American Dialogues; John Stockwell

Every thing they see once they step out of the Langley headquarters building is breaking some kind of a LOL you go overseas undercover. It's an illegal operation you're violating the agreements between the countries and violating their laws pretending to be someone you're not. All of these thousands of covert operations that have been run are illegal destabilization center France and other countries affairs when these case officers come back into the United States they don't take a purge you know on the airplane and go to the bathroom and get this all out of their system. They come back to the states with the same arrogance applying to U.S. law. Laws exist to be beaten in the furtherance of your operational plans and activities. The Iran-Contra hearings are now long past. But Americans remain shaken by the testimony and the operations that revealed neither the apparatus nor the fundamental attitudes that put these operations into action had significantly altered and serious questions remain about the very legitimacy of covert action.

Questions that were avoided by Congress and the media during the hearings. And I'm Robert Foxworth and you're listening to American dialogues. One American who continues to challenge the conventional wisdom regarding covert operations overseas is John Stockwell in one thousand seventy five. He was chief of the CIA Angola task force. He headed up an effort to destabilize Angola as that African nation approached independence from Portuguese colonial rule. Stockwell began his duties with a task force shortly after returning from Vietnam after the US war effort there collapsed. His experience in Vietnam had raised disturbing questions for him and his work on the task force served to crystalize those down the CIA's effort an angle that unraveled as chaotically ignominiously as its final operations in Vietnam. Stockwell resigned from the agency after 12 years as

a CIA officer. His book In Search of enemies details the operation and provides insight into the thinking and dynamics involved in secret wars overseas. John Stockwell joins us on this edition to discuss the issues and problems related to covert action and to provide an insider's analysis of the Iran-Contra scandal. John Stockwell you've been referred to as the other Ollie North and that's for your role in directing CIA operations in Angola in the 1970s. Why did the CIA begin operations in Angola at that time. Well the United States government had just taken a big blow with the evacuation from Vietnam three months before and the talk inside the National Security Council world the people in the top of the CIA the operatives the terminology of our bosses that they explain this to us was that the Soviets saw the United States is as weak after the collapse of the CIA the U.S.

programs and Vietnam and Angola coincidentally was getting its independence so they were moving into Angola to capture it as it got its independence. Henry Kissinger knew we couldn't stop them with the US Army therefore he was sending in the CIA to save you know Horatio on the bridge to stop the Soviet exploitation of U.S. weakness. It was at Henry Kissinger's behest the CIA director William Colby to his credit. Did not refuse to do it did not protest but he did exist. I have some reservations and explain them. He did say for example that it would take a hundred million dollar program to be sure of winning. And our first allowance was 14 million dollars which was enough to they felt to stabilize the situation to heat up the fighting so that one side or the other wouldnt just win in a clear walk over. What were your responsibilities and how did they compare to the North Sea in the

Iran-Contra operation. My responsibilities were comparable to North's in many ways there were differences of course. My office for example was in C headquarters which is a dramatic difference from his being in the White House. But nevertheless the National Security Council set up a special subcommittee to supervise our activities. And then about once a month the National Security Council met to consider our progress and to make major decisions on what we were doing. And so I was a member of this subcommittee. I met with them twice a week and explained what we were doing with my boss. I was the operative I was the one going to Angola and going to Europe. They were I would brief they would discuss they would make decisions I would fly away or hire people to fly away to hire mercenary armies to make things happen. We did many of the same things North did we

put arms through Israel we opened Swiss accounts for our clients funds were diverted. We hired mercenaries we destabilized a country we broke the law and we conspired to lied to the Congress to cover up our illegal activities. So the parallels were extensive. There was an investigation at the end and I faced exactly the same decisions of First Amendment do incriminate myself and I emphatically did not plead the Fifth. I was quite sure the law had been broken I'd studied it very much. The laws were broken and the specific instances of perjury of deliberate willful conspiracy to lie to the Congress. But my feeling was that two things one is desperately we needed to reassert the constitutional system. The thing in and go ahead in no way advanced U.S. national security interests are U.S. business interests or our U.S. position of credibility and leadership in the world.

