https://www.c-span.org/program/public-affairs-event/secret-wars-of-the-cia/159709 November 3, 1989 Secret Wars of the CIA At American University John Stockwell talked about the inner workings of the CIA. Topics included CIA destabilizing governments in Angola and other countries and setting up drug cartels as part of covert operations in certain countries. After his presentation he responded to audience members' questions. 00:00:17 Angola for the Central Intelligence Agency the forum was held in Washington and November. 00:00:26 00:00:46 Carla Feldpausch Good evening. Welcome to the American University I welcome you on the behalf of. The graduate students of the School of International Studies and the economic graduate student union. John Stockwell is the highest ranking CIA agent to go public he is the next morning and winner of the CIA's medal of Merit he served as an officer in charge of Vietnam and as for a covert war and then goal he served in the CIA for 12 years. John circle is the author of 8 books the most well known being in search of enemies which he wrote about the CIA and over which the CIA sued him as a result he received a court order ordering him to submit everything that he writes to the CIA person for ship and which awarded all the royalties of the book to the CIA This makes John the only author I know who regularly asked people not to virus books. John has also written fiction including a novel and titled red sunset. Unique for its premonitions of glasnost in the US not from the Soviet Union last September I spoke to John and I asked him if he could focus a thought on Central America in the world at the time the fight Central American president has just agreed to the motivation of the conference and the Nicaraguan Alexion were underway our main concern was to keep Central America and especially because I was coming elections in the arena of rational discussion and to counteract the Bush administration the several who say well as ation and this information policy. The conflict has become a time that has become timely in a way that couldn't have been foreseen since our take of this was forced to declare and into the you know his unilateral cease fire lastly we are fortunate to have John thoughtful with us tonight to help shed light on the events in this region Show Less 00:02:50 John Stockwell play strong and well done of the. Thank you thank you very much for inviting me and 00:03:06 John Stockwell for the welcome and for the good turnout let me begin by correcting a minor detail and this is not the fault of my host. I'm not the highest ranking CIA officer to go public there been 00:03:21 CIA directors going public all the time 00:03:23 I think I have the distinction of being one of the highest 00:03:26 case officers to go public 00:03:28 and endeavor to tell the truth about what the CIA has been up to and 00:03:32 we're going to talk about that tonight the 00:03:35 CIA's secret wars but what I've done over the years 00:03:37 since I left the agency is to pursue in my readings the broader subjects of how the CIA Secret Wars to understand them for 00:03:46 sure and show how they interrelate to the broader problems 00:03:50 that also affect or perhaps really affect our national security interests 00:03:55 tonight we're going to talk about the 00:03:57 secret wars of the CIA and the nuclear arms race in the age of glasnost with the next CIA director for President 00:04:04 we've got make Hill 00:04:06 Gorbachev's policies 00:04:08 of openness on the one hand and George 00:04:10 Bush on the other side saying we're a kinder and more 00:04:12 humane nation they're telling us that the communist bloc is breaking apart the Cold War is over the arms race is over and if this were all together true it would be absolutely wonderful 00:04:25 Unfortunately our priority 00:04:27 is still fraught with some grevious. Oblongs 00:04:31 our planet is still trapped was 60031 00:04:34 nuclear weapons and our factories are still producing them as fast as ever 00:04:39 in testing and developing them 00:04:41 as vigorously as ever we've just gotten through spending $2.00 trillion dollars And that's a conservative 00:04:48 figure 00:04:48 that's been published on the largest 00:04:50 arms build up 00:04:52 in the history of the world at least that piece and coincidentally increased our national debt we were not a debtor nation before 00:04:59 by about the same amount of 2 trillion 00:05:01 dollars the United States 00:05:03 still has an open policy of supporting coups and 00:05:08 the stabilization and low intensity conflicts in every corner of the growth of the globe the US doing this through the CIA my organization and as you 00:05:17 all well know our society 00:05:19 is said to be drowning in a sea of drugs and and to grow old to all of this is the systematic destruction of our environment and it's my thesis that these subjects interrelated drug trafficking the arms race conventional wars the destruction of the environment 00:05:34 and the killing of the United States 00:05:37 president in 1963 and the CIA Secret Wars all of these things are and woven together and it's my purpose tonight to try to give you in one hour a sense of how these things and to relate 00:05:50 it's a vast subject to different subject I can't possibly do justice to it in the time allowed this means I'm going to have to insult your intelligence by skimming across 00:06:00 the top of subjects that you can get a Ph D. dissertation 00:06:04 written in and still not cover thoroughly 00:06:07 so all I can do 00:06:09 is just try my best and then the question 00:06:11 and answer all stay with you a goodly time 00:06:13 taking questions in detail on the areas that you want to pursue in greater detail 00:06:18 I also 00:06:20 publish a bibliography and we'll put the address up here where you can order 00:06:24 copies of it of the best 120 00:06:27 books that I've found on the subject and I have a brief. Review of each of the books in it and some introductory remarks that may help you 00:06:35 to pursue this subject Mind you we have thousands of books 00:06:39 have been written about national security and world security and 00:06:42 U.S. security and these are merely the best 120 books that I've found on the subject this massive documentation of course is is the salvation 00:06:52 of the intellectually 00:06:54 I urge you to read for yourselves do not take anything 00:06:59 I am saying tonight as the gossip will I'm telling you that our leaders lie to us they lied to us systematically they lied to us with a purpose that may not be your 00:07:09 purpose some of their lies 00:07:12 if you're a young man may motivate shoe 00:07:14 to go off some day and die 00:07:17 be killed or to kill people 00:07:19 and the only way you can defend yourself 00:07:21 against other people programming you because we are programmable Marine Corps boot 00:07:27 camp taught me that they can teach you and get you fired up roar on and say charge and 00:07:32 you'll charge up the hill without asking why and perhaps 00:07:35 not come you know come down the hill of feet 00:07:38 1st the French have a saying 00:07:40 that I mingle in translation them that don't do politics will be done if you don't defend yourself 00:07:47 by filling your mind with a true understanding of what's happening in the world then others will fill it up for you and then at some point in time use 00:07:56 the information in the conditioning 00:07:57 that they planted in your mind and breast 00:08:00 to use you if you will once again I have a bibliography I urge you to read for yourself I urge you to reach inside the Biblia to the books and go to their bibliographies and pursue the subject on beyond 00:08:14 and travel and inform your so. We're going to take Nicaragua tonight we're going to get into these awesome subjects 00:08:21 of the arms race and whatnot 00:08:22 from my specialty which was CIA's activities I was a manager and 3 of the CIA's so-called C.. Good wars or low intensity conflicts 00:08:32 or whatever you would call them we're going to start with them of course I'm going to start with Nicaragua as a case study 00:08:40 because it's particularly timely because the elections are coming up because we've been beating up on Nicaragua for the last 10 years 00:08:47 and coincidentally 00:08:49 because it's very much in the news right now today tonight 00:08:53 during this last week in fact The Washington Post has special op ed 00:08:58 on it and editorial pieces on it today 00:09:00 I was just reading 00:09:01 John Stockwell them in my hotel room the Contras have moved several 1000 armed fighters down into the country but the State Department says they're not there to fight they're just down there to encourage people to vote but they're killing but they're killing people and Ortega sees his responsibility as trying to stop people from killing people in his country he's doing exactly what President George Bush would do if there were a force 00:09:25 in this country gunning people down and so he has said that this cease fire is no longer a ceasefire and our media the State Department post and the other 00:09:36 newspapers that are published in this city and elsewhere 00:09:39 are all falling right into 00:09:40 line with the propaganda lines of attacking or to go on trying to use his actions 00:09:45 to put him on and under under political pressure to discredit 00:09:49 him. If they can 00:09:51 to the degree they can 00:09:52 now another reason 00:09:54 we're picking Nicaragua for a case 00:09:56 study is because it's just particularly 00:09:58 useful of all the hundreds of CIA 00:10:00 John Stockwell operations that we could dissect in mind you end goal is in the news and I was once chief of the Angola task force on a subcommittee of the National Security Council called the interagency working group commanding although I was working closely 00:10:15 under the supervision of Jim Potts 00:10:17 of the Africa division and Henry Kissinger and the CIA director 00:10:20 Bill Colby and 00:10:21 Angola is very much in the news and Savimbi was just in town and I'm also 00:10:25 clearly tempted to talk about Angola but Nicaragua's a better example. Because it's closer to the United States culturally and physically and 00:10:34 because this covert action destabilization that we've run 00:10:37 against Nicaragua has been open on both ends usually 00:10:41 these things are closed usually our government is covering them and hiding them to the greatest degree it can and the country 00:10:48 we're attacking becomes hostile and paranoid and seals its borders in the case 00:10:53 of Nicaragua until last year until quite recently it had a policy of remaining open anyone from the states who wanted to go down and have a look could do so without getting a visa Meanwhile in Washington the thing was debated quite openly for more 00:11:06 aid and details of the A and abuse 00:11:09 of the aid and the little gradations of 00:11:11 rules we put on how the 8 could be 00:11:13 spent so we knew it from both ends and during 00:11:16 the entire period of the eighty's I was travelling 00:11:18 back and forth from Washington to Nicaragua elsewhere and forming myself to 00:11:24 assess this thing and also 00:11:26 using the material in my in my lectures also 00:11:29 unlike Angola there was never a chance in Angola that we would make 00:11:33 it into another Vietnam putting in U.S. troops seriously 00:11:36 and this is a very real possibility in Nicaragua during 00:11:39 the mid eighty's it's a remote possibility to the U.S. of course as you know has had a fixation 00:11:46 on Nicaragua since the mid 18 hundreds it's been the issue of a 2nd canal or a better canal of different interest trying to develop it of military interventions of putting the 00:11:56 Marines in there half a dozen times to occupy 00:12:00 it to dominate it for selections 00:12:02 to control events in that country the Marines were eventually withdrawn in 1933 00:12:07 as a result of the international pressure of the international 00:12:11 peace movement 00:12:12 and at that time we 00:12:13 switched into a more subtle 00:12:15 says' of the ancient Monroe Doctrine where instead of using marine so much with gunboat diplomacy we created 00:12:24 a National Guard with officers trained at our academy is here in the States and then maintain control. Of the country by proxy without taking the heat for having our troops inside the 00:12:34 country itself it's been said 00:12:36 that this event was the birth of neo colonialism this also was the kickoff 00:12:42 of the U.S. policy of establishing 00:12:45 a military oligarchy we 00:12:46 set up schools and trained tens of thousands of military 00:12:51 and police officers 00:12:52 in countries all over Latin America and 00:12:54 Africa in some cases and Asia putting them through our Cademy is arming them paying their salaries 00:13:00 afterwards trying to create and successfully creating a situation where we 00:13:04 would have a fraternity 00:13:05 of people in these countries in power who were more loyal to the fraternity 00:13:10 of our own military than they were to the peasants and people of their own countries. Meanwhile this cat and mouse game that we've played with 00:13:18 Nicaragua since 1901 is a classic case of what CIA directors more recently themselves called destabilization The point is to put pressure on the targeted government by ripping apart the social and economic fabric of the country 00:13:35 now that's words you know social 00:13:37 and economic fabric that means making 00:13:39 the people suffer as much as you can until the country plunges into chaos 00:13:44 until at some point 00:13:45 you can step in and impose your choice of governments on that country the rationales we've used in Nicaragua are classic we've been fighting communism 00:13:55 it's been national security there are a Marxist bastion in our own backyard and all of that more specifically our leaders have said at 1st that the purpose 00:14:05 of this program was to enter dight the flow of arms from Nicaragua 00:14:10 to the rebels in El Salvador 00:14:12 unable to prove any flow of arms 00:14:15 whatsoever from Nicaragua into 00:14:17 all Salva door they eventually got 00:14:20 into the line which they use in the last few years of returning 00:14:23 Nicaragua to democracy 00:14:25 and then we pointed out to them that Nicaragua never had a democracy certainly not under the samosa dictatorships 00:14:31 so they call it the democratization of Nicaragua ignoring the fact that that Nicaragua by the way had a lock sions in 1904 that were much more democratic than the elections that we had in this republic we don't live in a democracy 00:14:46 John Stockwell in the United States itself now. We submit we'll never know exactly what the Sandinistas would have done with this country of Nicaragua if we had left them alone to react 00:15:02 to the country's problems according 00:15:04 to their own interests and ideology and compulsions we do know however 00:15:09 that they abolished the death sentence at exactly the same time the United States was reinstituting the death sentence 00:15:16 in this country maximum penalty in their courts is 30 years in jail they released thousands of the hated National Guard that they had in their custody saying that they would not jail anyone 00:15:29 for having belonged to an organization 00:15:30 they would have to be convicted of individual crimes 00:15:33 they launched a literacy campaign to teach 00:15:36 each Nicaraguan to read and write they set out to build 2500 clinics so each Nicaraguan would have access to some kind of medical treatment these are all things that the most of the dictator backed up by the United States 00:15:48 had not gotten around 00:15:50 to doing and they launched the most ambitious land reform campaign in the history of Central America 00:15:56 and they did this by maintaining a free enterprise economy if you owned land and you were working it you kept it they were taking the lands that samosa and his family and the people who had fled 00:16:09 John Stockwell had stolen or taken or gotten and they were turning those lands back to the people in different forms and cooperatives feeling their way as they went making mistakes as they went trying this solution on that one but with the purpose of getting the land back to the people 00:16:25 so people would work the land on land relate to land and profit from the land 00:16:30 that they worked on in their own country and they brought something totally 00:16:34 new I believe 00:16:36 to the modern world which is a. Unity 00:16:39 between Christianity and Marxism 00:16:43 of 00:16:44 asserting that the church should 00:16:46 have if it has any purpose 00:16:47 and justification at all it's that it should be the Church of the people. The Church of the poor not 00:16:54 the Church of the oligarchy and the rich and the wealthy I've been and 00:16:58 bore hate the most bore his 00:16:59 office the minister of interior 00:17:02 and counted on the wall 00:17:04 25 Catholic icon collector items 00:17:07 that he's put on the wall there if he had counted them 00:17:10 twice there were exactly 25 that infers that he must have others 00:17:14 at home and these were the selected ones 00:17:16 that he put on 00:17:17 that he chose to display 00:17:19 on his wall and until today despite 00:17:22 this continued attack 00:17:24 war is what the world court 00:17:26 court called it that we've waged on Nicaragua 00:17:29 Nicaragua has yet to commit one act of war against the United States. But instead of joining 00:17:36 them and building the healthiest most 00:17:39 dynamic most enthusiastic country and 00:17:42 Central America we spent 00:17:44 over a $1000000000.00 during the eighty's to destabilize the country 00:17:49 we set out systematically to create conditions where the farmer could not get his produce to market where children couldn't go to school 00:17:57 or women were terrified 00:17:58 inside their homes as well as outside their homes 00:18:01 or being attacked 00:18:03 or the hospitals were treating wounded people instead of sick people were government administration grinds to a halt or the trucks don't run the bridges or blow the salaries aren't paid you can't get a driver's license all the infrastructure breaks down and of course eventually 00:18:17 international capital is scared away and the country plunges into chaos and bankruptcy we created the contra program 00:18:24 beginning in about 1981 00:18:26 I was a Newsweek 00:18:28 article following up if there was plenty of documentation on this on November 7th and 8982 00:18:34 that said Here we go again 00:18:37 we've done this before it's been a mistake 00:18:39 before we're going into Nicaragua 00:18:40 once again we're we're supporting the wrong 00:18:43 side news we noted it said that we had elected to support the only 00:18:48 truly evil totally unacceptable faction 00:18:52 in the Nicaraguan equalization that being the remnants of some most 00:18:56 of his hated National Guard 00:18:59 but using Argentine trainers that 1st and then eventually CIA mercenaries we armed and directed this mall army from 00:19:06 bases mostly in Honduras 00:19:08 to attack in Nicaragua and destabilize systematically they were blowing up greenery sawmills bridges 00:19:15 government offices schools health centers mines mining roads ambushing trucks raiding farms 00:19:21 and villages we have massive documentation of all this 00:19:24 because the country as I said 00:19:26 was kept open for the 1st few years C.B.S. N.B.C. 00:19:30 A.B.C. B.B.C. 00:19:31 C.B.C. all had crews down there and resident. And when there would be atrocities they would rush up 00:19:37 and film them we also had what total eventually dozens of thousands of witnesses from this country and Canada and Europe and Australia going down and living right in the towns and villages with the people 00:19:49 and when there were atrocities rushing out to film and photograph 00:19:52 and document them like I say massive documentation There's also been direct 00:19:58 U.S. military involvement in all of this U.S. military mining 00:20:01 harbors overflights underwater demolitions teams going in to blow up things 00:20:06 in the ports there's been assassination of of religious leaders teachers health workers elected officials government administrators