John Stockwell: Former Chief CIA Angola Task Force: Nicaragua Reagan Lies War Under The Bush With The CIA | LIVESTREAM BEGINS AT 8:00 PM EST

➡ Ron Partain, the host of the Untold History Channel, shares that he plans on introducing a trend to the channel where every Friday night, the audience will watch something historical. In this particular episode, he mentions an old video he happened upon from the mid-eighties about former CIA agent, John Stockwell, revealing his experiences with the CIA and its strategies to create enemies, provoke wars, and cause destabilization. Partain also gives a heads up about a guest coming on the show, David Curtis, who has a unique outlook on Christianity.
➡ The text discusses the Reagan administration’s strategy in Central America, particularly Nicaragua, in July 1986. It outlines the expenditure of hundreds of millions of dollars on arms and infrastructure for anti-communist “Contras” fighters, including funds redirected from designated aid for Ethiopia. It also reports attempts to recruit mercenaries from previous conflicts. The text suggests this is part of a wider campaign to drum up support for a sizable military intervention, despite potential domestic opposition, and speculates about the eventual necessity to “do Nicaragua” to justify the massive investment.
➡ The text expresses concern about the state of affairs in El Salvador in the context of U.S military aid and the likelihood of the right-wing Arena party winning the approaching elections. A notable fear is that U.S. troops may have to be sent to El Salvador, potentially sparking discontent in the U.S. and globally. Furthermore, the predicament in Cambodia is discussed, where multiple factions vying for power after the Vietnamese withdrawal may lead to a major bloodbath partly attributable to past U.S. government policies, including supporting Pol Pot, bombing operations, and CIA-led destabilization efforts.
➡ The text discusses the destructive environmental and human impacts of CIA wars, highlighting the hypocrisy of figures like Bush who publicly support covert actions causing mayhem and chaos. Several individuals are critiqued for their roles in conflicts and it’s suggested that future wars will exist in the third world as the U.S. and the Soviet Union cooperate. The author expresses skepticism over the motivations of figures from the Cold War era, questioning their simplistic goals and usefulness in fighting communism, while hoping for future generations to have a more nuanced understanding of these geopolitics.
➡ The speaker reflects on being part of a generation fighting for their independence and expresses pride in this. They discuss their political volunteer experiences and mention watching the controversial Clinton Chronicles documentary, which outlines alleged criminal activities of Bill Clinton, a topic the speaker seems engrossed in. They also discuss the deviant sexual behavior of powerful individuals and their pursuit of power and control over love. In conclusion, they propose a plan to establish a Friday night watch party featuring historical movies.
➡ The speaker plans to shift their Friday night activities towards watching more historical movies like “Wilson’s War,” featuring Tom Hanks, and “Enemy of the State,” starring Will Smith. They’re going to leave the serious and depressive content for the week, making Friday nights more entertaining and enjoyable. They also look forward to discussing the “fourth branch of government” tomorrow for some intellectual discussion.
➡ The text discusses a potential military intervention by the U.S. in Nicaragua, likely due to concerns about increasing power and efficiency of the Sandinista forces. The forecast suggests the U.S. may amplify support for the Contras, raising the number of equipped troops from 15,000 to 30,000. Despite misgivings about this strategy, the media appears to favor the intervention. However, public sentiment is mostly against military aid and intervention, but the text suggests this doesn’t guarantee a halt to decisions favoring military action.
➡ In the 1980s, Nicaragua received technical and financial support from the USSR and its allies for military infrastructure developments, igniting US concerns of communist spread in the region. This geopolitical shift prompted anti-communist interventions, including establishing the Contras force, funded by the US to challenge the dominant Sandinistas. Despite the economic and social impact of this prolonged conflict, Nicaragua maintained internal stability and citizen welfare better than neighboring countries. Controversially, the country started to see a collaborative socialist movement involving religious institutions, marking a potential shift in Marxist ideology. The US, however, manipulated narrative around the situation to justify intervention, falsely branding Nicaragua as oppressive.
➡ The text discusses the perceived failures of Reagan’s administration, highlighting its flawed influence, specifically on the CIA. It claims the increased budget and increased covert activity can be likened to the CIA operations of the 50s. It also questions the credibility of leadership and justifies the rise of institutions that teach state repression techniques, preparing to preemptively control perceived internal threats. Lastly, it mentions resignations within the CIA due to disagreements over the handling of intelligence.
➡ The text recounts diverse instances of the CIA’s covert actions, malpractices, and deceit under William Casey’s rule, limited understanding and manipulation of facts in Reagan’s administration. It presents arguments against these actions, pointing out Reagan’s inability to make rational decisions and his reiteration of lies to the public for the accomplishment of political agendas. It also suggests that a self-destruction may occur due to these actions and policies based on ill-founded fantasies and non-realities.
➡ The text discusses the questionable morality of certain practices and decisions by the CIA, particularly its tendency to lie or mislead for what it perceives as the greater good. This was seen when Schultz testified to Congress about the CIA’s alleged funneling of information to the South African government during apartheid, despite all evidence indicating this was a lie. Schultz defended these actions, arguing they were in line with ideological beliefs, even if they involved deceit. The text also touches on broader themes such as the use of media to manipulate public perception and the potential risks of covert operations.
➡ The text discusses the CIA’s covert operations in Vietnam, Laos, and Afghanistan, with the greatest expenditure in Afghanistan remaining undisclosed. It compares the CIA’s destabilizing efforts in these countries, including funding various rebel groups, with the ultimate effect being a potentially enduring state of violence and conflict. The Reagan and Bush administrations are highlighted for their continuation of these tactics, even after the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan, causing destructive consequences and possible humiliation if ties to barbaric atrocities are revealed.
➡ The CIA has a history of clandestine involvement in conflicts, often backing various groups but maintaining public silence. In this case, evidence suggests the CIA’s involvement in Afghanistan and Angola, even allegedly participating in illegal drug trade operations. However, this is seldom covered in detail in mainstream media, thereby helping keep the extent of the agency’s activities obscured.
➡ Namibia is gaining its independence but faces a precarious situation due to potential destabilization efforts by South Africa and the CIA. Meanwhile, other African and Central American countries, including Angola and Nicaragua, are experiencing similar threats and setbacks in their independence efforts from external forces seeking to maintain control and prevent socialist developments. Underlying these dynamics is a pattern of undermining nations attempting to break free from foreign influence, often through economic destabilization. In this context, the Contras in Nicaragua are facing disintegration while El Salvador is once again experiencing a high level of violence and instability.

Everybody to the Untold History Channel. My name is Ron Partain. Today is Friday. Friday the September 22. How’s everybody doing tonight? Hope you’re all well. Apologize for last night. I had every intention of being here yesterday. Um, but I had a situation with a friend in the hospital and my services were needed elsewhere. That’s kind of what was going on. And anyway, I didn’t get home till late and I was like, I’m done.

I can do it. But I stumbled upon some very interesting, very interesting old school video. This is from like the mid eighty s. And it’s a perfect dovetail with what I read on Wednesday because what I read on Wednesday was all about Reagan and Bush and the CIA and the School of the Americas and a lot of that kind of stuff. Well, it’s Friday night and I’m going to kind of start a trend where Friday night is going to basically be friday night is going to be the night that we like it’s like a watch party.

So we’ll be playing something live or we would be playing something on Friday night. So that’s what we’re going to be doing tonight. We’re going to be watching something. And what we’re going to be doing tonight, not every single I’m not devoting only Friday nights to watching something, but every Friday night you can pretty much rest assured that we will be watching something. Just so that we’re clear, this is going to be some very interesting stuff.

Now you guys probably don’t get excited about these sorts of things like I do when I see old video of people who are talking about stuff from yesteryear. For me it’s like I’m a kid in a candy store. I just absolutely love it because it’s listening to people who actually lived the history. And this individual, this John Stockwell, he is somebody who was former CIA. He actually quit the CIA in basically disgust because of the things that he saw.

And he wrote a book called In Search of Enemies. And now I haven’t read the book, but I have found the book and I’ve ordered the book. My understanding of what the book is about is he was talking about how the CIA is just out there creating enemies, looking to provoke wars. And so they’re finding enemies to have a war with just for the sake of having wars and for the sake of creating destabilization.

Which basically coincides with everything that I have come to learn about the CIA and about the United States in general. And not just the United States, but the Soviet Union as well. The Soviet Union and United States were know, we had the Cold War. And the Cold War was in my humble opinion, the Cold War was theater to keep us all in a perpetual state of fear. That’s what I tend to believe.

I could be wrong on that, but I don’t think I am. Actually. I think that’s pretty right on the mark. But anyway, so tonight we are going to watch. It’s going to be a little bit lengthy. I’m going to speed it up a little bit. It’s like an hour and 47 minutes for both of them, but I’m probably going to play it at about a 1. 2 or a 1.

3 speed just because you’re still going to be able to understand it. The video is definitely older. You can tell it’s like from VHS from the 80s, mid to late 80s. But you’re still going to be able to get the gist of what’s going on. And despite the quality of the video, you’re going to understand everything. He says. A few things in there that are very interesting. I’ve heard several times that Reagan in the 80s was showing signs of dementia late in his first term.

And that was one of the reasons why Bush was able to do a lot of the things that he was able to get away with, because Reagan was not. He was losing his mental faculties. Now, we all know that when Reagan passed away later on in his life, he was suffering from dementia. And I don’t know if he died from Alzheimer’s, but that was essentially his ailment. So he talks in there about Reagan.

He was frustrated and he had note cards and stuff and he would get frustrated or whatnot. So anyway, I’ll let you guys watch that and make your own mind up in terms of what he’s saying. But I’m going to be in the chat watching this with you guys. But I’m kind of excited about tonight. I’ve watched this already. But believe it or not, again, when I see stuff like this, it’s like, man, this is like gold.

It’s like going to a thrift store and finding an old record that is just of your favorite band from when you were a kid, and you’re like, oh my God, how awesome it was. Anyway, that’s kind of like my attitude when I find stuff like what I found. It’s like I found a whole treasure trove of it’s, like 400 videos of these guys. Anyway, that said, I’m going to jump in that here in a second and play that.

But just as a reminder, monday night at 07:00 p. m. . Eastern, I’m going to have David Curtis on and he’s going to be talking about the predatorist view of Eschatology. If you haven’t yet, I highly encourage you guys to go watch the understanding of the Book of Revelation and the inspiration of the Second Coming. If you’re a Christian, it’s going to give you a completely different outlook on Christianity that you’ve never had.

Now, that is my outlook on Christianity, but it took me a long time to get there. And when I have David on, david is going to talk about what his journey was to get to the point where he is today. And for him, it was the same. It wasn’t something where he just all of a sudden woke up one day and that was what he believed. It was a long process to get to where he is, but what he realized that, oh, my gosh, I essentially have been lied to all my life by preachers, well meaning preachers who didn’t necessarily understand scripture that were just passing on the same thing that they had been taught without really questioning anything.

Now, where have you heard that mean? That’s basically our lives as a whole. So that’s one of the reasons why I have a tremendous amount of respect for David and why I’m really trying to build up some anticipation for having him on. But anyway, I digress. There may be a couple of times when I kind of skip out. I’m still going to have the thing playing here, but my little kitty, my little kitten, he’s not feeling too well.

I came home today and he’s not wanting to eat, and he’s crying a little bit. So I’m a little apprehensive, and I’m going to be kind of I don’t know. I’m a little nervous about him right now. So even though the vet gave him a clean bill of help on Wednesday, I’m freaking out. So I don’t know, maybe I’m gun shy because I’ve had this happen before anyway, so if you guys put something in the chat and I’m not there, then you’ll know that.

But I will be back anyway. All right, guys, so first one up is going to be it’s actually going to be all in one continuous one, but the first one up is episode 300 of the Alternative Views, and it’s all about Nicaragua, the CIA, Reagan, lies and war. So here we go. Get this fired up and let me know actually, let me know if you guys are able to hear this.

And I’m going to mute my audio and let’s get this started. Although this program was made in 1986, the opinions and perspectives and information of John Stockwell were not presented on the establishment media, so are still of very vital interest. We’re pleased to have with us today on Alternative Views ex CIA agent John Stockwell. John is going to talk with us today about CIA operations in Central America and particularly the cultural war against the Sandinista government in Nicaragua.

