Alternative Views - Covert Action (1982)

Speaker 1: Although this program was made in 1982, the information contained in it has not been presented in the establishment media.

John Stockwell: The CIA's greatest operation, without any qualifications. It's better than, in terms of their interests, than when they installed the Shah in power. It's better than the coup in Guatemala. And of course, there are many failures from their own point of view. Better than putting Pinochet in power, in terms of CIA values. What it is is nothing less than an Official Secrets Act. This is the, the legislation that the CIA has been trying for 30 years to get, to give it legal protection and legal exemption from freedom of speech and freedom of the press.

Louis Wolf: We'll begin to learn what it's like to live in a third-world country which is being targeted by the CIA. Many Americans have no We've lost sight of the fact that many citizens of other countries, particularly in the Third World, have been the victims of massive CIA operations, covert operations, everything from recruitment to bribery to buying of an election, on up the line to paramilitary activities and terrorism, training in torture, and even assassination and overthrowing of governments.

John Stockwell: I think that's a very important point.

Louis Wolf: And I think that Americans fail to realize this until it starts sometimes to hit them at home. And that's apparently what's going to be happening now, and legally.

Speaker 1: John Stockwell, former high CIA official, and Louis Wolff, co-editor of COVID Action Information Bulletin, tonight on Alternative Views. Although glasnost is occurring in the Soviet Union, we still have not had glasnost in the United States concerning the subjects which we'll discuss on Alternative Views. Good evening. Glad you're with us tonight on Alternative Views. This is a very special treat, because we have 2 very, very prominent people in the world of COVID activity, experts in their field and nice people, too. That's a strange combination, but we've got them. We have John Stockwell back with us. John was a key official in the CIA for several years before quitting and writing about his experiences in the book On Company Business. His most recent book is a novel entitled Red Sunset. We're also going to do something special tonight. A few weeks ago, we did an interview with Louis Wolf, who's one of the editors of COVID Action Information Bulletin. Now, this is one of the bulletins which really has been freaking out the CIA for many years because it does name names of agents. But that's just one of the things it does. It has a lot of stories about Covert activity and some overt activity of intelligence organizations and semi-intelligence organizations around the world. So you'll find out what happens with coups and various types of activities like this around the world by reading Covert Action Information Bulletin. Well, we were going to have Jon with us to do the interview with Louis Wolf, but Jon was out of town. So what we're going to do is the next best thing. We're going to show segments of the interview we did with Louis Wolf.

John Stockwell: Okay.

Speaker 1: Louis Wolf, and then we'll have John comment on them.

Speaker 4: Louis and his colleagues since 1978 have been publishing articles exposing the various operations of the CIA all over the world and some of the threats to civil liberties and democracy that this organization has contained. Louis, welcome to Alternative Views.

Louis Wolf: Thank you. I'm glad to be here.

Speaker 4: First of all, how did you get into the CIA watch business? business, and what led you and your colleagues to found the COVID Action Information Bulletin?

Louis Wolf: Well, I've been a journalist since the 1960s, and actually 1966. I spent 9 years in Southeast Asia, and it was really there that I first came to grips with what the CIA does in the world, that its main function, as I learned at that time in Laos and the Philippines, is intervening covertly in the affairs of other countries. And in fact, covert action, by the CIA's own definition, is activity— secret activity— which can be carried out without the knowledge of the targets of that activity being able to learn that it was carried out by the CIA, or in fact by the U.S. government.

Speaker 4: And what led you and your colleagues to found the COVID Action Information Bulletin? When did you begin to do this?

Louis Wolf: Well, it was, uh, after a long succession of efforts, um, largely growing out of the Watergate revelations, of the Church Committee and Pike Committee reports, even the Rockefeller Commission reports, which documented gross and ongoing and very large-scale CIA covert activities that had been carried out. Up till that time, the American people didn't know very much about this, and that was really what the CIA is about, is keeping it secret from the American people. In, in, in sum, the CIA's activities, of course, are known to the people against whom they're carried out, but it's the American people who are the last to know about it. And we, as a result of a lot of those revelations and a lot of other people who were concerned about it, decided to try and put together a journalistic effort to look into these areas. There was another magazine, Counterspy, which started earlier, and after several years it, it bit the dust, and we decided after 2 years in 1978 to start Covert Action Information Bulletin.

Speaker 1: Well, it looks like there's going to be some real problems coming up, not only just for you and Covert Action Information Bulletin, But also for civil liberties in general in the United States and finding out what's happening, what our government is doing in our name covertly around the world. With the Intelligence Identities Protection Act just about to be passed in Congress, and with Reagan's Executive Order 12333, things are going to be quite different shortly, aren't they?

Louis Wolf: There is clearly a, a very marked escalation towards secrecy in this government. These 2 pieces of— one legislation and one executive order. The executive order does not have to be propounded by Congress. Congress doesn't have a single word to say about it. Basically, these 2 working in tandem with each other, along with other efforts by this administration to embed the CIA and the other intelligence agencies, of which there are some 18 federal agencies in secrecy.

John Stockwell: This bill is the CIA's greatest operation without any qualifications. It's better than, in terms of their interests, than when they installed the Shah in power. It's better than the coup in Guatemala. And of course, there are many failures from their own point of view. Better than putting Pinochet in power in terms of CIA values. What it is is nothing less than an Official Secrets Act. This is the, the legislation that the CIA has been trying for 30 years to get, to give it legal protection and legal exemption from freedom of speech and freedom of the press. Now, what makes it such a beautiful operation is that it is in the process of being passed. It's going through the Congress more or less like a dose of the salts. With the Senate voted on it a couple of months ago, the vote was something like 90 to 2.

Speaker 1: 92.

John Stockwell: And the House, it's expected to pass by a similar majority. And yet the American people, by and large, including media people, including television interviewers across the nation and journalists, are oblivious that it's even passing, much less what it really means. Now, what it really means— see, it's couched, and what makes it such a typical and beautiful CIA operation is that it's couched in the terms Of protecting our agents who are out in the cold risking their lives to defend the country.

Speaker 4: This is—

John Stockwell: Senator Benson was the original sponsor of this bill, by the way, and this was what he said about it in many speeches here in Texas. Now it's passed to Senator John Chafee and Jake Garn sponsoring the bill in Washington. Now, who can argue with that? Legal protection for our agents whose names are being exposed by irresponsible people who don't agree with the government's policy.

Speaker 4: Right.

John Stockwell: Now, if the facts were that simple, if those were the true facts, who could argue with it? But the truth is that these agents' lives are not in danger because of their names being exposed. The truth is that these agents are functioning from embassies with diplomatic passports under circumstances in which, if the worst possibly happens and they're absolutely caught Buying secrets from some local spy agent, a minister in the government or whatnot, the worst that will be— will happen to them, even in the Soviet Union, is that they will be asked to leave the country. Under no circumstances will they ever be attacked or jailed or executed or whatnot.

Speaker 4: By the government, another government?

John Stockwell: By the host government where they're living and breaking all the local laws by being a secret agent and recruiting spies and inducing people to commit treason. Now, in the 4 or 5 posts that I served in overseas full-time, we had full liaison with the president of the country, the chief of the police, and all the police officers, and all the military officers. This means that we met with them weekly in the name of the CIA— no secrets— to have lunch or dinner and exchange information and do favors for each other. If there were ever a terrorist attack or If there were a threat against one of us, the first thing we would do would be to pick up the telephone and call the local police chief and say, hey, there's a threat against us. And I might note that this would also apply in the Soviet Union. If there were a terrorist threat in Moscow against the U.S. Embassy or a U.S. case officer or a CIA man, they would call the local police and say, you know, somebody's about to blow us up. There is a brotherhood of secret— quote, secret police agents.

Louis Wolf: Right.

John Stockwell: That functions like a brotherhood even when they're supposedly on the other side. They're competing, but it's sort of like professional football players. They're on different teams, but they're still professional football players.

Speaker 1: Well, you had buddies who were KGB agents.

John Stockwell: Oh, indeed. Played tennis with them, played chess with them, socialized with them, went drinking with them. And that was the SOP for all case officers everywhere. 2,000-plus, well over 2,000 names have been revealed Printed, published in the last few years, and not one agent has been killed because of his name being revealed.

Speaker 1: Now, there were 2 cases where it looked like they were put-up jobs, right?

John Stockwell: One in— one—

Speaker 1: Which the congressmen and the CIA always mention as the reason they had to do this.

John Stockwell: Which they jumped on, yeah. Richard Welch in Athens, the 18th of December in 1975, was killed. Shot up by terrorists in front of his home. And at that moment, the Church Committee, which was in full session, was out of business. Washington— every door in Washington closed on the Church Committee, because, as though the church investigation had anything whatsoever to do with it, they flew him back and gave him a full state ceremony, which of course was admission that he was CIA to the world. I mean, the headlines were CIA chief killed. They didn't say 3rd secretary of embassy killed. The United States government government made as much politics as they could out of the fact that this man was a career diplomat agent. Now, the fact was they caught the terrorists that killed him, and they ascertained, they verified that those were the individuals who had published his name in an Athens newspaper 3 days before they killed him because they wanted world attention to what they were doing. And it had nothing to do with the investigations or publications in Washington, and they already planned to kill him.

Louis Wolf: Right.

John Stockwell: Now, this man had been ordered by CIA security to change houses, because he was living in the same house that 8 other CIA station chiefs had lived in before him. Generation after generation after generation after generation of CIA station chiefs had lived in that same mansion. It was a big villa in a very posh part of Athens. As governments had changed, coups, the colonels' coups, the monarchy in and out of power, Much earlier, and dealing with all of the terrorist activities and anti-terrorist activities and coups in the Middle East from Athens, with the CIA heavily involved with each government and change of government and the ins and outs in these governments. And yet the CIA station chief was living in the same house throughout. Eventually he was killed. He refused to move because he said it was a good house. Now, there is no way that that can be blamed on U.S. journalists publishing names in Washington. Right. Moreover, as I pointed out, the CIA, the CIA director Bill Colby exploited that man's death to make a big issue and to effectively close down the Church Committee. Now, which was investigating the CIA, which was investigating its practices, the CIA's extensive malpractices. They put the Church Committee on the defensive and out of business. Now, there was one other incident in El Salvador where 2 agents who were under a labor cover were killed by right-wing— by the government police, the secret police. They're Treasury agents, is it, in El Salvador that do the killing down there? Now, these 2 guys were in contact with the government. They were killed by government agents, set up in a hotel and shot. And the United States announced to the world that they were secret agents. Their names had been published much previously, but the United States identified them Thereby admitting they were agents and admitting that they were using this labor organization as cover. Where did they make this announcement? They did it— the prosecuting attorney, the State Department's representative in the passport case, in which they took Phil Agee's passport away from him, revealed the identities of these agents and claimed that that proved that people publishing the names led to their deaths. They were already dead when the government chose To use a totally fictitious, a totally false ploy to discredit Phil Agee. He had not revealed their names. And so it's now in the Supreme Court records. It's cited by the Supreme Court justices in their decision against Phil Agee on his passport, him keeping his passport, these agents being killed, i.e., the Supreme Court and the State Department revealed their identities to accomplish their objective against Phil Agee.

Speaker 1: There was another situation in Jamaica where it looked like it was a planned put-up job.

John Stockwell: In that case, indeed, the chief of station's house was shot up with machine gun bullets, and so they made considerable propaganda publicity out of that with photographs of the bullets. But what— it's true his name had been published, but what happened is the back wall of his garage, well away from the house, received 5 machine gun bullets at a time when his family was out of the country and he was not in the house. And yet they tried to use that to make publicity to show that it made it dangerous to have the names revealed.

Speaker 4: It was also during an election where the opposition to the Social Democratic government wanted to make it appear that terrorism was rampant in Jamaica. And so, wasn't there some political exploitation?

John Stockwell: Oh, indeed, there was considerable political exploitation of it. And all evidence points that it was the government secret police that fired the bullets.

Speaker 4: Right.

John Stockwell: But, again, the press in Washington played this as— played, cooperated with the CIA to give publicity for the bill against the exposing of names.

Speaker 4: So there's no real need for the bill. It's not protecting in any way our national security. It's not required by the Constitution. The history of the CIA.

John Stockwell: Precisely. On the one hand, that's the problem. And I go a bit further to point out that these agents, 80% of them, were identified from overt information in the Library of Congress. The people publishing the COVID Action Information Bulletin go to the Library of Congress and go through the State Department's overt records of its personnel and come up with the CIA officers' names infallibly, because there are little indicators in there which you or you or you, anyone can go in and read through and say, that's CIA, and that's CIA, and that's CIA.

Speaker 4: Plus, isn't it just generally known in most CIA stations who is CIA?

John Stockwell: It's universal.

Speaker 4: But they want themselves to be known.

John Stockwell: We used to call it—

Speaker 4: To get contacts and information.

John Stockwell: We used to call it wearing an invisible badge. You acted as though you had a badge, CIA, up here. You drew people to you. I'm CIA, talk to me. You were taught to do this. Allen Dulles, And the original CIA great, in his book The Craft of Intelligence, makes this point that you have to be known to be an effective intelligence officer. But see, that's on the one hand. The bill is not necessary, and it's dishonest in that sense. It's based on false premises. On the other hand, the bill is so written that it goes far beyond the protection of agents' names.

Craig: Right.

John Stockwell: For example, the bill is so written that it will be a felony for agents' names to be published, even if they're already— to republish the names, even if they've already been published, as in the Library of Congress or anywhere else. It also includes activities of agents, so that you can— if an agent kicks in the door of your house and rapes your wife or whatever, and you publish a story about it without citing the name, it would still be a felony. Right.

Louis Wolf: Under the executive order— so we have to see both the executive order and the Intelligence Identities Bill as almost part of a package. Under the executive order, the CIA now will be allowed, and is allowed since it was signed in December by the president, it is now law. The CIA will be allowed to carry out covert activities in the United States, as well as all the other agencies, too. So that if you were to discover, for example, that a member of an intelligence agency had infiltrated Say your church organization, your student organization, a trade union, or whatever organization, or any group of more than 2 people was infiltrated and you discovered this, and you so much as mentioned it to a friend without even writing a news article or without even talking about it on the media, on television, for example, you could be held criminally liable under this bill. And we're talking about a bill which authorizes, or which Penalizes persons for 15 years in prison— I'm sorry, 5 years in prison, $15,000 fine, or both, for persons who've never worked in the government. And that's a pretty heavy price to have to pay to try and hold up your rights, stand up for your rights against the onslaught of the intelligence agencies.

John Stockwell: Now, the New York Times, to give you the proof of the The argument that this is an official secrets act. The New York Times, in questioning the sponsors of the bill on the floor of the Senate, pointed out that as it was written, if the London Times published a story about CIA activities and the station chief, some scandal of some kind, the New York Times couldn't republish the London Times story without committing a felony. And the sponsor of the bill slapped his hand on the table and said, that's right, we want to knock off all this criticism of the CIA.

Speaker 1: Well, the situation has already come up with the revelation of CIA activity in Iran recently, which was not published in the United States for very long, but eventually it got— either the Washington Post or the New York Times did it, and there was a big uproar because they were publishing it.