C.B.S. N.B.C. others have footage of this the Americans watch 00:20:19 the witness for peace we've managed to come up with a list of the names of hundreds 00:20:23 and hundreds of leaders who've been assassinated down there we also have admission of this program 00:20:28 by President Ronald Reagan on national television in the debates with Walter Mondale because an assassination manual that we were using to train these people the Contras with was brought to the attention of the press and it became a big issue and led to change a slight change in the politics in Congress towards the contra program 00:20:49 and President Reagan said this was the work of the CIA 00:20:52 station chief and to good see golf 00:20:54 and I can assure you the CIA was not 00:20:57 appreciative of him and you know with 00:20:59 that particular slip up because one 00:21:02 it attributed you know assassinations 00:21:04 John Stockwell a policy of so the media went to the White House the next the following Monday and said Did that mean that there had been a change in U.S. policy against assassinations and the White House playing you know double speak said well no not really because in our opinion assassination applies to world leaders only when you're killing really religious leaders or regional leaders it's not assassination 00:21:27 John Stockwell it's just killing. Terror has been a part of this program wrote terror as Roy's anything that happens in the Middle East or elsewhere these Contras have been going into villages they've been hauling families out with other men 00:21:42 members of the family forced to watch they've been castrating fathers gang raping mothers slashing off their breasts again while the children are forced to watch 222000 is the figure the New York Times gave the last time I counted it is the number of people killed 00:22:00 in this thing and again this is nobody's propaganda this is documented and condemned by the World Court by the Presbyterian Church by the Methodist church by broad 00:22:10 segments of the Catholic Church and again by these dozens of thousands of witnesses 00:22:17 who go on down from other countries to see for themselves as you recall President Reagan remained throughout unapologetic 00:22:23 for this activity he took pride in saying quote I'm a contra 00:22:28 he took pride in saying that these people were the moral equivalent of his founding fathers and of course George Bush has never missed 00:22:37 John Stockwell a chance to identify himself with these Contras again read for yourself read contra terror by Reed Brody former assistant attorney general of New York State read the Contras by Dieter I read with the Contras by Christopher Dickey a so-called moderate journalist representing the Washington Post in Central America read witness for peace what we have seen and heard read the lawyers Commission on Human Rights read the violations of war on 00:23:05 both sides by the Americas Watch read the Miskito Indians in Nicaragua 00:23:09 read Washington's were on it get out of the holly Sklar or go to Nicaragua and see for yourself you have to get a visa now but there's not one person in this room who cannot find 00:23:20 a way in the coming summer for example or during the winter even 00:23:24 to raise enough money to go to Nicaragua 00:23:25 and see for yourself and I urge you to do so because we have a. A unique situation it may be 10 or 20 years before they'll be another 00:23:33 covert action which is so open 00:23:36 that you can be sure of the fact 00:23:37 you can have absolute knowledge of what your government is doing there 00:23:41 John Stockwell and you can go inside the country and circulate and see the effects of our destabilization policy on the targeted country of course throughout these years there's been a really limitless pro propaganda program to discredit the Sandinistas we've labeled as Sandinistas as to tell a Tarion dictators 00:23:59 we said it 1st 00:24:00 that they were flowing arms 00:24:02 into well Salvador we claim when they put together 00:24:05 a military machine to defend their country 00:24:07 from this attack we claim they were building a 00:24:10 Warmachine that quote threaten the stability 00:24:12 of all of Central America without 00:24:14 noting that they did not have strategic 00:24:16 John Stockwell weapons they did not have tanks and bombers they could in fact attack of the countries we charged them with censorship specifically closing down La Prensa newspaper and it was several years after we were crowing about this censorship by the government before it came out that La Prensa was on the United States government payroll the National 00:24:37 Endowment for Democracy using U.S. government funds was subsidizing La Prensa as our propaganda arm right in the 00:24:45 capital of that country while we brutally destabilize the country and of course in 1984 00:24:51 we launched a big risk campaign 00:24:52 to discredit their elections now they had elections that 00:24:56 were supervised and witnessed by United Nations groups and other 00:25:00 groups who who said that they were as fair 00:25:03 as any elections they had seen 00:25:05 and Central America in many many years and these elections were quite 00:25:10 an embarrassment to Ronald Reagan who was then 00:25:13 the champion of the contra program in this country and I'm sure to George Bush today because they were quite a bit more Democratic 00:25:20 than the elections that we held 00:25:22 in this country during the same year I suggest you go to the covert action 00:25:27 information bulletins number 00:25:28 25 from 00:25:30 the summer of 1906 there 00:25:32 later versions of the bulletin being sold outside tonight for an article by Mr Michael Parineeti. 00:25:38 Discussing 00:25:39 the democracy in Nicaragua they had 7 parties with candidates running for election 00:25:47 we had to they turned 00:25:49 out 75.4 00:25:51 percent of the vote 00:25:52 we turned out 53 percent of the vote in this country they voted directly we voted for elect tours who selected our leaders 00:26:01 they passed a law that every legitimate 00:26:03 party would have an equal amount of money 00:26:06 to spend for campaign purposes in this country if you can raise more money you can buy more television time you have 00:26:12 a much better chance of winning the election in fact the in terms of direct voter participation and this republic we are not a democracy where Republic in terms of voter 00:26:23 representation were rated 75th in the world just before South Africa which is 76. Another element of propaganda that we were slamming them with was claiming that the sun and east as were smuggling drugs to finance their revolution we staged scenes paying the pilot Barry Seal's plea bargaining a deal with him to land a plane in Nicaragua to kick some bales of marijuana out on the runway to photograph by satellite so President Reagan 00:26:51 could put could put him on television saying this proves there's smuggling drugs in fact the record is out 00:26:57 massively clear the contra program 00:26:59 was smuggling drugs I won't go into the details right here now and the question and answer we will 00:27:04 mention them later but we had 00:27:07 the Senator Kerry investigation we had also intensive investigation by our media we have dozens of cases where people in the contra program including Adolfo Calero his 00:27:18 brother in law caught smuggling cocaine into this country using the National 00:27:23 Security Oh she'll 00:27:25 bear passes using telephone numbers from the past from the from the White House to get themselves cleared when F.B.I. or DA 00:27:32 officers would come down on them we claim the sun 00:27:36 and he says were responsible for 00:27:37 terrorism in Central 00:27:40 America and this case of course has never been made Meanwhile however the United States has 00:27:45 been supporting with literally 00:27:47 billions of dollars the activities of death squads that were slaughtering people brutally in countries like El Salvador and Guatemala and we've been blaming the sun in East as for the misery and it got ugly and the country 00:28:02 is miserable they say no ha 00:28:03 we don't have everything there are shortages of everything the country is suffering 00:28:09 but US representatives go down 00:28:11 there and have a look and come back and go on television and say you won't believe the place it's the most miserable country I've ever visited the Senate needs to have not been able to manage it look what happens 00:28:22 when you have a Marxist government 00:28:23 to be honest obviously they would 00:28:26 go down and say our stated purpose back since 1980. To was to break the Nicaraguan economy 00:28:32 we spent a $1000000000.00 destabilizing 00:28:35 the country to break 00:28:36 its economy now here 00:28:38 are my snapshots of the results of our 00:28:40 successful program to break their economy of course they 00:28:44 John Stockwell don't do that because they're playing propaganda because they're not being honest the country is miserable it's not the fault of the sun and east as it was the purpose of our contra program and then there's the Soviet threat President Reagan saying all those years you know that we were having Soviets in our own backyard he used to like to say there were Russians flying airplanes in this hemisphere meaning into Nicaragua for the 1st time in all of history and like much of what he said you know his mind Show More 00:29:13 didn't work clearly on all 3 cylinders 00:29:15 at best like much of what he 00:29:18 said this was not accurate anyone who would think for 00:29:21 a minute would note that Aeroflot has been 00:29:24 flying into Canada and to Mexico into Latin America 00:29:28 into New York City for 30 or 40 years 00:29:31 on a daily basis not to mention flying in and out of Cuba continuously So the statement simply was not true but again all together over this period of time 00:29:41 we spend a $1000000000.00 to destabilize this country you can only 00:29:46 you can only weep to think what could have been done with that money to build schools and clinics and irrigation projects in Nicaragua 00:29:55 to create a healthy country to this date they have not committed an act of war 00:29:59 against us our broken relations with us we could go in now and reverse this program and work with them to alleviate suffering and stead of to make 00:30:08 people suffer now they've sent the Contras back into the country they 00:30:13 being 00:30:14 George Bush and the CIA managers 00:30:16 they are still providing 00:30:17 them with what they call humanitarian aid and in a war situation 00:30:21 there is no humanitarian aid for the combatants you're buying 00:30:25 uniforms and boots and food for them while privates or. Give them arms they've sent several 1000 of these 00:30:33 troops into the country now to resume 00:30:36 the military activities to destabilize the country as it goes into its 2nd election process and when Ortega has said 00:30:44 we can't have a ceasefire if they're killing people in the country 00:30:47 as they are doing then we had attacked them and say see it's all their fault as we've been doing throughout this thing that happened in Costa 00:30:55 Rica last week where George 00:30:57 Bush was down there for a meeting and he met with Ortega on Ortega announced that he would have to to to 00:31:03 to nullify the cease fire and put his troops 00:31:06 back into trying to maintain the peace was George Bush's reaction 00:31:11 was the ugliest thing I think mean viscerally in terms of the dignity of a world leader 00:31:17 that I recall seeing since Lyndon Johnson was president of this country 00:31:20 as a Texan I can say that he was not a graceful men Bush with an ugly look on his face referred to this little man and his green uniform breaking up our garden party 00:31:32 and Ortega eventually replied 00:31:35 and then he kept saying US democratically 00:31:37 elected leaders and he's coming 00:31:39 in here breaking up our garden party now he didn't bother to mention and I must say the media working like silly putty to his lead 00:31:47 nobody said at the time none of the commentators said at the time 00:31:51 but President Bush you 00:31:53 with do you forget or take it was also democratically elected and no one stood 00:31:58 up and said Yes but people are dying in Nicaragua what 00:32:01 can he do and Stead 00:32:03 George Bush was lashing 00:32:04 out at him and continues to do so 00:32:06 and the leading candidate against the Senate East as against Ortega in the next elections is none other than Violeta Chamorro a long time CIA agent affiliated 00:32:17 with La Prensa newspaper 00:32:18 that was on the C.I. payroll 00:32:20 throughout the eighty's like honest those honest us feel so most saw the work the El Salvador 00:32:27 or best of that we saw in El Salvador Manuel. Noriega 00:32:30 in Panama the Shah of Iran 00:32:33 . Year 00:32:34 this woman is a CIA agent who is now being run for Open Office and they could argue well Meanwhile moving 00:32:42 on from Nicaragua to the rest 00:32:43 of the world but keeping all of this in mind as a case study we have a church committee report of 1975 in which we were we were told that this. And over 10000 minor operations 00:32:57 John Stockwell all illegal all of these signed to disrupt or destabilize or modify the activities of other countries that's a lot of mischief every covert operation of course rationalized in terms of national security 00:33:12 or anti-communism We've got lots and lots and lots of these 00:33:16 out in the public record the world is 00:33:17 only so big these things are never completely 00:33:20 secret you can read for yourselves 00:33:22 at great length about these things we've set out to overthrow functioning constitutional democracies in over 20 countries we manipulated elections and dozens of countries we created standing armies and directed them to fight we went after to work United ethnic minorities to encourage 00:33:41 them to revolt the 1st thing we did in Nicaragua was 00:33:44 to go to the mosquito Indians would never gotten along with the other people and they got out with very well 00:33:49 and give them more money than they had seen in the entirety of history and arms and training and rationales and sanctuaries in Honduras and sent 00:33:56 them into Nicaragua to attack kill fight rape 00:34:01 burn pillage and this is an insidious 00:34:04 thing every society is torn 00:34:06 with racial conflicts and conflicts with minorities think how violent 00:34:10 Our nation is think what if there were a super 00:34:14 superpower so big that 00:34:16 we didn't dare even flash back or strike back at them that were coming to our minorities 00:34:21 with huge sums of money 00:34:23 and arms and training people from our minority groups and sending them into the country to do open acts of violence how we would 00:34:32 rise up and the blood that would ensue and this 00:34:36 has been a technique the CIA has used in Nicaragua and Thailand and Vietnam and Laos and the Congo and Iran Iraq with the Kurds in different parts of the world we created trained and funded death squads like the Treasury police and else well they'll solve 00:34:53 the door. That are responsible 00:34:55 for killing as many as 70000 people according to the count of the Catholic Church and we've assassinated 00:35:01 world leaders including 00:35:03 the United States president in 1963 and I'll get to that 00:35:07 in more detail in just a moment getting back to the subject of democracy cent that 00:35:12 that's something that Bush and everyone is talking about 00:35:14 right now I remind you of Chile in 1973 the CIA organized the overthrow of Salvador Allende 00:35:22 the democratically elected president 00:35:24 of Chile and 00:35:25 John Stockwell he was killed in the process and we killed general Schneider who was the pro U.S. defender of the constitution there in order to put the CIA's representative Pinochet in power and Henry Kissinger's when he was grilled by the Congress over this program His rationale was yes the issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves 00:35:46 now there was a long C.I. destabilization 00:35:50 and propaganda campaign against 00:35:52 China 00:35:53 we were parachuting teens from paying more in Matsue. 00:35:56 To bet Burma Thailand to destabilize China with the propaganda campaign the propaganda 00:36:02 aimed at the United States as well as China 00:36:05 and other parts of the world until eventually 00:36:07 we talked ourselves into the Korean War in which a 1000000 people were where we fought China in Korea and a 1000000 00:36:14 people were killed there was a long CIA 00:36:17 destabilization and propaganda campaign against Vietnam until we talked ourselves into going into Vietnam to fight and 2000000 people were killed again read for yourselves read Bill blogs book the CIA 00:36:29 or forgotten history read portrait 00:36:32 of a Cold Warrior by Joseph Burkholder Smith 00:36:34 that was a CIA case officer in Southeast Asia read far in the lake by Francis 00:36:39 Fitzgerald the daughter of Desmond Fitzgerald the 00:36:41 famous CIA Chief of Operations of Southeast 00:36:44 Asia read deadly deceit 00:36:46 by Ralph McGee he another case officer who served in Southeast Asia read decent interval by Frank snap 00:36:53 who covered the. Out of time in Vietnam 7375 00:36:55 he and I were colleagues there at that time or if you will read my own book In Search of enemies by Norton which remains the only insiders detailed account of the inner functioning of a covert 00:37:08 action or read Washington's 00:37:10 were only cut out well by Holly Sklar not written by an insider but a remarkable detail on the Nicaraguan operation great detail of how that operation has been run trying to come to grips with the CIA activities 00:37:23 in these broad numbers trying to figure out how many people have been killed you can count it up different ways 00:37:29 you can never be sure how many people are killed in the jungles of 00:37:33 of Laos or the hills of Nicaragua but adding them up as best we can we come up with a figure of $6000000.00 00:37:40 John Stockwell people killed minimum figure it has to be more than that a 1000000 in the Korean War 2000000 in the Vietnam War 800000 in Indonesia a couple of 1000000 in Cambodia 20000 and Angola the operation I was part of 22000 and Nicaragua again the figure the New York Times cites you're dealing with large numbers of people who died who would not have died if our tax dollars had not been spent by the CIA to exacerbate situations and destabilize 00:38:08 and set people to fighting so you begin to analyze these figures to figure out who are these $6000000.00 people we've 00:38:16 killed and again that's 00:38:17 a minimum figure that conservatives tell us it's a dangerous world 00:38:21 our enemies have to die so we 00:38:23 can be safe and secure 00:38:25 some of them say I'm sorry 00:38:26 about that but that's the way the world is we 00:38:28 have to accept this reality so you begin 00:38:31 John Stockwell to study these things and rip through them and analyze them and break them apart and you find some shocking common denominators come out to you namely For example since 1954 we did not care shoot teams into the Soviet Union to destabilize the country in a brutal way coincidentally 1954 was the 1st year the Soviets developed their actual capability of act. Really dropping atomic weapons on the United States for other reasons we don't do these things in England France Show More 00:39:01 Sweden Norway Belgian 00:39:02 Switzerland etc These things are all done 00:39:05 in countries 00:39:06 of the 3rd World where the governments don't have the power 00:39:09 to force the United States 00:39:11 to stop these stabilizing the country and brutalizing their people 00:39:15 these 6000000 people killed 00:39:18 are people of the me too mountains of the Congo and the jungles of Southeast Asia and the hills 00:39:24 of northern Nicaragua conspicuously there are people who don't have I.C.B.M.'s armies or navies they don't have any capability of doing physical hurt to the United States the 22000 00:39:37 killed in Nicaragua for example there conspicuously not Russians they're not Cuban soldiers 00:39:43 or advisors they're not even percentage wise 00:39:46 mostly son and he says they're