We’ll also discuss with John some of the recent policy changes of the CIA under Reagan, under the William Casey regime, and we’ll talk about some other CIA operations and games that they’ve been playing all over the world. So, John, welcome back to alternative views. Thank you. My pleasure. Do you want to begin by giving us a sense of the scope of CIA operations in Central America today? Yes, indeed.

What’s happened, what’s different now from two months ago, of course, is the Contra aid bill, which gave the US. Government, the CI, $100 million to spend on the Contras, again adding to the 177,000,000 or so we’ve spent so far. But what’s happened is much bigger than $100 million, although that’s important in itself. At the same time, the CI was put back in charge of this operation in 1984, when they mined the harbors and began blowing up ships that were insured by Lloyds of London, the CIA was shut down in Nicaragua.

The Contras, they were shut out of it. There was also the assassination manual and some other missteps. And they have not been back in charge until now, July 1986. And they have $100 million. But what’s happening in Central America, our policy there, our new policy there, this big victory for the Reagan administration is a green light, and they’re upping the ante by several hundred times. Now, the $100 million will be spent on arms or direct expenditures buying things for the Contras.

We have a figure that was never brought out in the Angolan war, the one that I helped supervise, which is the overhead. In addition to the 100 million, the CI, Newsweek reported, has got $400 million to build up the infrastructure of CI officers and bases and facilities in Central America. And that’s quite a bit of money. So you’re talking about half a billion right there. Then, if you add on to that, President Reagan has taken 300 million from money that was designated for Ethiopia, including 75 million for food for Peace and 225,000,000 for development or reducing the famine situation in Ethiopia to spend that in Central America on his broader program, including the Contras.

So you’re talking about upfront $800 million. Then you add in the fact that they get to working with the permissive Congress, they get to working with the rest of the government structure to buy things at a discounted rate. For example, in the Angolan operation, the Congress was hostile to declare obsolete a bunch of weapons. So we were actually buying, I recall, on a 45 caliber pistol that will cost you about $450 out on the market here today.

We were getting them for $11, brand new, still in the cost money, but declared obsolete so they can get a lot more bang for the buck. You’re talking about a billion dollar program as of July 1986 in Central America. Plus the Green Berets and the CI advisors, plus the articles that we’re getting. The thing has such energy, and they’re so aggressive and confident and happy with what they’ve got.

They’re giving interviews and talking about how they’re going back into Laos and recruiting Vang Pao’s soldiers and mercenaries. That was an article in the right wing newspaper The Spotlight. And it was written by former CIA administrative officer Victor Marquetti. And he was talking just about that very thing about the Laosian fighter pilots whom they used back in the Vietnam era and bringing in. They were members of this mercenary army, and they were some of the people who were so much involved in the heroin traffic at that time.

But the CIA is bringing these people back again and putting them down in Central America. When you’re building up a mercenary army your force like the Qantas you have a big need for technical skills pilots to fly the planes, people who can repair the helicopters and make them run. You can hire Americans who have these skills but that’s very visible and very upfront. And they have to have all of this infrastructure of a living with the movies and officers clubs and flying home once a month to see the family and everything, what they’re looking for here.

We tried it in the Angolan operation to hire Vietnamese and Laos and Thai and Cambodians. And we were stopped by two things. One is we didn’t have the national presidential support that President Reagan is putting into this Nicaraguan thing. And the other thing was that all of these people, the Vietnamese and Laos just having escaped Southeast Asia coming into the United States the last thing they wanted to do was get involved in CIA adventures somewhere in Africa.

They just weren’t interested at all. I don’t know. The Spotlight article and the other I get telephone calls from a lot of people talking about these things. I don’t know how successful they really are at getting these people recruiting them and how rusty they might or might not be. How many operations have they been involved in in the last six years under Reagan and other parts of the world that we don’t know about? But what concerns me is since 19 80, 81 we’ve been talking together about the orchestration to the next war.

Central America having been designated grenada, Lebanon, Libya the bombing of Libya this spring all orchestrating the nation and working the nation up to get the Fervor ready to go and do the next war. We have not had universal support in this analysis. You have people like Colonel Jack Buchan with the CDI up in Washington. What’s? The CDI now. The center for Defense Information. David McMichael A Former analyst people that I respect enormously have been buying, to a degree at least, the administration position that we’re into low intensity warfare.

That doesn’t mean that Michael and Buchanan have been endorsing it. They deploy it, but they’ve been saying, no. The Reagan administration does not want to get dragged into a war. They would regret being dragged into a war. What they want to do is to go out and work these situations around the world in the low intensity conflicts short of the war which might get a negative reaction from the nation at large.

That is, short of sending American troops into Nicaragua. Yeah. The difference between Grenada, which was a three day, four day action and the Vietnam War talking about a war and the administration what they’ve been teaching in the war colleges and banding around Washington is, no, we learned our lesson in Vietnam. We don’t want a war. We do have to stand up as a Communist. So we’ll do it through low intensity conflict and using surrogates like the contrast to fight the battles that we would like to be fighting if we could get away with and Jonah Savimbi and Angola and Afghani.

I mean, there are ten places where they’re doing exactly with surrogates with mercenaries in effect, although emotionally involved mercenaries, the people whom they call communists against the people whom they call Communists. Now, I have been maintaining throughout we have because we’ve talked about this before, years ago, that it is the administration and the conservative backers of the administration it’s part of the Reagan revolution that eventually they have to have a war in order to consolidate the revolution.

I was saying this in a debate with David a cordial debate with David McMichael in 1984 and he was saying, no, they will avoid a war if at all possible because it might cost them the negative reaction, cost them the gains they’ve made in their revolution. And I’m saying, no. They’re getting all these laws on the books and all the fervor worked up. The only way they can erase Vietnam and make war again a noble, glorious American pastime is to do it again but do it right with leadership and the things if necessary pave North Vietnam the way Reagan’s just whatever is necessary to win dramatically and get the American people emotionally involved.

And they’ve been saying this all along, reagan saying that if he had been president during Vietnam we’d have done it right we wouldn’t have had domestic descent at home and we’d have carried out the war correctly to win in Vietnam. And even more recently, the secretary of defense has said that we will put U. S. Troops into Central America if the countries can’t handle it and they can’t handle it and they can’t.

Now, what’s happening this spring the big peace initiative last fall had everybody distracted reagan meeting Gorbachev and all of that. And it had a lot of people, even in the progressive community in Washington saying no, Nancy has discovered peace and she’s going to direct Ronnie into peace and it’s going to be the thing he’ll go out playing peace and just doing enough of the low intensity conflict to stand up to communists.

The debate then was does he want to go out as a big peace president or with a glorious war? And I was saying at the time, just hold on to your Britches by January. By next year he’s going to be bored with peace and back into the adventure because that’s the only way he can complete his revolution. And sure enough, in February they announced $100 million for contrary.

They’d never even asked for anything like that before. And military aid as well, significant aid, part of that advisors and support. He was defeated and he stuck with it and stuck with it and stuck with it until eventually he got it last month. Now, what I see happening they’ve upped the ante essentially to about a billion dollars. Now, we estimated that with all the rehearsals of the invasion big Pine one, Big Pine Three, Grenadier and all of these things and the bases they’ve built, the twelve bases they built in Honduras and all the other infrastructure and ships and surveillance and radar stations.

We were talking in terms of almost a billion dollar investment already. And now they’re throwing a second billion dollars onto it. And what that means, as I see it is that there is no way they can spend $2 billion without doing Nicaragua, without doing their work to get their investment back, to explain it, to rationalize it. They cannot now turn around maybe this time next year and say, well, we tried, but the Santa needs to seem to be there to stay, so let’s go somewhere else and do something else.

As I see it, it’s cast in concrete. Barring a miracle, the United States will invade Nicaragua within the next two years, probably in 87, possibly before there is another spotlight, which has an article indicating that well, the headline is Nicaragua Invasion Plan. And curious that $1 billion is going to 15,000 Contras. That’s pretty good guaranteed annual income. But what this article says, after talking to some people in the Defense Department that they want to expand the contrast to 30,000 by September.

And then, of course, the old thing, if that doesn’t happen, if they can’t do it, then they’ll send in the Marines. What they want to do is to mount invasions on a wide area of Nicaragua, including along the Costa Rican border, and then try to take some territory they’ve never been able to hold and take territory and some major town. Now, you’ve been down in Nicaragua and you’ve talked to a lot of people and, you know, do you think that 30,000 instead of 15,000 countries can do this? Well, in December of 83, they tried to take the town, a little enclave exclave halapa in northern Nicaragua.

And their plan, and they talked about it openly, was that if the countries could take halapa, the US. Would recognize them as a legitimate government of Nicaragua and then go in with military aid and US. Forces and begin to build them up. They were not able to. They got defeated roundly and were thoroughly smashed. Meanwhile, the Saninista forces have been building and training continuously to where they’re one of the crack armies in the world in terms of getting the job done and jungle fighting and mountain fighting defensive.

This is something that David McMichael came back from one of his studies this spring down there. And I asked him about Cuban advisors and he says, Cuban advisors? Heck, he said, when is the last time the Cubans really fought? He said, they’re down there learning from the Nicaraguans now. It’s the Nicaraguans who have the hot hand in terms of fighting this kind of a war with a billion dollars and the men and material you can buy, and putting Americans to go on patrols with them.

Special forces. To work with them, if not to lead them and fly planes for them and giving them a serious air force and a serious little navy of PT boats. But not more than just two ships raiding down the coast, but missiles to shoot down helicopters and things. They’re going to heat that Contra war up enormously. On the other hand, all the accounts that I’ve read indicate the Sandinistas have an army of about 100,000 troops.

So if the Contras only have 10,000 or 15,000 today, and even if they got up to 30,000, they would still be so seriously overpersoned that it seems unlikely that they could do much without American troops. In terms of overthrowing the Sandinistas, in terms of overthrowing the Sandinistas, conquering Nicaragua, I don’t see it. And I don’t find anyone in Washington who believes that Contras can ever, with a billion dollars take Nicaragua.

But their purpose is to destabilize Nicaragua and set the stage, stress it out. See, already we’ve been down there destabilizing for five years, and now Congressmen who maybe weren’t in office then, who maybe didn’t know where Central America was five years ago, go down on delegations now and they come back and say, that place is really the pits. I mean, it’s awful. I mean, they don’t have medicine, they don’t have food, they don’t have shiny new cars.

Like Senator Percy was saying about Chile in 1974, this socialism doesn’t work. Look at Chile. It’s all run down. Well, we had been destabilizing it for three years. Then we’ve done the destabilization job on Nicaragua and it is stressed out. And the people are, however, hanging in there very tough with a larger Contra force, with ships and planes and air support, god knows what sort of things. We’re going to, in one form or another, sneaking in with them.

They’re going to be able to go in and hit targets they haven’t hit before. They’re going to be able to go in with a larger force and maybe take a town, while the San Anistas are more in a defensive situation and will chase them out. But it may take a day or two, and meanwhile the population and a town is raised and left in rubble. What I’m trying to say is, with 30,000 and boil that down, you cut away the fat.

10,000 effective troops and a billion dollars in the Special forces, a lot of mischief. They can do a lot of damage to the country. Plus perhaps more sophisticated equipment like plot handheld rockets to try to use against the Nicaraguan helicopters. Well, within weeks after the Congress voted the Contra eight, there was a major atrocity in Nicaragua that was hardly reported in the American press, which was a landmine that was exploded in the Nicaraguan countryside that destroyed a bus and killed 30 some people.

This was one of the largest slaughter of civilian lives that has taken place in some time. New York Times came out at the last moment in favor of aid for the contrast, the 100 million. So they knew. Yes, indeed. Their editorial, their own papers position was that we’ve got to do it. The whole establishment is now behind it. It’s consolidated the Washington Post, the New York Times. That means that trusted like you mentioned are not going to be given 06:00 primetime news coverage.

Alexander Coburn of The Village Voice was in Ireland when this happened, and this was a major story in European newspapers. It was a slaughter of 30 some civilians by the Contras. And this was during Liberty weekend in the United States. And all of the networks were focusing their attention on the celebration of Miss Liberty. There were some stories on the closing of Laprenza, of the opposition newspaper in Nicaragua, but there was nothing on television on this other incident.

