The CIA's Deadly Deceits and the Vietnam War Our Hidden History

CIA Whistleblower Ralph McGehee — 1986

Ralph W. McGehee: It's a real honor for me to be here today. I don't often say that, but I really mean it. I like to start off my talk by mentioning two things. One, please don't believe anything I'm going to tell you. The American people are so inundated by misinformation, there's absolutely no reason you should believe anything anybody tells you, particularly the evening news. Of course, with everything there is an exception, and I think in my case, I have a fairly valid exception. Because of the process that I had to go through to clear my book, I had to prove that everything I am saying is in the public domain. I still go down to the Agency about twice a month and turn in new material to let them clear it. And in doing that process, I have to produce or pull out from government documents that particular information, because they inevitably will say, "You can't say it, it's classified." And I will inevitably locate that information in the public domain.

So if you doubt me, and I hope you will, there is a way to check up on me. Go to the library and look in the back of my book, and almost every major conclusion that I will be talking about here today will be documented to an official government document. I've drawn upon the Pentagon Papers. Are you all familiar with the Pentagon Papers? And the Senate and House investigations of the Agency and a variety of other material. So don't believe what I say, but if you want to check up on me, the information is available.

Secondly, I'd like to say my message is basically a real downer. It is real negative, but I don't want to leave you with that impression, because I just returned from a two week speaking trip in Iowa, where I was going to testify at the court case there in Iowa City for the protesters, and in Nebraska. And I've been in Arizona and various other places speaking, and wherever you go, you find concerned groups. So I am encouraged. I know during the Vietnam War for the first ten years, we didn't even know what was going on. And then eleven or twelve years later, people began to protest. But this time in Latin America, the protest was almost instantaneous. The substructure is there. The only reason we got out of Vietnam, of course, is because of the student protests. So I am very encouraged. My message is negative, but I don't want to leave you with that impression. I am very, very encouraged.

I think I should talk in three basic phases. One, walk you very quickly through my career with the Agency up to right now where I am today, and back up and walk you through Vietnam a little bit or walk you through my career in a little more detail, including Vietnam. Now I do that not to talk about Vietnam but because the processes that are followed today in Central America, in the Middle East and in Africa have all been used in Vietnam. I'll take out three or four incidences, and they are documented by the way, and show you that these are sort of typical of what the Agency does around the world since the very beginning in '47, what it's doing today in '86.

Then I'll go back and review the Agency's domestic operations, and I'll do that for one purpose, because everything they were doing up to the mid-seventies they are now doing again. The only difference now is under President Reagan's Executive Order 12333 of December '81, they can do the things legally that they were doing illegally before. It's the only difference. Then I would like to talk, sort of bring it all together in Central America and talk about El Salvador, Grenada, and particularly Nicaragua, and then come to my conclusion. So that's basically the approach I'll take.

I went to the University of Notre Dame. I played on four undefeated football teams, three national championships, and then I tried out with the Green Bay Packers. And to this day, I can't understand what's the matter with the coaches up there. When I was cut, I received a cable, "Would you be interested in an important government position similar to the State Department in function?" My football background was not irrelevant. When I went down to Washington, I found that the class before me, my class, and the class after me were basically rejects from the National Football League, not the standard concept of an intelligent (He does say "intelligent" here, I think as a joke about football players) officer.

Well, I served in the Agency for 25 years. The first 15 or 16 years, I believed that the CIA was sort of like a missionary organization, out saving the world for democracy and religion and gathering good intelligence to help our policymakers make good decisions. When I'd go into work in the morning, I'd feel a real pride that I'm part of the great crusade to stop the international communist conspiracy. All that began to change for me in Vietnam. That's when I began protesting.

I should mention that I served my entire 25 years in the Directorate of Operations. Now, the Agency is broken down to basically four directorates, Administration, Science and Technology, Intelligence, and Operations. Administrators administrate. Science and Technology, they devise the sophisticated collection devices and monitor the results. The Directorate of Intelligence, that's the scholars who sit and read the reports that come in from around the world and then put out the final reports. And the Operators operate. The Directorate of Operations has two basic functions, covert operations and gathering intelligence covertly.