mostly rag poor peasants and polluting a high percentage 00:39:51 of women and children communists I'm sorry they're mostly 00:39:56 Roman Catholics enemies of the United States 00:40:00 John Stockwell I can't give you that one either because we have all these witnesses who gone down to live in their villages with them and they invariably come back to testify that the Nicaraguans of the warmest people on the face of the earth and they love people from the United States and they simply cannot understand why we would want our leaders would want to rationalize spending a $1000000000.00 on a contra force to go into their villages to kill them 00:40:25 and mutilate them while their families are forced 00:40:28 to watch. Meanwhile CIA activities 00:40:31 of course have taken their own left their own permanent mark on us 00:40:35 of society the M.K. ultra program 00:40:37 I'll talk about it in greater detail if you like 00:40:40 in the question and answer 00:40:42 we don't have full detail 00:40:43 about this but we have enough 00:40:44 to know enough to be thoroughly chilled by it the pro 00:40:49 agency book the agency by John Raine Les which is the memoirs of C.I. founders Larry 00:40:55 Hughes generate Kline and 00:40:56 others says that there 00:40:57 were $175.00 different projects and that 00:41:01 one program we know of about 5 00:41:03 of them these were experimentations was swine fever would 00:41:06 give fever with deadly diseases with psychedelic drugs on American 00:41:11 population groupings without their permission in many cases if you were reading the newspapers in October 00:41:17 of 1988 you notice that 00:41:19 there was a settlement declared between the CIA and the victims at McGill University in Canada where the C.I. had been working with a mad psychiatry as to his taking the patients who came 00:41:31 to him for help and shooting them up with house hallucinogenic drugs to experiment 00:41:36 with their minds instead 00:41:37 of healing them and this was a CIA program 00:41:40 for which with your tax 00:41:42 dollars we eventually pay damages to the to the victims 00:41:45 read for yourselves again 00:41:47 John Stockwell as I say read the agency by John Ridley read clouds of secrecy by Leonard Cole a professor from Rutgers and you find that this program is still going on today read In Search of The Manchurian Candidate by John Marks published by New York Times Press 00:42:03 in 1979 based 114000 documents gotten out of the CIA under the Freedom of Information Act or go through the back issues of covert action information bulletin which has a dozen solid articles about this program Colonel White one 00:42:19 of the founders of this program one 00:42:21 of the founders of the CIA retiring about the time I went in in the mid sixty's. Wrote from retired. And a letter about to a friend and then agreed 00:42:31 to have it published why not 00:42:33 he said and so we have it in his handwriting he wrote I toiled wholeheartedly in the vineyards because it was fun fun fun where else could a red blooded American boy like killed cheat steal rape and pillage with the 00:42:47 blessings of the old highest 00:42:48 . Then we had the MH chaos program 00:42:50 in the Cointelpro program CIA and F.B.I. programs where they were manipulating student and labor organizations 00:42:58 and civic organizations disrupting them trying to redirect them we have the findings of the Church Committee that they were getting journalists up to about $200.00 journalists 00:43:09 including some of the biggest names in the business and getting them to cooperate with the CIA to put its propaganda into our media so that we would be influenced with misunderstandings 00:43:20 of what was happening in Southeast Asia career 00:43:22 Vietnam or China or 00:43:24 Central America other parts 00:43:25 of the world that our 00:43:26 government wanted to destabilise and attack and fight wars co-opting professors to work with the CIA to MIT to manipulate 00:43:34 student groups and build files on students publishing $1200.00 books in which they were paying professors scholars journalists to write books and their names and these books are still in our libraries today because the Church Committee couldn't force 00:43:48 the CIA to reveal 00:43:50 the titles C.I. propaganda so that if you're doing your dissertation on the Vietnam War for example probably one or 2 dozen of the books that you will have in your bibliography 00:44:00 if not more 00:44:01 will in fact be C.I. propaganda and you can only guess and try to discern which is which and this is not ancient history F.B.I. Director William Sessions announced about this time 00:44:14 last year that he was disciplining officers 00:44:16 that he found had been 00:44:17 improperly targeting C. spece 00:44:19 and $160.00 00:44:21 John Stockwell of the civic organizations and this summer the Congressional Committee said there were a total of $1600.00 groups that had been targeted and listed as they say improperly by the F.B.I. again the same type of programs as the M M H chaos and COINTELPRO programs 00:44:39 and that's just F.B.I. the CIA 00:44:41 was doing the same thing during the same period of time but there's been no confession or revelation of what they were doing nor. Has there been a publication of the lists of the names of the the groups that were targeted 00:44:53 so if 00:44:54 you had trouble in one of your groups you can only guess 00:44:57 if it was because of F.B.I. or CIA disruption or just pure and simply human foible drug 00:45:04 every major area of operation in which the 00:45:08 CIA has work has left behind a 00:45:10 major functioning drug 00:45:11 cartel again this is a major 00:45:13 subject we could talk about all night I'll just mention it 00:45:17 we can go back to it in detail if you like in the question and answer the French 00:45:21 connection directly from the 00:45:23 John Stockwell O.S.'s the CIA's getting lucky Luciana out of prison and funding him to activate the mafia to work with the U.S. forces during the war and then right after the war to break up the strikes on the docks in March say the Golden 00:45:39 Triangle in Southeast Asia grew directly out of our covert policies there before it had been run by French intelligence with the Corsican Mafia we took over with our Air America and civil air transport planes flying in arms to our allies flying back out with the heroin the 1st target being US G.I.'s during the Vietnam War 00:46:00 the 2nd target being the United States itself. The 00:46:04 Golden Crescent Afghanistan of course is the largest 00:46:08 covert operation the CIA has run to date we understand in terms of the hundreds 00:46:12 of millions of dollars it's cost going 00:46:14 on for over a year and sure enough after about 6 years the Golden Crescent in that area becomes the 00:46:20 largest source of heroin in 00:46:21 the world today and then again to mention 00:46:24 the meddling Colombian cocaine cartel getting the big surge of its 00:46:28 activities during the eighty's the importation of cocaine in 1901 according to the D.E.A.'s Being a 1000 kilograms jumping 00:46:38 to 35000 kilograms 00:46:41 a little over 35 tons in 1987 we have again the findings of the Curie committee the findings of investigative journalist 00:46:51 the massive overlapping 00:46:53 between the contra program and the met a year in smuggling drugs into 00:46:58 John Stockwell this country the beauty of it being that the Contras the people who were running the contra program for the CIA were eminently corruptible and the planes would fly down with arms and come back to our National Guard and Air Force bases where they had C.I. clearances so 00:47:14 they could lead land at Homestead 00:47:16 and then have passes in a low tone to the trucks and clear the bases without being stopped 00:47:21 and when they would be stopped 00:47:23 or someone like Leon Kellner the attorney down in in Florida trying to prosecute word would come down from the attorney general's office. From the attorney 00:47:33 general's office 00:47:34 to tell them that it was national security that they should 00:47:38 not try to prosecute this thing even Adolfo Calero as brother in law caught 00:47:43 involved in in the importation of 200 kilograms of cocaine into 00:47:49 this country and not prosecuted again 00:47:51 because they said it involved US national security namely the destabilization of Nicaragua 00:47:56 see for yourselves 00:47:58 if you like to get your information from video see guns drugs and 00:48:03 John Stockwell the CIA the frontline P.B.S. show or read for yourselves read the great heroine coup by and recruit read the Iran Contra connection by Peter Dale Scott read the politics of heroin in Southeast Asia by all McCloy read the cocaine wars by Paul Eddy read out of control by Lesley Coburn read Mafia Kingfish by John Davis read the senator must die by 00:48:28 Bob morrow 80 00:48:30 percent of the people in this country have been polled 00:48:32 for some time when their pinned down do you believe that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in killing John Kennedy or was there a conspiracy 80 00:48:41 percent of the people have been saying 00:48:43 there had to be a conspiracy but we were saying this without having the facts 00:48:47 without being able to say 00:48:49 what kind of a conspiracy who was behind it now we 00:48:53 have the facts out in abundant detail this by the mid by the spring 00:48:58 of 1963 00:49:00 the liberal President John Kennedy had antagonized a number of powerful and very ugly forces 00:49:07 John Stockwell in this country the CIA's O.-P. mine Guus J M wave group out of Florida that had been attacking Cuba like the Contras in Nicaragua with lots of atrocities and vicious activities and a program to assassinate leaders including Fidel Castro 00:49:25 they hated Kennedy because the Bay of Pigs fiasco 00:49:28 although it was their fault it was bungled they blamed him for not sending in the Marines to bail them out and they hated 00:49:36 him for that and they hated him for making a deal with the Russians to have the Russian missiles withdrawn from Cuba 00:49:42 with the promise that we would not invade 00:49:44 Cuba. And also at the same time because of that deal Kennedy was shutting 00:49:49 down their destabilization 00:49:51 contra type program going from Florida to Cuba 00:49:56 and they hated him for that they were very angry and they were armed and they were practiced and trained at 00:50:01 military type ambushes 00:50:03 the right wing military was angry because Kennedy had decided 00:50:07 to pull us out of the Vietnam War the conservative Dallas businessmen were angry because he was moving to terminate the oil depletion 00:50:13 allowance is that had made them so terrifically 00:50:16 rich over a period of years the Deep South was becoming enraged because this was an era of deep segregation 00:50:23 and he was beginning to say 00:50:25 we've got to let go we've got to loosen up we've got to stop the segregation and the south 00:50:30 and some very heavy people were very thing 00:50:32 very angry and fighting killing mad about that and the Mafia 00:50:37 was in battle John Kennedy 00:50:39 the president and his brother Bobby the attorney general had for years been waging a war 00:50:44 against the Mafia 00:50:45 John Stockwell trying to put the leaders in jail throwing Carlos Marcello the Don from New Orleans out of the country going after them in a serious systematic way and it turned out that there were numerous threats and indications of the mafia's plans to kill the Kennedy brothers 00:51:03 the war as they saw it between 00:51:06 themselves and the Kennedy brothers so what happened was a team of what they call CIA renegades because it wasn't the coat and tie people inside the building like myself 00:51:18 and David McMichael I think is sitting in the back 00:51:20 CIA officers who were all of the establishment 00:51:23 John Stockwell inside it was the Renegades down in Florida who were working this this this destabilization activity against Cuba Working with Cuban exiles overlapping greatly with the Mafia which was involved in this flow 00:51:38 of drugs from Cuba into the United States these people 00:51:43 plotted a military style ambushed. And 00:51:46 yes and they set up a team of shooters 00:51:48 on the top of buildings they had 00:51:50 cooperation of someone in the Secret Service they had the cooperation of the Dallas police they got the parade route redirected they got Kennedy into this the 00:52:00 cars into this place where we would have to make 120 00:52:02 degree turn the Secret Service driver stopped 00:52:05 when the bullets began flying and anyone who's been through that kind of training and I've been through their bang 00:52:11 and burn courses they drill it into you that when the bullets start flying 00:52:16 in a situation like you have a president or yourself 00:52:19 or something you mash down on the gas and you get the 00:52:21 hell out of there you don't stop and look around as the seasoned Secret 00:52:25 Service driver did in fact and Kennedy 00:52:28 was shot down short distances 00:52:30 from shooting stations probably 4 of them firing probably 7 shots he was hit twice 00:52:37 once in the back once in the front of 00:52:39 the neck and twice in the hit Connally was hit once or twice 00:52:43 2 bullets were fired on each side of the thing the convoy then blasted 00:52:47 away and got out of there immediately 00:52:49 the F.B.I. launched the cover 00:52:51 up the announced purpose by the people in the establishment 00:52:55 being to prove 00:52:57 to reassure as they put it the nation that it was the work 00:53:00 of the lone assassin Lee Harvey Oswald the evidence was 00:53:05 tampered with massively the President's body was altered the photographs 00:53:09 of the autopsy were or were altered 00:53:12 and 49 witnesses were killed so they could 00:53:15 not blow the whistle and testify and blow this thing open until this day despite the fact that the House Committee in 1979 concluded 00:53:23 that it was a conspiracy there has been no formal investigation by the justice department of the conspiracy to kill 00:53:31 our president this was nothing 00:53:34 less than I who date thought they were faced they the conservatives the ones that hated John Kennedy were faced with his reelection and possibly his brother's 00:53:44 after that and they couldn't. Not be bothered to 00:53:46 wait for democracy to take its course so 00:53:49 they plotted an ambush ambush and they killed him 00:53:52 and their choice 00:53:54 man who was playing ball with them who was accepting 00:53:57 money from the mob Lyndon Johnson moved right in to the presidency and the oil depletion allowance the Vietnam War the essential things they wanted 00:54:06 they got immediately the crusade against organized crime was dropped and world went on as they wanted it to according to their wishes without their having to bother with 00:54:16 an election read for yourselves we've got a number of meticulously 00:54:21 researched books out 00:54:22 on the market now and a bunch of people who are determined to bring this out and finally to unhappy Cade's later 00:54:29 make it clear to the people that the government must sooner or later 00:54:33 face the truth and go after 00:54:36 John Stockwell and punish the people who are responsible for assassinating our president read high treason by Groden and Livingston read the senator must die or be trailed by Bob more read on the trail of the assassin by Jim Garrison read Contract on America the best bestseller that's afoot today by David shine read Mafia Kingfish by John Davis read gumshoe by Josiah Thompson read reasonable doubt by Kurt read best 00:55:05 evidence by David Lifton 00:55:07 read secrecy and power the 00:55:08 life of J. Edgar Hoover by Richard Powers 00:55:10 among other things you will find that J. Edgar Hoover the F.B.I. director 00:55:15 John Stockwell was a major hoodlum he was the master of blackmail in this country everyone in Washington knew it he was building files on senators and congresspeople if they crossed him they would be exposed if they tried to force an investigation of the F.B.I. they would be exposed personally if they 00:55:35 tried to force investigations of the mafia 00:55:38 they would be exposed Richard Nixon had mob ties dating back to his 00:55:42 1st election campaign 00:55:44 in California. Lyndon 00:55:46 Johnson anyone down in Texas could tell you that his campaigns were very dirty and now we've come to the breathtaking scandal of having this man Manuel Noriega 00:55:57 . 00:55:59 Who's a former paid CIA agent under 6 00:56:02 presidents That's according to George Bush he revealed 00:56:05 that information in the presidential debates with Michael Dukakis this man Noriega 00:56:10 the dictator of Panama an indicted 00:56:13 drug dealer boasting that 00:56:15 he has blackmail control over George Bush the United 00:56:18 States president I refer you to the Newsweek May 23988 issue in which it's about Noriega concludes with Noriega's quote quotation marks I have George Bush by the ball 00:56:32 this may 00:56:34 help you understand 00:56:36 why of all the dictators in the world who are smuggling 00:56:39 drugs who are not very nice who have manipulated elections why George Bush has 00:56:45 John Stockwell a fixation on Noriega he's got a problem there he's got to keep the pressure on Noriega else if Noriega ever got some credibility working who knows what might happen in our own legal system up here I worked for George Bush personally at the end of the Angolan operation when he was CIA 00:57:04 director in 1976 we had broken the law and we had perjured ourselves to cover it up we've big Henry Kissinger and Bill 00:57:14 Colby mostly me being 00:57:15 in a staff position under them Bush's policies were not to find out the truth and punish the perpetrators and clean up the CIA 00:57:24 John Stockwell It was to cover for us he went to the congressional committees and said I wasn't here but these nice people I mean he's a very nice person by the way he would walk down the hall shaking our hand saying hello I'm George Bush and I want you to know I love being here working with all 00:57:40 these fine people in the CIA 00:57:41 and we were saying Ha I mean this is the CIA director. Posed to have kind of an aura you know and but he was going to the Congress saying I can't believe that these nice people out there would do the things 00:57:53 that you're alleging but I'll 00:57:55 check and then he had but 00:57:58 and then he had a young attorney sent down to my office to 00:58:01 go through my files to purge them of 00:58:04 documents that would prove exactly what they were accusing 00:58:06 us of and then he went back to them and said 00:58:09 John Stockwell We've checked there are no files in the agency that prove anything like you're alleging therefore you can drop it and they did and the Orlando literally a killing this is a bombing in Washington Square in our capital done by CIA or former CIA 00:58:25 agents with Dina agents from the Chilean service 00:58:29 he immediately went to the Justice Department and asked them to soft pedal it because 00:58:33 he said it involves sensitive relationships with other countries meaning the service in Chile a bombing 00:58:38 in this capital and he wants to cover 00:58:40 it up he also went to the 00:58:42 veterans of the OPI mongoose destabilization of Cuba when Johnson had shut that program down or 00:58:49 Kennedy it shut it down and Johnson had let it die these people 00:58:52 had turned to drugs modeling and murder and bombing 00:58:55 shooting bazookas that are at ships 00:58:57 coming into the Miami Harbor stuff 00:58:59 like that out of control he went to them and said look the pressure 00:59:03 is mounting you've got to get your 00:59:04 act out of the country and in June of 76 they went to the Dominican 00:59:09 Republic and had a meeting and formed this group planning their activities counter-revolutionary unit and October 6 of 1976 they blew up an airplane that was 00:59:20 taking off from Barbados killing $73.00 00:59:21 John Stockwell passengers on board in a royal act of terrorism Louis pathetic ideas and Orlando Bosch were jailed in Venezuela for being the authors of that bombing we have classified 00:59:35 testimony before