And even The New York Times and the Washington Post had hardly anything on this. So this was a major example of a American media cover up, selective coverage to build the impression in the American people of communist repression of the press, la prerenza and ignoring the atrocities. I’ve said it before and it’s even more true now. The media could shut down Mr. Reagan’s contra program in two weeks time if they would just run the footage that they’ve got of what’s happening.

You were talking with media people down there or somebody you know was talking with media people, and the network’s own people down there were saying this. Is that correct? If I remember right? Oh, yeah. I’ve been into discussions of this down there, the Intercontinental Hotel. I haven’t been down this year. I’m preparing to go, but they had the last time I was down there and all the years before, permanent offices CBS, NBC, ABC, people in residence there, there’s a big atrocity.

The word gets out, they get in jeeps, they zip up there or plane something and photograph while the blood still the flies on the blood on the ground. And they’ve been doing that. Now, there are several thousand documented atrocities that they have filmed and they have not been. And they are not running these things on the evening news because they don’t want to put it before the American consciousness because they’ve decided to cooperate with the administration in letting this war, the Central American war, evolve.

And what is so fascinating to me, and I’m sure to you, Doug, since we both studied the media so much, is that in spite of all this press control, in spite of all the disinformation, still, 67% of the American people in the last poll are against sending aid to the contrast and have continued for the last several years to oppose aid to the contrast at very high figures.

Whereas during the Vietnam era it took until almost the last American troops went out before even 50% of the people opposed American intervention in Vietnam. So this is quite a switch, it’s true, but it’s also a little bit misleading. It’s not as reassuring as it might be because, for example, 70% of the people in the polls said that bombing Libya wouldn’t accomplish a thing in terms of terrorism.

But 70% of the people also said it was a good thing to do. And the two sides of their minds not connecting. It is true that 67% of the people are saying we should not go down and kill people in Nicaragua or aid these rapists and murderers. The contrast. But at the same time, the people are flocking to the movie theaters and seeing the Rambos and all of that and rocky cheering as he hammers on the Russian and all this stuff.

Top Gun is the most popular movie this summer. Yeah. John, I’d like to run this by you. This is a continuation of the article we were talking about in the Spotlight a while ago. And this is some of the right wing propaganda. Well, I’ll let you determine if it’s propaganda or not, but The Spotlight quotes intelligence experts in Miami and Washington. And here’s what they say is happening down in Nicaragua.

A group of more than 60 Soviet engineers arrived in Nicaragua in May, and they spread out in a dozen survey teams helping to build military facilities. Czech, East German, Bulgarian and Cuban engineers are hard at work dredging and upgrading three ports. El bluff near Bluefield Mosquito Coast. And this will help Soviet freighters get in there. And then the thing which you saw them trot out during the years of Grenada, ultimately they’ll be dredged to more than 60ft in order to accommodate a Soviet submarine.

And it goes on. It says, Estimated 300 Soviet technicians have been flown to Nicaragua in recent months to activate four major electronic listening posts. And additionally, advanced electronic military air base has been built by Cuban construction crews under the direction of Czech and East German engineers. And to finance this crash and military build up, the Soviet Union has spent more than a billion dollars in Nicaragua during the first half, just six months of 1986.

And then it says, of course, the right wing newspaper says, we got to the damn is bursting. We got to stop these Communist spirits. All this data now. Well, every bit of that may be true. Soviet ships going in and dredging the harbors and improving the facilities and people coming in to help them run their radar and what other facilities. But I point out the Newsweek article in November 8, 1982, which said, we’re doing it again.

We’re creating this contra force. That’s the one who had that quote in it calling the Contras. They were the former Somalis guardsman saying they’re the only truly evil, totally unacceptable factor in the Nicaraguan equation. This was Newsweek in November 8, 1982. And then it quoted someone else pointing out. That no one in Washington, in the CIA or the White House or anywhere thought the Contras had a chance of ever overthrowing the San Anistas.

And then it said, So therefore, why are we doing it? What’s the rationale for getting involved in this morass? Another big sticky bog. And the answer that they included was that the purpose was to push the Sandinistas into a more radical position from which they could be attacked more openly. We’ve spent a billion dollars destabilizing the place. We’ve had the Contras in there raping and burning and bombing and maiming.

We’ve hit the economic targets endlessly. The country is stressed out. It is at war. This war is for Nicaragua much larger than the Vietnam War was for the United States. In addition to which, it’s in Nicaragua. We weren’t fighting in our own country. I mean, this is a much more serious thing than World War II was for the United States. Stressing their country out more with people dying in the country itself.

So they’re getting help. So they’re getting help from wherever they can. So they’re getting help from Cubans, so they’re getting help from Russians. And now we can stand up and say, hey, Russians are actually flying planes in Nicaragua in this hemisphere for the first time in modern in. Therefore, we’re in a situation of dire. The dam is bursting, and we have to go in and do something about it.

The Congress and the New York Times can all say, hey, it’s just too grim. The Communists are in this hemisphere now flying planes, so we got to go to war. And yet, before all this started, the percentage of trade with the Eastern Bloc was quite small compared to the Western capitalist countries. And the percentage of aid from the Soviet Union and Eastern European countries was quite small in percentage.

Very small. In addition to this, I haven’t talked to anybody about the economy down there, but for a long period of time when the economy was really flourishing, they had a 4% growth rate, positive growth rate. Before the destabilization began, 60% of the economy in Nicaragua was in private hands, which is more than Mexico or many others or Brazil or even the United States. Yeah. No, free enterprise is still the Reagan administration is operating on a massive big lie, hitlerian big lie in Nicaragua, claiming it’s not a democracy, whereas international observers said their elections were fairer in some ways than in the United States.

Oh, sure. Fairer certainly, than El Salvador, which we support next door, claiming press censorship without noting that in times of war, we’ve had far worse than what the San Anistas do to La Prenza. I mean, you have a situation where the United States is at war with Nicaragua, slaughtering people inside Nicaragua and funding the major newspaper, giving it cash. We knew this for years, but eventually this last year it was brought out.

The National Endowment for Democracy. A us. Government semi overt front, actually giving them hundreds of thousands of dollars to run this newspaper, to destabilize the economy. I mean, picture the New York Times, funded by Germany during the war, running headlines saying the stock market’s crashing, saying we’re running out of nickel or tin or cars so everybody rush off coal so everybody would go out and buy up this and create shortages here and there.

We have been doing this. It’s not a secret. I’m not getting into anything. Their congressional committee screaming about it and investigating it, not able to stop it. The administration trying to make it look know there’s a grievous, hideous, monstrous, totalitarian problem in Nicaragua and it just isn’t true. Now it is becoming true that to defend themselves, they’re beginning to get arms and they’re beginning to get advisors and whatever they can to fend off this gigantic war that they’ve got to deal with, which now the administration in making its predictions come true, is able to stand up and say, AHA, there are Russians in there.

See, we told you these people wanted Russians in there. And they’re tightening up their internal security and for good reasons. For instance, in the COVID Action Information Bulletin, they talk about assassination squads and assassination attempts by CIA agents roaming Nicaragua and trying to do in their top men and women and their government. And then when the Nicaraguans find out about it and the complicity of the US embassy down there and expel these embassy people who have been involved with this, well then the US press and Reagan, they get all huffy and say what do they mean expelling our people down there? We would never assassinate them.

1983, they caught the CI, they filmed them, photographed and taped them, setting up a plot to poison the Foreign Minister, Diaz Kodo. And they showed the Americans the evidence. And privately the American CI agents in the embassy laughed and said you nailed this. But publicly, of course, we do not assassinate the President’s policy as we do not assassinate. But just about ten months later, we have the assassination manual come public and President Reagan himself had to address it in the debates with Walter Mondale publicly.

So President Reagan himself has corroborated the Santa Anista’s claims about assassination. He himself had to rationalize and explain this assassination manual. They also have a situation, a problem there which our society is exploiting at length, and that’s the split in the Catholic Church and the misdirection of some of the people leaders in the Catholic Church in Nicaragua, and then of course Rome through bureaucracy, not through ideology, siding with the hierarchy of bishops and the Archbishops.

What I’m talking about is obando I’m supporting, who publicly supports peace and all of that. But the fact is he’s gone to Miami and held mass for Contra leaders who are going into combat. They’ve caught priests down there literally carrying arms and explosive devices under their robes. The celician obando bravo. I mean, this is an order which is three steps to the right of Attila de Hun. And it has a following.

It obviously has some power. The Pope, while you read his messages, you get a sense that he has more sympathy for the Nicaraguan people. But he’s caught in a dilemma because the hierarchy under him in Nicaragua is entrenched it’s the former know, the oligarchy, the priests that related to the oligarchy and the wealthy and the rich. Meanwhile, other priests working with the Saninista government to build what’s a completely new wrinkle in Marxist ideology which is a non atheist Marxism, a socialism that incorporates the Church and works with it.

It is a new wrinkle in the Church. There’s a tendency towards liberation theology in Latin America where Catholics are working for social justice and thus are aligning themselves with regimes like the Sandinistas that they see as serving the needs and interests of the people. So it’s sort of a new synthesis between socialists. You have liberation theology coming burgeoning in the Catholic Church in other countries aside from Nicaragua and before the Saninista revolution.

And then on the other side you have the Saninistas with Marxist philosophy but incorporating the Church into their belief, their ideology, their functioning. And of course, this is a major problem to Rome, but it’s not a problem to the propagandists in Washington and to our media because the Saninistas eventually sufficiently stressed out. They catch priests vigorously, actively working in the destabilization. They have expelled two of them. Of course, our society.

They’re cracking down on the Catholic Church. They’re throwing priests out of the country. And without taking the time to really headline and say priests active, you know, priests actively involved in brutal destabilization, caught red handed, warned 25 times, were asked to leave the country if they can’t cease their bloody activities. I mean, that would be an honest statement. But that’s not the way the administration and the major media is playing it.

This kind of thing coming from Reagan, it’s so inane. The man’s mind. His computer is all scrambled and he blips in little images from movies he did in World War II and from scripts he worked on in the they keep popping out and he uses them and it’s so inane, it’s silly, it’s comical. It’s like a caricature, except it’s got the whole nation plunging into war. You can’t afford to laugh or snicker because we are going to war.

And the nuclear arms race, of course, the shadow, the giant shadow behind all of this adventuring is also this man with a defective mind up front of this whole thing and pushing it and articulating it. It boggles the mind that he would have credibility on the part of any rational human as he gets these things all garbled and scrambled and confused and deliberately lies about them. And in terms of the CIA, this has led to a massive increase of their budget, a hiring of all sorts of new agents a carrying through of new covert operations all over the world that’s more or less gone back to the 50s in terms of the operations of the CIA.

Do you want to comment on this? To put it in a broader perspective, what’s going on in Nicaragua of the CIA under Reagan and Casey? Yeah. Reagan came into office and put Casey, who was very close to him, in charge of the CIA. And the man takes pride in being called Wild Bill Casey. He took know, the statue in front and put up his own idol, was Wild Bill Donovan from the Wild Bill Hickok.

And they set themselves out to restore the CI to full historical function. Everything they’ve done in the past, no holes barred. Their budget and their manpower have been increasing. The fastest growing department of the US government, hiring back people who were fired because of getting carried away in operations and out of control and getting the United States into trouble, launching lots and lots and lots of what we call covert action about a little going into countries and manipulating affairs.

Covertly or semicovertly 50 or so they were running around the world. And we know this because the debate in Congress under Reagan is quite open. If the White House and President Reagan if he goes on his radio talk show and talks about the contras and why shouldn’t we be arming them and aiding them and the debate for money and everything it’s impossible for them to keep anything very secret or much of it very secret.

So we get all kinds of what you can’t really call leaks. Just part of the debate. 50 covert actions. Ten major bloody ones involving hundreds of millions of dollars. They’ve come up with a new name, which they actually borrowed from General Kitson’s operations in Ireland. Low intensity conflict, low intensity warfare. And they’ve got a whole theory from Kitson’s writings and in their own studies, evel’s writings from Ireland as well.