John Stockwell: And in the last hearings, the New York Times, questioning again Senator Chafee about this bill, said that as they read it, They would not be able to publish their very legitimate and valuable stories about the activities of CIA agents Ed Wilson and Frank Terpel, who were selling terrorist technology to Libya after they left the CIA, without committing a felony. And Senator Chafee said, yes, in the future, the Washington Post and the New York Times will have to be careful what they publish about the CIA.

Louis Wolf: I should say If this bill had been law then, we would have never known about Watergate.

Speaker 1: It would have been illegal to expose it.

Louis Wolf: Absolutely. But now it will be clear to many more Americans that there is a sort of a split-level foreign policy, as there is a split-level policy at home. There is the rhetoric, and then there is the reality. And with secrecy in their vest pocket, they can now carry out a lot of these activities And do it, as they say, legally. And what's— once more, we're going back to the age of almost the cowboy politics that the CIA carried out in the '50s and '60s. They claim, as a result of the Church Committee and other revelations, that they don't do that anymore. Well, this administration is not only not saying that, but they're saying that it's now legal, and now they're being very upfront about Covert activity. In many cases, the COVID activities are now being overt activities.

Speaker 1: He's been talking about the CIA being the main focus of this bill, but it isn't just the CIA. It's the FBI, where they're involved in, quote, anti-terrorist activities. And of course, Reagan has said anybody who dissents is a terrorist and involved in disinformation. That's no exaggeration.

Craig: That's correct.

Speaker 1: And also any of the other government or military intelligence organizations.

Louis Wolf: I think many Americans, as a result of these 2 matters and others also, will begin to learn what it's like to live in a Third World country which is being targeted by the CIA. Many Americans have lost sight of the fact that many citizens of other countries, particularly in the Third World, have been the victims of massive CIA operations, covert operations, everything from recruitment to bribery, to buying of an election, on up the line to paramilitary activities and terrorism, training in torture, and even assassination and overthrowing of governments. And I think that Americans fail to realize this until it starts sometimes to hit them at home. And that's apparently what's going to be happening now. And legally, this administration Makes no bones that it wishes to— that it sees its own people, many of us, as the enemy. And in fact, there are many people, I think, in the country who consider themselves very middle of the road who would be opposed to this.

John Stockwell: It is absolutely incompatible with our system of government as we have known it in the past. Moreover, it's written to include obviously more than the CIA.

Louis Wolf: That was the—

John Stockwell: all government agencies That have a right to secrecy will be included in this thing.

Speaker 4: Jon, this is literally unconstitutional, though.

John Stockwell: This is absolutely unconstitutional.

Louis Wolf: Freedom of speech. It seems to us that there are people in Congress who are prepared to relegate the First Amendment to a lower priority, and they are more interested in what they call national security. One member of Congress As well as one deputy director of the CIA once stated that the First Amendment, that's only an amendment. It seems to me that's a rather shocking description of one of the hallmarks of our Constitution.

John Stockwell: This is why I call it their greatest operation, is they're doing it without a constitutional amendment, which is beautiful in itself. If they propose to have all the states ratify A bill saying throw out freedom of speech and freedom of the press and give the CIA a law, it would never pass. But on the one hand, they're doing it without constitutional amendments, and two, they're doing it without the nation even being aware of it, which says something about the vigilance of Americans and their own feelings about their freedom of speech and press. They could care less. They would rather watch a football game.

Speaker 4: Why is this the case, or why have they gotten so far with it? Without media scrutiny, without public uproar, etc. It's not just the apathy of the people, isn't it? Also, the media just hasn't reported on what's involved in this.

John Stockwell: Well, the media in this country is, is, and is the most apathetic that I've ever seen in the world in terms of playing ball with the administration. 80% of our news is reporting quotations of political leaders. President Reagan giving a speech in which everything he says is either distortions of historical fact or propaganda statements, in effect. Or bald-faced lies. Or bald-faced lies, all mixed together. And yet the press will report his speech as a fact. It is a fact. He made a speech. He said those words. But they don't say at the end, and everybody in the room that it was all balderdash. Now, there's a little bit more of that with Reagan than there was with other presidents because he makes these misstatements so constantly. He gets the facts screwed up so much. But the press doesn't have any sense of defending its own rights. We have had an occasional editorial, including in the Austin American-Statesman, saying that the Names of Agents bill is unfortunate. And that's about the size. The New York Times ran an editorial saying, this is unfortunate.

Craig: Right.

John Stockwell: They said it was kind of, it was kind of wistful. I read it when I was on my way to lecture at Yale and Wesleyan a couple of months ago, and I read it in the New York Times. They were saying, golly gee whiz, they mean this thing to apply to us too.

Speaker 1: There was another in which they mentioned Louis Wolf, and they said, well, it's a bad bill, but on the other hand, we've got to take care of people like Louis Wolf and maybe John Stockwell.

John Stockwell: They cannot Believe that the— this— that such a thing will actually apply to them.

Louis Wolf: But unfortunately, the CIA has many allies in Congress and some even in the media. And so sometimes you can pick up a newspaper and read some of the CIA's own propaganda coming from, from some of those people.

Speaker 4: What is the source of the CIA's power in Washington?

Louis Wolf: Well, I think it's the whole idea that the CIA has built up, even in the halls of Congress, that it is somehow a sacred entity, and that while there was a lot of criticism of J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI, not a whole lot of it while he was alive. It's all happened since he died. It's interesting because It is known, for example, that Hoover had a lot of information and a lot of very damaging information against members of Congress. It is also clear that the CIA maintains relations with a number of congresspeople who have— some of whom have said so on the floor of Congress, that they are in close contact with the CIA. And this bill, for example, which was written by the CIA, and they said so— Deputy Director Frank Carlucci said it on national television back in 1978.

Speaker 1: That's right.

Louis Wolf: And said, we are now about to deliver this bill up to Congress. That's a little bit of a strange way for laws to be written, if they're going to be written by the CIA.

John Stockwell: Now, what this bill is, it's part of a number of bills and legal precedents that the government is obtaining to keep— now, they're not going to go out and arrest the editor of The New York Times and put him in jail for 10 years the week after this bill is passed. They're not that stupid. But they're getting— they may arrest Lou Wolf if he violates it. I think they probably would, because they could make propaganda out of such an arrest. But what they're doing is they're getting that bill, they're getting the passport ruling, for example, they're getting the other legal precedents, such as the lawsuit against Frank Snepp, Marchetti, and myself, and travel restrictions. They're getting authority for the Secretary of State to throw people out of the country who should have political exile here, such as the El Salvador And they're getting these things ready so that the next war that they get us into, as in Vietnam, they will have the legal power muscle to handle it differently than they did during the Vietnam War.

Speaker 4: To handle dissent at home, to make it impossible to speak out.

John Stockwell: The dissent that choked off Kissinger's and Nixon's, and before that Rusk's, efforts in Vietnam, the popular uprising at home that forced the United States government to abandon its policies and plans in Vietnam will not be nearly— the government will have weapons to crush such a thing in the future. It'll have an Official Secrets Act to make it illegal to publish stories like My Lai and whatnot, because there were obviously secret agents involved. So the publication of the My Lai stories would be a felony. Jane Fonda and Cora Weiss's travels to try to make communication and establish some basis for working out a peaceful solution to the thing, they would snap their passports up in the future. And, and then the other restrictions on travel, the other restrictions on government agents so that an officer who's been in the service can't stop and say, we were bombing villages and bombing churches and schools. That would be a felony. He would go to jail. It's a British Official Secrets Act with a different name.

Speaker 1: You know, you were mentioning a while ago it's not only just the CIA, but it's others too. We had a program recently, which you may remember, about the Greensboro massacres, in which the Klan and the Nazis, in broad daylight and in front of TV cameras, shot down 5 labor organizers and killed them in Greensboro, North Carolina. It came out by the investigations that Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agents was working with the Nazis. Indeed, he was the one who gave them the names of the people to be shot. Also, there was FBI and local police complicity with the Klan members. As a matter of fact, it's come out that the FBI itself established over 40 chapters of the Klan over the years in North Carolina alone.

John Stockwell: Right.

Speaker 1: These revelations would be a felony now.

John Stockwell: Yeah, it would—

Craig: exactly.

Speaker 1: If this passes.

John Stockwell: It would be a felony to reveal such information to the American public. Government of, by, and for the people is soon to be a thing of the past in the United States of America.

Speaker 4: What this will do is to put the CIA, the FBI, and these other government agencies outside of the realm of public criticism and even discussion.

John Stockwell: Or law.

Speaker 4: Yeah, absolutely.

John Stockwell: Outside of the law. Because they've broken every law of man and God in, in the activities they have conducted. The experimentation on American citizens, for example, with chemicals and disease. The propaganda of the United States, breaking and entering. Colonel White's famous words about, where else can a red-blooded boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape, and pillage in the name of the All-Highest? Now they will be able to—

Speaker 1: Who was this?

John Stockwell: This was Colonel George M. White, one of the founders of the CIA, who eventually directed Oh. The MKUltra program. And he was retiring. He and I overlapped by about 4 years. He came out of retirement to address my mid-career seminar, and telling about how we put the CIA together and we did this, that, and the other. In his letters, memoirs, he wrote, and then allowed it to be published, that statement: Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape, And pillage with the blessings of the All-Highest. And, uh, that was before they had an Official Secrets Act to protect their activities.

Speaker 4: Jon, there's been very few people in this country that have actually told us what the CIA has been up to and exposed some of their misdeeds, etc. You, of course, and a few other former agents have written some books and given lectures criticizing agents' activities. This would be impossible In the future, would it not be?

John Stockwell: We will never know the truth and the details, the blood and gore, the extent of responsibility and culpability for the CIA's program in Nicaragua right now, unless someone like Reagan or in his adminis— a top official chooses to stand up and denounce what's happening, because top officials are exempt from these laws. But we will never know the truth about, for example, the Shah and the evacuation of Iran, which was a debacle. I was told by a friend of mine who was close to a third friend of mine who was part of the CIA security establishment in Iran, who said it was a debacle that far exceeded the evacuation of Vietnam, the evacuation of the United States from Iran. And this story will never come out, and the many other stories, the assassinations that probably are being planned today, such as the coup in Chile or the assassination of Patrice Lumumba. These sort of things are going on, but the public won't know about them in the future.

Speaker 4: Why has the government been so outraged by this publication and putting so much heat on them? I don't think there's any other publication In America that's had so much government pressure put on them, then—

John Stockwell: Well, you have 2 forces in the government functioning here. You have one is a defensive outrage against being attacked. Secret police organizations don't like to be exposed and attacked. That's the same anger that they focused at me. People who are performing Activities that the full range of the society, the 90% of the society, would describe as depraved. People who are doing this while functioning under the COVID of being legitimate State Department diplomats, prestigious cover positions, don't like to have their activities and names published for what they really are. This is traditional anywhere in the world. The goon squads in Chile don't like to be attacked.

Craig: Right.

John Stockwell: Nor does the KGB in Russia, to be attacked and exposed. But nowhere else in the world do they become as self-righteous and as vindictive as they do in Washington, where they— the United States ambivalence, the duplicity, the Jekyll and Hyde aspect of the United States character, where we profess such high ideals, and yet traditionally we have Exploited— we have engaged in activities that included dropping atom bombs on women and children in Japan, eliminating large elements of the Indian population of this country, and in the past 30 years killing well over 800,000 people in the Third World under circumstances that can only be called terrorism, but doing it pretending all the while to be Idealistic, high-minded, human rights-oriented, freedom-loving people. Now, these values are brought together in the CIA, where people are diplomats by cover and CIA agents by trade. And when they have themselves exposed and have their children, their family, their friends find out that, hey, you weren't really a nice diplomat all these years, you were in fact running the Phoenix Program in Vietnam that killed 40,000 people.

Speaker 1: Right.

John Stockwell: Including many innocent people. This isn't, this isn't something that makes these people feel good, and they get very angry. Moreover, the nation in the mid-'70s was clearly close to closing down the CIA, to rejecting this kind of activity. So they were fighting for their existence. And there you get into the other driving force of their reaction against Lew Wolfe and Bill Shapp and myself and others, is just simply exploitation. Working the thing against the people who— there is a theory, which is of course nonsense, that Phil Agee was sent by the CIA to reveal names to create an atmosphere which would lead eventually to an Official Secrets Act.

Speaker 1: That's right.

John Stockwell: Now, that is certainly nonsense, and the extent to which it discredits a very honorable man, you know, I— But the fact is that they are exploiting this revelation of names extensively to effect the passage of an Official Secrets Act.

Speaker 1: They were—

John Stockwell: they've tried every other way over the past 30 years, every other way you could conceive of. They didn't succeed until modern times and the curious vacillation of the American public and Washington and the senators and congressmen in terms of just pure conservatism. Right.

Louis Wolf: And I think that American people really have to understand that it is their rights which are being threatened here. Now, we are among many people ones who reject the idea that it's more important to protect our rights than people in other countries. Clearly, that is not the case. The minute we are involved in the torture or in the death of a single person in another country, our rights are being abridged, and our tax money, to say the least, is being used to carry it out.

Speaker 4: And our humanity is being violated, because we're being asked to accept inhuman acts perpetuated in our name as Americans.

Speaker 1: Plus the fact that it eventually will come home. If they use it successfully overseas, they'll use it on the United States citizens as well.

John Stockwell: One of the most interesting aspects of this bill and the current environment in Washington is to project what it does to the legal system of a free society like ours in terms of the individual when you begin to give a special police, a secret police, a legal priority, legal freedoms and rights over The citizens. We have some examples. We don't have to speculate. The bill isn't passed yet, and yet some of the things that have been happening in the last few years illustrate what we can look forward to. For example, one to begin with a personal experience: I testified to the Senate a little over a year ago over a year ago against this bill. I demanded the right to testify because they had ACLU testify. Testifying against it, and journalists, but no one who had been inside, who knew about COVR and could say, this is bullshit, I was there, we didn't do it that way. They acquiesced and let me testify. Now, you have to write out a written statement before you testify and submit it, and then you verbally introduce yourself on the floor of the Senate— I am so-and-so— and then proceed to make a verbal statement which parallels the written statement. And you were asked to testify about what? statement. The Senate Oversight— Intelligence Oversight Committee submitted my written statement to the CIA for censorship the day before my testimony. The CIA struck out 2 parts which were in the public record, published in my book and republished in many magazines, overt information which both of you have read and many other people in this nation, 40,000 people or so that bought my book, have read. Which was not national security information, but there were 2 things that I cited that showed the CIA's disregard for agents' cover. It just illustrated the fact that there was no— that they weren't secret agents. The CIA struck them out and returned the report, deleting these points. Now, I was meeting with the representatives of the Senate committee just before I went on to testify. And the Senate legal counsel, the young attorney, threatened me right outside their office. I didn't have a badge to get inside their office, so we were standing in the little foyer outside. And I mean finger in the chest, thump, thump, you know, and I'm warning you, John Stockwell, do not use the floor of the Senate to challenge CIA review, like this. And I'm backing up like that. Then we walk into the—

Speaker 1: He didn't know you were an international karate champion, right?