the Senate Church Committee and 00:59:37 before the house assassination committee that Orlando Bosch was also a member 00:59:42 of the team that killed 00:59:43 President Kennedy. In the Iran Contra scandal we have a very curious and awesome and 00:59:50 John Stockwell awful situation where the vice president was supposedly in charge of an anti drug task force where he got involved in the contra program where he had this man done Greg a long time CIA officer working as his national security advisor and 01:00:05 Greg had a relationship with Felix Rodriguez who was one 01:00:08 of the Bay of Pigs veterans one of the drug smuggling these stabilizing people working against Cuba who was with Don great 01:00:16 in M R 3 in Vietnam my 01:00:18 military region in Vietnam although we did not overlap there they were there before I got there Bush has done great working for him and they placed Felix Rhodri because and he looked bungle in El Salvador where he's in charge of and we have the documents proving that he was involved in primarily 01:00:34 working with the Contra Air Force and these were the planes 01:00:37 that were flying the drugs 01:00:39 the arms to the Contras and the drugs back to the United States we have testimony before courts and evidence and the trial of Miyan Rodrigue because that they delivered they being Medion laundering 01:00:50 money for the Mehdi and delivered $10000000.00 01:00:52 to the Contras through Felix road because buying access to this airwing Now these people got 01:01:00 loose pathetic ideas out of prison in Venezuela 01:01:02 Felix Rodriguez told the press he said we needed him he's a good man and they got Louis 01:01:07 pathetic ideas out of Venezuela to help them 01:01:10 with this program and this man 01:01:12 was the terrorist who was involved in blowing up the passenger plane that was taking off 01:01:17 John Stockwell from Barbados and he's working for Felix Rodriguez who is reporting directly to the vice president's office Vice President George Bush's office and flying up to report in person and going into Bush's office to report Bush says he doesn't remember there ever talking about the contra program 01:01:34 or anything down in Central America they were talking about 01:01:36 their lunch or dinner or something seeing the trouble with this is that with Ronald Reagan 01:01:42 you really could believe that he didn't understand when people bring. The man's mind skipped 01:01:48 in and out as everyone well knew 01:01:50 but George Bush is an intelligence person it's very difficult to believe that he would not be mentally involved 01:01:56 in these things but even if 01:01:58 by chance they did talk about 01:02:00 lunch or breakfast when it became 01:02:02 clear we brought it out in the media vigorously and the Congress discussed it that a known terrorist was working one step up 01:02:10 the chain or down the chain of command from him reporting into his office he 01:02:14 did not perjure himself of these associations to the contrary he went on and nominated Don great to be and of Korea where I believe 01:02:25 he is today one might 01:02:26 speculate going back to Noriega's 01:02:29 boast that George Bush could not separate himself from these people 01:02:33 because of what they would know of their involvement with him 01:02:37 going back to the CIA days and to the activities when he was vice president working with them looking at George Bush's policies now he's been 01:02:45 in office a few months and we can begin to measure the personality of his presidency he's maintaining a slightly 01:02:51 lower less noisy profile 01:02:53 than Ronald Reagan 01:02:55 but he's continuing his policies across the 01:02:57 globe Bush has refused 01:02:59 John Stockwell the Soviets offer for both superpowers to abstain from delivering arms to the combatants in Afghanistan he has asked for military aid for the Contras in Nicaragua so they could continue fighting and he is pressing ahead with vigorous plans to interfere with the elections in Nicaragua that's 01:03:16 exactly what's happening 01:03:17 now when these Contras are going back across 01:03:19 the border and uniform with their weapons to disrupt the elections in Nicaragua today he has already entered fared with the elections and Panama if you recall 01:03:28 the Congress allocated 01:03:30 John Stockwell $10000000.00 for the purpose of disrupting those elections he encouraged a disastrous coup d'etat in Panama that blew up on must say and his own fates he's delivering arms through Thailand into company destabilizing that country that. And had a moment's peace for 25 years 01:03:48 and he's continuing to deliver arms to Jonas Savimbi in Angola including Stinger 01:03:52 John Stockwell missiles ground to air missiles after Savimbi has boasted openly of shooting down passenger planes and he's continued military support for the death squads in El Salvador and under the guise of the drug war he's putting U.S. 01:04:07 military into Latin America 01:04:09 where they're doing the same thing in countries like they've been doing in El Salvador flying 01:04:14 planes strafing 01:04:16 and rocketing villages Meanwhile 01:04:19 despite glasnost the Soviet record is not all 01:04:22 that much better their continuing 01:04:24 to pump arms into Afghanistan and come up with their increasing expenditures on their 01:04:30 military in fact last most was not intended to benefit the 3rd World the impetus behind glass nose was Soviet economic problems 01:04:38 not sympathy for the 01:04:39 3rd world if you go 01:04:41 back and read Andre cozied up the article 01:04:43 in The New York Times on the on January 01:04:45 7th 1989 01:04:47 you find he's calling for the Soviet Union to join with the United States 01:04:51 in the capitalist solution 01:04:53 and supporting the status quo and what they call stability and countries 01:04:57 of the world in the interest of world trade in which the Soviet Union 01:05:01 would become more active and we find the most shocking thing of all to date is that today Soviet attack helicopters designed for the fighting in Afghanistan 01:05:12 are now being used in joint operations with U.S. military and Peruvian military in Peru to strafe and rocket villagers there 01:05:23 meanwhile you've 01:05:25 got to be screaming Why what is the purpose of all this and I promise just bring it all together and show you how these things 01:05:31 and to relate and in a very 01:05:33 few minutes I propose to do that so we can get on to the question and answer period which is really the most fun part where you can direct you know your interest in these things why would we spend billions of dollars 01:05:44 to destabilize 01:05:46 every corner of the globe for 4 or 5 decades. Economics I mean it's a complex world there are lots of reasons there are people 01:05:54 who do these things just because they 01:05:55 think they're fun to blow things up and kill people but economics the biggest 150000000000 dollar drug trade speaks for itself the 3rd the 2nd most profitable industry in the world of course 01:06:08 is the production of arms $3000000000.00 a day bought and sold of weapons the defense corporations 01:06:15 making 20 01:06:16 to 24 percent profit 01:06:18 we just got through spending a total of $2.00 trillion dollars on the largest arms buildup perhaps in the history of the world certainly 01:06:26 of any peacetime 01:06:28 arms buildup and our debt increasing by just about exactly the same amount during that period of time 01:06:34 the result is that we've created a society that's dominated 01:06:37 by of what President Eisenhower called the Military Industrial Complex the US taxpayer is not carrying a gigantic burden. One 3rd of our budget about is for the military $0.53 according to The Washington Post of every tax 01:06:53 dollar goes to the military 01:06:55 we begin the conditioning to war 01:06:57 in this country this permanent war complex we maintain 01:07:01 pretending we're good guys at the age of 2. 01:07:05 This is the age at which we put our children in front of the one night babysitter and turn it on so we can go wash the dishes or take a break and they watch the same show with different characters 01:07:15 10 or 15 times a day and I'm talking 01:07:18 about I have a kid so I meant of these things you know he 01:07:21 men and Sheena and Scooby Doo even and the Transformers and 01:07:26 the Decepticons and what each one of these nice little 01:07:29 people put upon by ugly evil forces always saying please be nice the evil forces insist 01:07:36 John Stockwell on attacking and at the last minute the good guys rise up and stomp them down cut commercial and we move on you know to the next show until it's estimated when we graduate from high school we've spent more time watching violence 01:07:50 on television 01:07:51 than we've spent in the classrooms itself and then you get 01:07:55 into the movies with Been feeding ourselves during this military build up during the eighty's Rambo commando read on the rocky Siri is under siege under siege Delta Force America missing in action Top Gun heartbreak bridge death 01:08:09 before dishonor platoon 01:08:10 Hamburger Hill tour of duty 01:08:12 China Beach and they go 01:08:13 on and on how many people 01:08:15 saw the movie Red Dawn by 01:08:18 the way this is fun don't 01:08:19 John Stockwell be embarrassed it's a great movie now. This this story it's science fiction the producer of this movie went on television around the nation saying it was his purpose to create a movie that would make people with that would draw people back to war that would make them feel war could be a good and exciting thing and this film was actually shown in marine boot camps 01:08:41 to motivate people and the National Guard groups that were about to go down to train in Honduras for 01:08:46 the possible invasion of Nicaragua 01:08:48 the science fiction is that 01:08:50 they have a force issue a recall of Russians Cubans a Nicaraguans 01:08:54 who invaded the United States and they've gotten all the way to the Rocky 01:08:57 Mountains. Now you ask yourself why the 01:09:01 planning as they did the movie why did they pick 01:09:03 Russians Cubans in it get out when I mean it would be a 01:09:06 better movie if they picked Russians Canadians and Cubans so because because Canada is an industrial country and there's 01:09:14 a huge border and there could be the Russians coming across at 100 places and 01:09:18 pinning us against Cuba I mean you could kind of get your head I mean it's all science fiction you know blow off our nuclear weapons and our army and all of that this is the 01:09:26 given so why did they pick God one instead of say 01:09:30 Canada and the answer is of course they were targeting 01:09:32 Nicaragua for a possible invasion by US troops so they had to condition the people that Nicaragua 01:09:38 John Stockwell would be the next enemy the next target anyway this force gets all the way to the Rocky Mountains where they're eventually stopped by the high school football team. Now. Now. I submit to you that the eighty's you see is the big cage of the middle age women this is you know Dallas and Dynasty and the Golden Girls and Murder She Wrote Linda Evans you know is in better physical condition than I am and Joan Collins is older than I am and she is a symbol in the novelist's workouts in the jogging I mean eighty's movie would have been the Soviet Cuban's a Nicaraguans with middle age school teachers running through the mountains and shooting them down and drinking beers blood and all of that so why did they pick the high school football team you see the answer is obvious they're going to fight the next war with 18 year olds and 19 year olds it's not going to be the middle age 50 year olds we're too smart We've Show More 01:10:33 seen the cynicism of war we wouldn't 01:10:35 John Stockwell buy it it's at that age the high school graduates where the young men are suffering from their massive doses of testosterone poisoning and their minds have not yet had a chance to be filled for all of them some are precautious but many of them have not yet had a chance to fill their minds with experience to understand what the world is all about to understand how their. Being Hughes 01:10:59 so that's why they targeted that 01:11:00 film at the high school and then you look at the ads on television that were pumping out us then and now join the army be all that you can be with these tanks 01:11:10 jumping ditches and helicopters going to 100 miles an hour and these things are great I watch 01:11:15 John Stockwell them and come up on the edge of my chair and we didn't have tanks like that when David and I were in the Marine Corps they would jump a little and break down and they were not coming to rise and then you know they didn't go in the helicopters went about 01:11:29 80 miles an hour not 200 miles 01:11:31 an hour and 01:11:32 so you know and then I say wait a minute what's going 01:11:34 on here what's missing you know 01:11:36 where the young men with their legs blown 01:11:38 John Stockwell off at the knees with their intestines wrapped around their necks and the answer is that these things are not meant to educate you see that's where they're reaching inside people's breasts and pressing buttons and manipulating people to join the Army and be all that you can be and be available 01:11:52 to be sent down to Central America 01:11:54 to kill people and 01:11:56 John Stockwell to die for your country and then there's the most insidious that I think I've seen in all of the days that I've watched television this is the one of the soldier coming home on vacation in uniform handsome young man he's met by his brother I think he's getting off a train and he says Dad never did understand why I join the army and then they're driving and he says Do you think you'll ever forgive 01:12:17 me and then the boy says well you know dad and then they get in the living 01:12:21 John Stockwell room and the young soldier says Dad and the father turns and hugs in minerals forgiven and what's the point they must have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on this ad what's the point the point you see is that there are a lot of fathers in this country that are saying do not join the army they've seen the Vietnam War in the Korean War and they 01:12:40 seen the cynicism and they're telling their sons not to 01:12:43 John Stockwell join the army and this ad is saying that it's OK according to the values of US society to defy your father and join the army. Now. The result of course of of this runaway arms race that we've got going with this expenditure giant expenditures on the military is that we can't afford it we're having to cut every conceivable social service we can't afford to care for the old people or the poor people of the handicapped people or the farmers are to help the young people get through college and we're gutting Social Security to cover the deficit I repeat you and I got a job we're taxed the FICA tax it's 15 percent your employer pays 7 and a half if you're self-employed like me you pay all 15 percent and this is your retirement you're supposed to get that back when you're $65.00 Show More 01:13:36 and they're spending that money like it was when for profits to cover the deficit that they run up on the production of arms the real deficits are running about $300000000000.00 01:13:46 They're calling them one $152000000000.00 the difference they're claiming 01:13:50 against boring against the Social Security retirement fund that belongs to us 01:13:55 and they're spending it on their military today. What's happening is 01:14:00 that the United States has plunged 01:14:02 John Stockwell relative to the less the rest of the world 25 percent of the people in this country are now functionally illiterate were 6 than the world in terms of the percentage of children in school were 10th in the world in quality of education were 7th in the world in terms of life expectancy were 20th in the world in terms of infant mortality to sell these sacrifices to the American people the world has to be 01:14:26 hostile and dangerous 01:14:28 John Stockwell if the world were peaceful we would never put up with this kind of expenditure on arms these thousands of C.I. destabilisation to have the function of killing people who never were our enemies but the effect of leaving behind for each one of them perhaps 5 loved ones who are now traumatically 01:14:46 condition to violence 01:14:47 John Stockwell to ensure that the world will go on being violent and in each one of them leaving behind the Contras and the Cuban exiles and the people in Southeast Asia and helps elsewhere that we've trained into this brutality to guarantee that the world will go on being brutal to justify this giant arm scam and keep it going Meanwhile even if the morality of all this and the damage to our nation doesn't bother you we've got to take a serious look at this the arms race is breaking the economies of both of the superpowers the multinational defense corporations have no great loyalty to the United States they are no longer U.S. corporations they make enormous profits and invest the money overseas they are quite willing to sell the US economy down the drain in order to make their profits while the United States is producing in the next missiles which you put in the ground which can never be used and most significantly they can never be traded countries overseas our allies not our enemies are producing Sony's And Toyota's and passing us by and the trade deficit and we're plunging deep into debt. To take a beautiful clear simple example President Reagan spent more money on his got more presidential energy on his contra program against Nicaragua than any other aspect of the presidency he spent more time talking publicly about his Contras than any other aspect of the presidency his contre program in Nicaragua Nicaragua a country with 2 elevators while Japan was proceeding to capture 30 percent of the international overseas exchange and the United Show More 01:16:29 States became a debtor nation for 01:16:30 John Stockwell the 1st time since World War one with the greatest debt in the history of the world the 2nd reason that we've got to take a long hard look at this system of doing business is because the result of a runaway arms race is the production of arms We've such aerated with the world trapped it as Carl Sagan says with 60000 thermonuclear weapons and 1981 we had the capability of destroying utterly 80 and 80 Soviet Union of rendering 20 planets uninhabitable Now despite the I.N.F. Treaty the world is 4 times as dangerous as it was in 1981 the US and the U.S.S.R. have effected a 40 percent increase in the numbers of their strategic weapons and they've made them more modern and more efficient the U.S. is currently racing to deploy the B. one B. bomber the B. 2 bomber the a mix missile to try to missiles and the Star Wars programs Meanwhile the Soviet Union is deploying $3300.00 more more accurate more sophisticated strategic weapons that can target any corner of the United States and the Soviet Union now the makers of the journal will plant our marketing a nuclear reactor for use in space and a country wants to buy one they'll sell him one and they're 9 other countries rushing to join the nuclear club and they tell us these things are fail safe we don't have to worry about them and even. If you don't have time to read the books or the scientific articles or even the newspapers if you've only read the headlines you know that none of this stuff is failsafe backing up a couple of years and 112 Show More 01:18:10 month period of time the Challenger 2 blew up a Delta rocket blew up too tight missiles blew up a French Ariane missile blew up a chair a noble plant melted down in a Soviet 01:18:21 US S. a teen blew up and that was not a particularly bad year we've dropped 7 bombs accidentally 01:18:28 out of airplanes I won't take the time to list 01:18:30 them all but the one over South Carolina we never found and so they went in and bought a huge tract of the swamp land and declared it a nuclear restricted zone and that bomb presumably 01:18:41 is still there and that brackish water 01:18:43 John Stockwell rusting Unless of course someone else has found it 6 submarines that sunk into the bottom of the ocean we recovered $2.00 and $1.00 of ours one of