua - 12,000 peasants. We have not killed KGB or Russian army advisors in Nicaragua. We
are not killing Cuban advisors. We're not killing very many Sandinistas. The 12,000 that we have killed in Nicaragua
are peasants, who have the misfortune of living in a CIA's chosen battlefield. Mostly women and children.
Communists? Far, far, far more Catholics than anything else.
Now case officers that do these things in places in Nicaragua, they do not come back to the U.S. and click their
heels and suddenly become responsible citizens. They see themselves - they have been functioning above the laws, of
God, and the laws of man - they've come back to this country, and they've continued their operations as far as they
can get by with them. And we have abundant documentation of that as well. The MH-Chaos program, exposed in the late
60's and shut down, re-activated by President Reagan to a degree - we don't have the details yet - in which they
were spending a billion dollars to manipulate U.S. student, and labor organizations. The MK-ultra program. For 20
years, working through over 200 medical schools and mental hospitals, including Harvard medical school, Georgetown,
some of the biggest places we've got, to experiment on American citizens with disease, and drugs.
They dragged a barge through San Francisco bay, leaking a virus, to measure this technique for crippling a city.
They launched a whooping cough epidemic in a Long Island suburb, to see what it would do to the community if all the
kids had whooping cough. Tough shit about the 2 or 3 with weak constitutions that might die in the process. They put
light bulbs in the subways in Manhattan, that would create vertigo - make people have double vision, so you couldn't
see straight - and hid cameras in the walls - to see what would happen at rush hour when the trains are zipping past
- if everybody has vertigo and they can't see straight and they're bumping into each other.
Colonel White - oh yes, and I can't not mention the disease experimentations - the use of deadly diseases. We
launched - when we were destabilizing Cuba for 7 years - we launched the swine fever epidemic, in the hog
population, trying to kill out all of the pigs - a virus. We experimented in Haiti on the people with viruses.
I'm not saying, I do not have the slightest shred of evidence, that there is any truth or indication to the rumor
that the CIA and its experimentations were responsible for AIDS. But we do have it documented that the CIA has been
experimenting on people, with viruses. And now we have some deadly, killer viruses running around in society. And it
has to make you wonder, and it has to make you worry.
Colonel White wrote from retirement - he was the man who was in charge of this macabre program - he wrote, 'I toiled
whole-heartedly in the vineyards because it was fun, fun fun. Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill,
cheat, steal, rape and pillage with the blessings of the all highest?' Now that program, the MK-ultra program, was
eventually exposed by the press in 1972, investigated by the Congress, and shut down by the Congress. You can dig up
the Congressional record and read it for yourself.
There's one book called 'In Search of the Manchurian Candidate'. It's written by John Marks, based on 14,000
documents gotten out of the government under the Freedom of Information Act. Read for yourselves. The thing was shut
down but not one CIA case officer who was involved was in any way punished. Not one case officer involved in these
experimentations on the American public, lost a single paycheck for what they had done.
The Church committee found that the CIA had co-opted several hundred journalists, including some of the biggest
names in the business. The latest flap or scandal we had about that was a year and a half ago. Lesley Gelb, the
heavyweight with the New York Times, was exposed for having
been working covertly with the CIA in 1978 to recruit journalists in Europe, who would introduce stories, print
stories that would create sympathy for the neutron bomb.
The Church committee found that they had published over 1,000 books, paying someone to write a book, the CIA puts
its propaganda lines in it, the professor or the scholar gets credit for the book and gets the royalties. The latest
flap we had about that was last year. A professor at Harvard was exposed for accepting 105,000 dollars from the CIA
to write a book about the Middle East. Several thousand professors and graduate students co-opted by the CIA to run
its operations on campuses and build files on students.
And then we have evidence - now, which has been hard to collect in the past but we knew it was happening - of CIA
agents participating, trying to manipulate, our elections. FDN, Contra commanders, traveling this country on CIA
plane tickets, going on television and pin-pointing a Congressional and saying, 'That man is soft on Communism. That
man is a Sandinista lover.' A CIA agent going on television, trying to manipulate our elections.
All of this, to keep America safe for freedom and democracy.
In Nicaragua the objective is to stop the Cuban and Soviet take-over, we say. Another big operation in which we said
the same thing was Angola, 1975, my little war. We were saying exactly the same thing - Cubans and Soviets.
Now I will not going into great detail about this one tonight because I wrote a book about it, I detailed it. And
you can get a copy of that book and read it for yourselves. I have to urge you, however - please do not rush out and
buy a copy of that book because the CIA sued me. All of my profits go to the CIA, so if you buy a copy of the book
you'll be donating 65 cents to the CIA. So check it out from your library!