John Stockwell: And so then I went in to testify, and I began to introduce myself, and Jake Garnes from Utah— I was saying, you know, Stockwell, 19 years in the Marine Corps and Marine Corps Reserves, 13 years in the CIA, the wars and medals and whatnot, to establish the fact that I, you know, I have certain credentials for having served my country. And he interrupted me to say, I know who you are. You're a traitor, and everything about you fills me with loathing and disgust. And I said, Senator, no one is going to say something like that to me anywhere. And he said, I just did. I have my freedom of speech too, and grinned at the cameras. And I said, yeah, but the difference is that I give you your freedom of speech, and you're trying to take mine away from me. Okay. In Frank Snepp's case, where the government sued him to take— a civil suit to take a Take away the profits from his book, so-called. They took away all the gross proceeds, not just the profits.

Speaker 1: Gee.

John Stockwell: They took him into the 4th— oh, yes, he couldn't deduct his typing costs or whatever. They took away the gross of everything the book had made. Now, in the first day of hearing in the 4th District Court under Judge Orin Lewis, with all kinds of attorneys and journalists attending this thing. Oren Lewis made statements which the Washington Post— 3 major newspapers in the nation were virtually calling for his impeachment the next day for the bias of his statements. He said that it would not be necessary to have a jury, that he could handle it himself. He said that the facts in the case didn't interest him one damn bit. He said that it was his objective to take away from Mr. Snapp his That was before the trial even started. This was the first day. This was in the first days of the thing.

Speaker 4: Unbiased open mind.

John Stockwell: He did this in front of, like I say, 50 attorneys who were there because of the unconstitutional, the new law aspect of the case, and journalists, prominent journalists from all over the world. Now, that's horrifying. But what's much more horrifying is what follows. Frank Snepp and his attorney were relaxed after that, figuring that whatever happened, they had it won in the appeals because of his incredibly prejudiced statements then and throughout the case. He kept interrupting the state's counsel to disallow, to protest Snepp's positions, and vice versa. I mean, he was conducting the hearings. Now, Snapp and Mark Lynch, the ACLU attorney working with him, felt that they had it absolutely won in the appeals. When they got the court record to go to the 4th District Appeals Court in Richmond, Virginia, those statements had been expunged from the record.

Speaker 1: Wow.

John Stockwell: And the appeals court refused to address itself to the fact that Oren Lewis's prejudicial statements had been written out. The judge had gotten to the court recorder and told him to type the thing up without those statements in it.

Speaker 4: Is that legal? What's the status of that?

John Stockwell: That's a pure, raw felony. Warren Lewis and the court recorder, whoever did it, should, you know, should get about 15 years for that. But the courts refused to consider the fact that the court record had been modified. There were 50 witnesses, 3 newspapers calling for the man's— virtually for the man's impeachment for his statements. And then when they get there, the court record, it doesn't say the same thing that all of these witnesses said it did afterwards. That's just one example.

Speaker 4: This also shows very graphically how if you have these police agencies like the CIA or the FBI getting out of control, how they corrupt the entire legal system.

John Stockwell: And then the case of Phil Agee that we mentioned previously in his passport hearing, where the state is revealing names, falsely claiming these men were killed, in order to prove a point to get broader legislation for the CIA. And then just a little case that has no implications in terms of names of agents, bills, or whatnot, freedom of speech, but it illustrates the point.

Speaker 1: Phil Litschke.

John Stockwell: Quit the CIA. He was writing a book about Koreagate, which I hope he gets published. It's truly a horrifying account of its own about the inside story of Koreagate. He submitted it for review, as the law requires him to do. They challenged it and deleted a lot of things. So then he would write footnotes saying, the information blanked out in the above paragraphs discusses a high-ranking CIA official who was taken out by Korean police and gotten drunk. And And coerced and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, but without, you know, trying to come up with a footnote and then submit the footnotes for review. And he was truly a thorn in their side, and then they were having to address themselves to what of the footnotes could they— because, you know, they eventually have to defend these things in court. But anyway, he was working on his book very seriously with them through the review process. His wife was unstable, treated for mental problems in, uh— In a mental hospital. Psychiatric treatment. She— they were in the process of getting a divorce. The CIA had its counsels work with her and work with her counsels. Now, they claimed this was necessary to prevent her or the divorce proceedings from revealing national security information, but she wasn't an employee of the CIA. They had prominent CIA— I mean, GS-17 CIA officers go to the divorce hearings and testify Against Phil Lychke, character assassination, saying things that his friends would absolutely deny in terms of his character and his stability. And when he and his attorney tried to cross-examine them, the court said no, because of national security. They couldn't be questioned on the statements they had made about him, and they were permitted to walk out of the room without cross-examination. So they could stand up and destroy his character lying while they did so, and walk away without being cross-examined. Now, see, the precedent in that case means that if the government begins to come after people, like, they have to rewrite the whole legal system. If they begin to prosecute people under the names of Agents Bill, they can't— you know, the citizen's defense of this was the truth, this horrible thing was happening, which might make some points with the jury, cannot be brought out. They'll claim national security. So they will allow government witnesses to come in and testify for the prosecution, but they will not allow them to be cross-examined to pull out the whole truth to defend the individual. This is what we're getting into with the new law.

Speaker 1: Legal libel, legal libel, legal slander?

John Stockwell: Legal libel, legal slander, legal biased information, and depriving the citizen, the defendant, of the right to defend himself, to act— to get the full information out. It's a new law. It's a new era we're getting into. It's 180 degrees new from what this country is all about. And again, I repeat the irony that the beauty of it, from the CIA's point of view, is that the great mass of the American people, including the press and the movers of the society, are oblivious of what's happening.

Speaker 4: Jon, we wanted to thank you for coming on our show to revealing to our audience here exactly what's at stake. State in this name of agents bill. And we also want to tell you that next week we have some more revelations, some startling revelations about recent CIA activity, with Louis Wolf of the COVID Action Information Bulletin, who will be back. And John Stockwell will again comment on some of Louis's revelations. We'll have some more updated stories about the CIA. So the CIA watch continues on Alternative Views. Thank you.

Speaker 1: And now for some news stories. How many of you have heard of Sonoma State College? Well, it's in California, and each year they select the 10 most censored stories of the year. And those who don't quite make the top 10 are considered the, oh, 15 or 20 underreported stories of the year. How do they select this? Well, they have a panel, mainly a combination of press muckrakers And people from the press itself, people from CBS or New York Times. And so since 1976, they've been doing this. And very interestingly, every one of these top 10 stories has been covered by alternative views, mainly because the stories originate or appear in the alternative press. For instance, the basic call— this was in 1981— the The top story was the basic cause of our economic crisis: monopoly, militarism, and multinationalization have destroyed America's free enterprise. The next story was injustice at Greensboro, members of the Klan and the Nazis shooting down those labor leaders there. We covered these. The third one was buying America and radioactive— burying America in radioactive waste. One hungry— one child dies of hunger every 2 seconds. And on and on and on. Anyway, these are all stories that we've covered, but nobody, nobody else. The one we missed was one which, well, it came across in the Chicago Tribune. I don't like the Chicago Tribune. I guess you don't either.

Speaker 4: I haven't seen that.

Speaker 1: But this is an incredible thing. I've never heard of this before. So this will close the gap, and now we'll report on all stories since 1976. Did you know that there is a bank in the United States government which will fund projects which Congress does not approve of, or if Congress does approve, they only give them a pittance rather than as much as they want. And they give a sample here, or if the federal, or if the executive branch wants to do something quietly, they have this special little bank which does it. For instance, NASA wanted a new satellite to track other satellites, but it was afraid that Congress wouldn't approve the money. They wanted Western Union to do it, and they would finance it. Just, hey, buddy, here's the money. And the government would— it was a straight loan from the government to them. This bank is in the office of the Federal Treasury Building in Washington. And was reported back in 1979. The bank operates with just a handful of staff members, but it has extended some $65 billion in loans since it started in 1974. And this is more than the total outstanding loans of the Bank of America, the world's largest private bank.

Speaker 4: That's big bucks.

Speaker 1: Yeah, that's incredible.

Speaker 4: I have an astonishing story here that I think will be on possibly Pomona College's 10 biggest stories that's been neglected for this year. This is a story that I haven't seen reported on television or in any of the media, and it is the trial that's going on now of the top chemical testing company in America called the Industrial Bio-Testing Laboratories, that is now going on in a case that in these times— and a story on this alleges— is the most massive scientific fraud fraud in U.S. history. Since 1953, the Industrial Bio-Testing Laboratories is the largest corporation in America that tests all of the chemicals that are used in herbicides, pesticides, that are used on many different products that we use daily. What these corporations do is they pay this corporation, Industrial Bio-Testing Laboratories, The government pays the laboratory's money to carry out tests to see if the products that these corporations want to sell are safe or not, and then the government takes a look at the tests and certifies on the basis of these chemical tests whether a product is or is not safe. Well, after 7 years of government investigation, it appears that there has been massive scientific fraud —in the testing that the biotest laboratories have been carrying out. In other words, they've been doing shoddy scientific research and testing. They've been covering over dangers in some of the products that we use, falsifying evidence, doing shoddy examination, making claims in tests that they didn't really carry out, failing to experiment for certain dangerous chemicals and substances. So it could be that many, many products that are now on the market that went through this company are dangerous. To give you a sense of the magnitude of what's at stake here, the In These Times stories indicates that over 10,000 IBT studies have been carried out to register products for the American market, and at least 2,000 of them are primary research. That no other testing company or no other government test was carried through to test the safety of these products. Moreover, independent Canadian and American scientists have called the majority of the studies that this corporation has carried out to be scientifically invalid, and they claim that almost all of the insecticides and herbicides that are on the market today, over 325 of them, that were certified by this company and their tests, may not be safe at all. So this is a massive scientific scandal that may have a lot of importance for us, because this may mean we've been using products that have really not been safe. And this hadn't been covered at all in the media that I've seen about, even though it seems to be a major story.

Craig: The Wall Street Journal reports that doctors defrauding Medicare may face fines in excess of $100,000. The Health Department's inspector general is readying civil penalties for doctors who double-bill patients or charge for operations that they never perform. Officials also are investigating kickback payments by medical equipment suppliers to hospitals and therapists. There are several good books out on this subject, but one I thought was particularly good It was called Tender Loving Greed by Mary Mendelson, and it chronicled abuses in the nursing home industry. And one of the things she says is a big scam in nursing homes nowadays that actually has the mob involved in it is the milking of the Medicare profits by rewriting loans. It seems that the mobs will buy up a whole chain of nursing homes and then funnel the Medicare and Medicaid money into rewritten loans that With interest rates of like 40%, so that most of the money, instead of going to the patients themselves in the form of food and healthcare, is actually going into the coffers of the mobsters. That's Tender Loving Greed by Mary Mendelson. It's an excellent book.

Speaker 1: Although this program was made in 1982, the information contained in it was never presented on the regular media.

Louis Wolf: It was, in fact, the New York Times, in a story in January, who disclosed the first part of the story, which was that the Green Berets, 8 of them, were present during a torture session. And the member of the Salvadoran Army who talked about this, who has now deserted and who is living in Mexico, he was somewhat intimidated, I guess, by talking to the New York Times. And he later revealed to the Mexican media— and that's the transcript in this story, in this article, that the Special Forces— and I should say the U.S. Special Forces was created originally by the CIA— the Special Forces were actually involved in the torture, as opposed to standing by observing it.

John Stockwell: The training facilities for torture, for interrogation techniques, were in San Antonio, Texas, at one time. It troubles me, not obviously because I was once part of all this, but also just as an American citizen, to realize that this country is indulging in activities that are just as cruel and just as depraved in some cases, and almost as extensive as what, for example, the Gestapo indulged in in Germany. We haven't liquidated 5 million Jews, but 800,000 minimum figure people killed in terrorist circumstances in the Third World is a lot of people dead.

Speaker 1: Former CIA official John Stockwell and co-editor of COVID Action Information Bulletin, Louis Wolf, tonight on Alternative Views. Tonight on part 2 of COVID Action, part 2 of a 3-part series, we again feature Louis Wolf, editor of COVID Action Information Bulletin. And John Stockwell, former CIA official and author of In Search of Enemies and Red Sunset. We'll take you on a tour of COVID intelligence activity around the world, some by the CIA, some by other countries, and even an attempted coup by the Ku Klux Klan. Now some news. We have something on the FBI. It seemed like they're trying to climb back in our Bedrooms and telephones and everywhere else, all of our organizations that we have. Back on April 28th, there was a UPI story which quoted the FBI Director William Webster saying, folks, we have some new FBI guidelines, and that means we're going to be able to go into the political spying business again. But he says, don't worry about it, our agents It's only— we'll be doing it if we think that a crime is going to be committed. There were some pretty stringent guidelines laid down on the FBI back during the Ford administration as a result of the revelations of the COINTELPRO program from 1957 to 1971. Amazingly enough, I gave a presentation at a college class Yes. These are college graduate students. They didn't know what the COINTELPRO program was. I thought, my God, is our memory that short? So, to let you know what COINTELPRO was, it was J. Edgar Hoover's program to infiltrate, dislocate, disrupt any lawful political organizations which J. Edgar Hoover didn't like. They had wiretaps, bugs, surreptitious mail openings, break-ins. They sent anonymous letters and all to break up marriages. They disrupted meetings, ostracized people from their professions, got people fired from their jobs. They provoked target groups into rivalries that could result in death. They dynamited publishing places of dissident press organizations. And our— from our program on the Klan, we found out that the Klan had organized over 40 chapters of the Klan in North Carolina alone back in the '60s. Anyway, it was a terrible, terrible thing. And— but they're wanting to do it again, but supposedly more gently. But in the June '83 edition of the Inquiry magazine, the libertarian magazine, Matt Hentoff says, watch out, folks, the interpretation which William Webster gives on what they can do is much more broad than even tail gunner Joe McCarthy had in his heyday. And the new guidelines give to the agents to let them go on their feelings as to what may advocate— only advocate— what they consider to be criminal activity. And that could be most anything. And as the article ends, it says, if keeping tabs on mere public advocacy is an authorized law enforcement activity, law enforcement activity in the domestic security field, then between what the FBI hears from soapboxes and informants and learns from collectively signed ads and letters to newspaper editors, folks, get ready for another COINTELPRO program.

Speaker 4: As an example of the sort of thing that the FBI has been doing over the last several decades and the subversive groups that they've been infiltrating and harassing. One case is the National Lawyers Guild. They've recently put a multimillion-dollar lawsuit through the courts claiming that the FBI has been illegally harassing them, surveilling them, infiltrating their group since the 1940s. And during this lawsuit, a document came out that revealed— That's right. That an FBI informer within the National Lawyers Guild Bar Association has every year been leaking to the FBI a list of all of the names of the members of the National Lawyers Guild that the FBI has put into its files to keep information on and to surveil. And they've also— the National Lawyers Guild has uncovered over 400,000 pages of documents that the FBI had amassed on them that are in FBI files, showing the depth of the surveillance of the FBI on the National Lawyers Guild. And they claim that another 3 million pages of documents have also been amassed by the FBI that the FBI has refused so far to release, but that Freedom of Information suits are trying to get opened up and disclosed. So here's an example of the kinds of groups that the FBI claim you have to have to keep their eye on, the National Lawyers Guild, this very subversive organization of liberal lawyers.

