John Stockwell, former CIA chief_citater

Taken from this 20 page pdf document

https://libcom.org/files/The%20secret%20wars%20of%20the%20CIA%20-%20John%20Stockwell.pdf

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.

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.


We’re going to talk about how and why the U.S. manipulates the press

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 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

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.

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.

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.

OM LØGN:
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.

MEDIERNES LØGNE:
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.

A CIA MODEL OPERATION FOR FUTURE OPERATIONS:
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.

MEDIERNES LØGNE + METOD
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.

…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

CIA DEATH SQUADS:
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.

CIA ER SOM GASTAPO, men vi undskylder det:
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!

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

[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 exnational 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 comicbook 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.

Undervisning i simpel sabotage fra CIAs egen hjemmeside.
CIAs “Simple Sabotage Field Manual”

MANIPULATING THE PRESS WITH La Prensa (CIA front newspaper):
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 newspaperLa Prensa’, which – it’s finally come out and been admitted, in Washington – the U.S. government is funding: a propaganda arm.

I LIGHED MED ASSAD OG SYRIEN:
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.

SAMMENLIGN MED HVAD WIKI SKRIVER OM NICARAGUA (REN PROPAGANDA):
The CIA carried out the Nicaraguan operation based on military intelligence indicating the Sandinista government had close ties to the Cuban and Soviet governments, which represented a strategic threat to the U.S.[7] US policy planners also feared that the success of democracy and socialism in Nicaragua would inspire revolutions across the continent, thereby challenging US hegemony and the interests of Western corporations. 

The United States saw the Sandinistas as Communists, and felt the need to stop them. Congress viewed the Reagan Administration’s anti-Sandinista policies with extreme skepticism, and were under the impression that the true goal of the CIA operation in Nicaragua was to overthrow the Sandinista government. 
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CIAs EGNE HISTORIKERE OG JOURNALISTER;
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.

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

What 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


BOG ANBEFALINGER FRA STOCKWELL:
Walter LaFeber’s book: Inevitable Revolutions
Bitter Fruit, by Schlesinger and Kinzer





CIA covert actions have the function of keeping the world hostile and
unstable….