Since it's my contention that the Agency is little more than a covert action agency, I will dwell a little bit on it. Now, covert action operations in broadest context can be described as those operations designed to overthrow or support foreign governments. Overthrow operations have four basic components, economic warfare, political warfare, psychological warfare, and economic warfare. In my 25 years in the Agency, I served overseas in Japan, in the Philippines, in Taiwan, six years or three tours in Thailand, and two years as the chief police adviser to the head of the Vietnamese Special Police. That's the equivalent of our FBI.

As I said, my period of protests began around the Vietnam War. I for the next period within the Agency began protesting, and having no luck with those protests, I finally left the Agency in 1977. Now, in a stroke of real irony at this particular point, because they had assigned me to the CIA’s Siberia. When you escalate your protest, you become persona non grata. In '77 in a stroke of irony, they awarded me the Career Intelligence Medal and the Honorable Service Medal. Of course, I think I know why. They knew they had a loose cannon and they wanted to kind of damp me down, appease me a little bit. And I think that was the purpose of giving them to me.

But I also earlier had won awards, two Vietnam service awards, a commendation from the director for devising a program of counterinsurgency and intelligence, and a variety of other CIA and foreign awards. Well, when I left the Agency, I testified before the Senate and House intelligence committees and before a variety of other Senate and House committees, all related to CIA activities.

I immediately set about writing a book about my experiences. It took me three years to research and write the book, and then like all CIA officers, when you join the Agency, you have to sign a secrecy agreement. And as I said, I must now submit everything to the CIA for pre-publication review. I did, and they came back and they said they have identified approximately 400 security violations in my manuscript. And they returned it in little bits and pieces of paper, because some of these deletions ran up to several pages in length.

Well, to defeat this process, I went through going through the public record and pulling out the identical information. And ultimately with this effort, I got virtually everything reinstated. There are a few little specifics that I didn't get reinstated, but for the most part they were all reinstated. I did in a few cases, they had deleted some very boring information, so I said rather than fight them over this one, let's just leave this comment, "Seven words deleted." It looks a lot sexier than mine. So I didn't fight them on all of them.

Then I went looking for a publisher, a long hard process, and finally one publisher said, "You know, you've written a nice legal brief here. You make your points and then you have your citations to your information. But boy, it's dull as mud. Who would want to read a legal brief? So we will publish it if you'll rewrite it as a autobiography," which I did. I then resubmitted it to the CIA for pre-publication review. I didn't put any more secret details in there. I just added my personal life.

At this time, William Casey had become Director of the CIA, and they in essence told me, "We're not going to let you publish a book." And I said, "Well, you can't stop me. Everything that's in the book, you have not only cleared for other people, it's not only in the public record, but you also cleared for me before. And the laws that you operate under say you may not reclassify information once it's been declassified and released." And their response in essence, "Well, that's tough. We're doing it anyhow. There's nothing you can do about it." Well, this was a very critical period. I just didn't know what to do. I really worried about this, because if they would've stopped me with that, then I would not be able to speak to you here this evening, because everything would have been classified.

So I called The Washington Post, and The Washington Post ran a long exposé of how the CIA was violating the law by reclassifying information that was in the public domain, a violation of the law of the land. This public exposure forced the Agency to relent, and the book was finally released. Subsequent to the release of the book, I then traveled to Cuba, where we stayed about a week, and to Grenada, where I met Maurice Bishop prior to the coup. He was head of the New Jewel Movement there.

And then I went on to Nicaragua and traveled around Nicaragua for a week, particularly up to Jalapa near the border area. I understand that's Boulder's sister city. And I saw the devastation being visited on the Nicaraguans by the CIA, by the Contras. I went to the hospitals and talked to some of the wounded soldiers. I talked to the mothers whose sons had been killed. And I saw the destroyed granaries and bridges and what all. I did this because I wanted to come back and talk about my experiences, and I felt it would give me greater credibility if I had actually been to those places and seen for myself.

Currently, I'm involved in what I think is probably the most informative program I've ever been involved in. I've joined the computer age. I've got an extensive library on the CIA. I doubt if there's a book about the CIA that I don't have. And what I'm doing is I'm going through all of the books written by pro-CIA officers, by anti-CIA officers, by the Senate committee, by the House committees, the Pentagon Papers, and I'm drawing out from those books information on CIA techniques. It's an extremely interesting process, because you could almost see the procedures are repeated over and over and over again in different situations overseas. Different procedures used in different situations, but the processes are fairly uniform. They call espionage and covert operations the world's second oldest profession. And like the world's first oldest profession, there ain't much new. (Laughter} The same things happen over and over again, just different settings and different partnerships.