Speaker 1: There's— in this article in Inquiry, it says that not only will the new guidelines allow the FBI to continue investigations into organizations, but it can do it even when an organization's inactive, like if the International Workers of the The old IWW Wobblies, if they wanted to get organized again, the FBI would be there, be one of the first ones to join up to continue their surveillance of them, even if there is no immediate harm. This is a guideline. Even if there is no immediate harm from the organization. And there's another thing that is continuing to— that we still have, which the media don't talk about, and that is the concentration camps in the United States. We have concentration camps. I think that's a good point. I think, what, there are 6 or 8 of them around the country that are caretaker status. And anytime the president says there is a national emergency, the FBI trots out its files and says, okay, we'll put these people in these concentration camps. That's on the law, and they're just ready and waiting.

Speaker 4: I have one final piece of data on this National Lawyers Guild suit, and that is the FBI itself has confirmed that at least 13 guild members were undercover FBI agents, and 102 more were paid informants. This shows the extent to which the FBI has infiltrated even liberal groups like the National Lawyers Guild, and has also subverted or corrupted their members by making them paid informants of the FBI. So this just shows you that any group— I'm sorry, I'm sorry. can be infiltrated and surveilled by the FBI.

Speaker 1: And on these lists of people to be put in concentration camps in the event of so-called national emergency are people like our good friend John Duncan, I imagine, from the Civil Liberties Union. Civil Liberties Union folks are on the FBI's list. People like, oh, Jane Fonda, Dr. Spock— dear Dr. Spock— is on the list. So, hey, we might have a pretty good time that Don't you expect that we'll be there?

Craig: Yeah. I was a member of SDS back in the '60s, and I'll tell you what, there never was a more boring organization. I went to about 2 meetings, and they sat around and argued about semantics and this and that. And finally, this one radical guy, he had real frizzy hair and just kind of a crazy dude. He was advocating taking over McDonald's, taking over this, taking over that. One of the meetings, he finally talked us in. We went down and occupied the McDonald's. And after, after a while, I got to thinking, boy, this is pretty stupid. And I'd always been an advocate of freedom of milkshake, so I ended up buying a strawberry milkshake and going home. And that was the extent of my involvement with SDS. But I'm sure it's in a file somewhere.

Speaker 1: And that guy who, that, who provoked everybody to doing it more than likely was an FBI agent. It was obvious because he was They found that in previous programs we've had on civil liberties, they found that the fellow who triggered the Chicago riot by skinnying up, climbing up the— oh, not a ladder. What do you call those things in the parks where the pigeons jump on?

Louis Wolf: Ladder, maple, or—

Speaker 1: Statue! That's it. Anyway, this guy climbed up on a statue and fired on the crowd. fluttered a Viet Cong flag up there, and that triggered the police. Then another, another person went up and slapped a policeman in the face. Both of these guys, even though they had beards and long hair, were both police undercover people, and they were provocative agents. And other people I've talked to said their organizations had these provocateurs in them who turned out to be FBI agents. What else you got, Craig?

Craig: Well, let me see. I clipped a little thing out of the paper. I think it was the Austin paper. I neglected to mark it. Careless me. This is a direct quote. I wonder if you could guess who said this. I quote, every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed, This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron. Do you guys have any idea who said that?

Speaker 1: No. He also said, as part of that, every warship launched, every gun that is fired, every bomb that is dropped represents a theft, a theft from those people who are hungry and don't have enough clothes and don't have work.

Craig: You obviously know who it is. Who do you think, Stokely Carmichael? No, that was Dwight David Eisenhower.

Speaker 1: That subversive president we had.

Louis Wolf: Yes, indeed.

Craig: And he was a Republican, I may note, and the commander of Allied forces in Europe during the war. So you might I think he would know something about that.

Speaker 1: And now the second in a 3-part series on covert action with John Stockwell and Louis Wolf.

Speaker 4: John, there has been over the last few years also a small handful of journalists who have been sort of CIA watchdogs, most prominent of which has been Louis Wolf. We have an interview with him. Maybe you can introduce this interview. Tell us a little bit about Louis Wolf and his journalistic publications. Who is Louis, and what has he been doing over the years, and why is the government so outraged by him?

John Stockwell: Well, his background is, is, uh, it's thoroughly, uh, legitimate standard, if you will, uh, journalism. He was assigned for a couple of years in Manchester writing for a couple of prominent news organizations.

Speaker 1: Manchester, England?

John Stockwell: Yes, Manchester, England. And eventually made his way through London back to the United States, where he gravitated to scrutiny of the CIA and the intelligence community, watching the revelations of the Church Committee, information that he had come across in his research, some of which he had published as part of news stories previously, other parts of which he was not permitted to published by the nature of the press establishment. And so he put together with Bill Shapp and Ellen Ray the COVID Action Information Bulletin, whose function was to focus on the intelligence organizations of the United States and discuss and expose in a perfectly legitimate way the COVID action activities of the CIA, principally, as well as the other intelligence organizations. I believe they formed that in about 1976 and have been in Washington since, publishing stories of— true stories. Their quality, their standards of journalism are exceedingly high. That bulletin is distributed in the State Department, and it's sold out the first morning that it's put on the stands, in the State Department newsstands. They also They also publish in that bulletin the names of CIA agents and where they are now, as they're assigned and reassigned about the world. I believe that in very recent months they have ceased the policy of publishing names because the controversy is so hot, and they would just as soon—

Speaker 4: Yeah.

John Stockwell: And also, it's never been their intention to break the law. They've made that clear from the outset. Bill Shapp is the brother. He is a highly competent attorney and is the brother of a top sportscaster in New York City. He is a very articulate man himself and has testified to the Senate many times against the names of agents Bill, for example, and defending what he and Lou Wolf are doing. And after his testimony, many times senators. have come up and shaken his hand and said, I disagree with you, but you certainly make your case for the legitimacy of what you're doing very well.

Speaker 1: Let's, let's, yeah, let's take a look at some of the things which Louis Wolff had to say, and we'll let you comment every so often on this, okay?

Speaker 4: Great. What in the years that you've been publishing it do you think are some of your most significant revelations?

Louis Wolf: Are there some stories that even Well, I think one of the big stories that we were able to document in some detail was the, the whole scope of CIA activities similar to what the CIA did in Chile, and which was documented by the Senate Select Committee, was the whole covert action program in Jamaica between 1976 and 1980. And we were— we did a great deal of research into that. And we discovered many, in many ways, a very similar program, almost a classic model that was followed along the lines of what they did in Chile, including 3 major categories: military, paramilitary activity, the use of propaganda in the media, and the third one, which was economic warfare, using the multilateral organizations, the International Monetary Fund and others to withhold loans which had been promised to the Jamaican government. This is one example.

Speaker 4: What are a couple more of the details of that? Particularly, you mentioned those first 2 examples of actual paramilitary activity the CIA was involved in in Jamaica.

Louis Wolf: There was a fire, for example, that took place in Jamaica of an old people's home. I think 150 old And infirm women, many of them blind, were living in this home. And as it turned out, the place burned down in the space of about 8 minutes, 7 or 8 minutes. It was discovered that the phone wires had been cut and that the exits had all been blocked. Even those who could see their way out could not get out. And That the means by which the fire was set was the use of a petroleum jelly, which was unavailable in Jamaica. This was one indication, among others, that there was outside help. Well, this is very— Why would the CIA, you might ask, why would the CIA want to murder 150 old women? It was because it was an effort, part of a very large-scale effort, to discredit the government in Jamaica, which was at the time headed by Michael Manley, the prime minister. There were images produced of Michael Manley in the media, in the Daily Gleaner, which was the newspaper which the United States, through the CIA, helped to support. And there is a good deal of evidence of that. There were images of Michael Manley showing a death mask. I mean, it was his face which had been somehow made to look like a death mask, although it was pretending to be a photograph of him. And there were many ways to try and discredit him. This is very, very similar, in fact, to what the CIA did to try and discredit Salvador Allende in Chile. If you remember, Richard Nixon instructed the CIA in a meeting which was in 1970 in the White House, and There was a document in the Senate report, which is reprinted, and he said, make the economy scream. Those were his words. And that's, of course, what the CIA proceeded to do in Chile, and that's what they also did in Jamaica.

Speaker 1: They also furnished a lot of munitions and assistance to the terrorist squads that were going around killing people in the cities and also in the countryside in Jamaica as well.

Louis Wolf: That's correct.

Speaker 1: Well, Jon, you had a trip down to Jamaica, and you saw a lot of these things about Jamaica with your own eyes, right?

John Stockwell: Yes, indeed. A very moving, a very interesting trip to me, to see a target country at a time in the height of a CIA operation when I was completely outside. So there's no way that I could see— to see the problem that journalists have always had when the U.S. government was targeting on a country in a situation, trying to destabilize it, overthrow, or manipulate the elections or whatever, of trying to figure out what's going on when you don't have access to all of the flow of cables and the discussions and National Security Council meetings and whatnot for the planning. I observed that from published information, the CIA station there was It was quite large for that size of a country. It was huge, in fact. It was bigger than any station I knew of in Africa, although Jamaica was a fairly small island with 2 million people. That's typical of when the CIA has got a big operation going in a place. They beef up the station and beef up the offices back stateside. The tone and flow of articles in The Gleaner was, of course, As Lou says, definitely a chapter out of Chile or a chapter out of the Angolan operation. Every indication of a massive CIA operation going to destabilize the government, to make the economy scream. And in that case, I would say that probably someone got promoted for that one, probably several people.

Speaker 1: Because Manley was right about this?

Speaker 4: By a legitimate election.

John Stockwell: Yeah, without a scandal, without an assassination, without the things that have caused the CIA so much grief, Manley, a champion of social democracy, of giving the people a piece of the pie, was thrown out of office and an arch-capitalist was put in office. And again, there was minimal adverse publicity. Lou Wolfe and the others were studying the situation and did publish about what was going on, but it was not published in the New York Times and the Washington Post, and the big television networks didn't do studies on it, primarily because even if the journalists of the big And even though the domestic organs knew what was happening and might have wanted to, they really just, because of the secrecy, couldn't get the truth about what the United States was doing. One interesting thing was that the effectiveness of the lies, the liars in our government, you know, the duplicity. When we formed the CIA, we committed our leaders to having 2 policies as loose as the the rhetoric, the public statements, and the truth about what United States policy is. So an interesting measure of presidents is how effectively they lie. Interesting discussions that occur inside the CIA is about lying. Would you lie? You know, you're the DDO and you're going to testify to the Senate, and it's serious discussions. Are you going to lie? Because if you do, it's perjury and there's a There's a chance you could go to jail, and yet, you know, the organization expects you to lie. President Carter was one of the most effective liars I have ever watched on television and through the media. As a poker player, man, I would never go up against that man. He could look at that camera and say things that obviously he knew were completely and totally false, and I would study his expression, and I could detect nothing except occasionally a little wisp of a smile that wasn't consistent with what he was saying, like he thought it was funny. But one of his more classic— Nervous tic, actually. Yeah, well, the, the smile that I was referring to wasn't that. It was just a kind of like he was repressing a grin, like he thought it was funny. How he rationalized these things, I don't know, but One of his most conspicuous lies was when he sat down with Manley just a few weeks before the elections in Washington and told him face-to-face that the CIA— don't have the CIA doing anything to destabilize you or your government, we have no such program going, when obviously he did. And he pulled it off to the point where even Manley was troubled.

Craig: Right.

John Stockwell: Very effective liars.

Louis Wolf: Another major story that we uncovered was the whole range of CIA media operations throughout the world. We did an analysis of these operations and the use of money, very large-scale money. It's thought between 1/3 and 40% of the CIA's budget And I should say that that budget figure is the biggest secret that there is in Washington today. At that time, it was estimated that the 1978 budget was in the range of $1.5 billion. A more recent estimate by a military journal, not a liberal journal by any means, estimated that the CIA's budget today is in the range of $10 billion. At any rate, this analysis that we made of the CIA's media operations disclosed, among other things, that they deliver through CIA couriers ready-to-print or ready-to-broadcast news— and I put that in inverted commas— which is used by the media. And this is created by the CIA.

Speaker 4: How often does the CIA manipulate the media in this way, plant stories, get their views in the media? Is this fairly common as a modus operandi for the CIA?

John Stockwell: It goes beyond your— in the course of the past 30 years, it goes beyond your wildest imagination, the extent to which the CIA has gone to manipulate public opinion. If you include the MH Chaos program, which was a billion-dollar program of setting up proprietary companies, setting up student organizations so they could draw radical students in and do every kind of duplicitous manipulation of national student movements, press propaganda, labor, extensive formation of labor unions, funding of major labor unions, With the objective essentially of manipulating the mind and attitudes of workers throughout the nation and the world. This was the essential tool that they used to destabilize Chile and overthrow Allende, was of course making the economy scream, getting to the military officers, but it was essentially the truckers union that finally brought the country down and justified, quote, justified Pinochet's takeover. of power. 5,000 university professors they've co-opted. This is Church Committee revelations. I'm not making this up. It's in print, Church Committee's revelations. 5,000 university professors co-opted to help the CIA manipulate people's minds. 400 journalists in the U.S., including big-name journalists— now, that's a big chunk of the prominent journalists— co-opted to function routinely to put—

Louis Wolf: help the There are a whole range of areas wherein the CIA provides briefings to selected journalists. And there are numerous cases where the CIA has, for example, published books. And several thousand books were published in English by the CIA. And this is documented in the Church Committee report. They set up 250 news services and wire services, some of which, not all, but some of which are still in the pocket of the CIA. And I think it's only fair to, to say that even some journalists who don't realize— there are some who are witting, but there are also some who do not realize that they're being targeted by the CIA when they come home from a trip overseas. They might talk to somebody, and they don't realize, at least right away, who they're talking to, and then it turns out that they've been the source of information which was used by the CIA.

John Stockwell: And then specific operations around the world, from corner to corner, to discredit this individual, create an impression about that situation, such as El Salvador, the famous white Our white papers in the Angolan operation, which I note were, you know, back in the good old days, we did a better job.

Speaker 4: Mm-hmm.

John Stockwell: Our white papers in the Angolan operation were based on very specific photographs and hard information of Soviet ships putting into Porto Ambuim in Angola. The white paper that the CIA produced for Alexander Haig to justify the intervention in El Salvador a piece of trash. It was discredited by the right and the left and the center. It didn't hold together.

Louis Wolf: I should point, for example, to the stories that came out during the Angola operation, where it was discovered that the CIA was involved in a massive covert operation, which the Congress cut off when they learned about it. There were certainly a small handful, really a tiny handful, you could count them on the fingers of one hand of the members of Congress who knew about that operation and the scale of it beforehand. And then they cut it off. Well, one of the revelations at the time that came out was that the CIA had created a story that was planted in the media that the Cubans who were in Angola at the time were raping Angolan women. And that they were really doing very, very gross things to these women and killing them. Well, it was disclosed, in fact, by John Stockwell, among other people, who was the former CIA station chief, or in charge of the CIA's task force in Angola, that that whole story was created by the CIA station in Zambia and in Zaire. Where they sat around a table and wrote this story, and then it was fed to a, a stringer who then fed it to a news service who then got it to the AP, Associated Press, who then picked it up and was sent around the world and was printed in hundreds of newspapers as fact.