And it got maybe 10000 people killed and we had broken the law there just wasn't any way you could justify it. And we had asserted ourselves as someone who could operate beyond the law which I felt was dangerous. So I felt the only way that I could purge myself of this activity was to try to set it back on the legal course by testifying to the committees. The second thing I observed was that they couldn't put me in jail. I didn't think without putting Henry Kissinger and Bill Colby in jail too because we had conspired to do these things we had conspired to commit perjury I had sat in the meetings and you know hey boss remember last week you said this. Don't screw up and say contradict yourself. But they were the ones who had actually committed the perjury in the briefings. They couldn't you know throw me away and put me in jail without putting them in jail too. And there was obviously some protection in one of the many famous assertions that came out of the

Iran-Contra hearings was Oliver North's. We live in a dangerous world speech by way of justifying covert operations. In your estimation what role do covert actions play in enhancing the security of the United States. We do indeed live in a dangerous world but the point that Oliver North hasn't matured enough to digest and understand is that it's made much more dangerous by the United States CIA running destabilizing operations all over the world like in Angola today like in Chad like in Ethiopia like in couple like in Nicaragua. There was not bloodshed and killing and they got. Until we put together contra force and sent them in there to do it this sort of activity makes the world much more dangerous. It doesn't make the world more peaceful and safe for anyone to live in. And the Iran-Contra hearings revealed a shadowy network of companies bank accounts and operatives who were not government personnel nor government controlled

but their activities were coordinated by people in the government. And this is referred to by some as an off the shelf operation. Is this a break with past methods of running covert operations. These things were in fact coordinated by Oliver North Elliott Abrams remember with a bank account number that he got the numbers transposed. It was at the highest level it was planned directed coordinated by William Casey this is coming out now in the hearings it wasn't clear this summer so the coordination was by governmental personnel who and this is the legal issue. They were subject to the Boland Amendment. They were working through some people one step away Secord Hakeem go by far the others who were not government personnel who were private employees. And this this is a degree thing. At some point in every operation in the world the CIA hires someone to go out CIA operatives don't go in as soldiers and fight battles.

They go in and pay someone to organize armies to fight the battles that's the way covert operations are run. The guy from the embassy doesn't go out with a machine gun in the jungle you know shooting people down. So the difference at some point in arms trading in the covert business you've got intermediaries not always in the Angolan thing we were we had U.S. planes flying the arms to Kinshasa. And then in Kinshasa we had an airline delivering the arms into Angola so it was at that point that the arms turned into civilians hands. This in this case it was more extensive certainly and more dramatic the efforts to raise money through private citizens and raising millions of dollars. But these people were encouraged by the White House. Oliver North went out and exhorted them and they were brought in to meet Mr. Reagan afterwards. So the management of it was very definitely government. And the pattern. There's an emphasis here and an emphasis there which is different but the pattern the structure is about

the same as I've seen done before. They were trying to come to grips with the degree if you will in all of these people who were delivering the arms and opening bank accounts the diversion of money and bringing it back into the Contra thing to get a source of 30 million dollars to run a war with us without having the Congress approve it. What makes this so dramatic. Is that the Congress had forbidden this operation so that made it illegal. If it hadn't been for the Boland Amendment and they had made this deal and diverted the funds back it wouldn't be much different from other shenanigans the CIA has played all over the world many times before at some point you have a C chord or a single OB team or go bonafide international arms dealers involved in the process. The drama of this one is they were doing it but Casey still was suggesting and approving this diversion of funds and managing the saying very much so.

Somebody following the media during the Iran-Contra hearings might get the impression that the operation was the result of harebrained scheme that got out of hand because of the president's now famous management style. Others say that it was business as usual which is something like what you were just saying isn't it. It's a little bit of both it's certainly business as usual it's certainly been done before. It's a question of degree however of the arrogance of the CII towards the government towards the Congress. The contempt I document in my book about the Angolan operation for example we had senators touring southern Africa to find out the truth about what was happening. We in the CIA were sending telegrams to the chief of stations in each country they were going to instructing them to go and secretly to see the presidents of the countries to tell them what to tell the senators to make sure the senators you know didn't get the truth about what was happening. So this kind of arrogance and contempt and hiding from the Congress some of these shadow activities is very much part of the game. In this case there is a difference. It's not

the president's laid back style which is a myth that's been perpetrated by the Tower Commission and the others to spare Mr. Reagan the inconvenience of being impeached. Because otherwise if they admitted that this was his program his plan they would have no choice but to impeach him. But in fact Oliver North's excesses and Poindexter backing him up and the shenanigans that have that have brought down the Reagan presidency to a degree. These are very much an extension of the Reagan revolution. He has set out 20 30 years ago to work his way into the presidency in effect a permanent change on this society. His purpose his plan and doing this has been to break apart the bureaucracy the structure. It's based on a revolutionary contempt for the status quo and a determination to blow it off and change it. And we've seen things like the appointment of an Burford