I'm pulling out, for example, how many times has the CIA planted a so-called communist weapons shipment, made arrangements for its discovery, then broadcast it through its massive media organization, and then used that communist weapons shipment as a justification for overturning another government? How many times has it forged a document in the name of a group or another government and used that information in that document as a means of overturning or supporting another government? And you can just see these processes over and over again, and I could almost write the script in advance, and sometimes I do. And of course I submit it to the CIA for pre-publication review, and when they scream real loud, I know how accurate my predictions are. Well, that's pretty much me right up to the moment. When I'm not speaking, I'm sitting in front of my computer, pulling out this information.

I'd like to back up now and go through my career just a little bit more in more detail. I took the training, the normal spy training, you know, document photography, secret writing, radio communications, agent communications, dead drops, live drops, recruitment, surveillance, counter-surveillance, all the various things that one tends to associate with spying operations and what we called tradecraft. Then I went down to Camp Peary for the paramilitary training. There we're given training in dirty fighting, I call it, how to kill or maim with a variety of innocent-looking implements, including your hands. The demolitions training, the characteristics and use of TNT, nitroglycerin, dynamite, C3 and C4 plastique, and the niceties of the various booby trapping devices, such as pressure release, push-pull, and the various detonating cords and fuses.

The firing, cleaning, and maintenance of a variety of weapons, Communist and American. The standard military tactics of small unit movements and survival, escape and evasion and all of those sorts of efforts. And the parachuting. I've never credited myself with being very swift, and I mean this. I'm very slow to get the picture. But one day when I was floating down under this canopy, I thought back to the cable that recruited me, "You will be doing something like the State Department in function." That wasn't my impression of the State Department.

Then after the training, I went to Japan, the Philippines, and Taiwan. In Taiwan, we were sending agents onto the mainland of China, or trying to send agents onto the mainland of China, and although I can't say this directly, I can quote Peer de Silva, former chief of station in Hong Kong. He said they had absolutely virtually no successes at all, and I think that was an overestimate of their operations.

Then in 1967, I was in Thailand, early '67, and the chief of station called me in. He said, "Ralph, we want you to begin a counterinsurgency program and an intelligence gathering program with the 50,000-man Thai National Police Force." And I looked at him in amazement. I was very surprised. "Me, just me, and 50,000 Thai police?" He said, "Yes." And the Thai police were basically just patrolmen who had several years of schooling. The officers, they had a little bit more schooling. And I thought, my God, this is a real mission impossible, because I had gone through college and I had gone through all the elitist training of the CIA, yet I didn't consider myself a good intelligence officer. How could I transform these unschooled patrolmen and make them into sophisticated intelligence gatherers and effective counterinsurgents?

Now, at this time the CIA was reporting in its intelligence that the communist movement in Thailand, which had begun basically 22 years earlier, it had had a longer history, but they announced in '65 that they were going to begin active insurgency operations in Thailand. The CIA was reporting then in all of Thailand that there were 2,500 guerillas and they lived in the mountainous areas in the mid-South, and up in the Northeast and the North of Thailand. And they were all guerrillas and they lived out in the mountainous areas and they would come down into the villages and raid in the villages to force the people to support them with money, food. And then they would kidnap young men and take them back up into the mountains and incorporate them into the movement. And the CIA reported they had absolutely no popular support in the villages.

And I'm going to ask your indulgence just here for a couple of minutes, because I think if I can explain to you what happened, this was sort of my denouement. If you will, if I can explain to you what happened in Thailand, then you will see what happens in Vietnam. It's very directly related to what happens in Vietnam. And what happens in Vietnam is very directly related to what the Agency is doing today around the world. So if you'll just bear with me a couple of minutes on this. And I did, I looked on this as my mission impossible. As I said, I could not have anticipated at that time that my world is going to be turned upside down, not by failing in this seemingly impossible mission, but by achieving unparalleled success.

So I looked at the problem. There were 72 provinces in Thailand. Half of them had communist insurgencies. How do you go about doing this? I thought, well, I can't do it in all provinces at once. What I'll do is narrow the scope of the effort down to one province in the Northeast where the problem was the greatest and try all efforts there, all intelligence gathering methods there. And then whatever works, then I can expand that outward to the entire country. And then I narrowed it down even smaller to a district within the province, and I'm going to try all the techniques.