They’ve got schools literally teaching in the techniques teaching not just our paramilitary commanders but this one CSTI in California turning out by 1979 at the UPI reported they’d turned out 14,000 graduates. That was an institute that was done started during the Reagan it was started during Reagan’s governorship. Yeah. And that was the one in which when he addressed the opening seminar, he said there’s some people who, if they could see us assembled here today, would say that their worst fears were being realized that I was planning a military takeover.

And that was back in the late sixty s and now chuckled and tilted his head. Oh, indeed, a joke. And everybody laughed. From this evolved FEMA the Federal Emergency Management Agency with Louis Giofrita, who’s a high ranking member of the Sleaze Factor. He’s been indicted for corruption or threatened with indictment for corruption along with 2000 other people in the Reagan administration. But planning and training in the techniques which even they might call state repression.

Planning in the techniques, holding seminars, doing training exercise where they have maps of the city of San Luis they call it a San Luisa where they actually on the map they draw Latin American, black, white breaking it all up racially and then going in to control this section and that one. Teaching in the techniques of torture and blackmail and bribery and coercion and intimidation, teaching how to set up false revolutionary fronts that you can use to dissipate, to get friction going in people’s movements of whatever kind, giving examples, we did it here, we did it there.

So and so was a great hero in 1968 when he did it in Florida. Like I say, they graduated according to UPI, they graduated 14,000 people by 1979. And this thing’s going, greater guns now, generals from the Pentagon, generals from the national guard, police chiefs, sheriffs, lower officials, defense contract executives, corporate officials, and bell telephone company officials going through this training program. I thought one thing was so fascinating about this organization, CSTI I forget what CSTI stands for.

Some type of institute, but anyway, california special training institute, okay? They made an analysis of us society, and they made an analysis of Vietnam war and the US response to it. And so then they started from there, saying, okay, we’ve got to control the US society, and we’ve got to destroy ahead of time any groups or individuals with any leadership capability before they can start to work, because we let them go too far during the Vietnam war.

We let organizations start up and come together and then start to take action. Basically, it’s the hit squad thing which they’re trying to do, which they are doing internationally. No, they teach that violence, what they call legitimate violence, meaning when the sheriff cracks someone’s skull and tortures someone is an integral part of our society. They teach this. They also teach one of their famous little quotes taken from their own training synopsis the papers was that the police chief is like any other executive.

He’s got to do his job well, but not so well that he puts himself out of work. You work against crime and all of these things, but you don’t suppress them completely. You don’t come up with a really clean society. John what about the CIA itself? During the 1950s, according to your colleague ralph McGee, who was a former CIA agent, who now, like yourself, is a critic of the agency.

McGee said that during the 1950s, 70% to 80% of the budget and the operations of the CIA went to covert action operations and only about 30% went to intelligence. Whereas by the 1950s, particularly under the carter administration, the budget was about 50 50, where there was much more emphasis on intelligence. And by the end of the Carter administration, almost all of the major covert operations were closed down.

Whereas Mcgeehy claims that under the Reagan administration, they’ve more or less gone back to the 50 percentages. That something like 70% to 80% of their budget, which is also significantly increased, is going into covert operation. I very much corroborate Mcgeehy’s analysis. He learned traumatically in his own career that the Agency would not tolerate it wasn’t just that it didn’t gather intelligence as its primary function. It would not tolerate good intelligence.

If the intelligence contradicted the rationales for war, for what we call now low intensity conflict, which they call then the COVID actions. And there’s been two major resignations within the CIA hierarchy in the last year to a John Horton and a John McMahon, who also resigned simply because the CIA wouldn’t accept their intelligence assessments of certain situations and simply didn’t seem to be interested in intelligence that went against some of their aims in carrying out covert operations.

Yeah. John Horton was a careerist and a loyalist who was rehired on contract. They can extend past the age of 60 or 62. And he was on contract and in charge of doing a study about Mexico. And they were ordering him what conclusions to make, and the White House was and he resigned and went public, semi public in an in house way. He held an off the record seminar where he presented his thesis, but he wouldn’t let the press quote him and run the thing because his view is he still supported the CI and covert action and everything, but he didn’t want to be ordered to write a false paper.

David McMichael, the year before that, in 84, had resigned for exactly the same reason. John Mcaraguan study. Yeah, on the Nicaraguan study, they were ordering him to write about a flow of arms from Nicaraguan to El Salvador. And there was no raw data in the CIA about a flow of arms. Then you have McMahon, of course, was the number two officer in the Agency supports to this day the CIA in principle and covert action in principle.

But he’s been against the US involvement in Afghanistan, for example, and very, very skeptical about the contra program. His reasoning is not that we don’t have the right to do covert actions, to destabilize countries and rape them and ruin them. But his feeling is that history, experience, three, four decades of experience, has taught us that the Quantra thing is not going to work and it’s going to get us in a lot of trouble.

And the Afghani thing as well, and the others. And he was arguing for a rational program, which means sort of the opposite approach in the same ballgame of the wild belt. Casey which is do it all. Go, kill, rape, maim, have fun, do all these good things. Casey whom any way I analyze this man’s activities, I don’t come up with much respect. We in the Angolan operation were faced with the decision a guy in the field clamoring to mine the harbors.

And we thought about it and said, wait a know, mines blow up ships. Ships belong to the industrial world in the United States, and they’re insured by Lloyds of London. If we do that, we’re going to have the whole world come crashing down on our heads. And he did it. He didn’t just talk about it. He mined the harbors, and it cost him his contra program for two years.

Assassination manuals. Publishing a document in a situation like that and disseminating it, advocating killing officials, that’s not very bright. Then you get Casey, for example, in 1982, the DDI, the intelligence side of the house was to do a study of Africa what’s the situation and dynamics in Africa. And they did the study and came up, africa’s problems are economic. Africa’s problems are indigenous. Here are the problems. It was their best shot.

Casey went into a rage, and he fired the analysts who’d come up with this study and ordered another one that would focus on the Soviet threat in Africa. And so they tore up the first report and they wrote another one, which is cold war rationalization, and wrote it to Mr. Casey’s taste I e. There was no John Horton writing. You know, he brought in someone who would write it for him the way he wanted it and produced a paper that would justify all kinds of cold war activity in Africa.

Instead of focusing on the real problems, the real intelligence, the indigenous and economic problems that are stressing out Africa so much know it just occurred to me that this whole right wing, covert action, militarist thrust of the CIA might self destruct simply because they’re operating on fantasies about the world rather than real information and intelligence. In other words, they might be so far gone in their cowboy politics that they’re really going against the trends of reality and the facts of the situation that might lead to disaster from their point of view.

Well, there’s not much hope in what you say, although I’ve thought about it a lot just this morning driving, and I was thinking about exactly that and reading some stuff in the car. The intellectual high ground, the inverse ratios, the NPR study they cited, where the more intelligent people are, the less enthusiastic they are for Mr. Reagan’s policies as a whole. And the lower the IQ gets, the more enthusiastic they get.

But unfortunately, I mean, the whole Reagan phenomenon, a man with literally a defective mind has got the whole nation blowing and going in the direction of adrenaline and feeling great and feeling wonderful and marching off to war. I mean, literally, a man who nowadays cannot be turned loose in public scrutiny because he can’t handle it. He cannot even you remember the press conference two weeks ago where they would ask a question and he was pulling up the wrong card.

I mean, he had these little cards for if they asked this and he couldn’t even connect to read the right card. So they would ask a question, he would read the wrong card and visibly rattled this guy. It’s not just that he’s in charge as a benign daddy figure. He is relating to the subrational forces that in fact dominate or provide the major energy in this society that has this galloping off to wars.

You see this in the CMA. The Civilian Material Association that was three years ago had two pilots flying for the CIA in Nicaragua when they got shot down and killed. And that got them some publicity. Now they’re claiming 5000 membership. They’re involved in Angola, they’re running patrols on our borders with Mexico armed patrols going over the borders. They’re involved with what’s left over of the Vang POW thing in Laos, Cambodia as well, afghanistan unquestionably.

They have some ties with the government. But you have the this is kind of a right wing mercenary organization. Absolutely fight communists. What they’re doing, they say what their spokes folks say on the Arizona Mexico border is they’re there to lay their lives on the line to stop the communists from subverting our society by pumping drugs across the border. I was actually suggesting something else though, John, that there are objective limits to what they’re able to accomplish in their policy simply because they’re not assessing correctly the situation.

They’ve lost touch with reality to such an extent that if they carry through these fantasies to their logical conclusions, this may constitute a disaster that will lead to their self destruction. That’s more what I was replay of the Vietnam War. And this exactly is what happened during the Vietnam War and the Korean War and the Philippines campaign and the Plains Indians war. Unfortunately, I understand the question and it’s very pertinent, very example.

I see, as I said before, very little chance that we will avoid a war. Only a miracle will keep us out of the Central American war. But at the same time, this thing’s going to be a colossal catastrophe in terms of the reaction throughout Central America and Latin America, all of the countries and the population and the hundreds of millions of people who are not going to be sympathetic for the gringos going down and shooting and killing and bombing and strafing again.

Now, the trouble is that these subintellectual people, including Mr. Reagan and the people responding to him could care less. On a previous program you made a statement which was so significant we didn’t pursue it and I would like to do it now. And that is relating to this phenomenon of lying in the Reagan administration. Not just Reagan, but also the other people we’ve seen ever since Reagan came to the presidency that there have been reports that they’ve put out, there have been propaganda, there have been all kinds of things that have been shown to be just blatantly false.

There have been government investigations showed that their things are false, absolutely false. And then during the last election. We saw that when somebody nailed George Bush about lying on the debates, his campaign manager said, yeah, we know he’s lying, but 50 million people saw it. But your remark was that, and I’d like for you expound on it the fact that these people are working from an ideological basis so that truth is irrelevant.

Precisely. This is where you get and it’s not always clear which people are right around. Reagan and his primary supporters have functioning intellects. Don Regan, running the White House, comes out with stuff that is I mean, he shoots himself in the foot. That’s so inane and counterproductive that you wonder if he’s very bright. This thing about, you know, women all over the United States will support apartheid because they want their diamond rings, as if women all over the United States could afford diamond rings.

But it’s just blatant lying, and they know it. When they talk about Nicaragua, when they talk about all these other things, these people, and when they’re nailed on it, they don’t retract it or try to do anything about it. They just go on to the next lie. They don’t feel guilty. This is what I call the Bill Colby principle, where I suggested in my first book, In Search of Enemies, that Bill Colby could quite possibly pass a lie detector test while he is in the process of giving false testimony to a Senate committee because he doesn’t feel he knows he’s lying.

He knows he’s putting out false information. And the reason I know this is because we would sit around before he would go and give this testimony in Angolan operation and remind him, remember last week, this was our line, so don’t contradict yourself. And yet the point, though, is that his belief in what he’s doing makes lying okay. In order to accomplish the Reagan revolution, they have to mislead the people and lie to the people and distract the people in order to accomplish their greater goals, which is what’s important.

So they don’t feel the least bit guilty about being caught out in their lives. If they’re caught out to the point it becomes counterproductive, then they’ll change their line. Oh, that didn’t work. Let’s change this. It’s ad agency. You’re selling Coca Cola, and all that matters is the result. How you do it doesn’t matter. And their objective is to get the American people hyped up for the excitement and adventure and politically beneficial event of war.

John, there is a very striking example of how truth and morality went out the window this week when Schultz was testifying to Congress about South Africa and some representatives asked him about a report that the CIA had been giving information on the African National Congress and other opponents of apartheid to the South African government. And Schultz said, Well, I just talked to William Casey this morning and he denied this.

He said that we haven’t been giving them information, whereas everyone knew this was a lie. Then there was a whole question about the morality of I wanted to say something real quick. I’m going to pause it, but this is really interesting. What he said was that from an ideological standpoint, as long as what they were doing that they believed in, it was okay to lie. And that is very reminiscent of Zionist behavior.

Talmudic behavior is in the Talmud. It’s okay to lie if you are. It’s okay to lie. It’s okay to deceive because you know what’s best for everybody else, because you’re operating from a position of superiority. So anyway, I just thought that just kind of struck me, right. If you listen to what he said, he said that William Casey went up there and he knew he was lying. He said he could pass a lie detector test while giving false testimony to Congress.

