FORMER CIA AGENT BLASTS REAGAN'S MOTIVES IN NICARAGUA

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP91-00587R000201100021-7
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: June 17, 2010
• Sequence Number: 21
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

Approved For Release 2010/06/17: CIA-RDP91-00587R000201100021-7
HUTCHINSON NEWS (KS)~~~ ONLY
20 April 1985
Former cIA agen t blasts Reagan's
motives in Nicaragua
B
y Duane Schrag
The Hutchinson News
NORTH NEWTON - The United
States, led by a president with a
"fixation on Armageddon," and an
intelligence gathering organization
responsible for the deaths ? of mil-
lions of people,
is carefully lay-
ing the ground-
work for war in
Central America,
a former CIA
agent said in a
speech Thursday ..',
night.
John Stock-
= I w i o spoke
as a guest in the Stockwell
Betel Colle a Peace Lecture
Series, sai of deen"~' eA' agars in-
n to have the Nicaraguan gov-
ernment overthrown.
"There's not a prayer that he is
going to go out of office without
ousting the Sandinistas," Stockwell
said. "They want to build tensions
are trying to do is methodically rip
apart the social and economic fabric
of the country."
American-backed Contras - Rea-
gan likes to call them freedom fight-
ers, he said - have killed 8,000
people, most of them women and
children, he said.
It is not unusual for the Contras
to pull a family from its hut and
force members to watch the father,
mother or child be tortured to
death, he said.
"Sometimes for variety they will
put (a) grenade in a 7-year-old's
mouth and pull the pin," he said. "I
suggest to you it is not the Sand-
inistas that are responsible for the
misery (in Nicaragua) - it is the
United States."
He talked of American advisers
coaching rebels in torture tech-
niques.
"We are taught in our ideology
that it is the Gestapo or the KGB
that does hideous things to other
people
" he said
,
.
to the point where they send in the In reality, all humans - including
Marines -' this is Vietnam in 1964. Americans, are capable of such
This is the establishment saying acts, he said.
we've got to go in and get it over Stockwell grew up in the Belgian
with. We are in fact poised on the Congo in a conservative family and
brink of the next war." then joined the Marines, a young
Stockwell, who resigned from the man eager to serve his country, he
CIA in 1977 to write a book highly said. In 1964, he was recruited by
critical of the agency, has been in the CIA because of his military
Nicaragua recently investigating background and upbringing in Af-
American involvement in Central rica.
America. The information presented When he first began to notice the
Thursday night is fully documented, agency's questionable activities he
he told the audience. rationalized it by telling himself
At the end of his hour-long that he was not responsible for oth-
speech, he received a standing ova- ers' actions.
tion from the audience of several But after serving in Vietnam and
hundred. witnessing the CIA's bungling
America is involved in "raw ter- there, he became disillusioned.
rorism," he said. ' Even so, he was asked to head the
"There can be no other word for CIA's covert activities in Angola,
what the CIA has been doing in where the CIA was trying to fight
Nicaragua," he said. "What they the spread of communism.
He decided to play along for a
while, to see for himself just how
corrupt things were inside the se-
cretive agency.
"I just made a deal with the devil
at that point," he said, admitting
there was "no honor or nobility" in
what he did.
He resigned in 1977 and the fol-
lowing year published "In Search of
Enemies," which became a best-
seller. Because he wouldn't submit
the manuscripts to the CIA for cen-
sorship, he was barred by court or-
der from receiving royalties.
At Thursday night's meeting he
told the audience the CIA receives
65 cents per copy sold and urged
members of the audience not to buy
the book. He did suggest, jokingly,
that copies might be shoplifted-from
prosperous bookstores or that
people check the book'out of local li-
braries.
Stockwell said the CIA today is
trying to "destabilize" the govern-
ments of 50 countries.
But the agency has not limited its
influence to overseas countries, he
said. He reminded the audience of
the M.K. Ultra project, the CIA se-
cret experiment in which diseases
were spread in American cities and
drugs secretly administered.
When the project was exposed,
the public outcry forced the CIA to
scale back its activities. But the
Reagan administration has given
the green light to the agency and is
proposing laws that would allow for
the creation of "death squads,"
Stockwell said:
Secretary of State George Schultz
has for a year been trying to get
Congress to approve a "pre-emptive
strikes" bill, he said. The bill would
allow the government to move
against terrorists - in America -
before they had'a chance to act.
Approved For Release 2010/06/17: CIA-RDP91-00587R000201100021-7