with her unshakable loyalty to the offending Corporation put in the Elliott Abrams one of the least sensitive people around put in charge of the Human Rights Division of the State Department to close it down. Ed Meese for God sakes made Attorney General with his incredible background of selling jobs and whatnot from the White House and his going around lecturing and the country saying the Constitution never did guarantee freedoms of speech and press and assembly and then doing his job as this crisis brags of thwarting the investigations of contra drug smuggling and then giving Oliver North the time to burn the files. All of this is revolutionary activity as they called it in their terms. But the magic of the Reagan presidency is that he can manage to say dramatic things and teflon people don't hold him accountable for what he said when he was calling his his program a revolution and talking in

revolutionary terms. People thought it was political sloganeering. Let me put it this way Oliver North's defiance of the Congress and the hearings and his defense it has all of the trappings of the delts defense and his trial for the assault on the Moncada Gerson which was titled history will absolve me. The revolutionary ideology Oliver North is saying in a dangerous world. You may not like what I've done. You may claim I've broken the law but history will absolve me. Listening to American dialogue I'm Robert Foxworth guest on this edition is John Stockwell the highest ranking CIA officer to go public. With some of the descriptions of the Iran-Contra operation describes an unbelievable snafu. It's like

well this is not so unbelievable like a ship full of arms anchored off the coast of Portugal for over a month sitting there waiting for Congress to agree to Contra aid. Is this sort of thing typical of covert operations in general. It is indeed. My book focuses a lot on the just the utter incompetence. One point the chief of station. In Kinshasa had this obsession with firecrackers and he wanted us to give him send them some firecrackers that would sound like machine guns so we could airdrop them and wonder with delayed fuses and the people would panic thinking the you know that machine guns were going off and one of the offered to mine I mean he was urging us to mine the harbors oblivious of the fact that it was us and as you know Western corporations own the ships that would be blown up. Nevertheless despite this incompetence while it's very hard to make an operation

succeed you can certainly with enough money create a lot of misery because you can get the stuff shipped in there so it isn't a Bob Hope movie thing. In this particular operation the comedy effect the comic relief is perhaps greater than any others because Oliver North was not a pro he had tremendous energy but he's not a person. His gyroscope isn't balance just right. He doesn't have the stabilizing factor of judgement of balancing what he's saying what he's doing you know of his operational plan he's just charging a full speed ahead. Remarkable ability to get some things done. And he did effect the deflection of that airplane the grounding of the airplane with the terrorist on it. He did arrange the invasion of Grenada. He did arrange the bombing of Libya moving the Pentagon on the ships and making him that and the mining of the harbors and all of these things illegal. All of these things very very dangerous. Let me summarize and say his

activities when taken all together he certainly has done more as one individual more than all of the progressives in the world to destroy Ronald Reagan for years now there have been reports of CIA covert operations playing fast and loose with the law and we've all heard about a lot of these shady dealings outright galaxy's some of what you pointed out. These are responsibly justified by the final goal of the. And justifies the means. Illegal or extra legal activities part of the standard operating procedure. Or more exceptions to the rule that we hear about because they're so spectacular. Everything once they step out of the Langley headquarters building is breaking some kind of a LOL you go overseas undercover. It's an illegal operation you're violating the agreements between the countries and violating their laws pretending to be someone you're not.

All of these thousands of covert operations that have been run are illegal destabilization center France and other countries affairs when these case officers come back into the United States. They don't take a purge you know on the airplane and go to the bathroom and get this all out of their system. They're committed to a form of life and conduct an activity and a view of themselves as being and moralists as being above the law. Their whole life is what's the law. You know you're living a cover and trying 24 hours a day to thwart the law and make sure you don't get caught and make things happen and engineer coup d'etat as they come back to the states with the same arrogance applying to U.S. law. Laws exist to be beaten in the furtherance of your operational plans and activities and their arrogance toward United States laws we could talk about it all day. You are currently launching an organization with the goal of dismantling the CIA and.