And he said that he knew he was lying, but he didn’t care because he actually believed it was the right thing to do, regardless of he thought that it was absolutely the right thing to do and the right course forward, even though it was deceitful. Anyway, I thought that was like, whoa. That kind of struck me as just hit me like a ton of bricks. So anyway, just wanted to point that out window this week when Schultz was testifying to Congress about South Africa and some representatives asked him about a report that the CIA had been giving information on the African National Congress and other opponents of apartheid to the South African government.

And Schultz said, Well, I just talked to William Casey this morning and he denied this. He said that we haven’t been giving them information, whereas everyone knew this was a lie. Then there was a whole question about the morality of the Reagan administration policy of constructive engagement, and again, there was a claim by Schultz this was a completely moral policy. So again, truth and morality don’t seem to matter.

Their view of morality, their view of revolution, their view of what they want to accomplish in the society is quite clear in their minds, but they’re just dealing with the different semantics of the whole thing. They feel that lying on the subject, like you say, of South Africa, what we’re talking about is the CI, in fact delivered the information to Boss, the South African service, 20 years ago, fingering Nelson Mandela so he could be arrested and jailed.

They have a policy of delivering information. Psy. Hirsch dug this up in a story that was published this past week, and it’s a beautiful example of journalism almost doing its job. This story was run in the New York Times. It was run in the Austin American Statesman, but the wording was so bland, it wouldn’t catch anyone’s eye unless they were into the subject. They didn’t have a little headline saying CIA fingering black movements to white supremacists in South Africa.

That would have caught people’s eye, and they. Would have understood what was involved. What they wrote was that the CIA had been gathering information about pro communist liberation movements in southern Africa and cooperating with governments like Pretoria, et cetera. And of course, if someone’s up on South Africa, they would understand that. But the emotional impact was not anything like the way they will play other issues to their advantage.

This gets back to another conversation I had with one of Carl Sagan’s assistants when I lectured in Ithaca. And then I talked to Carl about it in Las Vegas about what is the likelihood of Armageddon? Could you put ODS on it as one in a million, one in a hundred? And he was saying it’s not one in a million, maybe one in 100, because there’s the unknown. Maybe the human race faced with total annihilation, it will have a survival impulse and will jump back from the brink.

And this is what we’re saying here. I fully agree with you that if rationality steps in, it will pull the nation back from the Central American war. But rationality has not won Reagan. We had the contra aid stopped earlier this spring and Reagan hammered away with the brutal policies and eventually got his aid, which, like we said, is 800 million in reality and the New York Times supporting him.

It may happen that rationality will step back and take charge, but probably after the war has been fought to a point where a few hundred thousand people have been killed, and then the horror, we may recoil. This is the American cycle. It’s what we have done throughout our entire history. President George Bush was head of the CIA. He has said that he is going to increase covert action activities of the CIA.

Well, we’re going to talk with former CIA official John Stockwell and see what the status is of the actions going on right now across the world, places like Afghanistan, Central America, southern Africa and Cambodia. One of the jobs which John had when he was in the CIA was to run the Angolan program. He later quit the CIA and wrote his famous book, In Search of Enemies. John, George Bush has inherited quite a few covert operations from the Reagan administration.

Can you provide an overview of the CIA’s secret wars under Reagan and tell us what is likely to happen with these operations under Bush? This is the most fascinating period, perhaps, of the Cold War, because there is the suggestion, the rumor afoot, if you will, that the Cold War is coming to an end. The Russians are withdrawing from the battlefield, and it’s all over. That’s not going to happen.

I was just in London conferring with a number of people, including Tony Ben of the Labor Party, talking about just that sort of thing. What Bush is going to do is put the COVID back in covert actions. Reagan wanted to be the cowboy, showing the world how he stood up to communism in Nicaragua and bombed Libya and did dramatic things. Or to put it another way is Bush is going to use Vaseline as he proceeds with the rape of the world and get it back into more of an old school.

They’re bragging of course, big about Afghanistan. Reagan, as he went out of office, cited all of his peace. You know, of course a big one. He was a little bit quiet on Nicaragua because he had sworn that he would not go out of office with the San Anistas still in office and they did outlast him. El Salvador is probably the hottest spot as I see it, if you measure it in terms of where the United States might be provoked to put in US troops and have our next war, could very well be El Salvador Campuchia.

They’re citing that as another big victory. We’ve got the Russians withdrawing know? The Cubans from Angola, the Soviets from Afghanistan, the Vietnamese from Campuccia. But as we get into the discussion, you peel off the layer of the COVID story and you start finding very quickly the cynicism going on full of pace. And the basic point I think that I would register is that we got a lot of energy from Reagan’s, cowboy style.

He wanted the world to debate contra aid instead of focus on the fact that Reaganomics had run up the biggest debt in the history of the world. And so he was focusing attention there. But there were 21 low intensity conflicts going that the CIA was a major participant in. And the only one that got any remarkable coverage in the peace community or the press was Nicaragua. And it was by no means the biggest in terms of money or in terms of lives lost.

Now with the Vaseline president, we’re going to have a situation working where we may not have that infusion of energy from the White House, from the Congress giving us the ammunition for our debates and rallies and a rallying. Point for the Peace Corps, a little bit harder for us to be sure what’s happening in given countries. The sort of thing where it may come out five years later, like Chad with Woodward’s coverage coming out years later.

What was that about? Well, back in the early 80s, Woodward’s book Bail, there was some coverage at the time, Newsweek, but the CIA put two consecutive invasions or forces together from the Sudan to move into Chad to take power to counter Gaddafi and his forces coming down from Libya at the time it was happening. You don’t get the coverage. They keep it secret if they want to. The Afghani operation is the biggest one in the history of the CIA and they managed to divert biggest in every sense, including the fact the largest heroin smuggling ring left behind.

And they managed to keep it from not secret, but keep it from being a focal point of debate for the six major years that it was run. How could it have been bigger than Vietnam? Well, Vietnam was a CIA operation for years before the army came in. Vietnam became the Vietnam War with US Army, us Air Force. Billions of dollars. Laos had always been cited as the CIA’s biggest war.

Vietnam became an overt war. Laos remained a CIA secret war and the hundreds of millions of dollars there supported with Air Force bombing and everything. But Afghanistan is they haven’t published the figure. I’ve never been able to find anyone who confident like the archives, national Security Archives, scott Armstrong in Washington, a solid figure on how much they’ve spent in Afghanistan, but it’s in the billions, biggest in the history.

Let’s go into Afghanistan in some detail. I read in the New York Times just this morning that the Reagan administration was bragging that they refused to compromise with the Soviet Union to pull out their support for the Afghan rebels in exchange for the Soviets pulling out. So let’s see who the US actually was supporting in Afghanistan over the last years, what of the rebel forces, how they were supporting them, and what the effects of this have already been and might be.

As we now are moving to a new era for Afghanistan, there could be total chaos, it looks like the Levinization of Afghanistan, all these different groups. First of all, there’s all these different rebel groups. Who is the US supporting out of the whole spectrum? I bet I saw him on TV yesterday. There was a guy they found who spoke good English and he was clean shaven and looked like an old Mcsai type from the Philippines.

I’m going to hedge a little bit because this is not an area of my primary expertise and I’ve not been able to travel there and look at it like I did Nicaragua and El Salvador and Angola and all of that. But you essentially have it. We do have it. The Admiral Turner, when I debated him at he cited he was boasting about that covert action, that he had started it and citing it as an example of a successful covert operation.

They set it in motion and then eventually it led to the Soviets having to withdraw their troops. The game that they’re playing, essentially the US. The parallel to Vietnam is significant. We invaded, they invaded. Each created governments that invited us in, so to speak. The differences in the breakup, of course, that the NLF would not compromise in Vietnam, the Tom Poolgar scandal we’ve talked about before, the Chief of Station hoping they would give the US a break and they had no reason to.

They had the US down and dirty and were going to humiliate us as effectively as they could. This is essentially what Reagan is doing in Afghanistan. But the difference is that in Vietnam the other side had created a very cohesive force in an orderly way to move in and take power and administrate and run a country, the NLF and Hanoi and the government and everything. What we’ve been doing in Afghanistan is just pure and simple shotgun destabilization, funding anybody that’s got a group giving them arms through Pakistan, every kind of group, as you say, the Lebanonization.

So that now we’ve won in the sense that Reagan is growing and Turner is growing and Carter is growing. You heard that on the news yesterday, that his policies had been vindicated and all of that. And the Russians are pulling out, admitting that they made a big mistake. In fact, they’re probably being more candid than we were when we pulled out of Vietnam. We tried to say it was an honorable this and everything.

They’re just saying, flat, we made a mistake, a tragic mistake, but we have not created a force, our government, our movement, or anything that believes in anything to step into the vacuum. I thought I was going to debate an Afghani professor at the World Affairs Conference in Boulder last year because he was paid working for the VOA and US propaganda arm. So I presumed he was bought and paid for.

And he kept telling know, just let me finish my sentence, so to speak. And I did. And what he said is, what the powers have done is condemned Afghanistan to eternal violence and conflict. It looks like it’s going to be horrible. They’re pulling out, and this side is not going to agree to relent, and the Soviets are going to see what they would call a necessity to keep arming the other side.

This is where you get into a test, if you will, of Gorbachev’s sincerity and know, kinder, gentler, goodness in the nation. Do they really mean it? They’re trying to convince the world that the Cold War is winding down. Dunesbury’s already told us the Cold War is over. It isn’t. Now, the danger, of course, is that people are so eager craving for hope and craving for peace. It doesn’t take much as dynamic as the peace movement arguably is in the United States and Europe, for example.

It sure doesn’t take much for a president to get up there in just three words kinder, gentler, and then the goodness and greatness four words and people, oh, wow, you know, whereas the actual policies are to keep violence and covert operations and secret wars going. So your point about the US. Intervention in Afghanistan, rather than negotiating a peaceful settlement or negotiating some sort of a governmental structure, we just supported any forces whatsoever to create chaos in the region, to humiliate the Soviet Union.

That that was the goal and continues to be the goal of the Bush administration that continues to fund the Afghan rebels to make sure there’s more murder, chaos, et cetera. Bush how can he justify continuing to support the Afghan rebels now that the Soviet Union is pulled out? There’s no longer a foreign oppressor. This is just classic old cold War, the elephants fighting and the grass getting trampled.

We haven’t had our victory over there yet. I’m putting it in their terms, in Bush’s terms, the CIA’s terms. It is in the process of happening. We haven’t taken Kabul yet. We haven’t installed any kind of a government other than what the Soviets left behind. And so they’re pressing ahead, and it’s going to be very much in Bush’s interest to try to get them to moderate the violence.

The bloodiness of the revolution, the last great successful revolution from the other side was the Sandinistas, and they abolished the death sentence. The thing that’s happening now with the US forces, us backed forces, as they say in Afghanistan, apparently, is just utter atrocities when they take a city and then they lose it. Perhaps there are crates full of dismembered bodies, meat stuck in crates of hundreds of bodies left behind.

Horror beyond comprehension, perpetrated by the rebels, by the US backed forces, the different ones. But there’s different ones. There’s no one force that the US expects will take over. No. The US is working very hard, I am sure, to try to get its so they have some secret strategy, some forces that they hope absolutely take over. Absolutely. They hope to take the capital and establish a government and then reinforce that government as it dominates the others and establishes some kind of peace in the country.

The process is going to be extremely bloody, and the US will be doing its very best with the US media probably not giving us the vivid clippings of the horrors as they’re happening, just as they’re not doing it in El Salvador or Guatemala today. But couldn’t there be an embarrassment for the US if it turns out to be a bloodbath, that the US supported rebels turn out to be barbaric and there’s atrocities committed everywhere? Well, there is a bloodbath happening right now, and it’s just not being run in our media.

The US and the CIA have done this continually through the years. That’s absolutely vietnam in Iran, with a shah in El Salvador, with different degrees all the time and with different degrees of collusion from the press in Central America. For example, in 81, when Reagan was first plunging in the media, they had cruised all over Nicaragua, they had permanent offices set up for all the biggies in the Intercontinental Hotel.