And we tried all of the various spy sort of techniques, recruiting agents, secret writing, and clandestine meetings and all that. And all of these things just failed and they failed spectacularly. Acting on information that I had provided, there was a sixteen-helicopter raid on an empty rice field. Rather embarrassing. But one effort I developed had immediate success. Now, I'm going to compress it a little bit for you. It doesn't all happen in this sequence, but I'm compressing it a little bit for you to show you, for time purposes.

I devised another program I ultimately called a district survey. Now, the district survey, what I did is I gathered all the information that existed on the communist movement in that province, from the national level down to the district level, from the Thai side and from the American side. And I drew up a situation report on the district, on what the communists were doing in the district. And to the back of the district situation report I added village situation reports. To the back of the village situation reports, I attached name lists of everyone in the village reported to be pro-government or pro-communist.

Then, I trained a 25-man, officer grade, police team on the techniques of interrogation and interviewing. Now the process they were to follow when they went into villages, each police officer was to take one individual off by himself, out of hearing range of anyone else and interrogate or interview with that person about the nature of communist activities, what was going on in the village. Now, I kind of realized the human rights ramifications now, but at the time I felt extremely proud because we weren't torturing anybody. Of course, there was a tremendous amount of psychological torture that I wasn't sensitive to, but there was no physical torture that I knew of. And, we weren't killing anybody, so much a part of so many other counterinsurgency operations.

I was kind of proud of how humane my effort was. And in the first village, what the team was to do, go in and interrogate everybody, then compare the information and see where there were discrepancies and then, go back and reinterrogate until we got down to the truth. And one of the villages we went into, one of the first ones who went into, a man said, "Okay, you got me. I'm a member of the Farmer's Liberation Association of the Communist Party of Thailand." And we said, "Oh, well, that's very nice. What in the hell is it? We never heard of it." So he explained, and again, I'm compressing it for you for purposes of time, said that about a year ago, some Thai communists who have been trained in Hoa Binh in North Vietnam.

So, they're obviously using the same techniques that have been used in the Vietnamese revolution, they came into the village and they explain the nature of the society to us. That 80% of the population were peasants and living in the villages and were poor and virtually landless, that the United States was supporting the elite, tiny elite, several percent elite of the country, or I shouldn't call them elite. The rich and the military leaders and the United States was sort of the controller of the Thai government. And our offer was, here's what we offer you. If you, the 80% of the poor, will join together with us, we will then overturn, we'll kick out this American-backed government. And we will give you, we'll redivide the land. Each person will be given his own lot. So, they were appealing to the very strong emotions of nationalism and social equality.

So this man said, "I agreed. I signed a pledge to the Farmer's Liberation Association, and I have willingly donated money. I have given food. My son has joined the guerrilla movement and he's pledged his life to the communist victory. And, I'm part of a three-man cell. There's two other members of the Farmer's Liberation cell in Thailand. I mean, in my village or my two neighbors here are also members of the cell." And, he gave us their aliases and their operational histories with the communist movement. So then, we went from person to person, cell to cell, village to village, district to district, and we found the same thing everywhere. I wrote four district survey reports and they went back to the State Department Bureau of Intelligence, the director of intelligence, the CIA director of intelligence, to the Thai counterinsurgency authorities, to the station.

We got that praise from everybody. They're saying, "This is the best information we've ever had." The DDI, the director of intelligence came back and said, "This is the first time we've ever understood what the communists were doing in the rural areas." The governor of the province said the same thing, "I've been a native of the province for all of my life. And it's the first time I have known what the communists are doing in my province." So the chief of station then called me in and said, "Ralph." He congratulated me. He had congratulated me many times, but he congratulated me again and said, "Your two-year tour is almost up." A normal tour is two years. Said, "We want you to expand this program outward to the entire country, as was the original plan. Will you agree now to come back for another two-year tour to sign up for another two-year tour?"

And to me, it was like a prayer being answered. Really it was. We were destroying the hated communist movement. We're doing it without all the torture and killing that so much attended those sorts of programs. We're doing it at virtually no expense because the Thais were so happy with the program they were paying the salaries of everybody. That was a very unique situation in Agency liaison operations. And, I was personally very ambitious. I said, "Of course, I'll come back." It is like a prayer being answered. It's just what I wanted to do. So, I went back to the province and a couple of weeks later I was called back to the station. And the chief of station said, "I've got a dispatch here from headquarters and they say, your tour is almost up. How soon can you get out of here?"

