NARRATOR: Stockwell began his CIA career in Africa. JOHN STOCKWELL: "Frankly, sir, you know this stuff doesn't make any sense. We're not saving anybody from anything, and we are corrupting people. And everybody knows we're doing it, and that makes the US look bad." He said I was getting too big for my britches. He said I was "trying to think like the people in the NSC back in Washington, who have the big picture, who know what is going on in the world, who have all the secret information, and the experience to digest it. If they decide we should have somebody in Bujumbura, Burundi, and that person should be you, then you should do your job. Wait till you have more experience, and work your way up to that point, and then you'll understand national secuirity, and you can make the big decisions. Now, get to work, and stop this philosophizing." It's a powerful argument. Our presidents use it on us. President Reagan has used it on the American people saying, "If you knew what I know about the situation in Central America, you would understand why it's necessary for us to intervene." NARRATOR: In Viet Nam, Stockwell ran a CIA intelligence gathering post. JOHN STOCKWELL: I had to work with a sadistic police chief. He liked to carve people with knives in the CIA safe house. When I reported this to my bosses, they said, One: the post is too important to close down. Two: they weren't going to get the man transferred or fired because that would make problems politically. He was very good at working with us in the operations he worked on. Three: therefore, if I didn't have the stomach for it, they could transfer me, but they hastened to point out that if I did demonstrate a lack of moral fiber, to handle working with this sadistic police chief, I wouldn't get another good job with the CIA. It would be a mark against my career. So I kept the job. I closed the safe house down. I told my staff that I didn't approve of that kind of activity, and proceeded to work with him for the next two years, pretending that I had reformed him and that he didn't do this sort of thing anymore. The parallel is obvious with El Salvador today, where the CIA, the State Department, works with the death squads. NARRATOR: In this second part of our special presentation, John Stockwell brings us up to date with his experiences after leaving the CIA in 1977. He discusses CIA covert operations in Central America, CIA manipulation of the press, and CIA experiments conducted on the US public. John Stockwell: The Secret Wars of the CIA, brought to you by the Other Americas Radio and your local public radio station. JOHN STOCKWELL: "What we're going to talk about tonight are the CIA's secret wars. But the subject is much broader than merely little CIA dirty tricks and shenanigans. We're talking about a situation -- we're living in a world which has grievous problems. Our planet is terminally ill, and it's not a long term disease. We're talking about the nuclear arms race. This is something. These 52,000, soon to be 70,000, nuclear weapons are going to be going off sooner rather than later. At the same time, the world is facing serious economic problems, of the sort that triggered world wars in the past. Leaders of countries, leaders of banks, for purposes basically of greed, have never been able to balance their checkbooks. They always overspend. They run countries into bankruptcy. When the world has gotten blocked up before, like a Monopoly game where everything is owned and nobody can make any progress, the way they erase the board and start over has been to have big world wars. Erase countries, bomb cities, and bomb banks, and then start from scratch again. This is not an option to us now, because of all these 52,000 nuclear weapons. The Center for Defense Information counts 60 wars that are being fought in the world today, in which they estimate 5 million people will die. The US is on the brink of its next war: the Central American War. In this situation of a volatile world, about as troubled as it can get, the US CIA is running 50 covert actions, destabilizing further almost one third of the countries in the world today. Now these things inter-relate. The nuclear arms race, conventional wars, the world debt, CIA covert actions; they're all viewed from our point of view, they're all part of our national security. They're supervised by the National Security Council - the National Security Advisor advises the President - and we respond to them in terms of our own national security compulsions. look at Nicaragua. This is the most famous covert action of the 50 that are going on today. They say there are 13 "major" ones. This is not the biggest one. Afghanistan is. We've spent several hundred million dollars in Afghanistan, We've spent somewhat less than that, but close, in Nicaragua. Nicaragua is the most famous one, and there's a reason. Part of it is, it's closer, but a big part of it is the fact that the Administration is using Nicaragua for a very special purpose, so they have made it public from the outset. What this is, is a technique of destabilization If you ask the State Dept. today what is their official explanation of the purpose of the Contras, they say, it is to attack economic targets, meaning, break up the economy of the country. Of course, they're attacking a lot more. If you want one example of hard proof of the CIA's involvement in this and their approach to it, dig up the "Sabotage Manual" that they were circulating throughout Nicaragua. [It was] a comic-book type of a paper, with visual explanations of what you can do to bring a society to a halt: how you can gum up typewriters, what you can pour in a gas tank to burn up engines, what you can stuff in a sewer to stop up the sewage so it won't work; things you can do to make a society simply cease to function.