theirs at least 4 submarines down twisted and rusting in the bottom of the ocean with their nuclear plants and nuclear weapons on board the I.P.S. reported last spring that there is debris from 50 nuclear reactors and nuclear weapons scattering the bottom of the ocean today and we have hundreds of millions of gallons of radioactive Show More 01:19:10 waste that we have no idea what 01:19:12 to do with that we'll still be talked to 50000 years 01:19:16 from now and huge stockpiles 01:19:18 of chemical and biological weapons 01:19:20 and proceeding 01:19:21 John Stockwell apace integral into all of this I haven't had the time to show the relationship but I will if you want to ask him the question and answer is the systematic destruction destruction of our environment Carl Sagan says a species divided against itself cannot survive. A planet divided against itself cannot survive Eisenhower as he was leaving office in a speech said the people of the world genuinely want peace some day the leaders of the world are going to have to give in and give it to them Helen Caldicott talking around the nation on this issue Show More 01:19:56 with some passion says get involved your planet is that they get terminally ill with this public health disease which is the arms race if we don't clean it up the planet will die and she notes if you will get to work on it you'll feel better about yourself and your planet 01:20:12 and your environment and your life and 01:20:14 she notes very dramatically that if you do get involved in working on this problem with the missile start going off some day and there's a few minutes before the one lands on your town at least you can turn 01:20:26 to your loved one and hug them and say honey at least we try. Now if I stop this right 01:20:32 now I would be doing you a great service because you 01:20:36 know it is such an awesome down subject terrifying and disempowering and yet people have done dramatic things 01:20:45 over history to change 01:20:47 John Stockwell the way people enter related with each other glass nosed is a tentative in some ways misguided but nevertheless a step in the direction of people stopping this madness stopping the arms race that should give us hope I'll just give you 2 quick examples and then we'll go to the question and answer one these are carefully 01:21:07 chosen I've done a lot of reading 01:21:08 on the subject of hope as well one of these is the women's movement in this country 80 years ago a man could put his sisters wife daughters to work 12 hours a day 7 days a week and factories and pocket 01:21:24 their cell rules and if they didn't like 01:21:26 it he could beat them and there was nothing they could do about it and that has changed to the evolving situation of women today not by accident but by the determined struggles of 01:21:35 feminist activists and the reason I select this example is they did it without cracking skulls they did it without killing people they did it without violence My point is that if the problem is essentially testosterone poisoning as Carl Sagan calls it we're not going to solve the problem with more testosterone poisoning 01:21:55 or more violence we have to find on an evolutionary scale a new 01:22:00 way for human beings to enter relate with each other 01:22:03 or we're going to or we're going to self-destruct as a species 01:22:08 and the other example we're 01:22:10 John Stockwell all disempowered we're all so helpless the individual here in Washington or in Maine where I was a couple of nights ago are in South Texas or California you know what can I do and it's a tough one we're up against the power structure we're 01:22:24 up against the military industrial complex is with the media bought 01:22:27 in world and right into the 01:22:29 thing and the things. It's a tough one but the professor who stopped the war is a wonderful to me an inspiring example my 01:22:39 war and end goal then young professor Jerry Bender of U.C. San 01:22:43 Diego who had done his studies in Angola 01:22:45 and he saw what we were doing 01:22:47 and they bothered him and he couldn't figure out what to do about it how could he stop it so one day he picked up the telephone 01:22:53 John Stockwell and he called his senator and he said Senator Tony I have an expertise on Angola I see what the CIA is doing I think they're lying to you I think it's dangerous I would like the opportunity to brief you I will not waste your time and the senator listen to him and came back to Washington and found that we were indeed lying to the Congress and he introduced the tourney amendment to defy 76 Defense Appropriation Act that stopped my war in Angola now some years ago I came to talk to Admiral rock at the Center for Defense Information here in Washington because I was way over my head to ask him you know people ask me Admiral I said What can I do and I don't know what to tell him specifically and this beautiful Show More 01:23:39 man we were having breakfast at his home and he stood 01:23:41 up he said I love that question he said I tell people I don't know you 01:23:45 but you know yourselves you know 01:23:47 what your capabilities are he said I tell people if you can write write articles write letters write books write telegrams if you can organize 01:23:55 organize if you can travel go to 01:23:57 Nicaragua or lot or the Las Vegas test sites and see for yourself so you can be an intelligent witness to what's happening 01:24:04 in the world he said and I quote I tell people if they feel comfortable lying down in front of bombs trucks with bombs 01:24:11 John Stockwell on them to lie down in front of trucks with bombs on them but he said I tell them you got to do what you can do every day of your life you can't wait until you graduate next summer get married or get divorced or get a job because these things malfunction all the time and they're controlled by 01:24:28 by intellectual giants like Ronald. 01:24:31 And the world may not be here 01:24:34 by the time you graduate next summer 01:24:36 get divorced or get a job or whatever Thank you very much for hearing me thank you for your. Thanks for your. 01:25:13 Carla Feldpausch I just wanted to make a couple of announcements and then we'll open up the floor for question and answers we have to mikes and any child and you have questions a kind of you to write them down make the same thing clear and then just stand at the mikes and return. One of the announcements that I wanted to make your own wondering about something that you can do the CIA will be on the American University campus recruiting December 1st and you can do something about that if you don't like that idea. The deadline for. Getting an interview with the CIA is next Monday I would encourage each and every one of you to go and make an appointment with the CIA and talk with them and tell them what you think of them and tell them what you think about them being on American University campus if you want an interview with the CIA You need to go to the butler pavilion on the 4th floor in the career center and bring 20 copies of your resume. I hope you all go maybe a whole lot of us go they want to come back Show More 01:26:22 . The other thing going on. 01:26:27 The other things I want to say is. This lecture is being broadcast on C.-SPAN nationwide and I can't tell you the dates right now but only will be probably more than once and. You can look for that also D.C. cable the channel 34 public access channel will be broadcasting this lecture we have the covert action information bulletin and other materials and books on sale behind you out these back doors you can check those out after the question and answer there we are free that's available I'm going to put the interests here on this. Talk we're back here Show More 01:27:05 OK Back to Don. 01:27:11 Yes. 01:27:13 Just a question how did you come to see the light and if you could just 01:27:18 tell us briefly. Yeah terms of I 01:27:22 can tell you very briefly I can also tell you that this is a subject of another lecture that I give. Which 01:27:28 we call. 01:27:30 Getting out and getting 01:27:32 out a career in the CIA with anecdotes of how they recruit you and how they train you and. The experiences that turn your mind around or did mine and. In the brief as possible terms 01:27:45 people like myself I know of course myself quite well David I know 01:27:52 pretty well we're not people that change 01:27:55 easily by the way David why don't you 01:27:58 stand up they should know who you are David as an organizer and here in Washington who was in the 2nd Force Recon 01:28:06 John Stockwell company that I was in he was a year or 2 ahead of me. Were not people that change easily and we were conditioned by childhood experiences to believe that these were noble and right things to do defending our country from the evils of this that and the other I had to get into the CIA all the conditioning in the Marine Corps all the conditioning on the CIA I had to. It into him. At the lower levels in the CIA They keep the conditioning go and the cover stories you don't talk talk you don't talk goon talk you don't send a cable to headquarters saying send me out an assassin to knock off somebody if you did you'd get you would get put down you get reprimanded it's all very high minded there is some double speak and at a certain level operations are killing people certainly but especially for the younger officers they keep the myths go and I began to get a little higher I never made it all the way to the top by any manner of means but I did get into the management of 3 operations I did get to be a chief of station where I was dealing with policy I did get into a position in the Vietnam War in a key province where I saw the utter horror and debacle and shamefulness of the CIA's evacuation from Vietnam and I'll let that be a separate question if someone asked that I'll tell you about the evacuation from Vietnam and how Show More 01:29:34 the CIA chief of station was 01:29:36 delivering our secrets to the 01:29:38 enemy and what happened to him after that and then I came back to the States and was 01:29:44 put in charge of the Angola Task Force a big break for someone at the level of the G.S. 14 just like Ollie North 01:29:52 who was a lieutenant 01:29:54 John Stockwell colonel I was about the same grade with a similar background except I had professional training and I hope my gyroscope was bolted down solidly his is missing a couple of key bolts down on the base obviously and wobbles a little bit but nevertheless I found myself in a position where I was literally occupying the responsibilities of someone much older 17 would normally have had that job but because the chief of Africa division had been struck down with polio. And was somewhat immobile he wanted to run the. Operation but he literally needed he had no paramilitary expertise which I did and he needed a good set of legs and I was very young and energetic and jogging and lifting weights and so we were kind of a team and that put me on the subcommittee of the National Security Council running this operation internationally now you can ask in Vietnam we left our employees behind in a scandalous way and in many cases we left files behind that identified them and this is something that no Marine officer could ever do and look him self in in the mirror when he shaves anymore the rest of his life and we did it I fought it but I was forced to do it and left the country leaving my people behind so you can ask you know what why did you take this next job and without being melodramatic am not a brilliant person and I was much more confused then so there was no brilliance in my decision but quite literally I went out and sat on a rock in Great Falls park here and model about what should I do and the one thing I just could not get out of my mind as after all these years in the field running operations that did not make sense in terms of national security in terms of the benefits to the United States that were hurting people it same needlessly. I was being offered a job in the inner sanctum. Where I would have access to every document that was written about the Angolan program and its rationale everyone copy eyes only to the president memos no letter I would have access to the park Show More 01:32:16 and I just couldn't resist it if you want to dramatize 01:32:20 it you could just you could say I made 01:32:22 a deal with the devil I felt like I was joining something that would be evil and criminal but I could not resist being inside and then once I got inside I had to see it through to the end and I worked extremely 01:32:35 hard these 01:32:37 jobs this is something that North 01:32:39 John Stockwell does not exaggerate when he was writing notes saying some day I've got to get some sleep closure safe's well after midnight you're sitting back at your desk at 6 in the morning and that goes on holidays weekends around the clock Christmas on a fly overseas fly back you don't have time to go home to change clothes you're working so hard to keep all of the things going because it's happening in Angola but you're coordinating them all over the world and I didn't want to stop until it was over because I didn't want to feel like I had seen up to here and I hadn't seen the end the end of the show and I was taking notes as I went you're permitted to do that in the agency because you're having meetings staff meeting Show More 01:33:17 for example from which may come 01:33:20 John Stockwell 50 immediate cables all of them vitally important and you've got to be able to put down 7000 rifles and not 700000 rifles so a lot of people are scribbling notes and I carefully scribble notes including as rapidly verbatim as I could as what his interest said what investor had milk a he said what Jim thought Bill Colby said what each person said sometimes I couldn't keep up with him of trying to get it all down because I had a purpose not to write a book it never entered my mind I had never known anyone who had written a book at that time but I just wanted to Show More 01:33:55 know for myself what this stuff was all about just to give you one anecdote and again you can read. My book In Search of enemies so we don't have to spend more time on the Angola program except just to say that National Security Council meetings and I didn't get to 01:34:12 go to many of those the CIA 01:34:14 director would go to those I went to all 01:34:16 of the working groups subcommittee meetings but the National Security Council meetings are our crack playing they're important men and I say men because I don't know of any 01:34:26 women that have ever served on the. 01:34:28 Secretary of State Secretary of Defense vice president the president comes in sometimes the CIA director People like that with enormous responsibilities and power who are aware of their power the etiquette is that you don't keep people waiting you don't show up 30 minutes late to those meetings because the other 01:34:46 John Stockwell people are powerful and busy too but one day. Henry Kissinger came the meeting late and everyone was having to wait a minute this is not a meeting of the Supreme Court which is prescribed by law where everybody sits according seniority it's at least that time 01:35:05 it was an office not very esoteric 01:35:07 office and the White House with an oak table and some drapes and some maps but no electronic flashing boards or anything like that and people sit around a table and 01:35:15 then chairs were staffers consider around 01:35:17 the side the table and help the boss and the Secretary Defense plop down at it to in a chair to talk to somebody while we waited for Kissinger and then Kissinger came steaming in and 01:35:30 he told the secretary of defense you know I'm here we can go to work move down to your chair and the secretary 01:35:38 John Stockwell of defense said well I'm all set up here today you you sit down there today and Kissinger said no I'm the secretary of state this is my chair and you sit down there and they argued like 5 year olds for about 5 minutes and eventually the secretary of defense wouldn't move and Kissinger had to go sit down at that end of the table but he turned his back on the briefings 01:35:57 and saw he wouldn't pay attention to that 01:36:01 to what we were. Saying that 01:36:02 they because he couldn't have his chair and we were making decisions that were getting people killed and Angola and I'm not exaggerating one bit I could go on and on with such anecdotes of what I saw some of them obviously much more pertinent and tailed and serious than that one but the fact that I left afterwards I testified for 5 days to the Congress I did not plead the 5th Amendment I did not think that officers in the Marine Corps and middle lead level officers in the CIA should have the right to plead the 5th Amendment if they'd been involved in a government operation doing what they thought was their duty if they'd gone to Iraq I felt like we had a responsibility to take our medicine if if punishment was due in addition to which because of the nature and detail of my notes I knew there was no way they could put me in jail without putting Henry Kissinger in jail and the CIA director Bill Colby in jail too so that would be my consolation if they convicted us of a conspiracy in this and that's the beginning of the story because I left the agency then I wrote the book and then I went on to read endlessly and travel to pantries like Grenada and. Vietnam target countries to try to learn for myself what this stuff was all about that Show More 01:37:27 I had been part of history. If you please comment on Barbara ha I would be well to stand she added allegations of treason. Against Ronald Reagan and George 01:37:38 Bush related to the CIA's 01:37:40 murder of American military men in the act over 979 sabotage a rescue mission 01:37:47 in the Iranian desert in a bid to 01:37:50 ensure Carter's defeat Yeah 01:37:52 I certainly shall. Yet. I'm sure do just a 2nd I'm going to get to that and it's a good question but we have a couple of details before I should have done this before the address of the bibliography so that you can order copies and it may help you. Get started reading for yourself there is some students down at the University of Texas that help me by mailing this thing now and they have no financial support so you have to send them I think it's 7 dollars is their cost for the printing costs and the on votes and the mailing and whatnot and yeah yeah yeah. And also we wanted to note that there's another distinguished CIA alumnus who has gone public Mr Allen Orton and if you'd like to stand up as well he's been active and trying to speak. Is there anyone else here Alan David Show More 01:38:55 that I've missed. Lou Lou Wolf. 01:39:01 Lou are you still here Yeah Lou is the editor of the covert 01:39:06 action information bulletin which is probably done more to 01:39:11 bring the history of the covert action of the secret activities of this government 01:39:16 public than any 01:39:18 other one writer author or publisher in the nation and he's got copies back there and I highly recommend his research and work to 01:39:27 now excuse me sir getting back to your question which is a good one 01:39:30 where did you go the October 01:39:32 surprise. 