THE CIA AND A SECRET WAR AGAINST NICARAGUA

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00552R000100070006-9
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 6
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: June 24, 2010
• Sequence Number: 6
• Publication Date: March 12, 1982
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

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RAL)IU RI ILF'UkI, IN
4701 WILLARD AVENUE, CHEVY CHASE, MARYLAND 20015 656-4068
PROGRAM NBC M a g a z i n e
STATION W R C TV
NBC Network
DATE March 12, 1982 8:00 PM CITY Washington, DC
SUBJECT The CIA and a Secret War Against Nicaragua
GARRICK UTLEY: There were reports this week that the
CIA is organizing a paramilitary force to fight a secret war
against Nicaragua. The Reagan Administration refuses to con-
firm or deny whether that is true, but it has happened before.
The CIA's last secret war was in Angola, in Africa.
That was seven years ago. There, too, there was fighting among
rival political factions, and the side backed by Cuba and the
Soviet Union seemed to be heading for victory. Our story to-
night is about one American caught up in that secret war. His
name is Gary Aker, and his family is still waiting for him to
come home.
WOMAN: We'd always go to the zoo, which was always
fun. Gary'd wear this hat, and he always -- when he was small,
he had a great big hat. All you could see was the big hat
walking down the sidewalk and this little bitty kid in it.
And when you'd put him up in front of the cage, you know, this
cat would just -- alI of a sudden, he'd get really wide-eyed
and notice Gary. He didn't notice anybody else but Gary in
this hat. It really caught his fancy and made him all excited.
UTLEY: For the past six years,. the little boy in the
white hat has himself been in a cage in Africa, imprisoned by
forces he may not yet fully understand. One of them, the Cen-
tral Intelligence Agency.
JOHN STOCKWELL: It was a suicidal situation.
UTLEY: John Stockwell was in charge of the CIA's
Angola task force. He later resigned to protest what the agency
did there.
OFFICES IN: WASHINGTON D.C. ? NEW YORK ? LOS ANGELES ? CHICAGO ? DETROIT ? AND OTHER PRINCIPAL CITIES
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STOCKWELL: We sent Gary Aker in a month after we pulled
out our own people. The Cuban and Angolan force was marching for-
ward with tanks and jets and a modern military machine, and it was
being opposed by a force of -- a disorganized, untrained force of
about a hundred mercenaries.
UTLEY: Gary Aker was one of those mercenaries. This
is the story of a young man from a nice neighborhood with his life
out of control, and a government agency that used people like Gary
Aker to fight its secret war, then walked away from all responsi-
bility.
So, first, we must get to know Gary Aker. Everyone who
knew him agrees about one thing. His teacher:
MAN: I sized him up as a bit of a loner.
UTLEY: His friend:
MAN: He seemed to be a real loner.
UTLEY: His mother:
WOMAN: He was a loner. Very definitely.
UTLEY: Gary grew up here, in Sacramento. His father
was a policeman, then a fireman. As you look at the pictures on
the mantelpiece and in the family album, you notice one thing:
Gary Aker almost never smiled.
His older sister, Cathy, who may have been closer to
him than anyone, remembers that he always had strange ideas,
dangerous ones.
CATHY: He always said that he was -- he felt he was
going to die when he was 21.
UTLEY: When did he first start saying that?
UTLEY: What do you think it was in your younger bro-
ther's life and his makeup that finally led him to make that
decision to go to Angola?
CATHY: I think it's a lot of what you'd see on tele-
vision as the American dream. I saw a lot of war movies and,
really, it sounds glamorous to kids, and they make all these war
toys and stuff. Plus, he thought he was helping his country,
because he doesn't like Communism. And you get kind of an idea
that you're either going to die or you're going to come home a
hero. Our civilization has shown people, you know, combat,
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combat, combat, combat. And this is, I think, what led him there.
UTLEY: While Gary Aker dreamed of wars, there was a war
growing in Angola. He many never have heard of the place, probably
didn't know in 1975 that the Portugese were being forced out after
four centuries of rule. The new country was potentially rich,
Africa's second biggest oil producer. And three factions fought
for control. In the capital, Luanda, there was the MPLA, the
Marxist movement. To the south, UNITA. In the north, the FNLA.
When it appeared the Soviet-backed Marxists would win,
the CIA intervened with money and weapons. These pictures show
task force commander John Stockwell with Holdin Roberto, the lea-
der of the northern forces, with which the CIA hoped to prevent
an easy leftist victory.
STOCKWELL: We escalated the fighting and we lost, ulti-
mately. We discredited the United States, ultimately. We spent
$31 million, all together, in the program. We delivered about
$5 1/2 million in cash to Holdin Roberto. But we were backing
the wrong party and the wrong guy.
UTLEY: While all that was going on in Angola, the war
expanding, the American involvement deepening, Gary Aker was here
in Sacramento. This is where he grew up. And this is where he
went to school, McClachey (?) Senior High School. He was a good
student. He got A's and B's. And when you look at the yearbook
his senior year, you will see his picture and his name, but no
mention of any other school activities.
At a high school which values athletic achievement, he
was small, not athletic. He never spoke up in class. He had few
close friends, no girlfriends. But he found a way to win atten-
tion, and it was a shocker. One day he handed his history tea-
cher, George Serlan (?), an essay.
GEORGE SERLAN: It really showed me the bent of his
mind. And it was very totalitarian, and someone who, I'd say,
found, let's say, a Nazi philosophy very congenial to his way of
thinking.
UTLEY: Was Gary Aker a Nazi, or just a mixed-up teen-
ager?
This
is the way he left his bedroom when he went to
Angola.
Bhis
picture with that big German battle flag and pub-
lished
reports
about his Nazi leanings angered a lot of Ameri-
cans.