John Stockwell: But you can rest assured that it, it is at least very difficult for the American people, including us, to know what is true about the Sandinista government in Nicaragua, for example, or about El Salvador, or about Argentina and the Falklands right now. Our former ally of a month ago is now our enemy in this confrontation. In Jamaica, for example. And then this very specific— the Libyan hit squad, the mythical Libyan hit squad. We had a situation where Reagan And President Reagan and President Gaddafi were confronting each other internationally. Reagan ordered our ship into what Libya claims as its waters with the specific intention of either standing Gaddafi down or provoking an incident. And it worked. He shot down 2 Libyan jet fighter planes. And then could— Gaddafi was incensed, and there was a credibility problem. There was the president of the giant United States confronting this relatively small Arab country.

Speaker 1: I guess this leads us to your Covert Action Information Bulletin, because there's a story in here about the hit squads, and it actually originated apparently with the Israeli secret police, the Mossad.

Louis Wolf: It's a very interesting case study of, of how these propaganda operations can come about. Apparently, since the Israelis working, as they have for many years, very closely— the Israeli Secret Intelligence Service, or Mossad, has worked very, very closely with the CIA, and in fact the CIA helped to set it up back in the mid-'50s. Originally, part of the story came from Mossad, that there were 2 people who who apparently were either employed or were agents, contract agents for Mossad, who fed some of this information to the U.S. government.

Speaker 4: I see.

Louis Wolf: And the U.S. government was fully prepared to believe it. They said that one of their witnesses, or one of their sources, had been polygraphed and had checked out. His information had checked out. There was a story suggesting that It was reported by one of the networks that somebody had been offered $250,000 for his information to the effect that there were hit squads. And some of it originated, as I said, from Mossad, and some of it originated from CIA fabrications. Jack Anderson, for example, reported that some of the information that he had been given and reported in his column had turned out to have been CIA fabrications. And that's the kind of thing that you're talking about. It's important to remember that the Israelis, as much, I guess, as the U.S., considers it a priority to discredit and to possibly destabilize or overthrow the Libyan government. And one method that they saw— thought of, I guess, was to create a story that said that Libya had sent death squads to assassinate President Kennedy. President Reagan and other high officials. Uh, only recently—

Speaker 4: Yeah, go ahead.

Louis Wolf: Well, only recently, uh, some of the same high officials who before were saying that, uh, there were— that they had evidence that some of these hit squads had entered the country through Canada are now on record and quoted in Newsweek and in other media saying that they never located a single person and a single, single evidence that there was a hit squad, and yet they say there is still a threat. Well, I think it's fair to assume, though there is not enough information yet to say, but it's fair to assume that the CIA was hoping through this to create a justification for further intervention in Libya, possible military activity or economic boycott as, or blockade, as they've now proposed, as has been proposed by the White House.

Speaker 1: Well, let's take a look at some of the articles in the latest issue of the COVID Action Information Bulletin. Not only will it give you an idea of what the magazine is about— it's, oh my goodness, over 50 pages— but also it gives, just this one issue gives a good example of the widespread operations not only of the CIA. It's not just restricted to the CIA, but mercenary activities around the world as well. We have been following the Seychelles Island attempted coup for ever since it started, and we did a program with John Stockwell just recently where we mentioned that. I noticed on page 4 you have an article that says Seychelles beat back the mercenaries. This is quite a complex operation which involves South Africa and mercenaries and Was the CIA involved in that?

Louis Wolf: There's still a lot of information that will come out, but it is known that some of the activity— I should say, primarily the main source of the coup, or attempted coup, was South Africa, that South African intelligence, including one admitted former, so-called former member of the South African intelligence who says that he, quote-unquote, retired in order to go for a visit to the Seychelles for his vacation. And largely the program was initiated by the South Africans. It does appear, however, that the United States, which has had an ongoing interest in creating a base of operations in the Indian Ocean, And the Seychelles is a very strategic area, not just because of its— it has no large natural resources as such, but that it is of critical importance to the U.S. as a jumping point in the Indian Ocean.

Speaker 1: It looks like there are other aspects, too, that they're also trying to keep the government of Mauritius from becoming a more progressive government. There were some significant elections coming up. Plus, there was something I didn't know at all, and that was the fact that there is an island chain, Comoros, which actually were taken over in a coup which was carried out by mercenaries.

Louis Wolf: Yes, that— in that case, it was largely French intelligence which was the source of that one. There is some indication that the CIA was involved, though. Somewhat peripherally in that one.

Speaker 1: So I can see where that could stimulate people like in the group down in New Orleans of missionaries— boy, they are in a way, aren't they?

John Stockwell: Crusaders.

Speaker 1: Of mercenaries that were going to take over Dominica.

Louis Wolf: Yes.

Speaker 1: Since apparently the plot fell through for Grenada, and they've seen that it can happen in Comoros, that they actually can take over an island government.

Louis Wolf: The case of the attempted coup in Dominica is a very interesting one, and here the U.S. involvement is rather strong. Let's look at why. There was an attempt to build a force mainly made up of members of the Ku Klux Klan, together with some other former and active mercenaries who had long involvement in U.S. Special Forces and army background. And they first— their first idea was to invade Grenada, but then they realized that the Grenadian government probably would be able to offset their activities and probably defeat them, and since their security forces are quite well organized there. And so they changed their plan and decided to go into Dominica, the former Prime Minister Patrick John, who was very, very closely identified with South Africa. In fact, he had helped to set up a monitoring station and also a base for the manufacture of long-range torpedoes, which could be built with the help of South Africa, on in which he helped to set up and. Basically, they had hoped, he had hoped, that if the coup succeeded, and he agreed with the Klan people, that if it succeeded, that he would give them rights to casinos, to gambling operations, to— he would even give them several posts in his cabinet if he came back to power. Well, of course, needless to say, it failed. But—

Speaker 1: See, was there some dope, some narcotics business involved in it too, wasn't there?

Speaker 4: This is—

Louis Wolf: As there often is in these things.

Speaker 1: Yeah. This is on page 44, by the way. We're getting a little bit ahead of it.

Speaker 4: Yeah, that's right.

Speaker 1: This is also covered in the same, uh, in the same— yes.

Speaker 4: This highlights a point, though, that we've made several times on this show, how the CIA will use anyone to carry through their objectives: the Ku Klux Klan, mercenaries, the Mafia, drug operations. It's reasons like this that John Stockwell thinks that the CIA is completely corrupt.

Speaker 1: Not to mention the 800,000 people that have been killed through CIA operations.

Louis Wolf: I think 800,000 is a very, very conservative figure, but yes, that's correct. There is clearly a trend today in the CIA to move more in the direction of contracting out some of the operations that it does not really want to get itself Not that it doesn't want to get involved, but doesn't want to get caught with its pants down doing it. And so some of the more sensitive activities, they're branching out and letting other— either other intelligence services or other quote-unquote private freelance types.

Speaker 1: It looks like that they are developing a very significant alliance with the South Africans and the Argentinians. Once again, these are both covered in this edition of the COVID Action Information Bulletin. Angola, the Pretorias' Continuing War, talks about South African involvement there. Mozambique Rebels Exposed, once again we find South Africa involved in that.

Louis Wolf: And the CIA in that case.

Speaker 1: Yeah, and the CIA. And then we get to an article here about Argentina Activates International Death Squads, and this Article shows that these God wretched horrible people involved in tremendous amount of torture and maiming and killing of people in Argentina are now, like I say, they're subcontractees. And not only that, but the U.S. is trying to make a regional type of kind of a NATO. It's called Sato, which is a good Sato for Sato. Sato. But anyway, with South Africa taking care of the area in the Indian Ocean and Africa, and Argentina taking care of Central America and South America— in fact, Argentina said they would be glad to come up and help with the El Salvadorian folks, right?

Louis Wolf: That's correct. Argentina, if there's a country in the world that has perfected the art of torture and the art of making people disappear, it is Argentina. And thousands upon thousands of Argentinians have disappeared. And I think that this article demonstrates— and this was an article which we did a lot of research on and which was the result of a lot of press reports which came out, some of them in South Africa itself, of the fact that the Argentinians had sent some of their more renowned and best-known torturers To South Africa because they could no longer be active in Argentina. They were so well known, so they sent them to South Africa as part of the diplomatic corps in the Argentine embassy.

Speaker 4: And they were specialists in torture.

Speaker 1: Yes.

Louis Wolf: Go ahead. It is unclear at this point whether they were advising the South Africans, who also know a good deal about how to torture people and how to, how to make people die in prison, as they have the highest rate of death of people in their prisons. Whether in fact they're training each other is unclear, but certainly they have a good deal of sharing and common interests involved.

Speaker 1: We showed the movie On Company Business, which you— or sections of the movie On Company Business, which you might remember. This movie showed the complicity of the CIA with torture all around the world. As a matter of fact, there are CIA torture schools in the United States. They bring people over here from various countries abroad— police, military— teach them the very sophisticated ways of torture. Then they go back and operate on their own folks back home. And just to make sure that everything goes right, the CIA then has their agents which go down and supervise. They hold clinics. They bring people off the streets. And they torture them. and torture them. I mean, it sounds like something which you couldn't even think up out of a sick imagination, but this is what goes on. And the next article in your bulletin for March talks about the Salvadoran deserter who disclosed the Green Beret torture role. This was in the news just recently. And it has actually the transcript and a considerable summary of what actually went on, and it showed the Americans Supervising and helping out, and they tortured the first person to show that, uh, how this would be done. This is a 14-year-old boy, and the next person brought in was a 13-year-old girl. Of course, after raping her, then they let the El Salvadorans try it and make sure they did it right.

Louis Wolf: It's a gruesome story, and I think this is an example of, uh, something that the American people are being asked to overlook or to turned a blind eye to, that is the brutality of the Salvadoran government. It is not a case of Salvadoran— of President Duarte as, quote-unquote, a moderate person who's trying to stand up to the forces both from left and right.

Speaker 1: Which the New York Times always says.

Louis Wolf: Exactly. It was, in fact, the New York Times, in a story in January, who disclosed the first part of the story, which was that That the Green Berets, 8 of them, were present during a torture session. And it was a major story. Strangely, it was such a major story, but it was on page 2 of the New York Times rather than on page 1. But it was a very big and important story. I would say, however, that one of the reasons, I guess, was that the Salvadoran— the member of the Salvadoran Army who talked about this, who who is now deserted and who is living in Mexico, he was somewhat intimidated, I guess, by talking to the New York Times, and he's later revealed to the Mexican media, and that's the transcript in this story, in this article, that the Special Forces— and I should say the U.S. Special Forces was created originally by the CIA— the Special Forces were actually involved in the torture as opposed to standing by observing.

Speaker 1: They said they didn't rape the little girl, though. I mean, there is some morality left, right?

Speaker 4: Louis, how does this torture and all of these CIA covert operations fit into American foreign policy as a whole? You have a couple articles in your current journal about the role of the CIA in these sorts of operations we're talking about within American foreign policy. Could you focus on that for a minute?

Louis Wolf: Well, I guess it comes down to the, the whole doctrine that the United States feels it has to keep its role in its sphere of influence, or its spheres of influence. And part of this is putting governments in power, and part of it is keeping them in power. Now, there are many governments with whom the United States has been closely identified around the country who cannot stay in power without massive repression. And of course, El Salvador is one. There are many others around the world in all the 3 continents.

Speaker 4: Argentina and South Africa for 2.

Louis Wolf: Absolutely.

Speaker 4: Obvious examples.

Louis Wolf: South Korea is another example, and the Philippines. I think we have to understand, though, that What— why would the United States do this? Is it simply to keep somebody who is a friend of the United States in power? Successive presidents— and it's not just Reagan, and it's not Carter before him, it's successive presidents since— basically since the '50s, since Eisenhower— have been working hand in glove and even have been on camera embracing successive dictators with whom we've been identified. The most recent example, if you remember, was the case of Jimmy Carter embracing the Shah of Iran a few months before he was overthrown on the steps of the White House. I think it's because of the CIA's involvement and, in fact, direction of much of these activities. It's not that the CIA is working— It's not working for the CIA. On its own, as some people suggest, as a rogue elephant. The CIA works directly under the guidance and direction of the chief of state, of the president. And of course, the president not only doesn't know but doesn't want to know every day what the CIA is doing. But the fact of the matter is that they— that They're doing what the president asked them to do. And the other thing I should just mention quickly is that the CIA carries out these activities to keep the interests of the corporations, U.S. corporations, who have great interests at stake, for example, in South Africa and in all the other countries we've mentioned.

Speaker 1: That's right. The multinationals value stability above everything else, plus the ability to operate there, keep the economy low as far as wages, and be able to take the riches out of the country, and these right-wing dictatorships let them do that. Of course, there's a point which is reached that, like in El Salvador, once it gets too far and the people really start a revolution, then the multinationals suffer there.

Louis Wolf: And there is a certain level beyond which the U.S., when it becomes publicly known, as opposed to known in the country itself, publicly known in the United States that the U.S. is so closely identified with such a repressive regime as today in El Salvador, that it finally realizes it has to fish or cut bait. It has to decide whether we continue to support this openly or whether we have to find other ways to support, as, for example, Argentina has now offered, we understand, directly to the United States to be a surrogate for the U.S. in El Salvador. Also Honduras is—

Speaker 1: Mm-hmm.

Speaker 4: This is what's so chilling about this Agents' Identities Information Act, that it will cover over the possibility of the media exposing the worst abuses of the CIA, which will mean the American people won't know what it's doing. We'll have a secret government, and we will therefore increase the power and the scope of operations of the CIA, whereas— And the media is the watchdog. In the past, when there has been media and public focus on CIA operations and excesses, there has been pressure to cut back on the CIA.

Louis Wolf: I think, however, the most threatening part of this is the, is the whole move towards greater and greater secrecy, and so that the media will not even have the opportunity to report on this whole area. It will be illegal almost for a journalist for one of the major media to write or to report about intelligence. In many ways, that will just be beyond the pale now.

Speaker 1: This also ties in with the progress of Senate Bill 1 in the Senate, or the great-grandson of Senate Bill 1, which is designed to take away a lot of our civil liberties. We're gradually becoming a police state, really.

John Stockwell: Well, I—

Speaker 1: What can be done about it?

Louis Wolf: Well, I don't feel it's fair to be rhetorical about this. I agree that there is a move towards greater and greater secrecy and greater and greater— or less and less accountability of the government to the people. And there are, of course, a lot of people who are Opposed to this, including quite a few members of Congress. For example, 29 members of Congress signed a resolution challenging the right of the president to intervene in El Salvador. Under the War Powers Act, he has no right to do this, and they're challenging his right. And that's 29 members out of hundreds, but it is a significant, I think, indication that there is, even in the halls of Congress opposition to his policies.

