EX-SPY SAYS CIA TO BLAME FOR OVER 1 MILLION DEATHS

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00806R000100670001-6
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: September 8, 2010
• Sequence Number: 1
• Publication Date: March 8, 1984
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

STAT Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2010/09/08: CIA-RDP90-00806R000100670001-6
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MANCHESTER JOURNAL-ENQUIRER (CT)
8 March 1984
!Ex-spy says CIA to blame
for over 1 -million deaths
By CAROLINE WILLSON
Staff Writer
MANCHESTER - The Central In-
telligence Agency has run over 20,000 covert
operations since it was founded 35 years ago
- and more than 1 million people in third-
world countries have died as a result, accord-
ing to the highest-ranking case officer ever
quit the CIA and call for its abolition.
John Stockwell, who headed the CIA
Angola Task Force in the mid-1970s, chron-
ciled a list of agency misdeeds to a
Manchester Community College audience
Wednesday. -
And he maintained that unless Americans
begin exerting pressure on their leaders to
rein in the agency's activities in Central
America and elsewhere, a major war is
around the corner.
Raised in Texas and what was then the
Belgian Congo, Stockwell joined the agency
20 years ago after military training in col-
lege. Describing his recruitment and training
for the CIA, he said, "It was during the height
of the domino theory, and we were invited to
join the elite in the fight to stop the com-
munist menace."
He said he later came to believe that no
CIA operation in which he participated ever
significantly advanced American national
security interests.
Stockwell's career "moved well," and he
soon found himself "chief of station" in West
Africa, he told students. Though shaken by
his indirect responsibility for the death of an
African recruit, it was not until he was as-
signed to South Vietnam that he entertained
serious doubts about the organization.
While Stockwell said his mission in Viet-
nam was "bloody," he addd that it was less
the violence he witnessed than the evidence
of American "dishonor" that made him lay
awake at nights when he returned to Texas
after the fall of Saigon.
The agency's abandonment of its South
Vietnamese employees to the enemy when
the U.S. pulled out of the country was
particularly "shameful," Stockwell said.
"We had dropped 25,000 tons of Agent Or-
ange and one 500-pound bomb for every Viet-
ing me that it was not our fault these people I gram in Latin American taught local secret
had the misfortune of being born Viet-
namese," he recalled. .
Stockwell said his decision finally to quit
the CIA was based on the cynicism rife in the
Angola operation - including what he
charges was constant and criminal lying by
top agency officials to the Congress, presi-
dent and public.
He charged that the CIA used-Daniel
Patrick Moynihan, the New York senator
who was then the U.S. ambassador to the
United Nations, to create an impression of
Soviet-backed aggression.
"In truth, we were escalating the fight-
ing," Stockwell said. For the nine months he
headed that operation, Stockwell-- said he
never once heard CIA officials present a true
picture of events in Angola.
He went on to charge that William Colby,
the CIA's director at the time, lied repeatedly
to congressional committees - denying, for
example, that the agency was cooperating
closely with South Africa, he said. Stockwell
added that all of his attempts to provide
accurate information to U.S. policymakers
were thwarted by his superiors.
When he reported on the negative image of
U.S.-hired mercenaries in Angola, Stockwell
said his superior changed their titles to
"foreign military technicians." Prostitutes
recruited on the streets of Miami to sleep
with Soviet embassy officials were dubbed
"special access agents," he added.
After U.S.-supplied forces were "routed"
and the CIA intervention in Angola was
halted, the nation's new, ostensibly pro-Sov-
iet leaders invited the Gulf Oil Corp. back to
the country, Stockwell recalled. Cuban
ldiers were put in the ironic position of
protecting American technicians from U.S.
mercenaries who continued to conduct free-
lance attacks, he said.
Claiming the CIA has sponsored the ov-
erthrow of 18 democratically elected govern-
ments, Stockwell aired alleged abuses by the
agency in such nations as China, Guatamala,
Iran, Congo, Chile, Cuba and Guyana.
Officers in the CIA's Public Safety Pro-
namese citizen, and my superiors were tell--
police police officers to torture detainees by.prac-
ticing on innocent beggars until they died, he
Back in America, the agency slipped drugs
such as LSD into drinks of unwitting in-
dividuals and water supplies of entire cities,
he claimed, adding that the CIA also exposed
large populations to diseases like whooping
cough.
Because he disregarded his CIA secrecy
oath in discussing these clandestine activites
in a book he wrote in 1976 - "In Search of.
Enemies: A CIA Story" - Stockwell is now
required to submit all his writings to CIA
censors.
"The problem is how to police the police,"
he said, adding that CIA operatives "will
never restrain themselves." Because they
are hired to plan and implement aggressive
destabilizing activities designed to "make
the Russians look bad," he said CIA officers
become "just as frustrated as the military in
peacetime" if their operations are curtailed.
Stockwell wrapped up his speech by calling
for public pressure on American
policymakers to end a cycle of "paranoia and
aggression," recalling that such protest
helped bring..about an end to the Vietnam
war.
. "If Americans let our
our rights, we have no
ourselves," he warned.
leaders take away
one to blame but
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