Former CIA Agent John Stockwell on media manipulation — I transcribed the entire interview, there are some great quotes (www.youtube.com)

submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I'll put the transcript in the comments. I just stuck the vid at 50% speed and typed along. I'm not that weird, do not make fun of me!

The transcript still has some ums, uhhs, and you-knows in it, might want to clean those up before you paste excerpts anywhere.

and uh shoutout to emizeko, who apparently posted this video a month ago

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[-] [email protected] 16 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

one of many standout quotes:

And we pumped just, just, dozens of stories about Cuban atrocities, Cuban rapists, uh, in one case we had the Cuban rapists caught and tried by the Ovimunda maidens who had been their victims, and then we ran photographs that made almost every newspaper in the country of the Cubans being executed by the Ovimunda women who had supposedly been their victims.

These were fake photos?

Oh, absolutely. We didn't know of one single atrocity committed by the Cubans. It was pure, raw, false propaganda to create an illusion of communists, you know, eating babies for breakfast and that sort — totally false propaganda.

[-] [email protected] 11 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Another good snippet, just before that quote:

We would take stories which we would write and put them in the Zambia times. And then pull them out and send them to a journalist on our payroll in Europe. But his cover story, you see, would be that he'd gotten them from his stringer in Lusaka who had gotten them from the Zambia times. We had the complicity of the government of Zambia, Kenneth Kaunda if you will, to put these false stories into his newspapers. But after that point, the journalists at Reuters and AFP, the management was not witting of it.

And this one:

You have contact with a journalist, you will give him true stories, you'll get information from him, you'll also give him false stories.

Did you buy his confidence with true stories?

You buy his confidence and set him up — we've seen this happen recently with Jack Anderson, for example, who has his intelligence sources, and he has also admitted that he's been set up by them. Every fifth story just simply being false. You also work on their human vulnerabilities to recruit them, in a classic sense, to make them your agent so you can control what they do, so you don't have to set them up sort of, you know, by putting one over on them, so you can say "here, plant this one next Tuesday."

Can you do this with responsible reporters?

Yes. The Church committee brought it out in 1975 and then Woodward and Bernstein put an article in Rolling Stone a couple years later. Um. Four hundred journalists cooperating with the CIA, uh, including some of the biggest names in the business, to consciously introduce the stories into the press.

[-] [email protected] 6 points 2 years ago

The story about the connections between the CIA and journalists was written by Bernstein by himself. It's a decent read:

https://www.carlbernstein.com/the-cia-and-the-media-rolling-stone-10-20-1977

[-] [email protected] 9 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

transcript 1/2

John you were in Vietnam for the CIA, and as I understand you were up country. What years were you there?

73–75. RIght after the troop evacuation, and I came out in the evacuation of April 75.

How long were you with the CIA?

13 years. I was a field case officer, served in Africa and Vietnam, and then, eventually, on a subcommittee of the National Security Council in Washington.

You were in Angola, were you not?

Well I ran the Angolan covert action, but I ran it from Washington. These things are global, and as chief of the Angola task force my office was in Washington.

When did you leave the CIA?

March 1977, I left to testify to the senate and go public and try to write a book, which I did.

I'll get into that a little later, I'd like to talk to you about what kind of experiences one has when one leaves the CIA and begins to talk. It must be very very interesting. Let's talk about the function of the CIA. I think a lot of us have an impression that all the CIA does is gather intelligence. Intelligence is information of course. One would think that if you obtained information that was based upon fact, and if that is so, what did you do with it?

Well, one of the four principle functions of the CIA is to gather intelligence, and ideally forward it to the president, the users of information, the policymakers as they say. There are other functions however, some of them more legitimate than others. One is to run secret wars. The covert action that's written and talked about so much, like what's happening in Nicaragua today from Hondoras. Another thing is to disseminate propaganda, to influence people's minds. And this is a major function of the CIA. And, uh, unfortunately of course it overlaps into the gathering of information. You have contact with a journalist, you will give him true stories, you'll get information from him, you'll also give him false stories.

Did you buy his confidence with true stories?

You buy his confidence and set him up — we've seen this happen recently with Jack Anderson, for example, who has his intelligence sources, and he has also admitted that he's been set up by them. Every fifth story just simply being false. You also work on their human vulnerabilities to recruit them, in a classic sense, to make them your agent so you can control what they do, so you don't have to set them up sort of, you know, by putting one over on them, so you can say "here, plant this one next Tuesday."

Can you do this with responsible reporters?