Speaker 4: As well as in the country at large. I mean, the overwhelming majority are against Reagan's policy in El Salvador.

Louis Wolf: And I think the recent polls have shown that the foreign policy in general is not entirely accepted, or is— there is great doubt and great wonderment as to whether there's any continuity, whether the policy is thought out, whether it's based on realities or only the very anti-communist rhetoric of this administration. There are also quite a few people high in the administration who have intelligence backgrounds, and this is another indication that the intelligence is on the rise in this administration.

Speaker 4: Louis, as the final question and to conclude, what can the American people do against these worst excesses of the CIA, and indeed against the threats to all of our civil liberties involved in some of these bills that are being passed that will unleash the CIA?

Louis Wolf: I think the biggest thing is that people can educate themselves as to what is going on, to read their press, and to demand to know what is going on from, from the media, to Try and exercise their rights, that is, to let their Congress, their member of Congress know that they don't accept whatever the policy may be, even to demonstrate publicly if they're opposed to these activities. I think most of all is to be— to keep themselves informed and to speak out against it.

Speaker 4: Well, thank you very much for—

Speaker 1: And good luck. And watch Watch your way home. There may be somebody following you.

Louis Wolf: Well, I believe it's best to speak out openly and not be paranoid. I'm not willing to resign myself to fear.

Speaker 1: Good. Thank you. And that is the second of our 3-part series on covert action, the CIA.

Speaker 4: And now we have a final Here's some of the antics that the Moral Majority has been up to recently. The head of their Maryland chapter, Jim Wright, recently went to the Maryland state legislature and complained about some bakery that was selling gingerbread cookies of little boys and little girls whose anatomy was displayed in these cookies. And predictably, the cookie source Sales soared after the Moral Majority attack on these cookies, and evidently the legislators are still laughing in Maryland about that. Not quite as funny is the head of the Moral Majority in New York, a Reverend Dan Fore, was recently caught with his foot in the mouth in an interview with the New York Times. First of all, he told the Times that the Jews have God-given ability to make money. They control the media. They control the city. When the Jewish reporter who was interviewing him mentioned that Jews had been subject to inquisitions throughout the centuries and that the anti-Semitism in the Moral Majority was feeding into this, he said that— the head of the Moral Majority said that, well, there was never any Christian persecution of Jews. And the reporter, Joe Klein, of the New York Times—

Louis Wolf: Right.

Speaker 4: reminded him of the Spanish Inquisition and its persecution of Jews. Here's what the Moral Majority said: Well, those weren't Christians. They were Roman Catholics. Strange distation. And then, last but not least, the head of the Santa Clara County chapter of the Moral Majority opined to reporters that capital punishment would be in line with Bible dictates An appropriate treatment for homosexuality. Now, it's true that the Moral Majority has been criticized recently in the media, and it's also argued that the kiss of death in a political election is Moral Majority support. We've seen 2 elections recently in Austin on housing discrimination for— and the school board, where the Moral Majority got heavily involved in this, and the opponents were able to Mobilize opposition to this Moral Majority attempt to legislate its morality and was able to defeat Moral Majority initiatives. Moreover, the Moral Majority television programs are getting more and more in debt, and I read in Broadcasting that their viewing audience has gone down about 16%. Now, you would think that the Moral Majority would be on the defensive and in retreat. But in fact, Jerry Falwell is exploiting these attacks on the Moral Majority to try to raise more money. Every month he sends out a new fundraising letter saying that they're about to go bankrupt and that they will be destroyed by their enemies unless you dig into your pockets and send the Moral Majority some more money. So as a result of this, whereas last year they were only able to raise $2 million, they've already in the last 12 months, been able to raise $5.7 million. And I've been increasingly successful with these crisis campaigns to raise money and to play on the sympathies of their supporters that the Moral Majority is a beleaguered oppositional group that's being attacked by all these liberals and humanists, etc. So we're far from having heard the last of the Moral Majority, unfortunately. Thank you.

Louis Wolf: Part of the campaign by the CIA against Nicaragua is through paramilitary units and squads of former Somocista soldiers who are being trained in Honduras. And their campaign is against these Miskito Indians. And a lot of— hundreds of Miskitos have been killed by those squads in cross-border raids.

John Stockwell: Now, the circumstances of this killing are pure terrorism, recruiting terrorists to go across the border and blow up and assassinate and kill. We have to remember that the next time President Reagan or Alexander Haig are making their pious statements about the threat of international terrorism and the horrors of international terrorism. The United States is, without any serious competition, leading the world in international terrorism. citizen today and for the past 30 years.

Speaker 1: The last in our 3-part series on what the intelligence services are doing, with John Stockwell, former CIA official, and editor of COVID Action Information Bulletin, Louis Wolf, tonight on Alternative Views. This is our last program in the series on what the government and private intelligence organizations are doing around the world. This is Louis Wolf, coeditor of COVID Action Information Bulletin, which specializes in revealing what these organizations are doing.

Craig: Hi.

Speaker 1: Our other guest is John Stockwell, who was with the CIA for many years, had a high position in the organization, actually ran their Angolan operation, and quit, wrote the book In Search of Enemies, subsequently a new novel, Red Sunset. Tonight we'll discuss particularly the CIA in Latin America and the total ramification on how this fits in to the United States foreign policy and the ramifications overseas. Now let's have some news. Everybody knows there's unemployment, but the cost to the American people, to individuals as well as the economy and the social fabric of the nation, is staggering. For instance, each 1% increment of unemployment diminishes the gross national product by about $68 billion. These are 1980 estimates. A lot of studies now are being made by sociologists and economists of the impact of unemployment, and this is just one of the statistics. The direct cost to the federal government in lost tax revenue and increased expenditures for each 1% rise in unemployment is over $25 billion. And of course, When the deficit goes up, so do the interest rates, and that puts an additional burden on the economy. But these statistics on unemployment actually underestimate the problem, because you have to add to the unemployment which we have right now, the almost 10%, the 5.8 million involuntary part-time workers, or at— they're at a record high too, 1.2 million. And also add the record number of discouraged workers, 10.8 million.

Speaker 4: That's right.

Speaker 1: million. So you actually get a grand total of unemployed or partly employed, 17.8 million, or 16.2%. Now, if you also compare this with the Great Depression, and to count in the factor of the millions of people who are in the armed forces or working for the government in relationship to defense, take them out of it and put them on the unemployed rolls like they were back in 1929, we actually would have an unemployment rate much more severe than at the Great Depression. It even gets worse when you talk about individuals. They've found now that each percentage point of increase of unemployment sustained over 5 years provides a 4.1% increase in suicides, 4.3% increase among men, 2.3% among women, in first-time admissions to state mental hospitals, 1.9% increase in deaths from disease, an increase of 4% in prison admissions, 5.7% increase in homicides. And of course, kids who don't get jobs during the summer are more likely to turn to crime to make ends meet. So everything isn't just the cold, hard, well, today, friends, the unemployment rate rose up almost to 10%.

Speaker 4: People are hurting.

Speaker 1: Some people are not, though.

Speaker 4: Some people are not. In fact, while a lot of people are hurting for the unemployment and the The poor are getting poorer under Reaganomics. The rich are getting richer. Forbes magazine advertises itself on television as a capitalist tool that will help young executives get the skills and the information they need to help them in their climb up the corporate ladder. And every year they publish the salaries of the highest 20 corporate executives. And the winner this year, folks, was— The president of Warner Communications, who came in for a cool $27.5 million a year.

John Stockwell: Boo!

Speaker 4: They also listed the next person, who was $7.5 million a year, also a corporate executive of a communications empire, and then listed the next 20 corporate executives, all of whom made over $1 million a year. Missing, for the first time, from the top 20 were corporation executives from the automobile, The steel or the manufacturing industries, which evidently aren't doing so well under today's economy. In fact, Craig, you have some information that small business, like the poor and the unemployed, are suffering in the age of Reaganomics.

Craig: Right, and not so small necessarily. I'd like to call this little bit of commentary Still We Got Fun. Yes, folks, it's time once again to ask, how's business? Not so good, to be honest. To put it in a nutshell. But if you've been following the antics of the Reagan team, you know it's not their fault. When inflation dips below the double-digit level, it's because Reaganomics is taking hold. But when leading economic indicators continue to shrivel and die on the vine, then, of course, it's the business blight brought on by that old peanut farmer Jimmy Carter lingering on. You might say that politicians in general can display an amazing flexibility in some matters. Particularly when relating to interim elections. Well, the lingering effects of peanut policy this time has led to a virtual epidemic of bankruptcies. The Wall Street Journal reports a post-Depression high in the percentage of failing firms. For the first 3 months of this year, an average of 36 businesses per hour have gone belly up, an increase from last year of 29%. At that pace, nearly 75,000 companies will go bankrupt this year, a new American record. Now, these aren't just your family-run shoestring organizations, either. Braniff Airlines, for one, went down in flames recently, and indications are that International Harvester may soon join the scrap heap. With revenues last year of over $7 billion, International Harvester would be the largest U.S. company ever to file bankruptcy. At least for the time being, that is. Edward Altman, the chairman of the MBA program at New York University, estimates that 200 of the biggest 2,000 industrial concerns now teeter on the brink of collapse. Well, inevitably, the big losers when a company folds are the workers. 4 out of 5 bankruptcy filings are for straight liquidation. As in, that's all she wrote. In the trucking industry, for example, 144 companies have gone under since mid-1980, at the cost of over 28,000 jobs. But that's not the worst of it. Consider the plight of hundreds of West Virginia coal miners who were stuck with unpaid medical bills when their employers went bankrupt without having paid the insurance premiums. What a nice surprise. The big winners in bankruptcy, naturally, are lawyers, accountants, and bankers. That's when the loot's all divvied up, particularly since the 1979 revision of the Bankruptcy Code eliminated the requirement that, quote, a spirit of economy prevail when bankruptcy lawyers set their fees. As might be expected, the hogs are hunkering down to the old trough.

John Stockwell: I'm a lawyer.

Craig: In Miami, for instance, a lawyer in a bankruptcy proceeding for the GAC Corporation sought court approval for a fee— and you're going to love this— for $210 an hour for 7,000 hours of work, or a cool $1.5 million for half a year's job. The judge settled a paltry $650,000 on him.

Louis Wolf: Wow.

Craig: You know, friends, maybe we're all in the wrong line of work. And with all this talk of bankruptcy and depression, I thought I was making the shrewd move, socking my money into apples and pencils.

Speaker 1: Well, I have a story here on the tragedy of dolphins around the world, particularly in Japan. This was provided by the Greenpeace people. Well, in the spring of 1980, Japanese fishermen began slaughtering dolphins off of Iki Island. They thought then that the dolphins were stealing their catch, refusing to acknowledge the fact that overfishing and heavy coastal pollution by man really bore much of the blame, the real blame. Dolphins, just by the hundreds, lie dead along the beaches of Iki Island by Japan, just waiting to be processed into fertilizer. The Japanese fishermen plan to continue this slaughter, and they will unless worldwide pressure is put on them. And this is the— what the Greenpeace people are trying to do. Worldwide, thousands of dolphins are being killed every year by Americans, Japanese, Turks, Peruvians. Man's war against the dolphins doesn't have any boundaries at all. In the United States alone, the government allows the killing of 31,000 dolphins a year by American tuna boats. So how do these wonderful, amazing, fun-loving, gentle animals end? Ground into fertilizer, the consequence of man's unthinking and unfeeling relationship.

Louis Wolf: That's horrible.

Speaker 1: to the earth and his fellow creatures.

Speaker 4: Let's focus on one of the current and most spectacular revelations that the CIA has made in recent years. And that is their exposé of Nicaragua that was just yesterday, the day before we're taping this, where a Department of Defense personnel and a CIA director, Bobby Inman—

Louis Wolf: Yes.

Speaker 4: I think it was— claimed to have photographs that showed that Nicaragua was greatly increasing their military forces, that it was on the same model as Cuba's, that this was all being funded by the Soviet Union. that Nicaragua was systematically carrying out genocidal operations against Indian tribes living in Nicaragua. They had pictures of villages that had been destroyed. What would your attitude towards this be?

Louis Wolf: I think the first time that I can remember since the Bay of Pigs that a single— there may have been one other case, but it's almost the only case since then that the CIA or U.S. intelligence has disclosed satellite data from which they say this came. Now, satellite data by its very nature, and depending on how far they enlarge it, can be made to prove anything. These pictures— I'm not saying I do not know, I have not seen the pictures— but we are asked to believe that these pictures were taken within the last several months in Nicaragua or over Nicaragua by US satellites. We are further asked to I believe that the activity which is portrayed in these pictures is taking place as of now. Recently, Secretary Haig said, and he held it up as the smoking gun in a press conference, that his information was that the Nicaraguan government was engaged in massive repression against the Miskito Indians. Right.

Speaker 4: Right. That was the big point they made again yesterday with these pictures of burned-out villages.

Louis Wolf: Well, one of those— the picture to which Secretary Haig referred to in his press conference 10 days ago was a picture which was published in Le Figaro magazine in Paris. And it later turned out that that picture had been published with a caption saying that this was the present Nicaraguan government showing them burning houses and burning people alive. I believe. It turned out that that picture, and Le Figaro has admitted it since then, was a picture that was taken during the Somoza rule, and that those pictures were 4 or 5 years old. And of course, Mr. Haig has had to— or General Haig has had to pull back on that one. But they are now still saying that there's massive repression against the Miskito Indians.

Speaker 4: Right.

Louis Wolf: I would simply point out that it's a dichotomy and a contradiction for this government to give a great deal of attention to the human rights of mosquitoes, if in fact these abuses are taking place, when in fact Native Americans are not accorded the same attention by our government.

Speaker 4: Nor are the El Salvadoran people, who are systematically being killed by these death squads that are—

Louis Wolf: And the Guatemalan Indians are being almost annihilated. It's almost a genocidal campaign by the Guatemalans. Government against the Indians in Guatemala. I do hope that some of this— well, first of all, there is a lot of evidence coming out that part of the campaign by the CIA against Nicaragua is through paramilitary units and squads of former Somocista soldiers who are being trained in Honduras. And their campaign is against these Miskito Indians. And a lot of— hundreds of Miskitos have been killed by those squads in cross-border raids. One of the reasons why the Nicaraguan government has been forced, I believe, by these campaigns to move a lot of these people away from the areas where they're in danger is because of those activities, not because of a policy of the Nicaraguan government. Right.

Speaker 4: What would their reason be to have genocide against these tribes, the current government in Nicaragua? The State Department hasn't given any hypotheses about why they would be engaging in this.

Speaker 1: I can't see any motive for it.

Speaker 4: Yeah, it seems strange.

Louis Wolf: Well, they pretend and would have us believe that the Nicaraguan government is a totalitarian, one-party, top-down, Dictatorial rule, and that they have no wish to integrate the Miskito Indians into, into their— into a society, into their society, and that furthermore they have us believe that the Miskitos want to secede or want to have an independent country or state, or at least an area which they can call a separate country.

Speaker 4: I don't think there's any evidence to show that that's what the Miskito Indians Jon, since the time we did that interview with Louis Wolf, there's been quite a few revelations about CIA covert operations in Nicaragua. Can you comment on those? I think there were some stories in the Indian Times about some of the things that the CIA was up to there.