And then after the Falkland Islands, they made a decision and didn’t send them back. The stuff was running on the evening news every day, the horror stories and visual imagery, and they shut it off as the media bought into Reagan’s contra program and the Office of Public Diplomacy and painting the white hats, as they’d put it, on the contras and the black hats on the Sandinistas. And the media, the Washington Post, the biggies cooperating, and they’re clearly cooperating in Afghanistan, otherwise we would be having much more graphic footage and graphic explanations of what’s happening in Afghanistan right now, today, and it’s going to get worse for the next year.

Freedom fighters, and that’s it. But there’s been nothing on US support of any specific groups or what the effects of supporting these groups are. This is exactly what I’m saying. This is the biggest one in the history of the CIA and there’s been nothing about it. And part of the reason is it’s been a full bipartisan. The contra program was public and there was debate on it and at times it was voted down.

It was close. There were serious differences in the Afghani. It’s virtually unanimous. Both sides of the House and the Congress or the Senator are fully behind it. And the administration didn’t want to provoke a debate on it. And the media was willing to go in and give us a glimpse now and then, but not map it out for us. They give you mainly the glimpse of the Soviet atrocities or it appears that it was the Soviet occupation that’s creating all of the bloodshed.

This is a legitimate revolutionary or counter revolutionary force, but they don’t go into any detail of how the US is supporting these groups. And there’s also nothing about the drug running of these different rebel drugs to say. And of course, there’s nothing about the CIA actually helping these rebel forces with their drug running to help support their military struggles against the Soviets without mention of the CIA program and the secret war.

You do pick up articles about the drug allocations around the world. And the Golden Crescent is now the largest source of heroin apparently in the world today. Right in there where the CIA has been running this operation with its C flying in with arms and flying out with the heroin. What’s the evidence that that’s happening? I mean, I haven’t even read anything about this, the CIA heroin route.

Well, there have been a lot of things in Covert Action Information Bulletin where they traced well, first of all, historically the rebels groups have been big dope operators for years. And this is one of the things that the communist government, which later became backed by the Soviet Union, was trying to do away with. They were trying to eliminate drugs from their country. They were trying to establish health and education.

They were trying to have some women’s lib give them a chance and do away with slavery. But when they started doing this and eliminate some of those drug runners, well then that’s one of the big groups. It’s sufficiently flagrant and open and it was the theme of the last James Bond movie, as a matter of fact, set in Afghanistan with these huge plain loads of heroin. John, there’s a byproduct of this.

We’re assuming that the activities of the CIA in Afghanistan will lessen somewhat as a result of this, do you suppose? Not for two or three years, no. They’ll be very busy funding the CIA and the paramilitary, the invisible government, the entire spectrum of it to build a solid government with death squads to pacify the country. I look for a tremendously troubled situation to go on several years at best.

I see like Lebanon with every single faction fighting in a situation where no faction can gain control as that Afghani professor said with just visible anguish. He said they have condemned Afghanistan to eternal violence so there won’t be any unemployed covert action hot dogs from the CIA who’ll be available and looking for work in the rest of the world like it happened in Vietnam for instance. No they’ll just be quieter and that will be the difference.

They’ll try to keep it out of sight. Instead of like the Quanta program posturing for the press and provoking public confrontations. Let’s look at another place, south Africa. South Africa is so called getting out of Angola but they did before and then they came right back in again when there looked like there was going to be peace in the area. Now looks like the same thing happened. They’re getting the Cubans to pull out.

They got their ears pinned back, they pulled away. But now I understand that I heard where they’ve actually made some more armed attacks already three weeks ago in London. In the interviews and discussions this is very much what we were talking about was what is the guarantee that South Africa is going to respect this? The Cubans pull out, South Africa pulls out. What’s going to keep? South Africa is violating every international law and boundary in Southern Africa.

What’s going to keep them from going back into Angola? How long will it be before they put their troops back in? And the answer was two weeks. Yeah now interestingly enough Washington’s reaction on this of course Reagan had a big aid program to Savimbi and Bush has promised to continue it and obviously is clearly doing so. Now Savimbi is pinned down on the border down there. Now militarily a little better off than the countries are and he was taking a beating so the South African forces came in to bail him out.

The US response, they obviously didn’t stand up and say well we happen to be in there in force with the CIA and we call the South Africans in. Their statement was I can just know back in the task force scribbling away. The wording on the know when you were running that running. Their answer was that it has not been confirmed by any reliable sources that the South Africans are in fact back in Angola.

We should in fact tell our audience that John Stockwell was the CIA officer in charge of the Angola operation and resigned after that wrote his book In Search of Enemies that began his process of developing a criticism of the CIA and has been speaking out as a peace activist ever since. So Angola has basically been a hot point for the whole reagan administration. Well, let’s strip Angola down.

Just real briefly, while we’re on the subject, chester Crocker, Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, was talking to some of us in the Africanist progressive side of things. Jerry Bender, particularly at the International School at USC and promising that he was going to negotiate a settlement for Namibia and get the Cubans out of Angola. And Jerry, a friend whom I respect enormously, said know if you succeed, we’ll give you credit for it publicly.

And crocker succeeded. He pounded away and negotiated away, and it took six years. And eventually he worked out a deal where the South Africans would give Namibia its independence and the Cubans would go home. And the Cubans are going home. And it’s a real deal. And the South Africans are there is at least some kind of a farcical independence being given to Namibia. The oversight, is it going to work? Are the UN forces going to cover it? Are death squads going to be left behind to keep a proxy control? That question remains.

But still Bender and I supporting him, were obliged to, you know, crocker, you did it. Namibia finally is getting its independence. However, in that fascinating, complex deal, the Cubans are coming home. South Africa is giving independence to Namibia and getting out of Angola and promising to stay out, even though but the United States, although arbitrating that thing, did not promise to cease its aid to Savimbi to destabilize Angola.

Now that is brass, but it’s also just idiotic. I mean, it sort of confirms your thesis in Search of enemies, that the role of the CIA is to search out enemies, to fight wars, to destabilize the world. Here’s a region that needs stability, there’s negotiations to try to stabilize it, and the US keeps supporting these rebel forces to try to overthrow the Angola government. That led to the absolutely bizarre situation of the Cubans there that were supporting the Soviet backed Angolan government, protecting the US multinational corporations.

I think Gulf oil had big Gulf oil which was bought up by Chevron, the Cubans were protecting against the CIA backed Angolan rebel forces. So it’s not even in US economic interest. When Savimi was brought to Washington in the winter of 86, remember, he dined at the White House. And yet he went on television promising the aid that he was being given that he would attack Gulf oil facilities which facilities had been built by loans which Reagan had approved in addition to which he has kept the central part of Angola frozen and the Benguela railroad shut.

And that’s Zaire, our big client’s, only economically viable, aggress to the sea, is that railroad that we pay Savimbi to keep shut. Meanwhile, the human horror, the Red Cross counts 55,000 people in Angola who have been maimed by Savimbi’s landmines and attacks. And George Bush continues to support those forces. John, one of the analyses that I heard about the situation was that there was pressure within South Africa to get out.

They wanted to get out of the Angolan situation. They didn’t want to support it financially. And also there were problems because their soldiers were getting killed. So the United States said, okay, go ahead, pull out. We’ll come in and we’ll directly supervise the situation and take care of it. So it wasn’t a big victory for the Angola government or for Cuba in that respect. It was just a switch of people who were going to control it.

Well, yeah, this is exactly the point I was trying to make, is that Crocker playing big Arbitrator and we didn’t agree to give the region peace. But it is a fact that Namibia is getting its independence. The South Africa is going to try to do what we did to Nicaragua in 1933 when we pulled the Marines out and created the Guard and left it behind with Samosa in charge.

They’re trying to create the same type of a situation and have a proxy control of it. From the Cuban point of view, the Angolans are being left facing a dire situation, with Savimbi still being funded to destabilize and the South Africans still coming across the border and the Cubans coming home and in Cuba’s interests. And it’s very difficult to fault them because they’ve sacrificed a lot of their own and their own capital to the extent that they can, and they’re not a wealthy country to stick up for their allies, the Angolans.

But this is the point at which they could in fact come home with having accomplished a measurable objective. But Namibia is independent because of what they did. Yet the independence of Namibia or any country in Africa is precarious because of the CIA presence there. Whenever an independent African nation takes a socialist road or a road that goes against the interests or ideologies of the CIA, they destabilize the government.

Kwame and Kruma wrote a book called Class Struggles in Africa that documented the ways that the CIA overthrew about 25 progressive governments in Africa, including and Kruma’s own Gandhian government in the 1960s. So if Namibia takes a route that the CIA doesn’t like, they can act to destabilize it one way or the other. So that’s really the precarious situation that all independent nations in Africa face. This is one of Chomsky’s best points, is that when a country tries to escape, our first effort is to bludgeon them back into the fold.

And if that fails, as it did in Cuba, conspicuously as it did in Vietnam, conspicuously as it’s done in Angola to date, and Nicaragua to date, then the fallback is to starve them out, create economic chaos, so that they will not be a positive example to anyone else to want to break free. And this is what Nicaragua is facing today. They won the first round. They survived six years of constant heavy duty military destabilization of the countryside.

The Contras collapsed in corruption and chaos and shambles and their own cowardice. And now a plan is afoot to disband them altogether, disband the camps and everything. But Nicaragua is now going to face a vigorous destabilization from the US government. There’s this Flora Lewis op ed piece that was in the New York Times a couple of days ago, the Austin American Statesman today where she summarizes the situation.

A good piece, well done. Except she talks about freedom of the press and she mentions La PrinceA and she does not mention the fact that it was funded by the CIA during this whole period and they were pro contra during the whole oh absolutely. A CIA propaganda piece to destabilize the country during a war no less, when they were fighting for their survival. She should have mentioned that.

It’s a good article. I compliment her. But still that little detail and then she doesn’t project it further. The Melden plan isn’t mentioned where the ambassador was funding during the height of peace talks and the contras and amnesty the embassy was caught funding people and organizing them to agitate into violence to prevent US embassy was funding opposition. Let’s focus on this contra thing for a while. I read today in the New York Times that the Bush administration seemed to be surprised that the leaders of the Central American government had the audacity to shut down the contrast to tell them they had to leave Honduras.

Evidently the Reagan Bush administration thought they’d cut a deal with the Honduran government that the contrast could stay there as long as money was being funneled into Honduras. And evidently the Bush administration was caught by surprise with this meeting and doesn’t exactly know how to react. How do you read this situation? It reminds me of an old sword, the bandy in the Third World saying you can rent us sometimes, but you can’t buy us.

And every time the Honduran generals would need put some more money in the bank accounts they would talk about throwing the contras out and it is an embarrassment to them, flagrant violation of all of their own internal laws and the international agreements in Central America. But each time they would propose to close down the Contrabases, reagan would hit them with another 20 mil in cash to the generals and quiet them down for another year.

And I would have to say that either the forces of peace in Central America are sufficient, that Honduras really is trying to get rid of this embarrassment, or the generals want another payment. Do you think the Bush administration will try to buy them off? How would they do it? Would they have to go to Congress for money or could they just cite Reagan? Well they have all kinds of contingency funds and you can 20 million they could squeeze out, but let’s watch and see.

Is Reagan going to hit the Honduran government with a lump of money or is he going to let. Them. Close down the contrabasis. What is the military situation with the Contras? I gain the impression that the Contras have pretty much closed down in terms of interventions into Nicaragua. That for a while they were quite an active fighting force. But this is pretty much wound down now. Is it that they’re demoralized, they’ve left the region, they don’t have the funding, the supplies.

What is the situation? No disintegration. Two years ago, the Sinanistas were giving them credit for some pretty serious activity up and down through the country, reaching pretty far in. They were not standing up to the Sinanistas in any pitch battles, but their raids and hitting and running. There was quite a bit of energy. Now there are occasional atrocities measured inside Nicaragua where there apparently a banned here or there, but the leadership has collapsed.

They have a sense the US is going to drop funding them, that we’ve shut down the great air wing that was funding them through the drug money. The leaders are looking for everybody scurrying to make sure they have some money in the bank so they can retire. And those soldiers that were expected to go and live in the jungle without being resupplied, without the planes coming in to get them, the thing is probably down to 5% or less of the energy that they had two years ago.