Yes. The Church committee brought it out in 1975 and then Woodward and Bernstein put an article in Rolling Stone a couple years later. Um. Four hundred journalists cooperating with the CIA, uh, including some of the biggest names in the business, to consciously introduce the stories into the press.

Well give me a concrete example of how you use the press this way, how a false story is planted and how you got it published.

Well, for example, in my war, the Angola war that I helped to manage, uh, one third of my staff was propaganda. Ironically, it's called covert action inside the CIA, outside that means the violent part. I had propagandists all over the world, principally in London, Kinshasa, and Zambia. We would take stories which we would write and put them in the Zambia times. And then pull them out and send them to a journalist on our payroll in Europe. But his cover story, you see, would be that he'd gotten them from his stringer in Lusaka who had gotten them from the Zambia times. We had the complicity of the government of Zambia, Kenneth Kaunda if you will, to put these false stories into his newspapers. But after that point, the journalists at Reuters and AFP, the management was not witting of it. Now our contact manager was. And we pumped just, just, dozens of stories about Cuban atrocities, Cuban rapists, uh, in one case we had the Cuban rapists caught and tried by the Ovimunda maidens who had been their victims, and then we ran photographs that made almost every newspaper in the country of the Cubans being executed by the Ovimunda women who had supposedly been their victims.

These were fake photos?

Oh, absolutely. We didn't know of one single atrocity committed by the Cubans. It was pure, raw, false propaganda to create an illusion of communists, you know, eating babies for breakfast and that sort — totally false propaganda.

John was this sort of thing practiced in Vietnam?

Oh. Endlessly, a massive propaganda in Vietnam in the 50s and in the 60s, including the thousand books that were published, several hundred in English, that were also propaganda books, sponsored by the CIA. Give some money to a writer, write this book for us, write anything you want, but on these matters make sure, you know, you have this line.

Writers in this country?

Sure

Books sold and distributed in this country?

Sure. English language books, meaning an American audience as the target, on the subject of Vietnam and the history of Vietnam and the history of Marxism and, supporting the Domino Theory etc.

Without opening us up to a lawsuit, could you name of one them?

[Pause] ... No I could not, uh, the Church Committee, when they found this out, demanded that they be given the titles so that the university libraries could at least go and stamp inside "CIA's version of history," and the CIA refused because it's been commissioned to protect its sources and methods, and the sources would be the authors [laughs] who wrote these false propaganda books, some of whom are now distinguished scholars [laughs again] and journalists.

Well, doesn't the CIA flatly deny — they've admitted that there is some propaganda at first, but, their position is that those are all *outside* the United States, not inside the United States. Isn't that true?

Absolutely. While we were running this Angolan operation in pumping these stories into the world and US press, exactly that time, Bill Colby, the CIA director, was testifying to Congress assuring them that we were extremely careful to make sure that none of our propaganda spilled back into the United States. And the very days that he was giving this false testimony, we were planting stories in the Washington Post. By that I mean not through Lusaka but we actually flew a journalist from Paris to Washington to plant a false story — I mentioned it, I give the text of the story in my book.

[-] [email protected] 9 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

2/2

So you planted a story in the Washington Post by bringing a man from abroad. You had no difficulty, got right past the editor with it?

Yeah.

Is this common? Is it easy?

It's easier than, than you would think, yes. If it's on the line — for example, if it's on the line of uh, Grenada being radical today, we've had articles in the Washington Post, the Star before it closed, Time Magazine, that could only have been written by, originally by, the CIA. Soviet submarine base... terrorist training... here's a little island where the major source of income is selling spice to the west, western tourism, and a large United States medical school. Tiny little island, 15 miles by 10 miles across, with 70,000 people, with US students in their cutaways and sandals and their noses in books wandering all over the island, and yet, major press organs, Time Magazine, running stories about their being so radical.

In Vietnam, John, what was your relationship, what was your role, in relation to the press?

Well, mine being the CIA's role, it was multifaceted, there were officers in the embassy, CIA officers, high-ranking officers, uh, Frank Snepp was one, not high-ranking, but he was at the, in the Chief of Station's office, who met with the press regularly. Uh, it shared information with them, gave them information, and got information from them. And then periodically would put some story into that that would be false. But also, in other cases, very valuable to the journalist. So even hard-nosed journalists who would never willfully cooperate with the CIA would consider it a useful source. At the same time, there are all kinds of people, you know, as journalists, and uh, case officers — many of the case officers, really quite afraid of the press. We upcountry, when journalists would come up nosing around, we would hide and let the AID officer talk to them. Because we were simply afraid that they would photograph us and write some article and have some allusion to what we were doing that would be unfortunate to our careers.