I was in total confusion. I don't want to leave. I want to go ahead with this program. I want to stay with this problem. Look at tremendous results we've had. I pulled out the rating sheets from the DDI, from the State Department, from the governor and all. Look, I want to continue this program. We're destroying the movement. All of these arguments. He said, "Well, headquarters wants you back there. There's nothing I can do. How soon can you get out of there?" Well, in my confused state I really was totally confused. I couldn't understand it at all. In my confused state, I started thinking, I said, "Well, I’ve got another team in the field. They'll be out there for another six weeks. It'll take me about six weeks to write the final reports once they come in and take me a couple of weeks to wind up my personal affairs. So I can get out of here in about three months." He said, "That's alright, I'm going to shut down the program. I want you out of here right away."

I couldn't understand that. I just could not understand it. It took me years to understand it. As I said, I'm not very swift, but here's what it was. We were finding that there was a popular-based movement in Thailand. Now, if the Agency allowed the CIA to tell the truth about the nature of the communist movement in Thailand, then they would have had to tell the truth about the communist movement in Vietnam. If they ever told the truth about the communist movement in Vietnam, there would have been only one policy option. That would be pull out and admit we were the invaders and that the communists had the intense loyalty of the people. That would have been the only solution. Well, as I said, it took me many years to understand this.

Well, I got back to headquarters and I tried to call attention to all that we'd achieved, I wanted to restart the district surveys out in Thailand. And, I began to see how this had ramifications for Vietnam. Well, I went back to the Thai desk and I began looking at intelligence coming in from Thailand, and it said there are 2,500 communists in the entire country of Thailand. They are all guerillas. They live up in the mountainous areas and they raid down into the villages and terrorize the people to give them money and food. And they kidnap young men to take them back up to join their guerrilla movement. Now, I had disproven that, misproven that or whatever you want to say, 2,500 times in that one province alone. Well, I fought that battle in total confusion because I was still a loyal Agency officer.

But at this time, Tet had occurred in Vietnam. Tet was when General Westmoreland was telling us “there's light at the end of the tunnel.” We will be out of here in a year. And all of a sudden, the whole countryside rose up and occupied every town and major city. And, there was even fighting in the American embassy in Saigon.

So I said, "Gosh, Vietnam needs me. I have to go out there and save Vietnam for democracy." So I say, I'm not too swift. It takes a while before the messages sink in. I thought the Agency had adopted a very wise policy at this particular time. Because after Tet, they had very heavy manpower requirements for Vietnam. And they were drafting people from the European division, from the Western Hemisphere division. Nobody wanted to go to Vietnam and they had to draft people. But, I did think that they adopted a wise policy because for anyone dumb enough to volunteer, they gave you an immediate and mandatory psychiatric assessment. Well, I talked to the doctor and he didn't tell me I passed or failed, but he sent me to Vietnam. I know his evaluation is in that action somewhere, but I don't want to examine it.

Before I went out to Vietnam, I started looking into the Agency’s intelligence about Vietnam that had ever been reported over the years, jumping out of airplanes and parachuting. It said in 1959, in South Vietnam, there are 2,000 communists. They're all guerillas. They live in the jungle areas. They raid in the villages and forced the people to give them money, food and they kidnapped young men and took them out and forced them to join them in the movement. Well, in the face of massive, and I mean massive, CIA-backed, counterinsurgency programs, in the face of massive bombing and napalming by the US military, one would think that 2,000 people by early ‘68 would have tended to have been suppressed a little bit, deleted or negated a little bit. Well, in 1958, they were reporting there are 5,000, excuse me, 500,000 communist guerrillas in South Vietnam.

They are all guerrillas. They have no popular support in the villages and they terrorize the people to cooperate with them. Well, how did this 2,000 get to these other 498,000? These 2,000 terrorize these other people to cooperate with them? There seemed to be a little bit of a non logic to this whole thing. So, I got a couple of academic studies, Douglas Pike's “Vietcong and Michael Charles Conley’s Vietcong: Communist Infrastructure in South Vietnam.” And I looked at these books and I said, "Here's how the communists go about building a revolutionary movement in the villages, for revolutionary movement. They go into the villages. They promise to eject the foreigners who control the country. Then very effectively had ejected the French earlier. And they confiscate the land of the absentee landlords, very conscientiously, divide the land up and give it to the people."