John Stockwell: I can comment in a speculative way, since I don't— you know, I'm analyzing the news now based on my past experience, of course. But let's see, what's the inflation rate since 1975 to 1982?

Speaker 4: In America?

John Stockwell: Yeah. What would that amount to, 5 years?

Speaker 4: It's been about 10% a year, even more.

John Stockwell: The point is that the CIA's budget— it's been announced that the CIA— the president signed an order on the 1st of December ordering the CIA into full paramilitary covert action against Nicaragua from Honduras, organizing mercenaries to destabilize the countryside, to counter the Cuban aggression in that country, is what they announced was the justification. And the budget they were given was $19 million. I compare that with the $14 million that I was given in 1975—

Speaker 4: In Angola.

John Stockwell: —for the Angolan operation. The parallels are quite striking. You know, there were parallels with the Angolan operation in the Bay of Pigs, for example, and other covert actions. But then Guatemala was different and Iran was different. So, you know, each one, each situation is different. But here we have so— it's so close. They're working from Honduras. We were working from Zaire and Kinshasa. They're working with ex-Samozist We were working with the Portuguese exiles, the Portuguese who had fled, for example, creating an army out of these people. Also, they have, quote, mercenaries, but actually soldiers, who were sent from Argentina, for example, and Venezuela and Chile and Colombia to join this force. We had people People coming from various places, from France, for example, and of course the South African force. They're functioning— I could map out the office for you, the program, the international program. Some things that I would observe, if you've read my book, is that such an operation is global. The commander would not be sitting in Honduras running the thing. The commander of the Nicaragua task force will be in Washington. He will be sending agents all around the world coordinating different aspects of this thing. They'll be sending cables to every station in the world advising the chief of station what his activities should be vis-à-vis the local police and the local president and the local press to create an atmosphere supporting to the greatest extent possible what they're doing, seeking arms that aren't Seeking sources of news comments and releases that can be put together in white papers to persuade. And then the bottom line, that the justification Reagan has given and the CIA have given for doing this intervention is to counter the Cuban activities in Nicaragua. But see, the point is that there are not going to be any Cuban There, I believe there— it said that there are 2,000 Cubans in Nicaragua now. They're functioning to help build an airport and, no doubt, military advising, although I've not seen that confirmed anywhere.

Speaker 1: A lot of doctors, medical personnel.

John Stockwell: Doctors and medical personnel and teachers and whatnot.

Speaker 4: And from Italy and several other countries, as well. It's not just Cubans that come— Oh, indeed. Oh, indeed. —to Nicaragua.

John Stockwell: The Nicaraguan arms, it's been shown, are not coming from the Soviet Union. They're buying them from France and Italy and all kinds of other places. Or are they coming from Cuba? This has been proven. But the point is that this program of the CIA is not going to be killing Cubans. It's going to be killing Nicaraguans. It's not going to be killing Nicaraguan officials. Not that many Nicaraguan soldiers. It's going to be destabilizing the countryside, blowing up bridges, ambushing buses. If they follow the pattern that they have in other places, there'll be some schools bombed and marketplaces bombed to destabilize the economy so it can't function, so the network and fabric of society will break down.

Speaker 1: They kill village leaders. I've read articles about that. They kill—

John Stockwell: the Phoenix Program being And it's been duplicated, killing village leaders, holding people out and executing them to terrorize them from cooperating with the government.

Louis Wolf: And their families.

John Stockwell: And their families.

Speaker 4: In fact, the last 3 weeks in these Times has had some very good articles on Nicaragua that indicates that from Honduras some hit squads were sent into Nicaragua that have killed at least 30 leaders and just innocent people in that region. Terrorized peasants and people living in Nicaragua near the Honduras border because of these hit raids, although on the other hand, they've led these people to organize and become even more firm and resolute in their will to protect their country. So sometimes these destabilization programs backfire and end up stabilizing the country, unifying them.

John Stockwell: Well, it certainly did in the Bay of Pigs, the CIA invasion there. A unified Cuba under Fidel Castro. He came out of that thing 10 times, 100 times stronger than he was going into it. And that probably will be in effect in Nicaragua. These Nicaraguans dying will be added to the 800,000 I mentioned earlier, the victims, people who die as a direct— as direct victims of CIA covert action.

Speaker 1: Right.

John Stockwell: in the last 30 years. The minimum figure given by all responsible parties and press and government studies and whatnot is 800,000. The figures range from 800,000 to a couple of million victims of CIA operations.

Speaker 1: Indirect type of—

John Stockwell: Indirect. Now, that does not include, for example, the people who died in the Vietnam War, which was a direct result of a CIA covert action.

Speaker 1: More than, what, 1.5 million in Indonesia?

John Stockwell: The 1.5 million in Indonesia. Indonesia. Now, that's, that's a lot of dead people. Now, the circumstances of this killing are pure terrorism, recruiting terrorists to go across the border and blow up and assassinate and kill. We have to remember that the next time President Reagan or Alexander de Haag are making their pious statements about the threat of international terrorism and the horrors of international terrorism. They The United States is, without any serious competition, leading the world in international terrorism today and for the past 30 years.

Speaker 1: Jon, isn't there something unique about this Nicaraguan situation, is that the administration is openly admitting that they are carrying it on?

John Stockwell: That's truly a difference. And this gets back to the rogue elephant. Is the CIA a rogue elephant, or is it— has it always these years been doing what the president wants. And of course the truth is both. In some cases it's done what it wanted contrary to presidential orders. In other cases it's done what the president probably wanted but didn't say. In this case, because of the nature of the Secretary of State and the president, the CIA is clearly doing exactly what the president wanted. Now, the president didn't hold a press Yeah. —to say, I'm sending in the CIA to kill people in Nicaragua. But it has been admitted by the White House that they did. It's been leaked, and the president smiled at the leaks, that he did order the CIA into this action. So he's clearly, you know, he sees himself as, you know, Marshall Reagan, sort of, you know, showing off how he can shoot, you know, let those people know he's He's got something he can do.

Speaker 4: Louis, while we're on Central America, we might also note that your group has published a book called White Paper Whitewash, in which you analyze the infamous white paper that was published by the American government to justify American intervention in El Salvador. Can you just briefly indicate some of the obvious whitewash in the white paper and some of the things published in your book, and then maybe we can tell our audience where they can get this.

Louis Wolf: The white paper was published in 1979 by— well, I should say, I'm sorry, there were prior indications of propaganda about U.S. intervention in El Salvador, but the original white paper that we're talking about here came out in 1981, February 1981. And it was said to have been captured— a series of documents that were captured by the Salvadoran Armed Forces. Now, we should remember, first of all, that there were 3 accounts offered as to how the information was captured. One said it was found by State Department intelligence men who went to El Salvador and saw it on a table in the headquarters of the Salvadoran Armed Forces. A second account said that it was found in what was called a safe house of the guerrillas in San Salvador. And the third and most unlikely account was that it was captured from a guerrilla who was found walking through the streets of El Salvador with a whole packet of documents under his arm. Each of those accounts were offered as the source of these documents. We have analyzed the documents that's in, in this book, co-edited by Warner Polchow, or edited by Warner Polchow, with interviews with Philip Agee. And it's very interesting to analyze, as has been done in the book, line by line, word by word, the, the so-called White Paper. There are parts of the paper, for example, that refer to in English sections of the so-called Spanish, original Spanish language documents that don't exist.

John Stockwell: There are—

Speaker 4: Creative translation.

Louis Wolf: Exactly. There are, there's one document, for example, that's partly in Spanish, in handwritten Spanish, and then on the same document it's typewritten in English. So we're asked to believe that whomever was sitting down at the table writing these shopping lists for arms from Cuba, from Vietnam, from Ethiopia, where— and Libya was going to move from a pen in Spanish to a typewriter and type in English, and very, I might say, very literal, very literary English. There are a lot of contradictions in the White Paper. Basically, we should understand this because it was and is the first and the most important justification that has been used by the government for its intervention in El Salvador. Of course, now they pretend that because the White Paper was so widely discredited, even by one of its authors who gave an interview to the Wall Street Journal and disclosed that he even had a lot of questions about it— so I think there's a lot of reason that this document or this exercise in propaganda is a Classic in CIA propaganda.

Speaker 4: If the audience wants to order this book, how can they get it?

Louis Wolf: Well, they can write to the publisher, which is Deep Cover Publications. Should I give the address? In Post Office Box 677, New York, New York 10013. And it's, well—

Speaker 4: $6.50 plus $1.50 handling.

Louis Wolf: Yeah.

Speaker 4: And can people also get the mailing list for your other publications? You've published a book called Dirty Work: The CIA in Western Europe and another one called Dirty Work: The CIA in Africa, as well as putting out this Covert Action Information Bulletin. Will you give information on how they can order those other publications?

Louis Wolf: They can write to us, to Covert Action Information Bulletin in Washington. I'll give the address. Post Office Box 50272, 50272, Washington, D.C. 20004, and we'll be happy to send you the information.

John Stockwell: I find this very sad, by the way. I find it troubles me, not obviously because I was once part of all this, but also just as an American citizen to realize that But this country is indulging in activities that are just as cruel and just as depraved in some cases and almost as extensive as what, for example, the Gestapo indulged in in Germany. We haven't liquidated 5 million Jews, but 800,000, minimum figure, people killed in terrorist circumstances in the Third World is a lot of people dead. And the responsibility ultimately, yes, you know, it's done by the CIA and it's a secret organization and therefore we have plausible denial to our own consciences because there's nothing we can do about it, we don't know about it, they didn't consult us. But the other side of that coin is that the CIA is the United States police organ and what it does We, the American people, are responsible for, so that in addition to the personal losses of freedom of speech and freedom of the press, we are responsible for the genocide of terrorism that's taking place against the world today in our name and with our tax dollars.

Speaker 1: And with the changes of the laws and executive orders, the whole apparatus of the intelligence Including the FBI and their right-wing hit squad buddies, like the Nazis and the Klan, are now being able to be turned on the American people.

John Stockwell: Turned on the American people.

Speaker 1: With impunity.

John Stockwell: Remember that Lou Wolf mentioning the executive order, which we've all followed with great interest, that too is President Reagan going public, bragging about what he's doing with the CIA. But don't forget that the CIA has always functioned extensively Massively inside the United States. The MHKS, you know, a billion-dollar program, was all domestic. And the MKUltra experimentation on American citizens with drugs and LSD and whatnot, that went on for 20 years, and that was inside the United States on American guinea pigs. The opening of mail for 20 years was American citizens' mail. They've always done this thing. The Operation Mongoose war against Cuba was— Right. was run from Florida, and they had over 1,000 safe houses and boat docks and whatnot that they were operating from the United States. The training facilities for torture, for interrogation techniques, were in San Antonio, Texas, at one time, a few years back. And, you know, that's something that's easy to move somewhere else. I don't know where it is today.

Speaker 4: Jon, recently Well, recently one of the individuals in the CIA that was in charge of these covert operations has recently resigned, and that is Admiral Bobby Inman, who was allegedly second in command at the CIA. It's been widely reported that Inman himself believed that William Casey, who is the director of the CIA, was overly fond of, quote, adventurous but ill-advised CIA operations abroad.

Craig: Right.

Speaker 4: And Senator Joseph Biden of Delaware has recently noted, without Inman, the intelligence agencies may be given license to try all kinds of questionable things here and abroad. In the light of what they've been doing, even under Inman already, what would be your comments on the Inman resignation and the future of the CIA?

John Stockwell: Well, I would have to regret the fact that he left, not that he was a paragon of liberal virtue, but he seemed to be, when compared with William Casey and some of the others, Jesse Helms over on the Senate side, Carlucci, his predecessor, he seemed to have some pretty strong instincts for protecting American institutions. He protested the Names of Agents Bill at one time, or at least one version of it, as being unessential To American national security. And of course, he got a lot of criticism for that. It would seem that he was, in effect, a moderating influence on some of the crueler instincts of men like Casey, who of course is a very inept and corrupt individual, the corruption being that he's maintained his own business portfolio. He's a millionaire.

Speaker 4: Yeah.

John Stockwell: While he's CIA director, he's running the CIA, he's running his own businesses, and of course from the CIA he can have some influence on world economic matters. He has also been appearing at Republican fundraisers, and of course that's one of the biggest no-nos in, in, in the United States governmental system, to have the head of a police organization with the influence of the CIA to openly advocate one political party's position and help it raise money. In that kind of a corrupt, adventuresome atmosphere, one would have to regret Inman's resignation. The whole milieu, the environment, is favorable to Reagan and the CIA and what they want to accomplish, what they are accomplishing. If you go one step further, And consider Reagan's policies his first year in office. He's muted this a little bit, faced with a clear indication by the American people, populace, about war. He and Attila the Hague were speaking constantly about the viability of nuclear war.

Speaker 1: Yes.

John Stockwell: nuclear war, war was an effective tool, we shouldn't be afraid of war, going to war in El Salvador, discussing sending troops into Nicaragua, talking frequently about going to the source, quote, in Cuba, and talking about, you know, demonstration wars or limited wars, nuclear wars in Europe and whatnot. These people gave every indication that they were looking for war.

Louis Wolf: Right.

John Stockwell: Now, they have toned this down a little bit in the last 2 months. First, you saw the turn, we all saw the turn, everybody who reads the newspapers, when the polls responded 89% of the American people said they were— did not favor American military intervention in Nicaragua. And this was a pretty clear message. That was a clear indication to the president that the American people were not going to support him. He would not be a successful president if he got us into a war. It would be something that he would have trouble selling, trouble maintaining. At the same time, there was a move in Congress that if the government of El Salvador didn't modify its human rights positions, they wouldn't get more money for aid. And then the second thing, of course, has been this massive groundswell reaction to his attitudes towards the bomb. And that's national, every corner of the nation, little bitty towns across the nation organizing effectively and having big demonstrations, as well as the big cities. The nation and the world so deeply concerned about the threat of nuclear war and just absolutely horrified that you could possibly have a president in office Whose mental capacities were so limited that he would actually talk publicly of demonstration atom bombs in Europe, popping off a bomb to show our will and resolve, limiting nuclear war to Europe, and the possibility of surviving nuclear war in the United States. This has horrified people to the point where he's got a big political problem on his hand from the famous Ground Zero and the freeze.

Speaker 4: Right.

John Stockwell: And the result is that it's, it's forcing a change in their stated policies and attitudes. They're toning down quite a bit from what they were saying a year ago at this time, for example, responding to the mood of the nation in some frustration, I think, clearly.

Speaker 4: Well, thank you, Jon.

Speaker 1: That's fine. We've exhausted you again, but we appreciate it. Now, news stories from 3 different years.