They knew who you were, they knew you were CIA?

Everyone always knows who the CIA people are. Let there be no doubt whatsoever. This is one of the biggest farces that the CIA and Congress have put on the American people. We, as Moynihan said, Patrick Moynihan said in testifying against the Official Secrets Act recently, he said at the UN, he said they swaggered around like Texas cowboys in 10 gallon hats and high heel boots. In Vietnam we had yellow Datsuns and sequential license plates. So if you had a yellow Datsun and 144 on your license plate you had to be CIA, and everyone knew it — upcountry we had, uh, emerald green jeeps, and the army had all of them drab and AID had grey jeeps, and if you had a green, green jeep you had to be CIA, and any denial of that was only tongue in cheek, perfunctory, certainly journalists knew the difference.

What a disillusionment! You're telling us that a spook is not a spook!

Alan Dulles wrote in his book "The Craft of Intelligence," a famous CIA director, in the forward of his book he says "an intelligence agent, contrary to popular opinion, has to be known as such, otherwise people with secrets won't know where to take them" [laughs]. He set up the policy, the precedent of traveling the world each year and assembling his case officers in hotels and having what you could only describe as a sales conference. Meetings in the hotel rooms... breakfast, lunch and dinner and drinks together in the hotel rooms. [Pause] Talking, so you're talking about, not an underworld, you're talking about ranking, privileged, members of the police brotherhood of the world. CIA officers are not in danger, terrorists don't hit them, and every country they can, they establish liaison with the local police, and inside the veils of, you know, their secrecy and protection, they're not fearful and they're not playing cover games, they're having lunch with the police chief.

John, I'd like to, I'd like to find out what makes a man like John Stockwell tick. One, why were you in the CIA, two, uh, why did you *quit* the CIA, and I'd like to find out what has happened since you quit the CIA and began speaking as openly as you've spoken to us.

Well, certainly that's a question as complicated as the dilemma facing this society about the CIA today. I went in, uh, marines, army, marine captain, conservative background, my father was an engineer in Africa, contracting to build for a Presbyterian mission, and I grew up in the Belgian Congo. Uh, about as conservative as you can get, I guess.

Missionary atmosphere?

On a mission station with an engineering father, but uh, humanist principles, high ideals, false, unrealistic ideals for the world, uh, education at the university of Texas. My service in the marine corps, active duty, all very exciting between wars. I was in a forest reconnaissance company, parachuting and locking out of submarines, very glamorous, but between wars no one getting shot. No moral issues, if you will. And then the CIA recruited me right at the end of the Kennedy era, he had just been shot, ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country. And all of the propaganda that had been put out on the American people against communism, the height of the Domino Theory, and my own naivete, thinking I was educated when in fact I was not. And uh, I thought going into the CIA that I was doing the best thing I possibly could with my life, in the noblest ideals of our society, thinking I was bettering mankind by making the world free for democracy and... it just took me 13 years and three secret wars to realize how absolutely false that was, and the Church Committee's revelations, simultaneously to the Vietnam and the Angolan thing... it just took me that long to see the thing from a totally different light. And my basic ideals have certainly never changed, in terms of basic humanism, basic sympathy for the people of the world. [Pause] Service to this country that goes back so far I don't even have to deal with detractors, I feel, who say I'm a traitor or whatnot, that's silly, with you know, with the things I've done with my life. But I think we are drifting from the values that we, we teach ourselves in school, of, of democracy, of freedoms, I think we're selling out to a very small police organization who is absorbing American principles about as fast as the judicial and legislative processes can absorb them, freedoms of speech and press, and at the same time are continuing policies of killing in every corner of the world, right now in Nicaragua and El Salvador. I think I deplore that morally, but I also think it's extremely dangerous because it can flash so easily into a world confrontation, and... with the Soviets... to the holocaust, to the nuclear war.

Well, what has happened to uh, to you since you left the CIA and started speaking like this?

Well I've been sued by the CIA, I've been threatened by the FBI, uh, I have not been beaten and mauled, I have exercised my right as I see it to speak out, and lectured at length. They've made it very clear they don't appreciate it, and like I say I've been warned that dire things could happen to me, but uh, I don't know if these were bluffs or not, nothing has yet. I've been sued for damages by the CIA, which is certainly an irony when you think about it.

this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2023

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