"They recruit the people on the basis of nationalism and social equality. And they form Farmer's Liberation associations, Women's Liberation associations, Youth Liberation associations, and they go from village to village. And when they have enough villages organized in a contiguous area, they have what you call a base area. And they organized base area, base area and base area. Now they're getting ready for the guerilla warfare stage and they begin to refine the organization and and upgrade it and form a militia which is upgraded to local forces or to guerillas, local forces, main forces to regular force units and the party expands. And they take over control of the government and the villages, and they own the entire loyalty, the complete dedication and loyalty of the entire people in the villages." Well, I went back to the Agency's intelligence, and it didn't mention a single member of a liberation association, not a single member.

Now the National Liberation Front tried to help us out on this, the communist side. It announced that it had in the various villages, six million members in the various liberation associations, two million farmers, a million point two women’s, about a million of youth and various other numbers, in a variety of other liberation associations. And yet, there was not a mention of a single one in any Agency intelligence report. I don't think you can find one in there, even today. This was a little bit puzzling. Well, I began to realize later, I realized why you couldn't admit to this six million. Because the counterinsurgency theory, prevalent at the time, prevalent again today in the counterinsurgency schools, is that you need ten counterinsurgents for every insurgent. Well, if you admitted, you had six and a half million insurgents, you'd have to ship every able-bodied American man, woman and child over there to fight as a counterinsurgent.

So, we just ignored this reality and talked only about the guerillas. Well, I took my books and my knowledge, and I went out. I was going to save Vietnam for democracy. And, I went out. I was going to change all of this. I was going to change the American government perception of the war in Vietnam, not realizing the nature of the enemy I was facing. And of course the enemy, he is us. And I got out there and I started writing memos to the chief of station and buttonholing my superiors and my peers and I virtually stood in downtown Saigon at high noon, shouting at the top of my lungs, "How in the hell are we going to win this thing if we don't admit the nature of the enemy we're facing? We can not win if we ignore the existence of this mass base, dedicated, popular movement."

So, I fought that battle for about six months. Then I began to realize the nature of the problem. And I thought, well, the only thing that's happening here Ralph, is you're running up against this brick wall and you're getting soft-headed, but you're not making any indent in this effort, at this particular point. At this time in Vietnam, we were dropping napalm on villages and bombing villages and all. And I began to look at the pictures of these little children being burned by napalm. And, this causes a reassessment of your evaluations. What had that beautiful child done to the United States that allowed us to incinerate it? What had it done?

Of course, when you get in this mode, it's all over. Well, I wanted to get out, excuse me. I have a little problem with that. I wanted to get out of the Agency and I had been in the Agency about nineteen years. So I thought, well, what will I do, I have four children, two girls in expensive colleges. What I'll do is I'll write a resume and send them out and I'll get another job because I wanted to keep food on the table and be able to pay the rent, but I had one little problem. I worked in the covert side of the Agency and I couldn't admit to Agency employment. So, my resume was a little skimpy. It said, I played four years of undefeated football at Notre Dame, graduated cum laude in business administration. Some nineteen years later, I think I'd like to go to work. What do you got for me?

You can anticipate my responses. Well, at that particular time, the CIA again was adopting what I thought was a wise policy. They were saying that because of the nature of the duties of operational officers, we frequently suffered from amotivational fatigue, so that we could qualify for early retirement if you had twenty years in, at least five years overseas. So I said, well, hell. Stay in for that extra year, protest from within. And then, in your twentieth year, you can get out. If I wasn't to realize that I was going to chase those requirements, they kept changing as I got near them. They seemed to slip away from me for another six years. So, I stayed in and I protested. Well, while I was in Vietnam because I worked with the head of the Vietnamese special police and we began rolling up communist net after communist net in the upper echelons of Thieu's government. In Thieu's foreign affairs office.

And I have to admit, I had become at this point, a very good intelligence officer. I knew how to work with information. And based somewhat on my efforts, we rolled up President Thieu's foreign affairs advisor, the national Catholic advisor, his best friend, and about 38 others who were members of the upper echelons of government, business and military in Vietnam. And we rolled them up and they were all communist spies. And then after the interrogations of them, we rolled up other groups. One analyst sitting back in Washington, excuse me, and counting the number of communist spies in all of the government. We hadn't identified them all, but there was evidence that they existed. And he came up with a list of approximately 30,000 communist spies in the Thieu government. Now here's a wartime situation in a tiny little country, and there were 30,000 communist spies in the government.