But his
family believes his Naziism was as unreal as most
of his ideas.
MAN: No person wants to go through school without
being noticed. And he found, I think, a way of shocking, sur-
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prising his classmates and fellow students so that they would
remember him.
UTLEY: Right out of high school, Aker, the Gary Aker
who could never cope with authority or finish anything he started,
joined the Marines.
MAN: When he finished his boot training, he came home
and he said, "This -- this Is tremendous. This is a good outfit.
I can -- maybe someday I'II be a general."
UTLEY: He made it as far as corporal. Then:
WOMAN: He had problems with an officer. A lot of his
gear was stolen and they wouldn't replace it. He just could not
get his men -- he was a corporal, and he couldn't get them to do
what he wanted them to do, and he got heck for it. It just was
a bunch of problems piling up.
UTLEY: So Corporal Gary Aker went AWOL, hiding from
the FBI in the park where the little boy in the white hat once
played. Finally, he surrendered. After a psychiatric examin-
ation, he wound up with a general discharge. No job, no career,
no goal.
On November 24th, 1975, Aker and Angola met. Gary Aker
read a newspaper piece about mercenaries being recruited for
Angola by David Bufkin, a shadowy figure who claimed he had links
with the CIA.
This was David Bufkin after the disaster in Angola,
talking about the mercenaries he'd recruited.
DAVID BUFKIN: As a matter of fact, they were told that
they were going to receive $1200 a month. When I got them into
Angola, they -- it was raised to $2000 a month. And then we --
we got better automatic weapons just before they arrived. We got
Uzis and FN's.
UTLEY: Bufkin made a few television appearances, but
in recent months he's dropped from sight.
Did you ever meet Bufkin?
WOMAN: Yes. Uh-huh. Several times.
UTLEY: What kind of a person was he?
WOMAN: Well, kind of flaky. He's different. He's
not trustworthy at all.
UTLEY: Did Gary sense that?
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WOMAN: Not at first. No. Gary was really taken with
him. I just think he led him down the garden path.
UTLEY: The CIA denies that it had any connection with
Bufkin or Gary Aker. In an official statement, the agency said
it, quote, neither paid nor authorized funds to Mr. Aker or to
other Americans engaged in armed combat in Angola. Neither Mr.
Aker nor other Americans engaged in armed combat in Angola were
flown there by or for the CIA.
To John Stockwell, that's just CIA disinformation.
STOCKWELL: He went in on a truck, a CIA truck. We
sent a shipload of equipment over there, most of it trucks and
vehicles. He went in by truck. He was not signed on a contract
by the CIA that, you know, with CIA letterhead. He was hired
by Bufkin, who was hired by Roberto with our money and under our
supervision. He was armed inside the country with CIA weapons.
Angola?
UTLEY: Was it a good idea to send mercenaries into
STOCKWELL: Well, it was the best way you possibly
could -- if you had set out to discredit the United States tot-
ally, that was the best thing you could possibly do.
UTLEY: Why?
STOCKWELL: You're dealing with the dregs of the earth,
in terms of humanity and morality. To hire whites from Europe
or the United States to send them into a black African country,
particularly with the passions of new independence, to kill blacks
in order to implement your policies is no way to advance your
standing and credibility in the world of nations in the Third
World.
UTLEY: Quite apart from the question of sending white
mercenaries to black Africa, the fact is that Gary Aker went in
to fight a war that was already lost. By November 1975, when
Aker was recruited, the Soviet involvement had gone beyond any-
thing the CIA had dreamed of. Thousands of Cuban troops with
hundreds of Russian tanks were grinding up the forces backed by
The CIA. Yet, three months later, February 1976, Gary Aker and
his fellow mercenaries were sent into the fighting.
STOCKWELL: About a month before then, we had withdrawn
all of our own staffers because it was much too dangerous. We
sent Gary Aker in a month after we pulled out our own people.
UTLEY: For once, Gary Aker, the lifelong loser, was
lucky. Four days after he crossed the border, a Cuban armored
car shot his truck to pieces. Gary Aker was captured. He was
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unharmed. He hadn't had a chance to kill anyone.
The Marxist government in Luanda held a big trial of
Aker and the other mercenaries. One of those recruited with
Aker was executed. But during the trial, the prosecutor said
one of the mercenaries was only a baby. He meant Aker. He was
sentenced to 16 years in prison. That was six years ago.
Should we feel
sorry for Gary Aker?
STOCKWELL: I, personally, have mixed emotions. On
the one hand, he was trying -- he did go to Africa to kill peo-
ple, for fame and fortune, for adventure and money. The other
side of that is that the CIA had a massive propaganda action
going presenting substantially false information about what was
happening in Angola, with the objective of creating sympathy
and support and getting mercenaries and people to go and fight
on our side. And Gary Aker was one young man who got caught
in this march off to fight Communism.
UTLEY: Perhaps the final words about Gary Aker should
come from Gary Aker himself, a letter he sent to his parents
from prison.
WOMAN: "There is only the feeling of total solitude
and emptiness, the continued striving and struggling to reach
the lights within, the ultimate realization of being lost.
"Where is there understanding and meaning? Where is
there truth and knowledge? Where there is there reality and
life? Where is the very essence that is men?"
UTLEY: You think he's found the answer?
WOMAN: I don't know. I don't know if he has. I think
he's still searching.
UTLEY: The State Department says it can't do much for
Gary Aker because the United States does not have diplomatic rela-
tions with Angola, because there are still Cuban troops there sup-
porting the Marxist government, which says, "Why should we release
this American prisoner as long as the United States opposes us?"
To the Angolans, Aker is a political pawn to be used.
To the CIA, he is an embarrassment to be forgotten. It is a
vicious circle. And caught in the middle sits Gary Aker, in.
prison.
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