And then the talk about just disbanding the camps altogether and this is enough of the little things, signals you look for here and there. That what’s really going on. Reagan, in his last couple of months commented that the United States should be willing to accept the Contras up here. And that’s pretty much of an admission on his part, that they have to go somewhere. Boy, that’s something that just galls me.

Every time there’s the US or the CIA lose a big one. We bring in all of these murderers and dope dealers and people who’ve committed horrible butcheries and atrocities. We welcome them back into our country where they continue to do the same thing here. Which is precisely, isn’t it, the issue down in South Texas right now, the so called Nicaraguan refugees coming up here, the ones who are supposedly fleeing the Sandinistas, these were clearly Contra supporters.

And the US has not really got that clear a policy. In fact, the only group that we just totally welcomed was the Cuban exile group that we had run from Florida. That has been a constant embarrassment to the United States government and the source of a major upheaval in crime and drug smuggling. And there’s quite a block of sane people in this country, not of our politics, but nevertheless sane, who are saying we don’t want them up here.

We don’t need another mafia. We have a Cuban Mafia. I mean, some of them have read Christopher Dickey’s book with the contrast about his patrol, about La Suicidas, just this incredible vendetta and orgy of violence down in the country. And no, we don’t want these people up here. But you see, the Honduran government doesn’t want them either. You remember? Maybe we can make them astronauts and shoot them out of space.

The Kurds. They call it the disposal. The disposal. Well, you have the Kurds, of course, in Iran, Iraq, and Henry Kissinger’s famous statement when we were winding that one down, and the Shah said, it’s not my problem. You’ve got to deal with them. And Kissinger recommended the congress that we let them go. He said that covert action is not to be confused with missionary work. So essentially the Kurds were just dropped and slaughtered.

John. Let’s talk about El Salvador. Now, you said at the start of the program that was going to be the next big place of contention. What has happened there that’s different? It’s returned to the same. And New York Times, international Herald Tribune are writing repeated articles saying that the level of violence and dispute and instability in the country is back to where it was in 1982 when it was about to go down the tubes.

It was a revolution could have happened, and the US. Began putting in massive shipments that eventually became $3. 3 billion worth of military aid. These big newspapers are sort of warning the establishment. That’s where we are right now today, counting the number of attacks on military camps by the so called rebels in the capital in the last month. And elections are coming up in which there’s every appearance that the Arena Party will win, which is the right wing Dobi San’s original creation.

And this is a situation where I think Bush is really desperate. I think his vaseline principle putting the COVID back in it. I don’t think he wants a showdown in El Salvador right now. He wants to sell this goodness for a while longer and keep things quiet until he’s got his credibility up. But one thing that I said in England that I fear very much is the reason he and the media that supports him are working so hard on this goodness image is so that when he puts U.

S. Troops into El Salvador to keep it from going down the tubes, he’ll be able to say, I’m a good guy, but I had to. Or to put it another way, he stays with a dire challenge to his first real test there. If the country comes apart, if it starts to go, if the revolution starts to really succeed, the oligarchy is already back to the 82 position of decapitalization, of taking their money out in case it blows, so they won’t be caught with it in the San Salvador banks.

If it goes, then he’s going to have to, either one, put US. Marines in there at just a point in history where the Soviets are pulling theirs out of Afghanistan. And the world’s not going to like that. And the people in the US. Aren’t going to like that. Or he’s going to take historical credit for, quote, letting El Salvador go down the tubes, as Carter was blamed, for example, for Iran and Nicaragua.

And he’s not going to want to do that. He’s not going to be comfortable, the conservative element of his being and his presidency. They’re not going to be happy to let a revolution actually happen in El Salvador. I see them as utterly desperate right now trying to work out some kind of a compromise and keep the lid on. Well, how can they do that if the rebel forces are about to win a military battle? Is there a possibility of negotiating a settlement? This is one thing that the Bush Reagan forces just haven’t done.

They have always used the big stick. I mean, covert secret wars has been their method. You notice in El Salvador, and this is just in the last few weeks, the rebels proposed to participate in the elections if the elections can be put back six months so they’ll have time to realistically and Dwarti immediately said, no, absolutely not. That would be unconstitutional. No way. And Bush, his White House said, well, slow down, maybe we can find a way.

So you think they may be forced to negotiate for the first time or face a desperate decision, one that could be a Bay of Pigs. Kind of a humiliation for George Bush in the early days of his presidency. But it’s another state of chaos right now in El Salvador. Not only are the rebel forces winning victories, but the death squads, from what I read, are also back into play.

So that in the city you have these right wing death squads carrying out wholesale assassinations and Bush’s options are pretty limited. The Arena Party appears it’s going to win if they do. Their inclination to violence, of course, is well known and they’re already into violence. The Congress is in a mood to cut off their military aid if the violence level goes up to a point beyond which they can no longer ignore it.

But if you cut away the military aid, then you don’t have any carrot, as they put it, to induce them to behave themselves. So the promise as they are threatening is that, well, in that case there would be no reason for us to restrain our soldiers and a great bloodbath might ensue. So El Salvador, as a result, in part of our meddling and policies and support of creation originally in the death squads and in support of them through today, is faced with a real terrible threat of a major upheaval like occurred in the 30s.

Another bloodbath where the oligarchy slaughter, where the oligarchy got together in the said, we’re going to have to kill 30,000 people to keep the lid on things. And that’s about where they are right now. And that’s what they did. And that’s what they did. John, there was another occurrence of a socialist government pulling out of a neighbor. We mentioned it briefly before, cambodia, when the Pole Pot regime was there and just murdering people by the millions.

The Vietnamese went in and stabilized the country and put in a government. Then the United States and the Chinese supported Pol Pot. The absolute butcher. Now the Vietnamese are pulling out of Cambodia. Now, what’s going to happen there? Is it going to be a bloodbath like Afghanistan? You spoke, you remember I said back when the three big failures of the Carter administration, from my point of view, the contradictions that represented a betrayal.

One of them was scotching the Olympics for political reasons, which was betraying the athletics and the peace athletic process of the world. Another one was supporting Paul Pott, the greatest mass murderer of modern times after Henry Kissinger, supporting him as the legitimate government at the United Nations when he had no power whatsoever inside the country. But Jimmy Carter did that. And the third thing of course, was suing me and taking my profits away from my book and putting me under a court order.

Those are the reasons why I couldn’t vote for Jimmy Carter in the 80 election. So what are the fruits of this policy? For years, it must be ten years now, we’ve been supporting Paul Pott along with the Chinese. Are the Chinese still behind him too? Or were they finally shamed into dropping this character? Now what they’ve got is four factions that are vying for power and the US has actually made some policy statements saying that Paul Pott cannot be in charge of the winning faction.

But once again we’ve created forces. Now mind you, I was on my way back to Vietnam in 85. The Vietnamese were opening up ten year anniversary and the US media went in and I went back with my lead to visit her family. And while we were traveling, William Casey and George Schultz toured the area and in Bangkok announced a new destabilization program against Vietnam in Campuchia. So we have created now putting our money in Willynilly.

We’ve created several factions and the Vietnamese, not that we’ve rocked their boat very successfully in Campuchia, but the Russian economic policy, russia was underwriting that totally Vietnam’s on its knees economically and Russia was bankrolling that. And the Russians decided that that’s one place they can cut some of their losses and also win some goodwill with the United States. So the Vietnamese are pulling out and we do not have control.

We have created something that we don’t have control of with every possibility that we’re going to see another major bloodbath in Campuchia for which we will be in part responsible. In fact, going back to, I guess it’s 19 early 70s, Campuchia was pretty much out of the Southeast Asian wars until Nixon started secretly bombing the country because he thought that North Vietnamese and Vietcong forces were using Cambodia as a sanctuary.

And because of US bombings, that country was destabilized and got into a situation of total chaos, was one of the most peaceful, most beautiful countries in the world. That the bombings, plus the CIA creation of the Lanal government, which went into the utter corruption, the standard pattern. And this reminds me, by the way, in London, some of the peace activists my conditions going over there is I would give four lectures, including the one in the House of Commons, but that they would talk to me.

50% of the time. So I would get their input, which was really useful to me. Getting Tony Ben to give his assessment of where socialism is going and where capitalism is going and where the Soviet Union is going. But they came to the hotel and played a video. They gave it to the hotel, and the hotel put it on their internal video so I could watch it on the TV.

Narrated by Eartha Kit, called after the Fire, which is a study of the environmental war we waged in Vietnam and the Mongoloid children that are being born today. And in my own province in Tae n, where I was the officer in charge, they interviewed a nurse who was a midwife with two assistants, the only medical help in the province. And they were saying that when a woman comes to us pregnant, we ask her where she lives, and we can tell her automatically whether or not she has a good chance of delivering a normal child just by where she lives.

All the chemical warfare in Vietnam has destroyed parts of the environment. This was the two greatest moments of shock that I felt as I’ve come into the peace movement. One of them was seeing the children. In 83, I went down and actually held main children in Nicaragua. And the second one was seeing this film and just seeing what we deliberately did to the environment, killing the thousand year old trees and permanently poisoning the land, and seeing the shots of the children that had been born since.

John, is there any possibility of stopping these CIA wars? We’ve seen the fruits that they bear, which is death, mayhem, destruction, chaos, et cetera. Is it possible to stop Bush and the secret wars? Bush himself was head of the CIA. He’s obviously someone deeply committed to covert action. While he smiles and talks about a kinder, gentler nation, he’s supporting all of these CIA operations, and he’s been open and truthful about it.

He says he supports them. But can this be stopped? I mean, is there a mood in Congress or elsewhere in the country that these are not helping anyone? They don’t serve any real US. Interests. They just destabilize and create chaos and death. They’re totally immoral. They’re irrational. Is there any sense that this is what’s really going on and that it just has to be stopped? Well, I mean, Gordon is evidently trying to create a saner, more rational Soviet policy.

So shouldn’t the counterpart of that be in the US to stop these covert wars. Well, I hate to keep pounding away like dr gloom, but even Glassnose, there’s a downside of glassnose. We do have, like I say, Dunesbury announced the end of the Cold War. The nation, we’ve gotten the word out there is a great movement in the nation, if you will, of revulsion, of saying these things are wrong.

They’re surprising people in the establishment. Bill Colby, who ran the Phoenix program and the CIAS that did all these things, said the Contra program was wrong and should be shut down, and then said that covert action should be gotten out of the CIA. You’re finding remarkable people saying that, acknowledging the fact that these things are wrong. What they’re doing, however, as I say, is just putting the COVID back into them and toning them down a little bit and trying to keep them out of the public consciousness and trying to get the major media to cooperate with them and keeping them out of the public consciousness.

I have to mention, however, the downside of glassnosed which people are overlooking as the Soviet Union invites openness and discussion. Everything but in the 7 January that was an utterly remarkable op ed piece in the New York Times. Which is a reprint from the Soviet Foreign Ministry journal from last summer done by Andre Kuzirov, in which he said, look, most of the Third World has opted for the capitalist solution.

It was a mistake for the USSR to support people’s movements around the world. It led us into the nuclear arms race that’s almost broken the Soviet economy. And in the Soviet economic interests we, he says, have to start supporting stability and the status quo in the third World and join in the capitalist process in order to participate in world trade, in order to recover our own economy and economic interests.

Now, on the one hand, we should have a celebration and then gorbachev at the United Nations said something, you know, your first reaction is let’s go out and have celebration. Because this does would seem to offer a hope that the Cold War, the brutalization of these countries, can be shut down with the Soviet initiative and people fatigued of them. In the United States. The problem is this there are two kinds of COVID actions to oversimplify.

Basically, you see them clearly in Central America, Nicaragua with a Contra freedom fighters destabilization force. And in El Salvador, where we spent $3. 3 billion on the death squads. To maintain the status quo. To keep a revolutionary forces from winning. To keep the people suppressed. To keep the oligarchies in power. To keep the dollars flowing, to keep the trade flowing at whatever price to the people. Now, if the Soviet Union proceeds to do what it’s discussing publicly doing, it is openly saying that it’s going to be cooperating with the United States, colluding with the United States to support for the El Salvadors.