Speaker 4: So we started our 3-part investigation of CIA covert action with a program with John Stockwell and Louis Wolf that talked about the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, and they did a criticism of it, of how it would subvert American civil liberties, freedom of speech and our democracy. Well, since then, we found out in an article in The Progressive that Uncle Walter, Walter Cronkite has joined John Stockwell and others in criticizing the Intelligence Identities Protection Act. The Progressive reports that Walter was talking in Dallas to the National Associations of Broadcasters convention, and he attacked the Reagan administration's pattern of restriction on press freedom. He deplored administration support for Supreme Court rulings that permit police to raid newsrooms rooms in search of sources and that compelled journalists to disclose sources in court. He also lamented the administration decision to limit the Freedom of Information Act and the Reagan policy of no longer declassifying government documents automatically after 30 years. Walter scorned a plan to protect business information that would keep investigative stories and commentary On topics ranging from pollution threats to dangerous drugs, at a serious disadvantage. And he called the free press's democracy the only failsafe system against both the dangers of its own excesses and the approach of tyranny. While I'm citing a story from The Progressive, I might also note that in the page after the story on Walter Cronkite, there's a story datelined Austin, Texas, with a headline And that's the way it really is. The article begins, the ever-shriveling scope, the triumph of technique over content, and the cheerful rush to insipidity among anchors on network news are familiar aspects of television news. From the happy talk and video gimmicks of local newscasts to the corporate paranoia of the networks, television's current events reporting has become almost Dysfunctional. Viewers know this, hence the deep-seated distrust of the broadcast media. But the oligarchic nature of the television industry has blocked alternatives up until now, leaving most Americans reliant on the lighted box as their primary source of information. At last, this stranglehold may be broken, the article reads. And by whom, by whom, we cry. And by whom? For the past 3 years, we learn, A weekly news documentary program, Alternative Views, produced in Austin—

Speaker 1: Fine.

Speaker 4: And broadcast over the public access channel provided by the local cable franchise, has been doing what others do not. It has been presenting very unslick, intense, hour-long documentaries and interviews with the likes of Ramsey Clark, Russell Means, Stokely Carmichael, Madeleine Murray O'Hair, John Henry Faulk, George Wald, John Henry Faulk, Helen Caldicott, William Kunstler, Daniel Ellsberg, and John Stockwell. And then the article goes on to describe our program, the format, and what we're trying to accomplish. So we thank The Progressive for publishing this, and we'll pat ourselves on the back.

Speaker 1: Well, I mean, I'm slick. Hey, really? I thought we were pretty slick here. Trust us. Well, I'm— I would assume by now that You've heard about that famous remark by Thomas K. Jones, Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Nuclear Theater Forces, or Strategic Theater Nuclear Forces. That's part of our own slickness there. He says, hey, don't worry about nuclear war. Everybody's going to make it if you've got enough dirt, if there are enough shovels to go around. You need those 2 things. Dig a hole, cover it up with a couple of doors, throw 3 feet of dirt on top, and you're safe from a nuclear holocaust.

John Stockwell: I think that's a very good point.

Speaker 1: That's what it costs, folks. Well, even to top that, in— that was just plain stupid, but in insensibility, the Department of Energy study recommended that after a nuclear attack, people over 40 years of age should be the first to leave their bomb shelters. To hell with that. These post-attack pioneers would search for food and clean up a bit, you know, for the younger survivors. Because, they say, older people have a shorter life expectancy anyway, and the study reasoned that near-lethal doses of radiation wouldn't make much difference anyway. By the time they caught anything, they'd already be dead. And also, they wouldn't pass on any radiation-induced genetic defects to future generations. Well, I don't know about that. Anyway, they asked Gray Panther President Maggie Kuhn what she thought about that. She told them.

Louis Wolf: I'm right behind you, Frank.

Speaker 1: Yeah, what, 39? But something is being done about it. The city council in Cambridge, Massachusetts determined that they, instead of having a cooperation day for evacuation with the civil defense folks, they would have a preventive evacuation day by urging their citizens to join in the mass rally for disarmament in New York City on June 12th. A lot of people are going to that.

Craig: Do y'all like fairy tales? Well, there's a dandy one every week in Sunday's Parade magazine if you're into real fantasy. I'm talking, of course, about your basic free enterprise message from the ever-loving people at Mobil Oil, part of their multimillion-dollar-a-year PR package. I'm sure you've all seen this. It's called Observations, and they've always got this little cartoon in here that's never funny. In case you've all noticed before. Well, this whole thing is designed to show America once and for all who are the good guys and who are the bad. A big is beautiful campaign, you might say. We're seeing a lot of this kind of thing on TV now, too. The whitewater canoeist experiencing the thrill of victory while simultaneously clearing the good name of Getty Oil. Those cute little oil wells that swarm with 59 different endangered species of birds and bugs. The industrious cartoon pie maker who has the world beating a path to his door to bid on his pies. They all strain to make that one meaningful statement: Hell, we just plain old folk like you. Well, is anybody listening? Personally, I'm underwhelmed at their sincerity and a tad put off by the political motif of stuff like this. You think Reagan's a supply-sider? This column makes him sound like Karl Marx or Freddie Engels. This particular one was exemplary. It made a monumental leap of reasoning across 2 centuries to assert that George Washington's troops almost starved to death at Valley Forge because of price controls.

Louis Wolf: Well, I'll be, I didn't know that.

Craig: After a quick razzle-dazzle of Oil production figures in constant 1980 dollars, the text then leads you to the inescapable conclusion that it would be silly to put price controls on natural gas. I mean, we wouldn't want the troops to starve. All those poor old oil barons down gutting it out in the trenches with the dirt, the vermin, the spilled Perrier. I may just be paranoid, but whenever corporations start billing their programs and ideas as a boon to all mankind, I think it's time to hide the silverware. And I still can't help but feel a little bit guilty when we fund the torture of peasants so that United Fruit can bring the world to us packed in a light syrup.

Speaker 1: From May of 1982, we now switch to May of 1983.

Craig: According to The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Reagan's Energy Department has been busily doling out more of that welfare for the rich. Rich oil companies, in this case. The General Accounting Office, which is a congressional watchdog agency, says that the department is making settlements with oil moguls that are unduly favorable to the industry. So what's new? The GAO charges that the Reagan team is letting some of the major oil companies off the hook to the tune of tens of millions of dollars. Shell Oil, U.S. Steel's Marathon Oil, Mobile Oil Company and several others were nailed for overcharging customers prior to the decontrol of oil in 1981. You may have seen the 60 Minutes segment that dealt with how new oil miraculously became old oil with its higher price tag and all that rot. Well, now comes payback time, and suddenly the Reagan gang is getting generous again with our money. The administration's top official in the department, Rayburn Hanslick says the new settlements are based on, quote, more accurate and more realistic cost figures than they ever had before. I guess somebody boogered up a neater set of books for the department this time. Shell Oil, for one, will save a pretty penny because of this. Company officials had originally bargained with the Carter administration to settle an alleged $151 million in overcharges. The Carter people said, ante up $75 million and we'll call it square. Well, now Mr. Reagan's department says that $50 million is quite enough, thank you. Marathon Oil overcharged customers some $41 million, according to government investigators. Mr. Hanslick and the boys in the back room will settle for $11 million. The topper is a deal they cut with Mobil. Overall, Mobil may have ripped off buyers for more than $900 million $900 million in various cost violations. Our benevolent Energy Department says $29 million will cover it. Or cover it up might be a better way to put it.

Louis Wolf: Mm-hmm.

Craig: Well, because of the hubbub surrounding these sweet deals, the department has delayed signing some of the agreements, and others pending with Gulf Oil and Cities Service, which was just recently swallowed up by Occidental Petroleum. The Wall Street Noted also that the Reagan team has not shown any great enthusiasm at all for pursuing this type of enforcement. In fact, the administration budget for 1984 proposed cutting their allotment from $21 million down to $7 million. They don't want them nosing around too much. But why would they want to bite the hand that feeds them? For my own part, I'm not particularly surprised by this whole affair. Once a week, it seems, the business press carries something or other like It's blatant stuff, and it's pretty old hat. What really amazes me is that so much energy is devoted to railing against pissant things such as unreported busboy and waitress tips, Social Security overpayments, where Gramps has gotten a part-time job selling candles, and food stamp abuse. These damn people are eating! And all the while, it's business as usual in the counting house. You know, I've just about decided to become a finance baron so I can live outside of the law, too.

Speaker 1: Say, Craig, I found an old statistic which I used about a few years ago, but it bears on what you were saying a while ago. When the price of gasoline at the pump is raised 1 penny around the country, Do you know how much wealth goes from us to them?

Craig: Yeah, it's got to be astounding.

Speaker 4: More than $5.

Speaker 1: It's $2.9 million a day.

John Stockwell: A day? A day.

Craig: In pennies.

Speaker 1: So you can imagine how much is going back to the oil companies after the oil glut brought the price down, and then the government, uh, put on that, what, 5 cents?

Speaker 4: 5 cents a gallon.

Speaker 1: 5 cents, but they raised it much higher than 5 cents.

Craig: Yeah, it seemed to go from about 10 to—

Speaker 1: Yeah, about 17 cents, anywhere between 10 and 17 cents. They raised it above that. So you can figure out that additional above the tax and figure out from $2.9 million a day, take that over a year. I'm no good at math, but that's—

Craig: It's a lot of money.

Speaker 1: A lot of money.

Speaker 4: In May of 1983, the Congress went along with Reagan's crazed plan to produce the MX missile. And it looks like money is being freed to continue the MX missile program, even though it appeared that it was going to be defeated. However, there's an article in the Indian Times that indicates that it's going to be a little bit difficult to base these MX missiles anywhere in the country because of the public opposition to the missile, the grassroots opposition that's arising. When Carter was talking about his racetrack concept, to have the MX missiles on this racetrack that would be put in Nevada or Utah, the citizens of that state organized and put tremendous pressure on the governor, the state legislature, to try to make it not be the case that these missiles be put in Nevada and Utah, so that suddenly this program was a abandoned by the federal government. Then they started talking about Montana and Wyoming as a good place to put the dense-pack MX missiles. Well, there was a lot of opposition that has already arisen in Montana. The governor came out against it, and 8 of the 9 congressional representatives, as well as grassroots groups throughout Montana. However, Wyoming, the governor and some of the congresspeople there seems to be a little friendlier to the MX, and they have invited the Air Force to come and check out the state and said they would cooperate with them as an MX missile site. However, a grassroots opposition group in Wyoming is now starting to form called Western Solidarity. Some of the same people that organized opposition to the MX in these other states are going to Wyoming to help them organize. They're planning a big rally in Cheyenne. Wyoming, and more and more groups and individuals are becoming aware of the dangers to their ecology and, of course, to their very survival if there was ever a nuclear war. So grassroots opposition to the MX missile program is growing significantly in Wyoming itself. Therefore, if the Reagan administration attempts to try to base these MX missiles anywhere in the Southwest or the Northwest They're going to get grassroots opposition from a new group called Western Solidarity that's organized throughout this region, consisting of ranchers, of church groups, of environmentalists, of public citizens, all of whom are opposed to the MX missile, including now a group in Wyoming.

Speaker 1: We've had stories from 1982 and '83, and now May 1985.

Speaker 4: Probably Ronald Reagan's greatest political and public relations blunder was his visit to Bitburg, Germany, To the cemetery where SS troopers were buried along with other German and American soldiers. You also might wonder why Reagan originally didn't agree to go to a concentration camp and to a commemoration service for the dead Jews who were killed in the Holocaust. Well, the New York Times reported that Nancy Reagan put a zap on that, that she thought that Holocaust and concentration camps were were sort of a downer and too depressing, and she thought that Reagan should project a more positive, happy, cheerful image. So she vetoed a trip to a concentration camp. However, there was such an outcry when it was revealed that there were all these SS stormtroopers buried at Bitburg that Reagan did finally agree to go to a concentration camp. Well, the Village Voice, the week before Reagan's visit to Germany, had an article about anti-Semitism in the Reagan administration and some very dubious attitudes of some of his officials in an article called Bitburg: Tip of the Iceberg. Reagan's communications director is Pat Buchanan, who you may have seen on the Cable News Network on the Firing Line show. And Buchanan, I think, was also Spiro Agnew's speechwriter and very active in the Nixon administration. Craig, you've read about Buchanan's attitude towards anti-Semitism and the Jews.

Craig: That's right. There is an office in— that Congress had a hand in setting up under the aegis of the Justice Department. It's called the Office of Special Investigations, which supposedly was set up to prosecute and deport alleged Nazi war criminals and collaborators who fraudulently entered the United States. Well, Mr. Buchanan, since he became involved with it, has not been He wasn't too gung-ho about prosecuting these people. In fact, he said in a speech, he said he saw nothing singular about the Holocaust. He said, and I quote, it just seems to me that allocating funds into running down aggressively these people is just not a proper use of resources. And like you say, he was involved with the Nixon campaign. He was a speechwriter for Mr. Nixon. And if you'll recall, if you read the Watergate tapes, the book that was made from the tapes, there were several anti-Semitic slurs on the tape from Mr. Buchanan. And it's said that Mr. Buchanan was the one important White House staffer who convinced Mr. Reagan to go ahead and visit Bitburg.

Speaker 4: The Reagan administration, in fact Ronald Reagan himself this time, is also in trouble for writing a friendly letter to one of the most notorious antisemites in the whole United States, a Dr. Roger Pearson, who's the president of the Council for Social and Economic Studies. Reagan wrote him a letter congratulating him on his journal and saying that you are performing a valuable service in bringing to a wide audience the work of leading scholars who are supportive of a free enterprise economy, a firm and consistent foreign policy, and a strong national defense. Defense. However, Mr. Pearson has also been active in anti-Semitic circles for many decades. In Britain in 1956, he started publishing a racist journal called Northern World, whose purpose was to make whites aware of their forgotten racial heritage and to cut through the Judaic fog of lies about our origin and the accomplishment of our race in Western culture. In 1958, Mr. Pearson He founded a Northern League in Britain whose purpose was to bring together the strands of postwar neo-Nazism and whose members included racial theorists who were active in the Nazi regime in Germany. Then he came to the United States in 1964 and began publishing a journal called Western Destiny, who had on its editorial board what the Village Voice described as a rogues' gallery of racists and anti-Semites: Klan leaders, Holocaust debunkers, former Waffen-SS officers, British and American neo-Nazis and fascists, members of the White Citizens' Council, etc. They then started publishing a journal called Mankind Quarterly that specialized in racist articles, including one that reported on a 1962 trip to South Africa that was sponsored by the apartheid government to study, quote, Bantu racial characteristics. It was illustrated by a photo of a Zulu man in profile intended to illustrate his Jewish nose. Since then, Mr. Pearson has published a whole stream of racist and anti-Semitic books: Eugenics and Race, Blood Groups and Race. He received $36,000 from the Pioneer Fund that was dedicated to scientific racism and run by political associates of Senator Jesse Helms, and more recently has been involved with the Liberty Lobby antisemites and racists in publishing several antisemitic things. So this is a gentleman that Ronald Reagan sent a personal letter to congratulating him on the valuable service that his publishing enterprises are carrying forth. And even after the criticism was leveled against Mr. Pearson for being one of the most grotesque racists in this country, the Reagan administration refused to retract the praise in this letter and refused to criticize Mr. Pearson publicly, showing an incredible moral blindness on the part of the Reagan administration towards the issue of antisemitism.

John Stockwell: It's nothing new, though.