01:39:38 This is a difficult this is an awkward question because I do not I cannot endorse Barbara Honegger as research because I found it 01:39:47 to be sloppy in some cases so I'm not going to comment on it 01:39:51 John Stockwell in detail I will comment on the October surprise by saying that most of the best heads that I know analyzing that event what the event is is that in 1980 our embassy was being held hostage and our media 01:40:08 was making a big issue 01:40:10 out of it as part of the surge 01:40:12 towards conservatives them that 01:40:15 eventually got Ronald Reagan and George Bush elected into the presidency and this was a massive 01:40:20 orchestrated plan that involved the A.B.C. television with America held hostage 01:40:28 John Stockwell on television several times a day to make to keep the people exercise and feeling militant with people in the Pentagon in the CIA and the State Department cooperating with the Bush Reagan candidates to Jimmy Carter's detriment The point was that in October if the hostages 01:40:50 had been released it's quite possible that Jimmy Carter would have won the election so it was urgently important that Iran not release the hostages until after the elections and they did not. And then they held them another $76.00 days until the inauguration of Ronald Reagan and released them 2 hours after he was sworn into office so he would get credit for their release and within a few weeks the 1st flow of arms was approved sale of arms to Iran secret sale of arms was in fact Show More 01:41:23 approved so the best heads that I know believe seem to agree that there was a tacit agreement at least between 01:41:33 the Bush Reagan campaign 01:41:35 and the Iranian 01:41:37 government that if they would keep the embassy people hostage 01:41:41 that the U.S. administration but re going to ministration would smile on 01:41:47 them afterwards Now as far as the details 01:41:50 of of the story that George Bush flew to Paris to deliver $40000000.00 to the Iranians as a 01:41:58 John Stockwell payment for that sort of thing in my own experience following this as closely as I can and talking to lots of journalists who have conscientiously researched this I have not found that the case has been made to the point where I would have published it had I been a journalist or editor of The Washington Post there are gaps there's just details that are not there that would have been been there I think if the story work completely true Moreover one of the very astute people I know sigh her maybe one of the best investigative journalists of our times I would say one of the very certainly maybe the best. He says the Iranians were quite smart enough to know in their own end trysts they didn't have to be told by George Bush that it would work in their interests and favor to keep the embassy hostage and let Reagan get credit for their release if they'd release the hostages after having antagonized and humiliated Carter he would come after them with a vengeance if they cooperated as the. They did with Reagan by keeping the embassy people hostage and giving red Reagan credit for getting them out Reagan would tend to go soft Show More 01:43:14 on them which which he did and Khomeini could brag 01:43:18 to his people that he had in fact impacted the American elections 01:43:21 and virtually picked who our next president would be and ensure 01:43:25 that it was his choice of satans 01:43:27 in office if you will so perhaps that will suffice as a comment on that and I again will not address 01:43:34 Barbara Honegger as writing in detail yes or getting back to what you said about Noriega maybe having the goods on Bush combined with other incidents like station chief Buckley being having all that information extracted from him and if indeed the presidency is being held hostage or certainly were were experiencing a paralysis yet denying degradation to the environment like lemmings given also the dynamic with the East and their rapid changes and is becoming more of a north south rather than east west situation so much of the CA work is analyzing Could you give us perhaps a look at the global situation and as a spiral tightens what's going on and what we can expect in the next in the Bush Show More 01:44:17 administration for example. 01:44:19 Well this is this is getting into the questions that you that you love because these this this gentleman is obviously got his finger on the pulse of what's happening in the world and is studying it in a serious way and a lot of 01:44:31 John Stockwell lectures I give are to people who who who know her Washington is and are interested in seeing the stories. The Soviet the Soviet Union to me we're in obviously the most dangerous dynamic exciting 01:44:51 troublesome period of change that I've seen since I was a kid at the end of World War 01:44:56 2. The Soviet leadership 01:45:00 has recognized that the 01:45:01 arms race has been a real bummer 01:45:04 John Stockwell for the Soviet economy that came out they came out of World War 2 with a giant complex about having been invaded once again by European powers and they said never again at any price and with an enormous at an enormous price of sacrifice of consumer goods and comforts for the Soviet people they created a superpower military so you have a country there now which in some ways is a 3rd world country but with a superpower military and nuclear weapons and all of that now the country is falling further and further behind not only Europe and the United States but also the Pacific Rim countries Singapore Taiwan for example South Korea not to mention Japan passing the Soviet Union by in terms of of effective productive industrial countries and to turn this around they simply have to get out from under this gigantic burden of production producing arms so that the people have enough of an interest I mean large portions of the Soviet Union don't have electricity they don't have adequate housing they don't have washing machines they suffer privation that we would not enjoy they spend a lot of time instead of working in the factories scurrying around another job just trying to have Show More 01:46:21 it a little better and there's an entire industry that defeating the purposes of 01:46:26 John Stockwell the major industries and the leadership eventually recognize this and that's what Gorbachev is all about the trouble is that the Soviet Union also and Lord knows the moves they've made and the crow that they've eaten they've admitted. They lost the Cold War They they've admitted that communism well in varying ways that communism they let Hungary say it's not a communist country things are happening in East Germany and Czechoslovakia that are utterly astonishing in terms of what you would have expected 3 or 4 years ago and railing openly against themselves against their own non-productivity against what they have to do to turn their situation around the trouble is that the Soviet Union has its full and fair share of Jesse Helms and Oliver North. And people then Pat Buchanan's for heaven's sake and people who are. Who who would storm Show More 01:47:21 the world who want a military machine and the word seems to be 01:47:27 that if robot chip cannot show 01:47:29 economic results 01:47:31 in the relative near future 01:47:34 either he will be ousted 01:47:35 by a conservative backlash or he will have to 01:47:40 turn the hard nose and crack down himself it seems to be 01:47:44 very much with 01:47:46 the map is being reconstructed whatever happens but it seems to be very 01:47:50 possible that in the next few years and the Soviet economic problems are not 01:47:55 problems that you can change in 2 years' time 01:47:57 20 years 50 years yes but I don't think Gorbachev can you can make the requisite 01:48:03 John Stockwell changes in the time allotted in the clocks running on so we're going to see major dramatic up evils and changes and quite possibly a major crackdown we've seen a major crackdown in China for example which was moving towards a colossal nose and the people got a taste of it and claw back to a repression like in the mid and late fifty's 01:48:25 we could see this in the Soviet 01:48:27 Union with a return to the Cold War There 01:48:30 John Stockwell are certainly plenty of people in the United States including both intellectuals who analyze it that way so if you tell it just but also people in the military industrial complex who would benefit enormously if it went that route who are quite wishfully hoping it will quite obviously wishfully wishing that it will and I can't predict what's going to happen except I'm sitting here aware of where reading the papers with a sense that we're living the most exciting and perhaps most dangerous period of history that I've witnessed in my 52 Show More 01:49:05 John Stockwell years. Or a perceived arrogance in light of all this environment you know seemingly not. Wanting to face reality here and as you so eloquently outlined are real dangerous situation and we stand was just on an economic level 01:49:21 John Stockwell alone to look at little into that it seems to me and I consult with economists every chance I get like Lloyd Dumas down in Texas and others about just that where is it going for us and mind you all economist like tell me to scholars disagree it seems about whether you know slow decline 01:49:43 of the United States or sudden 01:49:45 collapse or what's going to happen it seems to me that one possibility of what is going to evolve it's clear that we have lost economic 01:49:54 superpower status we still are a gigantic 01:49:58 driving economic machine but we're a debtor machine 01:50:02 John Stockwell other countries are healthier than we are economically their creditor countries specifically Japan and Germany. Other countries have industrial trade trade gaps trade credits instead 01:50:17 of deficit including Taiwan 01:50:19 for example in Korea and Singapore to our disadvantage the money away from us but what they're doing so far is reinvesting the money back buying up the debts in the United States 01:50:31 it has not turned into a bad that yet it's just that we own less 01:50:35 and less of ourselves of our own country so that we're creating a situation where there will be other peoples who will be 01:50:43 John Stockwell the bankers and we will remain the policeman or the soldiers or if you will the mercenaries or describe it as you will the way this could actually work would be we obviously would have tremendous clout but we would have less control of economic decisions around the world just to give you some examples of how this works with George Bush I don't know if you caught the 60 minute show during the presidential election campaign in which 01:51:12 they revealed that 18 members of his campaign 01:51:15 John Stockwell staff had accepted 6 figure fees from other governments to advise them he had surrounded himself with international law bills. What they're moving towards is an internationalist world a multinational world the people that he represents which are the capitalists are internationalist now and they don't see the U.S. as an island in itself or their island or their country they see a world economy of which they're apart and in control and the US building missiles and they can profit from that and the US standard of living dropping that's OK with them because their standard of living is certainly not dropping and then watching you know events in and Russia and China and other parts of the world to see how they can play and tune them to the increased productivity of their own economic country one thing that Lloyd Dumas points out to me though that's pretty scary is I'm saying to him but look they spend all this money to build these weapons and then the weapons could destroy the world and they're not it doesn't seem Show More 01:52:23 like they're thinking very far ahead in terms 01:52:25 of their own interest and he says Are you kidding you know these people are looking at quarterly reports and if they're in the red for 2 quarters they're out. And they're not planning the world economy they're not planning the economic health of the United States 01:52:40 John Stockwell there's some vague trilateral planning between Europe the US and Japan how they can work together to achieve greater industrial success but basically they're looking at very short term profits of their corporations in competition with other corporations and the which is another way of saying they're not responsible they don't consider their job to be responsible for the fate of the earth that other people's words their job is to get that next quarterly report into the black Show More 01:53:13 John Stockwell and assures. Us the 1st time from the Crist against it to tonight I speak for a lot of people there and thanking you for your work there is great talk you. Also I had a question about Southern Africa and with the conditions there talk of maybe Perestroika and in Southern Africa in South Africa I was wondering if you give that any credence it seems hard for me to believe and just to talk about what South Africa's role has been in destabilizing that whole region and how the CIA uses nations like South Africa Israel Taiwan. In it Show More 01:53:55 in its work. I don't know why I call people like Jerry Bender who's the best scholar that I know on Southern Africa I mentioned him you know during the talk and 01:54:07 in London I talked to Victoria Britton whose book. 01:54:12 John Stockwell Certainly doesn't give you much hope about a change of whatever in in South Africa and she's detailing the continuing horrors and they continue nevertheless they seem to be releasing some long term prisoners political prisoners and I read in the paper today that they seem to be making plans to release Mandela himself and it may be no I know I visited 01:54:38 South Africa many years ago and I found that. There are a lot of whites 01:54:46 there who are not as comfortable 01:54:47 with apartheid as you would think there's 01:54:49 a hardcore segment and enough of majority that they kept it tightly buckled down but I was invited 01:54:56 and went to a sports event at the University of Cape Town I was a judo player I was on a military cruise I was going to a Goodwill sort of thing I worked out 01:55:08 and it was a totally multi-racial meeting and 01:55:12 group and the whites and blacks 01:55:13 we went drinking afterwards and I was a 01:55:15 little shocked and they were saying that the whites that were in that group were saying they didn't think apartheid was was fair or right that 01:55:24 whole. I don't know is it possible that they're getting tired they the 01:55:30 Dutch decent hard core 01:55:33 advocates of apartheid or after the deep caves are feeling the international pressure and realizing that sooner or later they have to make change and trying to work out more peaceful accommodation This is 01:55:45 what they would have us believe. Still a lot of violence going along still a lot of suffering 01:55:53 John Stockwell going on. I have not been able to get any of my gurus on the subject to say that they are confident that apartheid going to be abolished in the near future but they give credit to the fact that is being status is being changed the South Africans still want to retain control of it and the others and Mandela maybe being released and these do seem to be gestures tentative in the right direction. 01:56:21 A kind of a tepid answer but I just don't dare 01:56:25 say anything much more forceful. Did you work it out with South Africa folks when you were operating in Angola 01:56:32 Yeah I know mind you my job was in Washington national security I went to Angola 01:56:38 I had chief of station throughout 01:56:40 Africa reporting to me 01:56:43 John Stockwell and to my boss and we were working with South Africans and I definitely had personal contact with South Africans and all of that. So the answer is definitely yes the CIA I can go on to comment beyond your question had a traditional Senate for the white South Africa last was considered to be a friendly service when I 1st joined the CIA. I found the deputy chief of the Africa division was waiting for his retirement job which he had selected for him self to be pretty. Because it was considered to be the prize of old jobs because the climate is wonderful it is a beloved country or could be and her job was to see I did not run any operations there because that might offend laws and so you got to play tennis and chess and go to the cocktail party in Vienna circuit with the elite of the white South African society so it was a prize assignment years later I find John Kelly researching with I think it was C.B.S. television breaking this story that it was the CIA that originally fingered Nelson Mandela to boss for his arrest. How 20 years ago whatever it was years ago now so there's been a very intimate relationship between the 2 when the sanctions were forced upon the Reagan administration they had an exception that the CIA would not be prohibited from continuing its intimate relationship Show More 01:58:19 John Stockwell with the white South African secret service. Yes and I was the 1st I noted. That you did you seemed not to mention too much about Afghanistan which as you mentioned was the largest covert operation arguably since World War 2. I wanted. The risk of being a bit specific so I started at the risk of being a bit specific I wondered if you might comment on what many believe the covert operation CIA covert operation in Afghanistan is run by only a handful of men and how was it that the CIA if you believe that if you're familiar with it and whether or not how could that come about that the CIA would let that happen or was it a policy or did it just come about like that or could you comment Show More 01:59:06 on that. 01:59:08 You're saying 01:59:10 that it was run by a handful 01:59:11 John Stockwell of CIA men well that it still is but that it was much smaller a much smaller group of men then then typically. Most people do that for such a large operation should have been in charge for for such a large operation. 01:59:28 Well this this operation we get glimmers in glimpses of the budget now and then hundreds of millions of dollars and we get a sense of that size which would make it I mean at times when. The. Contra program was getting $19000000.00 and then $100000000.00 increments 01:59:50 John Stockwell they were getting hundreds of millions of dollars so it seemed to be a much larger operation it was never controversial the administration never chose to make it a controversial issue which they chose to make the contra program public issue they wanted to apparently because they wanted to condition the nation to an eventual 02:00:11 invasion of Nicaragua they did 02:00:14 not want to have a public 02:00:16 debate about Afghanistan and it was not a situation where. They were as vulnerable because there was a Soviet army there so it was hard. For people in 02:00:29 this country to marshal a protest of the CIA going in to 02:00:33 help the OP gunning people now in fact there was a lot of cynicism and it 02:00:37 could have been brought out 02:00:39 the Soviet invasion 02:00:41 in fact was provoked 02:00:43 by the CIA trying to engineer a coup d'etat that would would have created a government on the Soviet flying 02:00:49 that would have been loyal to the 02:00:51 John Stockwell to the CIA as Iran had been under the Shah more or less and the Soviets not willing to let that happen put in their troops so there's that kind of complexity behind the scenes and then this massive flow of arms 02:01:06 and relatively 02:01:08 little information about the details of how it was run I have not commented on it in great link because it was not an area of operations where I ever served when I was with the government nor is it an area that I visited since I left the government nor has there been a great mass of information available about it and therefore rather than speculate 02:01:31 John Stockwell I just mentioned it in passing. If they did manage to manage it with fewer people it would mean that they were setting up pipelines if you were CIA staff people they were setting up pipelines to funnel the money 02:01:46 and the arms to the forces that they were supporting in Afghanistan and this might or might not be a factor in more of that being used to to 02:01:59 to to smuggle drugs to other enterprises 02:02:03 and Stinger missiles getting lost in floating around the terrorist community so we're faced now there what 50 odd stinger missiles that are missing now that are not accounted for that might appear in you in Ireland for example or somewhere else and the people who worry about terrorism are sweating that. 02:02:26 With good good reason. Yeah it's interesting to hear you explain how the destruction of the environment figured into everything else you're talking about. 02:02:37 Yes. The destruction of the environment of course is is in some ways there is only the parallel of just the indifference to the fate of the earth the same mentality 02:02:49 that would produce $60000.00 02:02:51 thermonuclear weapons and bluff and play with them is the same mentality that saying we're not 02:02:57 going to be here very long anyway it's the James of what syndrome saying the fate of the earth the end of the earth is in sight God put 02:03:06 these things on earth for us to use them so we might as well chop down the trees you know and and D. day will come when the last tree is felled when the earth and anyway this kind 02:03:16 of short sighted thinking. Big presumption the jury fall you know God will call 02:03:24 the chosen up on the high end and a wishing you know begging please call us kind 02:03:31 of thinking as opposed to saying aren't. Selves as because. 