If you will, to support the status quo. Which means there won’t be anyone. A major superpower supporting the people’s interests and the people’s aspirations and hopes. And the two superpowers will be colluding to have better trade, to dominate. The Third World. This would be a great step in the direction of the world security know. Let us not forget, wonderful as he may be but an Xkgb guy in Moscow and an XCI director as president here and that right there tells you quite a bit about the movement of the world, not to mention the know peacenik in London background.

Wasn’t this Henry Kissinger’s vision of the world that the US. And the Soviet Union have a lot of common interests and they should get together and sort of divide up the world where each has their sphere of influence. Kissinger, of course, studied 19th century Europe, where they had carving up of Europe and spheres of influence. So this has been his policies? Well, as a matter of fact, Kissinger published a paper co authored a paper which is discussed, I believe it’s in the December issue of the Progressive magazine in which he’s saying how? The US.

Bush, who had just won the election, should prepare to fight wars in the third world. That the Soviet Union. Mentioning specific weapons systems that had been designed to fight Soviets in Russia, in Europe. But how they could be reintegrated to fight wars in the Third World. Well, that’s more aggressive than Kissinger’s earlier posture. He’s flat, saying that the next wars will be in the Third World as we cooperate with the Soviet Union.

Wow. That’s heavy. Well, John, thank you for your gloom and doom. But, heck, you got to look at the world the way it is, don’t you? We’ve got a lot of work to do. We’ve got a lot of work to do. We can’t forget that the INF treaty gave us all so much hope. But the factories are spitting out bombs faster than they’ve ever then. And there are now nine nations producing bombs.

Well, it shows. We have to. Reveal what’s going on in these different CIA operations all over the world to try to publicize them. So hopefully, people will be horrified if they know the truth of what’s going on and the human consequences of these covert actions and just simply shut down these secret wars? Yes amen. Well that is that so? I found those to be very fascinating. Very fascinating.

So I don’t know. Maybe I’m just a nerd like that when I see things. That focus on geopolitics of yesteryear, specifically like the Cold War and that whole time frame. Sixty s. Seventy s. Eighty s. That was when I grew up. So I look back at that time of my life to thinking, that things were a certain way, only to realize now that it was not anywhere remotely close to what I thought it know, I’m not saying that Reagan was bad.

I’m not saying that at all. But I’m not going to die on the hill to say that he was good either. You know what I mean? I don’t know if that makes any sense, but I do think that he meant well. But I think he was manipulated by people who were able to manipulate him, that he was easily manipulatable because the goals that he were trying to seek out were simplistic in nature.

And as a result of them being simplistic in nature, he was easily manipulatable. It’s like, oh, well, I want to fight communism. Okay, well, if you want to fight communism, then, well, all you got to do is just sign on the dottom line here and we’ll make this go away or we’ll go fight communism over here. Okay, well, that isn’t necessarily it’s not quite that simple. There was a lot of things that happened in the 80s where there were covert wars and military actions that nowadays I look back and it’s like the dad doesn’t really pass the smell test.

So looking at the chat here, Nini says, Ron, I think a lot of us on here grew up during that time with that same thinking. Exactly. The vast majority of the people that are following my channel, I would say are probably my age or around my age or older. So, yeah, probably not that many people that are watching the Untold History Channel that are younger. This doesn’t really interest people.

They’re more interested in going out and partying, for lack of a better word. The older we get, I think the more interested we are about finding solutions for our children and for the younger generation. And then you know what? I will say that I take a lot of pride in the fact that it’s our generation that is doing what we can to fight back and hopefully win the war.

But there’s been so many generations that have come and gone that haven’t necessarily had the wherewithal or the tools necessary to fight the war that we have. So it’s kind of like looking at the generation that fought the revolution, right? Well, that was an awesome generation because they literally fought for our independence. And I view what we’re doing is we are literally fighting for our independence again. So I take a lot of pride in being part of that generation.

I don’t know, maybe that’s maybe that’s a romantic way of looking at it, but I do take a lot of pride in that. But let’s see here. suspenses. We all found it fascinating. Thank you so much. I was asleep then. Yes, so was I. I volunteered the entire summer for 86 for Bush once candidacy and the Republican National Convention in New Orleans. Interesting, in 96, I spent a lot of time volunteering for the Bob Dole campaign.

And God, I look back in the time know, it’s like how naive I remember, and maybe I’ll play this next week. Maybe I’ll play the Clinton Chronicles. I don’t know if anybody here has seen The Clinton Chronicles, and maybe I’ll just upload that at another point in time beforehand. But the Clinton Chronicles were really interesting. I remember watching The Clinton Chronicles and thinking, oh my gosh, what a dirtbag.

Bill Clinton was not realizing at the time that that entire operation was a Bush operation and how naive I was. Suspense, says my mother, who’s 82, is now totally engaged in the truth. She loves that I share info with her. Awesome PV. You would appreciate what me sharing the Clinton Chronicles? I don’t know. Do any of you know what the Clinton Chronicles is? Is that something that you guys even know what it is? There’s a little bit of a lag, obviously, so I’m waiting for a response.

But yeah, if you’ve never heard of The Clinton Chronicles, that’s like, wow, I remember when it came out. And here, in fact, let me find it here. Clinton Chronicle. I don’t think that’s the right thing. I don’t really want to look at the Wikipedia version because I don’t really trust Wikipedia, but for the sake of at least having something to look at. The Clinton Chronicles is an investigation into the alleged criminal activities of Bill Clinton, a 1994 documentary that accused Bill Clinton of a range of crimes.

The claims in the video are controversial. Some have been discredited bullshit, while others continue to be to be debated. The philandering and sexual harassment claims in the film have since been reported and in some cases confirmed by mainstream media. Years after the film was released, Clinton paid an out of court settlement to resolve the accusations made by Paula Jones, while the film was directed by Patrick Matris. Ghana.

I don’t know if I’m saying that right. Who has produced a company called Jeremiah Films. The production was credited to Citizens for Honest Government, a project of Westminster, California organization named Creative Ministries Incorporated that has connections to wherever that person’s name is. It was partially funded by Larry Nichols, a longtime Clinton opponent, and distributed with the help of Reverend Jerry Falwell, who also appears in the film. Over 300,000 copies of the film were put into speculation, with perhaps half of that being sales.

The film was produced shortly after Clinton’s election to the presidency and provides background on the number of Clinton’s conspiracy theories associated with now former Clinton. Several of these theories theories date to Clinton’s tenure as the governor of Arkansas. Allegations that include having been a drug addict, having affairs with or harassing numerous women troopergate, using Arkansas State Police officers to facilitate sexual liaisons and intimate and intimidated accusers misuse of funds with Arkansas Development Finance Authority that’s true.

Using bank of Credit and Commerce International to launder money. That’s true. Proffer from drug smuggling at the Mina Airport true. Protecting Barry seals drug smuggling activities. True. Murdering witnesses to the MENA drug smuggling true. Cover up the circumstances surrounding the deaths of two boy shots dead on the railroad tracks near the airport. Kevin Ives and Don Henry. True protecting a state medical examiner. Yeah, that was Rami Malachi, I think was his name.

Whitewater controversy. True covering up the cause of death of Vince Foster. True using contacts at the Rose Law Firm to share or to shred documents that would have implicated Clinton in yeah, I mean, I don’t know what they say that is false or was discredited, but yeah, there wasn’t much that I’m aware of that was discredited. That whole thing was all true. But the thing that I didn’t know is that the whole drug part of it was a Bush operation and that Clinton was a CIA asset.

He was a Rhodes scholar, CIA. So? So is Hillary. They’re all in. Anybody? Are you guys aware of Chelsea Clinton and Web Hubble? Does that ring a bell to you guys? Let me just pull this up. Okay, so take a look at this. So this is Chelsea Clinton and this is Web Hubble. Now compare. This is Chelsea Clinton and Webhubble. Chelsea Clinton and Web Hubble. Now, you compare that with let’s see.

Compare that with that, and you are not going to see that image. You tell me whose daughter that is. Yeah. That is not Bill Clinton’s daughter. I’m sorry. No way. So is it not showing up? Okay. Was behind. So, yeah, there’s no way that is Chelsea no way Chelsea Clinton came out is a product of Bill Clinton. No way. And as I understand it, as I understand it, who was it? Vince Foster and Hillary Clinton.

They had multiple affairs. But what about the sun? What, son? What about the sun PV which one you were talking about? I’m not sure what you mean about the sun. So the question is, what about the sun? And I don’t know what you’re referring to, so oh, yes. Yeah, the black kid, half black. Let’s see here. Bill Clinton son. AF. There we go. Yeah. Yep, yep. So this is this is yeah, definitely.

So there was lots of that. Well, she was she was her her directions she her her gate swung in both directions. Suspense. Her her gate swung in both directions. Obviously, she had to have been engaged in some sort of intimate relations with a man because Chelsea was born. But as I understand it from people who were like, who knew some of you know, who knew the Clintons, that Vince Foster and Hillary, they were having multiple relations, as I understand.

But anyway, whatever. Swingers. Oh, absolutely. When you think about it, from a sexual deviancy deviant, am I saying that right? Deviancy standpoint. These guys, what they do for them, they don’t look at sex from the same type of way that normal people look at it. For them, it’s like transactional. Do they get off on it? Yeah, but for them, it’s not about love. They’re more interested in power.

They’re. More interested in control, money, things like that are what interest them. They’re not interested in monogamous relationships. The monogamous relationship thing is something that they put on as a front to make them look like they’re normal people. But for them, having sex with multiple partners and orgies and all that kind of stuff, they’re always looking for a different way to get off. I’m not trying to be filthy with my words, but they are demonic.

They are demonic, but they don’t look at sex as a love making endeavor between two committed partners that have love and affection and are within the confines of a committed relationship. It’s far from that. For them, it’s all about it’s about the next thing they can do to get their, you know, to get the next high, if you will. But anyway, you’re getting into really disgusting lifestyles, but there’s a whole slew of people out there who also you say swingers.

There’s a lot of people out there who engage in that lifestyle. So I do not condone it at all. I would not want to be part of that. Just not something that I’m into. But anyway yeah, exactly. Talk to climbing the ladder. Nini says it’s all about climbing the ladder. Yeah, talk to Kamala about that. She climbed that ladder. Very much so. Climbed that ladder. Kamala got to the places that she’s on her knees.

But anyway, well, tomorrow I was debating tonight whether or not to read to go through and read one of the other articles that I had about the fourth branch of government. And I opted to do that tomorrow. So I’m going to be doing that tomorrow. But since it was Friday night and I kind of want to establish a Friday night like a watch party type thing. So when I discovered those videos this week, I was like, oh, I’ll do that tonight, or I’ll do that on Friday night.

But I think there might be a couple of times when what we do is we watch a movie that’s like a historical movie that’s a little bit more entertaining. I think a good movie to watch would be something like 13 Days. I don’t know if any of you guys have seen 13 Days. It’s about the Cuban missile crisis. There’s another movie out there called Charlie Wilson’s War. I know it has Tom Hanks in it.

I know, but that’s actually a pretty good movie. There’s actually some good historic there’s some good movies out there that are historical and, you know, might be it might be fun to do that too. So I think I think I might start to veer more in that direction on Friday night because it’s a little bit more fun and I have a whole ton of historical movies that we could watch.

So I think I might be doing that a little bit more and then leaving the serious stuff and the depressing stuff for later in the week. And then using the Friday night to watch the fun stuff or you know what I mean? There was another really good movie out there. I think it was from, it was like the early ninety s or the late 90s called Enemy of the State and with Will Smith and will Smith and who’s the john Voight? John Voight was the bad guy.

What’s his name? Gene Hackman. I’m thinking that may be what I’ll do next week. So probably get into, I don’t want to get into any copyright infringement on here, but as long as I don’t try to monetize it then I should be okay. But anyway, that said guys, it is a little after the two hour mark on Friday night. So I’m going to let you all go enjoy the remainder of your Friday evening and I will be back tomorrow and I’m going to go through more of the fourth branch of government from Sundance.

I’m going to go back and read a little bit more of that from some of those articles. So I will look forward to seeing y’all manyana. So hope you all have a great night and I will see you then. So take care everybody. Night. .