If you have to buy a copy, well buy one copy and share it with all your friends. If your bookstore is doing real
well and you want to just sort of put a copy down in your belt...
I don't know what the solution is when a society gets into censorship, government censorship, but that's what we're
in now. Do the rules change? I just got my book back, my latest book back from the CIA censors. If I had not
submitted it to them, I would have gone to jail, without trial - blow off juries and all that sort of thing - for
having violated our censorship laws....
So now we have the CIA running the operation in Nicaragua, lying to us, running 50 covert actions, and gearing us up
for our next war, the Central American war. Let there be no doubt about it, President Reagan has a fixation on
Nicaragua. He came into office saying that we shouldn't be afraid of war, saying we have to face and erase the scars
of the Vietnam war. He said in 1983, 'We will do whatever is necessary to defeat the Sandinistas. Admiral LaRoque,
at the Center for Defense Information in Washington, says this is the most elaborately prepared invasion that the
U.S. has ever done. At least that he's witnessed in his 40 years of association with our military.
We have rehearsed the invasion of Nicaragua in operations Big Pine I, Big Pine II, Ocean Venture, Grenada, Big Pine
III. We have troops right now in Honduras preparing. We've built 12 bases, including 8 airstrips. Obviously we don't
need 8 airstrips in Honduras for any purpose, except to support the invasion of Nicaragua. We've built radar
stations around, to survey and watch. Some of these ventures have been huge ones. Hundreds of airplanes, 30,000
troops, rehearsing the invasion of Nicaragua.
And of course, Americans are being given this negative view of these evil Communist dictators in Managua, just two
days drive from Harlington, Texas. (They drive faster than I do by the way). I saw an ad on TV just two days ago in
which they said that it was just two hours from Managua to Texas. All of this getting us ready for the invasion of
Nicaragua, for our next war.
Most of the people - 75% of the people - are polled as being against this action. However, President Eisenhower
said, 'The people of the world genuinely want peace. Someday the leadership of the world are going to have to give
in and give it to them'. But to date, the leaders never have, they've always been able to outwit the people, us, and
get us into the wars when they've chosen to do so.
People ask, how is this possible? I get this all the time.... Americans are decent people. They are nice people. And
they're insulated in the worlds that they live in, and they don't understand
and we don't read our history. History is the history of war. Of leaders of countries finding reasons and rationales
to send the young men off to fight.
In our country we talk about peace. But look at our own record. We have over 200 incidents in which we put our
troops into other countries to force them to our will. Now we're being prepared to hate the Sandinistas. The leaders
are doing exactly what they have done time and again throughout history. In the past we were taught to hate and
fight the Seminole Indians, after the leaders decided to annex Florida. To hate and fight the Cherokee Indians after
they found gold
in Georgia. To hate and fight Mexico twice. We annexed Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, part of Colorado, and California.
In each of these wars the leaders have worked to organize, to orchestrate public opinion. And then when they got
people worked up, they had a trigger that would flash, that would make people angry enough that we could go in and
do....
We have a feeling that the Vietnam war was the first one in which the people resisted. But once again, we haven't
read our history. Kate Richards-O'Hare. In 1915, she said about WW I, 'The Women of the U.S. are nothing but
brutesalles, producing sons to be put in the army, to be made into fertilizer'. She was jailed for 5 years for
anti-war talk.
The lessons of the Vietnam war for the American people is that it was a tragic mistake.... 58,000 of our own young
people were killed, 2 million Vietnamese were killed. We withdrew, and our position wound up actually stronger in
the Pacific basin.
You look around this society today to see if there's any evidence of our preparations for war, and it hits you in
the face....
'Join the Army. Be all that you can be'. Now if there was truth in advertising, obviously those commercials would
show a few seconds of young men with their legs blown off at the knees, young men with their intestines wrapped
around their necks because that's what war is really all about.
If there was honesty on the part of the army and the government, they would tell about the Vietnam veterans. More of
whom died violent deaths from suicide after they came back from Vietnam then died in the fighting itself.
Then you have President Reagan.... He talks about the glory of war, but you have to ask yourself, where was he when
wars were being fought that he was young enough to fight in them? World War II, and the Korean war. Where he was was
in Hollywood, making films, where the blood was catsup, and you could wash it off and go out to dinner
afterwards....
Where was Gordon Liddy when he was young enough to go and fight in a war? He was hiding out in the U.S. running
sloppy, illegal, un-professional breaking and entering operations. Now you'll forgive my egotism, at that time I was
running professional breaking and entering operations....