02:03:36 Of the planet Earth it's taken as Carl Sagan points out 4000000000 torturous years to evolve to the point where we are today we whatever we are. 02:03:47 Are we going to pass on something you know that will be here another 1000000000 years 02:03:53 or will it be here another 25 years and our attitudes are 25 years we're 02:03:59 doing things now that if we move to correct in terms of the greenhouse effect in terms 02:04:05 . Of the toxic wastes I 02:04:10 mean they're running studies now a coral thing going to sent me some material on this from papers 02:04:15 that he's delivered and because I'm I'm finishing up a book on the subject of the arms race showing how they're spending X. billions of dollars to study how these toxic materials could be stored safely for 10000 years because that's the maximum amount of time that they can possibly estimate the state of the crust of the worlds you know they can't 02:04:40 plan beyond that but the stuff 02:04:42 John Stockwell will be talked to 50000 or more years and so you know we're not planning that far down the road but getting more specific beyond just the arrogance you get into the weapons plant where managers of the plants have some some radioactive gases or liquids that they need to get rid of. And if they go to the Congress and say we have this problem we need 10000000000 dollars to find a way to to store these things it becomes a big stinky political issue so they just quietly open the vents and let them blow out into Show More 02:05:16 the atmosphere and 02:05:18 dump them into you know in pen ticks and this by the way the media got on to this finally we've had it in the piece community 02:05:26 for decades the best book I can think of on the subject is Wasserman and Solomon. Well killing our own 02:05:35 which is an excellent book summarizing this this kind 02:05:38 of details of this kind of activity but at the Pentagon plant 02:05:44 John Stockwell in near Amarillo Texas they had these hot radioactive liquids the and again they didn't want to go to Congress and ask for money so they dug what we called tanks in the ground that's the farmers dig tanks with bulldozers and to collect rainwater for the cattle to drink they scraped out these flat tanks in the ground and poured 02:06:03 John Stockwell all the stuff in there without sealing it not I mean with rubber concrete or anything they just poured the stuff in there so it could percolate down into the awkward for our below the winds are quite strong blow in the neighboring fields or evaporate up into the air and that was their donation to the environment 02:06:21 just to save money and embarrassment now there is a move afoot to investigate these things and that 02:06:28 and to talk about cleaning it up and to talk about criminal charges for the 02:06:32 directors of some of these plants so you know we are making dents 02:06:38 on some of this these thousands of books that are out 02:06:41 now the 120 books on my list 02:06:43 are almost all written in the eighty's. I should have gone on one more minute in my talk to point out that Europe 02:06:50 through some of you I was I was on the other side stop the Vietnam War eventually 2000000 people had been killed but if you had 02:07:00 risen up and taken to the streets and made them get out 4000000 people would have been killed and I will flatly assert that we stopped and 02:07:08 blocked the invasion of Central America 02:07:10 during the eighty's we all of us myself Lou Wolf David Allen all of us a lot of you we see that the Reagan administration ministration had clearly committed itself to orchestrating this nation into a war and they picked it out well and they were blocked by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Secretary of Defense Caspar 02:07:31 Weinberger and 02:07:32 open debate he was saying not with my Defense Department until you can sell it to the American people so they will applaud the troops coming home no more Vietnam no more unpopular wars we 02:07:45 will not do it unless you can sell it in advance to the people 02:07:49 John Stockwell and we kept the vigilance of the people up to 66 to 70 percent against a military invention intervention so that Weinberger himself was saying no not and Gorman and Galvin down in south command and the joint chiefs are saying no way until the people buy it if you can get the percentages down to 55 02:08:10 percent in favor of it we'll think about it so we can make a difference and we are making making a difference in terms of the accountability of plant. Directors 02:08:21 for example in the munitions in arms plants not 02:08:24 enough not fast enough of the problem is much greater but at the same time you know we do have them talking 02:08:31 we did get an I.N.F. Treaty 02:08:32 we did stop the Central American 02:08:34 war you know you grab at straws of hope because 02:08:38 John Stockwell you need to hope in order to keep your energies on. This and keep up alive to bring things. One to the remaining audience of shameless plug common concerns bookstore a Dupont Circle on Connecticut Avenue carries many if not all of the books that Mr Stockwell is describing a question addressed to you a bit. Personal just what if you could briefly outline or describe anything that your detractors has to 02:09:09 say about you and your 02:09:11 your goals that has 02:09:13 a shred of credibility in other words play the devil's advocate with yourself for just a moment Is there anything that you personally find on target 02:09:21 John Stockwell that's like anti. Questionis that I have trouble handling. They don't have a question they can present in the lectures that that we don't have the answers to we have staked out the intellectual high ground some of the fiercest battles that I've been in since I've been out have been a little a little 02:09:46 fusions Gulliver of Gulliver's Travels arguments about which 02:09:49 end of the egg in terms of 02:09:51 how we should go about our struggle arguing 02:09:54 John Stockwell about details of bacteria see with Barbara Honaker and others in which my position and I think Lou's I know and David's and the others are that he was the director of research for a while with Christic that we have the strongest one single thing we have is is the hot the intellectual high ground and we just simply cannot compromise 02:10:19 we cannot 02:10:21 we cannot be loose 02:10:22 we can't say the end justifies the means therefore go ahead and say it because it has a nice ring to it because the basic of the basis of our case is hard solid facts and and for that reason I I sometimes I mean I'm I'm I'm a little I'm I'm I'm always a little too. And on and lectures when something like last night in Brockport New 02:10:49 York a guy stood up and said Mr Stockwell I want you 02:10:54 to tell us about all of these fictional novels you guys are writing and making fortunes on and I said excuse me before you finish your question what is a fictional 02:11:05 novel and and then he 02:11:07 John Stockwell said Come on don't give me any I know you went into this to make a lot of money and you're ripping off everybody and everything and I went on to point out I said Sir you have me confused with Oliver North. You know my lecture fees at best run 1010 percent to 5 percent of his he's made millions of dollars by lying by destroying for he did a lot more damage to Ronald Reagan than I ever did by running operations that killed people in Central America by collaborating with drug smugglers and he just got his pension restored and I have no pension I had a guy and nailed me on a talk show in. Denver radio talk show and he said he said he said Show More 02:11:57 what's your retirement check how can you how 02:11:59 John Stockwell do you dare except your retirement checks while you attack the government the way you're doing and I said the retired act quit and he said Come on now you retired No I quit I was 40 years old I was not eligible for retirement I quit I got enough and you know to feed my family except my with a little bit of luck and the generosity of people bring the intellect and when I can sell something that I write but mostly the New York publishers don't want to publish the stuff I want to write because most of them are Show More 02:12:29 owned by the multinational corporation. 02:12:33 John Stockwell Sense of money well I just I came into this mind you. With with a morbid fear of public speaking. With with. With the thought that I was the least likely 02:12:48 public speaker on the face of the earth having been slow 02:12:54 of wit and having had a little bit of a speech not impediment but a speech difficulty as a boy. You wouldn't 02:13:02 pick me if you're going to train someone and send them out to debate these 02:13:05 John Stockwell issues and I gained confidence over the years because I found that the subject material genuinely interested people and that as I read the books I could handle the questions. I have fought off and on with a stomach ulcer and the anxiety and a loose bowels before I go on to lecture and what if they asked this and that and the other and and there were a lot of humiliations at 1st where I would be making a point someone stand up and say with all due credit Mr Starr at one point I had the pyramid I've misplaced them by 2500 years and my Dr been to Egypt and seen the Pyramids you know and the result is because of my anxieties you just don't touch me very often my nose is not in a book and trying to memorize trying to make the gray matter work studying before I came here tonight I was in the hotel going over my notes Mind you I've given 600 Show More 02:14:03 lectures but I was going over my notes again to get it straight but it's given me a lot of confidence to find professors and scholars to have her say going say you've got it right Joan you know then you know this sort of thing we do have it right and the reason I make I lean on this point a little bit is that if I can get to a point of 02:14:25 intellectual confidence 02:14:27 you can too. And this is very important 02:14:31 because I know what the feeling is when you go out and you're on a protest or demonstration or you go home on the holidays and your parents are nice people but they're saying what is this liberal you're being fed at college I should shut off your you know your your money or something you can develop the same confidence just by informing 02:14:50 John Stockwell yourself and getting your head involved yes now not to bring back the issue of Nicaragua and get your response to the interference in Nicaragua selection the massive infusion of money and the destabilization of that election and also I'd like to get your response is What do you think the scenario would be if this sounded nice does win the next election 02:15:13 well. 02:15:16 A well 02:15:17 run election manipulation operation 02:15:21 you won't see too much on the CIA 02:15:25 will be there quietly giving 02:15:27 money to the to the to 02:15:29 its choice candidates and the candidates will be spending the money and building the country and of course it taints their cause to have the CIA up front and generally the CIA 02:15:41 will not come to the rallies and go to the big meetings they'll have quiet meetings in the CIA 02:15:45 officers home 02:15:47 and the Violetta Chamorro as will walk out with $5000000.00 in cash to distribute in this verse and the CIA will put in radio stations around the region of which there are 70 that can beam shows 02:15:59 into the targeted country 02:16:01 namely Nicaragua full of the propaganda 02:16:03 but still it has to be orchestrated quietly for it to be maximum effectiveness this is one of the Sandinistas biggest points now string is that your moral is or is just very openly identified as the C.I. candidate there there have been elections won by the think I founded in 1980 02:16:24 See ya 02:16:26 go. See I agee is the way it spelled I believe in Jamaica won the election despite open support from the CIA So some more might win it if the country worse they 02:16:38 were stressed out enough and the people were so tired and the sun in the east as with their policies that turned sour and turned the people off I don't think she will I don't think she'll come close but if it's done well we may not see we do have historical evidence though to see how these things are done 02:16:57 in 1984 02:16:58 in El Salvador the CIA spent $2200000.00 on those elections successfully to put Napoleon Dort a long time CIA agent into power he was selected because he was a moderate 02:17:14 who could be sold to the people in this country as a moderate so the support could continue to Salvador the reason we know so much about that election 02:17:23 is because. 02:17:25 This antagonize Jesse home who favored Roberte to build the sun and you know Nazi 02:17:32 comrades in arms and so he went public from his position on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee he got himself a brief of the truth of what the CIA had done and he held a press conference and told us in great rage about how much money how it had been spent some of the things I recall they hired organized 02:17:52 teams of journalists from 02:17:56 Europe and around and slew them on blue chip tours of El Salvador guiding them through taking nice care of them and paying them off handsomely to go back and write articles that would create international sympathy for Doherty's campaign they're obviously doing the same thing with with Chamorro in this this get together in Costa Rica's she was clearly presented in the most favorable light by not just Bush but I did yes and all the other. Yes And so that's a little evidence right Show More 02:18:29 there of the ploy and what they're doing now. 02:18:35 He went and he went public very shortly after the election which I believe were in April of 84 were 02:18:40 they not in El Salvador you can go through and flip 02:18:43 through the micro films 02:18:44 and find his statements about that he was quite in range and I used it against him in my lecture that point out that he says I'm a traitor when I reveal stuff but he was revealing sensitive briefings but he has Washington sufficiently terrorized that no one 02:19:02 castigated him for revealing 02:19:03 that secret information. 02:19:08 Or 02:19:11 John Stockwell Holly's large book. By the way which is an excellent book again for a case study of a covert action and a case study of that one in particular now presuming that the sun and east as when we can look forward for continued pressure from Bush continued contra activity continued economic embargo economic destabilization and at worst from Bush's interests 02:19:38 another run 02:19:40 John Stockwell on the on the president on the presidential election the next time around. If nothing else if it works to get the sun in the east as out then the next time elections come up they will have that much more water under the bridge that much more suffering by the Nicaraguan people and Violetta Chamorro 02:19:58 presumably having that 02:20:00 many more years to campaign. I still think that there is a possibility 02:20:06 that Nicaragua would be the location of our next. 02:20:11 War. We don't know yet where Bush is going to go so far he seems to be act exercising more restraint than Ronald Reagan did Reagan clearly like to stong Bush has pulled back a little bit when he could have stopped in Panama this may be because the intend tend to maintain throughout his 8 years more restraint because he believes that he and the people he represents they're picking our pockets the money is being transferred from the poor in the middle classes to the capitalists at a tremendous rate in the last 8 years and right now Show More 02:20:52 if they exercise the people 02:20:55 with something unpopular like a 02:20:57 war then we may rise 02:20:59 up and force them to go back you know we may wake up. And 02:21:04 he may in fact see his role is to keep the lid 02:21:07 on and not provoke the people throughout however if the economic situation in the US worsens and the deficit thing comes to a head and the problems become much more and tense and the people start grumbling aloud late traditionally they crank out a war to distract 02:21:25 the feeble and he does have 02:21:27 . An obvious case of testosterone poisoning and he would not be hard to see him taking some pleasure in orchestrating a war and showing that he 02:21:39 has ball hard me that he has courage to. Run. On. 02:21:59 This is what I'm trying to say is that it may be that his policies generally are to keep it cool throughout but it may also that he be did that he's 02:22:10 posturing. So that he 02:22:12 will be forced into a war and that this is the way that they are trying to orchestrate the frustration in the American people 02:22:20 so when he finally puts 02:22:22 the U.S. troops into Panama people will applaud and demonstrate in the 02:22:26 street and if that's his plan then you could look for it to happen perhaps and. Before the next election process 02:22:35 if there's a serious challenge to. Yes and thank you Mr Stockwell 2 quick questions 1st of all any facts emerging about the deaths of 00 hockey in Pakistan and 2nd question. The F.B.I. has had a long history of intimidating people like you and I think of poor Karl Roves in recent biography written about him and his trials and tribulations so my 2nd question is is this sort of in a campaign of intimidation of American citizens 02:23:06 going on today. 02:23:08 I'll pass on the 1st question 02:23:10 because I just simply don't have any inside information on Pakistan I'm not saying this is not 02:23:15 an important part of the world it is it's just not my area of expertise on the F.B.I. intimidation as I said before we have the F.B.I. directors admissions 02:23:25 of punishment of F.B.I. officers 02:23:27 for improper. 