Reigning it in and making it accountable and understanding that there is a need for intelligence gathering. How would you set up an intelligence gathering organization so that the abuses we see now don't take place. Or is that possible. Well it's difficult to do certainly given the fact that we have a 40 year history now of this organization trampling on the law and killing people. Running operations that kill people. There would be nothing easy about making the change its origin only needed what we have to do is the first healthy step in a separate covert action from intelligence gathering. I was on the phone this morning for example with Admiral Iraq at the Center for Defense Information in Washington talking about just this and we both emphatically agree covert action has to be stopped. If there's something that has to be done in defense of our nation in a military way in terms of killing people the Defense Department has to do it and they must be strictly

accountable to the people through the Congress. We do not get good intelligence through the CIA because it has so much energy and macho and Budget and excitement and power comes through running operations destabilization of other countries and manipulations of affairs in this country they can't possibly be devoted to producing good intelligence objective intelligence because too often that will contract contradict their rationales for violence. And we will never have good intelligence we'll never have our leaders being given dispassionate objective studies of situations around the world as long as we have an organization that wants justifications for war. The CIA can never go in and say hey the Sandinistas are a little rough around the edges they just came out of the jungle. But they want us. They're abolishing the death sentence they're trying to teach the people to read and write they're very popular.

If we work with them we can draw them closer to us and wind up with the healthiest country in Central America identified with us. This is a very defensible objective report the CIA could have given but they couldn't see because they were wedded to violence justifying a destabilization of Nicaragua. Can you tell us just a bit more about your organization. Well indeed we've got an effort going right now which is just by focusing what we've all been doing by we I mean there's there's quite a bit of talent here of people who've been involved in government operations in different ways and fought their way through them and are now speaking out trying to educate the nation to the truth about these things and the unnecessary aspect of covert You know destabilizing countries brutalizing them. We have people like of course myself we have David Macmichael the CIA analyst former Marine who's speaking out Ralph McGee

he who ran operations in Southeast Asia is speaking out. Bill reading here this beautiful man who ran the operation to oust Ben's in Guatemala in 54 who is speaking out. Daniel Ellsberg very famous former Marine former National Security Council plotter in the Vietnam era. Charlie Clements a former Air Force pilot who's devoted his life to speaking out to stop the brutalization of the people in Central America El Salvador. The list goes on and we've all been working very hard and what we've we've been convince people have been urging us all along to put something together that would give a little bit more focus. We've been reluctant because we're all so busy we're afraid that if we started an organization we would have to spend time managing the organization instead of lecturing and writing but we're going to put together an organization and we've got one of us who will take the time to manage it fill

reading. And give him a staff so that we can lobby effectively so we can have someone there in Washington who will be calling senators and congressmen and saying in this situation we need David and Michael to testify on this one Ralph McGee he should speak meeting with leaders at the United Nations and the always us and saying we have an organization we have an expertise if you like we would like to come to your conference and brief you on what covert operations are really about. But we want an organization that people who are still in the government and see as we did that things are wrong can turn to and get some encouragement get some advice on what to do and be help to speak out if they want to. The other thing that I would like to say that are very important is to point out that these things are not done in a vacuum I am very much part of the protest against the nuclear arms race. I have been to Nevada repeatedly and done

civil disobedience there with the others but at the same time I urge people not to brush aside and there's sometimes a tendency to do this saying well that's the single issue the survival of our species of our planet and therefore we can't spend time worrying about what's happening in Central America and then it could have been peasants that are dying sorry about that. But we have to go for the major issue. What we have to realize is these issues are connected. They're all part of the national security they're all part of the national security mentality they're both supervised by the National Security Council. They're both extensions of the activities of the military industrial complex the way they complement each other. Is that in a peaceful world the military industrial complex the Congress the media the Senate could never solace in a in a peaceful world on a two trillion dollar budget for arms and weapons. We would say cut our taxes cut down all of

this 35 percent profit spending you're doing on the M axis and s d. And give us some more social services and spend money on schools you know instead of bombs and things. Certainly we would do this except that the world is so violent and teeming with violence that people are made very much aware of it and it's true. Now to keep this truth to make it true and keep it true you have to have something like the CIA out there destabilizing the world you have Ronald Reagan supporting 21 low intensity conflicts around the world in what he calls the Reagan doctrine. And this of course means 25 sites in the world. You have hot raging Moore's going killing lots of people with U.S. dollars and arms we bought for them which ends obviously to the violence. It adds to the brutality it adds to the children who see their parents brutally murdered who grow up in this world conditioned to violence and that continuing

violence guarantees that the rationales for the nuclear arms race will continue forever. You have been listening to American dialogues. I'm Robert Foxworth. I guess it has been John Stockwell former CIA officer and author of the book In Search of enemies. American dialogues is a project of the American dialogues Foundation Robert Foxworth executive producer Bobby Murry production coordinator the editor and technical producer is right below maps and. For information write American dialogues. Eight hundred thirty three Sunset Boulevard. Suite 9 6 7 Los Angeles California 9 0. 4 6. Stay tuned to this station for upcoming editions. This is Robert Foxworth.