What about Rambo himself? Sylvester Stallone. Where was Sylvester Stallone during the Vietnam war? He got a draft
deferment for a physical disability, and taught physical education in a girls' school in Switzerland during the war.
Getting back to President Reagan. He really did say that 'you can always call cruise missiles back'.... Now, you can
call back a B-52, and you can call back a submarine, but a cruise missile is different.... When it lands, it goes
boom!. And I would prefer that the man with the finger on the button could understand the difference. This is the
man that calls the MX a peace-maker. This is the man who's gone on television and told us that nuclear war could be
winnable. This is the man who's gone on television and proposed that we might want to drop demonstration [atom]
bombs in Europe to show people that we're serious people. This is the man who likens the Contras to the moral
equivalents of our own founding fathers. This is the man who says South Africa is making progress on racial
equality. This is the man who says that the Sandinistas are hunting down and hounding and persecuting Jews in
Nicaragua. And the Jewish leaders go on TV the next day in this country and say there are 5 Jewish families in
Nicaragua, and they're not having any problems at all. This is the man who says that they're financing their
revolution by smuggling drugs into the U.S. And the DEA says, 'It ain't true, it's president Reagan's Contras that
are doing it'....
[When Reagan was governor of California, Reagan] said 'If there has to be a bloodbath then let's get it over with'.
Now you have to think about this a minute. A leader of the U.S. seriously proposing a bloodbath of our own youth.
There was an outcry of the press, so 3 days later he said it again to make sure no one had misunderstood him.
Read. You have to read to inform yourselves. Read The Book of Quotes [12]. Read On
Reagan: The Man and the
Presidency [3] by Ronnie Dugger. It gets heavy. Dugger concludes in his last chapter that
President Reagan has a
fixation on Armageddon. The Village Voice 18 months ago published an article citing the 11 times that President
Reagan publicly has talked about the fact that we are all living out Armageddon today....
[Reagan] has Jerry Falwell into the White House. This is the man that preaches that we should get on our knees and
beg for God to send the rapture down. Hell's fires on earth so the chosen can go up on high and all the other people
can burn in hell's fires on earth. President Reagan sees himself as playing the role of the greatest leader of all
times forever. Leading us into Armageddon. As he goes out at the end of his long life, we'll all go out with him....
Why does the CIA run 10,000 brutal covert actions? Why are we destabilizing a third of the countries in the world
today when there's so much instability and misery already?
What you have to understand is the politics of paranoia. The easiest... buttons to punch are the buttons of macho,
aggression, paranoia, hate, anger, and fear. The Communists are in Managua and that's just 2 hours from San Diego,
CA. This gets people excited, they don't think. It's the pep-rally, the football pep-rally factor. When you get
people worked up to hate, they'll let you spend huge amounts of money on arms.
Read The Power Elite by C. Wright Mills. [11] Read The Permanent War Complex by Seymour
Melman. [10] CIA covert
actions have the function of keeping the world hostile and unstable....
We can't take care of the poor, we can't take care of the old, but we can spend millions, hundreds of millions of
dollars to destabilize Nicaragua....
Why arms instead of schools? .... They can make gigantic profits off the nuclear arms race because of the hysteria,
and the paranoia, and the secrecy. And that's why they're committed to building more and more and more weapons, is
because they're committed to making a profit. And that's what the propaganda, and that's what the hysteria is all
about. Now people say, 'What can I do?'....
The youth did rise up and stop the Vietnam war....
We have to join hands with the people in England, and France, and Germany, and Israel, and the Soviet Union, and
China, and India - the countries that have the bomb, and the others that are trying to get it. And give our leaders
no choice. They have to find some other way to do business other than to motivate us through hate and paranoia and
anger and killing, or we'll find other leaders to run the country.
Now, Helen Caldicott, at the end of her lectures, I've heard her say, very effectively, 'Tell people to get out and
get to work on the problem.... You'll feel better'....
'What can I do?'.... If you can travel, go to Nicaragua and see for yourself. Go to the Nevada test site and see for
yourself. Go to Pantex on Hiroshima day this summer, and see the vigil there. The place where we make 10 nose-cones
a day, 70 a week, year in and year out. He [Admiral LaRock] said, 'I'd tell them, if they feel comfortable lying
down in front of trucks with bombs on them, to lie down in front of trucks with bombs on them.' But he said, 'I'd
tell them that they can't wait. They've got to start tomorrow, today, and do it, what they can, every day of their
lives'.
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