02:23:29 Targeting of 02:23:31 civic groups of peace groups 02:23:33 we have evidence of disruptions we don't 02:23:38 know what the CIA has been doing I have been sued I've 02:23:44 been. There's there's clearly universities that 02:23:48 won't hire me to lecture because the defense department of the up guys telling them I'm a dirty 02:23:54 bird. And it goes a step beyond that and something I'm 02:23:59 John Stockwell not sure whether it's funny are scary but last week I was on C.N.N. CROSSFIRE they asked me on the show and this is where Pat Buchanan and Mike things really get together and beat up on guests and yell at him. Not my choice of format and not a format where I would see myself as being quick witted to really do a good job on and then worse after they got me hooked onto it I thought they were going to come up with 02:24:27 someone like Bill Colby 02:24:29 to debate me on the subject of should we assassinate people which is what William Webster the CIA director and the White 02:24:36 John Stockwell House are trying to sell to the Congress right now is a greater license to kill and we were to discuss this issue and it's important and I have a strong feeling about it so I agreed to go and then they told me that they had gotten bored in Libby to appear against me and of course as you all know Gordon Liddy is a loony tune and sure enough this thing and everybody's yelling and shouting at each other and in the course of the show he threatened my life and he said I should be killed and I protested and then in different words he said it again. And so I I demanded that Show More 02:25:15 I be given a moment to speak 02:25:16 and I said I want everybody 02:25:18 in the nation that's listening to this show to remember if my cars run off the road someday remember Mr Libby's threat and his F.B.I. and CIA buttons and I wasn't kidding atoll I was not amused with all the loonies that there are in the world out there some of them drawing up salaries to have little going on television saying he thought of them all as far as morally winning the debate it was a walk over because he was so well ranges 02:25:55 I think that 98 percent of the people in the nation 02:26:00 would say that he and Buchanan. Discredited themselves totally by the way if you can get a copy of this thing might my flow with there's a there's an amusing little footnote in it I was in Dallas and I couldn't hear because everybody was yelling so much and who sticks were bad 02:26:18 on my little dear thing 02:26:20 but the cannon wanted to 02:26:21 stick it to me and. He said 02:26:26 that he said if you have a terrorist like this man. She brought all he said as I heard 02:26:34 it. Who's clearly killing people and and we had a chance of getting Should 02:26:40 we not going in killing and my answer is Well if you're going to do it fairly You would also go after Louis Posada cardioids 02:26:48 and his friend George Bush would you not 02:26:51 and his eyes went kind of crossed 02:26:53 and now we're my whip was too slow to really mail him as I don't I 02:26:58 John Stockwell can't think of maybe David can I can think of any remount terrorist named a Martin Sheen brawl but there was a mock Hollywood. Who was the assassin in law Hank. And I would love to have been quick enough thinking to say did you. Think of who blew up the. Martha honey and Tony Abbott and should we kill him. I had an opening a miss. But I still made the point pretty good his eyes crossed and 02:27:29 he backed away from the question yes. Governmental mechanisms would you recommend to bring the National Security Council and the Central Intelligence Agency under this system of checks and balances that would hopefully 02:27:44 prevent some of these to trustees that you've in mind us about tonight well this is a tough tough basic problem that was debated 02:27:52 bitterly after World 02:27:54 War 2 when the O.S.'s had a mystique and they were discussing whether or not we should have CIA or central intelligence and in fact the U.S.S. 02:28:04 I've been working on a book that I've started writing on 02:28:07 that begins back in the those days fiction and it's not surprising at all when I think about it but by the end of the war they go with us had become deeply involved in corruption and international smuggling in and Germany right after the war the equivalent of 2 and a half $1000000000.00 in gold and jewelry from the rags bank disappeared 02:28:31 and the intelligence officers were involved like sharks and getting bites and bits and pieces of that and there were studies done on this and Truman at 1st had 02:28:41 deep reservations about keeping a secret branch of the government going at all because of the corruption and then he got into 02:28:49 the cold war and got gung ho and where it was pushing them and then later in retirement he again regretted essentially what he had done the problem very simply is how do you have a controlled little bit of cancer in a free society can you trust people with secrecy and the license to run deadly operation and how are you going to control them in J Edgar Hoover's case he turned the energies of the F.B.I. into building files on congressmen and senators so he could blackmail them so he could keep them from doing their. Duty to the public and people of this country I would say that's a pretty Show More 02:29:29 clear lesson learned and 02:29:31 the CIA's involvement in our politics goes back to to the 02:29:37 Truman 02:29:38 election campaign when when when the CIA was using secret funds trying to get do in and Truman out and then you get the 02:29:48 assassination of President Kennedy and again go and read those books for yourself that's massive involvement in our R. and democracy if you will and. My sense is very clear of this it was not when I 1st left the agency but the more I read and the more I study it the more I say that I used to say we should take our chances on facing the world 02:30:13 without a secret a deadly 02:30:15 arm now I say flat out we'll be safer and healthier and stronger 02:30:20 John Stockwell if we closed down the operations side of the CIA and keep the National Security Council as a strict advisory office only without any secret police like the CIA to go out and run operations for them. We need good intelligence but 02:30:39 we don't get it from the CIA 02:30:41 machine. 02:30:43 I think the people standing at the mikes now 02:30:47 John Stockwell that's going to be all the questions we can take. Last more of your listeners. My question has to you seem to agree with most analysts that the next to Vietnam will probably come in Nicaragua I personally think that it's more likely to come in El Salvador even in 100 years going to war to protect one of our erstwhile allies and I'm interested if you know of any current covert operations there helping our allies in the wars that are going on in El Salvador and in Honduras. Leading us to the 2nd Vietnam in those countries and perhaps in comparison with how covert ops operated to help us get involved in the 1st Vietnam. Well Show More 02:31:33 . You notice throughout the evening I've referred to the Central American war and not the Nicaraguan war because I have presumed all along 02:31:44 and we. 02:31:46 Various people agreeing and disagreeing 02:31:49 vigorously but 02:31:51 scholars and study years of these things over the eighty's about the likelihood of a sinful American war and where and how it would have. And. I I think we've all pretty well presumed that it would encompass El Salvador and it would be run from. The US S. Honduras would be the. Immobile air carrier from which we would fly the missions and Nicaragua was being groomed as the clear trigger and target 02:32:23 El Salvador 02:32:24 was definitely a candidate 02:32:27 to trigger the intervention of the US military 02:32:30 and had they had an insurrection. Run amok or are ignited an insurrection as opposed to what's happening now. They might have gone into all Salvador but undoubtedly 02:32:43 I felt they 02:32:45 would move and again I don't mean to be a egocentric better minds than 02:32:49 mine and talking to and that's what we're concluding sort of. Sort of that they would certainly have moved against Nicaragua 02:32:57 as well 02:32:59 I've never seen it being a war against Honduras 02:33:04 under us is there's a saying we used 02:33:07 to have in the agency that you can you can't buy countries of the 3rd world but you can rent them 02:33:14 and you quit making payments 02:33:17 and you know you may lose your position there but we've bought a pretty good investment in the well bases in Honduras and. I've never seen a situation developing where we would be at 02:33:30 war with Honduras. Share movements in Hungary or El Salvador even Guatemala is where the revolutionary movements continue to grow that's when we would go in to help our erstwhile allies to governments 02:33:42 I could easily 02:33:44 see a situation develop where 02:33:45 we were going into lending and staging through Honduras and to fighting in El Salvador and Nicaragua and panel 02:33:53 and we would be staging from Panama as well and do you have any knowledge of current covert operations being so who are sort of lot of moral Salvatore which would lead a step by 02:34:03 step into actual military involvement. Well. Actually some well but but but that would be a link these back to elation reviewing sort of. 3 read Hollies cards book come in we would have to review you know the activities and there's a lot of things going on and orchestrations of violence and U.S. pilots shooting up Salvadorian villages and provocations all over the place let me clarify one thing unless I am missing quoted after tonight I am not saying that I think we're on the brink of a Central American war I think the odds are very remote right now that it's going to happen it could happen. It could be that Panama would be the trigger it could be that Nicaragua would be the trigger maybe a year or 2 from now but I'm not saying that I think it's going to happen. Show More 02:34:59 John Stockwell I think. In your comments that the best election manipulation is the ones that we don't see and bring us back to southern Africa Angola South Africa and Namibia as we approach next week's about elections. From where you were in 1986 with it how was the Angola project preparing for the 1978 planned in the movie elections and were some of those highlights including the kind of tactics that we have seen in 1889 02:35:31 namely the massacre of 02:35:34 swappable people inside the movie in early April using the needs of forces to help with the D T A U.S. backed party this summer during the registration period and this week's forgery of United Nation transitional assistance group documents. In 1976 02:35:53 John Stockwell Mind you I was leaving the government preparing to write my book my assessment of the chances of election actually happening in Namibia at that time was that there was no chance and I took that talk as being just simply not serious talk I barely remember it. It has turned out now that the South Africans have yielded and they're trying to do obviously I think what we did in Nicaragua when we yielded and pulled out the Marines and 33 and leave behind the defense force that will give them good solid control behind a front like the old saw the Dorian democracy or the Honduran the Marcus the other Guatemalan the Marxist see. They'll have control tight control of the country Show More 02:36:46 without taking all the international heat. 02:36:51 John Stockwell Yes Mr Stockwell I've heard your discussions in the past on public radio about CIA and government. Orchestrations of experiments on the population with viruses and other sorts of like hooping cough in the epidemics in San Francisco Bay cetera I'm just curious about your knowledge or your speculation of CIA. And government involvement in the AIDS epidemic 02:37:21 you know this this is one that frustrates me greatly. I debated Admiral Turner at Colby College about a year ago and during my present we didn't exactly he wouldn't debate me but I presented and he presented and then they voted on the CIA on campus and end my presentation I said that we had the M.K. ultra program with the irresponsible research on diseases and afterwards mysterious diseases appeared 02:37:50 rampant in our country I did not say that I believed that 02:37:55 that AIDS was the direct 02:37:57 product of the government experiments but I was suggesting that we have certainly the right in fact the obligation to investigate we know they were experimenting 02:38:11 massively and pseudo scientists I call them promiscuously with diseases on population groups jerks running around taking sloppy notes about what was happening. And calling that experimentation like like John Le Carre's the Looking-Glass war doing it because they had a charter to do it rather than because they were real scientists really trying to find 02:38:36 out what would happen. It would seem to me if you have a disease like AIDS 02:38:42 of here which is mysterious and unexplained and you know that the government was experimenting carelessly that we ought 02:38:51 to have a vigorous open investigation of what they did we might 02:38:54 find that clued AIDS in there my guess is that if there was such experimentation that did lead to a those files probably have been burned very quickly 02:39:05 in the early eighty's but nevertheless. In that debate I just mention the experimentation and the mysterious diseases 02:39:14 and I went back to the University of Maine a couple of nights ago and 2 friendly supporters the guy driving me from the airport in the professor who hosted me said by the way I heard you you know you did real well at Colby too but you really stepped in it on the subject of AIDS and I said you know what are you talking about and they said well we heard you really lost the audience when you made these wild allegations about AIDS and all I had said 02:39:40 was just what I had said to you here so this 02:39:43 is one of these cases where they have staked 02:39:45 out of version of the 02:39:47 high ground so that if you even talk about the possibility of AIDS having derives from irresponsible government experimentation you lose your audience that's apparently what they were saying happened at Colby College there let me clarify my position as I said to those 2 gentleman I don't back down an inch on that. We have a government experimenting with diseases with viruses we know that some of those viruses like swine fever resemble a I've even been known to crack jokes at lectures saying we haven't closed the link to see Show More 02:40:24 how the virus could get from human beings to swine 02:40:27 waiting for someone to say well they're picked fuckers aren't you know but we 02:40:34 you know they're experimenting with viruses that resemble 02:40:36 AIDS and we have AIDS 02:40:38 appear 02:40:40 I demand let me just say I demand 02:40:43 that we investigate fully and see if there is any linkage and 02:40:49 if there is that we hold 02:40:50 them accountable for it and 02:40:53 2 that we might 02:40:54 find the key to how to solve it by the way. 02:40:57 Until today some of the best. I stay involved I correspond with some some lively progressive open 02:41:07 minded responsible responsible 02:41:09 John Stockwell doctors which means they're still members of the A.M.A. about the AIDS issue and we argue a little bit even though I'm not a scientist and I'm way over my head but anyway the best summary that I've found to date of what aids may be all about is the covert action information bulletins articles lose work in 1987 they had to break it into 2 issues one in September and 1 in December and in that the scientists that they had to write about AIDS then they do not present conclusions they offer as I recall 6 possible scenarios from which they may have the rise there's also an excellent book written by Show More 02:41:52 Jad Adams called 02:41:54 8888 HIV a myth. I think I've got that backwards I think Martin's Press this 02:42:02 spring where he raises a lot of questions what he's really pointing out is that they don't even know that AIDS is caused by the virus it could be a passenger virus piggybacking on the same cause they don't 02:42:15 know anything about AIDS yet except some of its symptoms and 02:42:19 some of its behavior patterns now 02:42:22 the Health is stablished months 02:42:24 seized upon it as 02:42:26 an excuse to grab a 1000000000 and a half dollars 02:42:30 of research money and got a big machine going again 02:42:34 AIDS remains something like the 15th killer in the United States today a hideous horrible disease but since if I've got my figures correct at this late hour since it was discovered $81.00 there been $59000.00 people die of AIDS and that's a lot and it's a terrible disease but there's going to be $850000.00 die this year alone of cardiovascular disease. Relating to eating beef and fats and smoking just to give you a sense of the relative 02:43:05 proportion and there's 02:43:06 John Stockwell more research being done on AIDS and money being spent on it than there is and propaganda being spent on it to the discomfiture of the principal groups which are the the needle needle drug users and the homosexuals then that is being spent on how the fat Jesse Helms is tobacco kills or whatever that figure is more people exponentially algebraic the more people it's about time for me to bring this to and 02:43:37 get them to get the glass of beer and yes Mr Stockwell present public presentations that you give must be very upsetting for the CIA Why aren't they doing more to 02:43:47 John Stockwell stop you. Well we haven't come to that point in this society where they can afford to gun down people who are speaking out without having a backlash that could shut them down they're more paranoid of their survival than you might think during the Watergate hearings I remember well this is before transistors but everybody and agency just about every office had a portable T.V. plugged in watching the hearings because we were so mortified and terrified because here are some guys who are being on trial a president was thrown out of office Show More 02:44:24 18 members of his staff went 02:44:26 to jail and polluting the attorney general for a little breaking and entering operation and covering it up I mean you know you're supposed to do 3 of those 02:44:35 before breakfast every morning I mean 02:44:37 really we presumed always that running these operations that we work for the president saying that 02:44:45 if you got caught you would be quickly sent out on 02:44:49 assignment to walk a Dugu for 2 years until the dust settles 02:44:52 or the attorney general and people would step 02:44:56 in and you know the memos would be written and you'd be let off the. Hooke and to realize that those 2 postal clerks I mean those 2 G.S. 9 who've been opening the mail were prosecuted now their superiors were not and we should have been but for 02:45:10 I remember when it really I realized with a shock to see I had this whole 02:45:14 wing of the turning paid by the taxpayers but they could not represent these people in a criminal 02:45:20 trial the law would not permit 02:45:23 it so these 2 G.S. 02:45:25 Nine's were out there trying to raise money 02:45:27 for their own defense and the CIA had to cut them 02:45:30 off and then the 02:45:32 and the Watergate thing all the chiefs are saying I don't know those people you know I vaguely remember they worked in the office and they had met him at a cocktail party some time you're on your own Charlie you know 02:45:44 this is of course at the heart of what guard Gordon Liddy says 02:45:46 if you work for someone you should 02:45:48 be willing to go to jail forever to 02:45:50 John Stockwell protect anyway and the agency we were a lot more paranoid about our vulnerability about our being exposed about remembering to burn files about the fact that we could be closed down and prosecuted then people out in the community realize and they're smart enough to know that if they start stomping those of us and there are a bunch of us speaking out that public opinion would turn against them now in my own case I'm quite ambivalent about this because when I'm you know when the lights are on and I'm feeling good and I'm awake I know that I'm a blue wide was from the middle of the establishment and I went public in the prescribe fashion in the states testifying to the Congress going on 60 minutes writing a book I did not reveal names or codes. So I'm not I haven't made myself really very vulnerable and I did not partially because I just didn't have the opportunity I did not reveal the kind of information that would put an Ed Wilson or Frank Sturgis or Theodore Shaklee or. Carlos Marcello in jail. And were those witnesses around those people died I don't know any witnesses around Shockley who died but around Marcello and Wilson witnesses died and I was addressing the system I just had been involved in the kind of operation that would put the really heavy people in jail Show More 02:47:17 . 02:47:19 John Stockwell I say that and then at the same time I wake up at 4 o'clock most morning saying what the have I gotten myself into you know and I've got a little boy and Gordon Liddy's threatening me on national television and I have not intelligently directed the course of my life and so I do suffers Zajac the and then when I'm clear headed and calm I think. The thing that worried me the most was not that they would run an operation to kill me approved by the director. Because it's too much to likely have that me or my colleague feel Show More 02:47:58 a G. or David or the others are loose 02:48:00 John Stockwell speaking out there's too much chance that people would. Someone in the group would blow the whistle and they would go to jail for violating our civil rights I mean it it's too explosive considering the damage that we're doing but the looting to. The people on the fringes you're Lundell Bosches and feel that for and reconsiders and people like that. Are scarier they're they're the ones that are are the Lewis pathetic idea of these people yeah that's a different thing and they're at a level where they might get a phone call by someone thing or that son of a you know I don't know why he's allowed to go around seeking out and so they drive by and crank a few 307 rounds at you. I think I think that's enough on the remember your Show More 02:48:54 question and for Clark this morning. *This text was compiled from uncorrected Closed Captioning.