You don't have much for government when they're penetrated. On the other hand, the CIA, the US military, the Thai, the Vietnamese intelligence and police and military had hundreds of thousands of people out trying to get penetrations into the communist movement. And I don't think there was one penetration at any level, any significant level within the communist movement. Now, it was a life-threatening situation to be a spy for the communists. And, it was a cush (as in cushy), profitable situation to be a spy for the government. Yet, 30,000 people voted to put their life on the line. This began to show, to demonstrate where the loyalties of the people really lay. Well, I left Vietnam completely disillusioned, I did another tour in Thailand. And by this time, my protest really escalated. I'd gone to the DDO grievance officers, to the inspector general, to the comptroller general, the executive director, who at that time was William Colby, with my protests.

And because of my protests, I was assigned to the Agency's Siberia. They assigned me to the international communism branch. They gave me a desk and a place to sit and nothing to do, and let it be known that I was a dissenter, around the bend a little bit and people not to have anything to do with me. And I'm saying, what in the world can I do? And, I don't have a job. I don't have a real job. And, I just want to sit here until I can get those years in. So, I decided to do a study on Asian communist revolutionary procedures. I was sitting in the international communism branch. It was a good place to work from. So, I began to compile this study and I had to be completely devious about this because every time I made my intentions known, somebody would stop it. So, I had to be very devious. And, I went about doing this study and to compile this study. And in addition to reading all the counterinsurgency theories of the US, I began to read the works of Mao Tse-Tung, Ho Chi Minh,

[DAVE; WHAT DID RALPH SAY HERE??] (Vo Giap, Lin Biao - I can't id the others. "Le Xuan" and "Tung Chien" it sounds like? It is at 40:03 ) all the various Chinese and Vietnamese authors and authorities on revolution. Not much to my surprise, everything I had been trying to tell the CIA about the movement in Vietnam was outlined very graphically in the writings of these authors.

Mao Tse-Tung had been particularly helpful. Just about the time of my birth. He had written his first essay on the necessity to organize the villagers in the villages for developing a revolutionary organization. Now, you would think from that time, till the end of the Vietnam war to even today, that somebody would have cottoned onto this. People in the campuses were reading Mao Tse-Tung all over the place, you'd think the Agency might want to peek into some of those writings. Maybe they did, maybe they didn't understand it. Or if they did understand it, maybe they didn't have the guts to stand up and say, "Hey, what's going on here?"

So I wrote the study, and I sent it up into the void, and of course, I didn't hear anything back from it. Then in early 1977 there on the bulletin board, when I returned from Christmas vacation was the glorious news. For those operations officers who have 25 years and a minimum of five years overseas, you can retire. I can't tell you how elated I was. I shouted, "Hallelujah," and when my feet finally came back to Earth, I rushed and called my wife and explained, I said, "Darling, you can't believe it. Now I can retire, and I can spend all my time with you at home. Won't that'd be great?" I'm sure it had nothing to do with it, but she decided it was time to go to work. Well, that's pretty much my career in the Agency.

On a backup note, I want to speak to a few incidences about Vietnam. In 1954, the French had been defeated in Dien Bien Phu. The country was divided after the Geneva Conference at the 16th parallel for 300 days. Those from the North who wanted to go South could go South and vice versa. In that 300-day period, the CIA was ordered by the National Security Council - that's a very tiny group of advisors that sits right under the presidency, over the CIA, the secretary of state, the secretary of defense and the director of CIA - ordered the CIA to create a non-communist alternative government to Ho Chi Minh.

Now, President Eisenhower writing later in his memoirs said that if ever the election or if there was an election called by the Geneva Conference in two years, a mandatory election was to be held, and whoever won, the country would be united under that leader. Well, President Eisenhower said, if ever that election had been held, 80% of the Vietnamese would have voted for Ho Chi Minh.

[DAVE: THESE ARE THE ACTUAL WORDS OF EISENHOWER – SHALL WE QUOTE HIM HERE. OR JUST LET RALPH SAY WHAT HE SAID??] (I'm not sure, can we do both? Like as a footnote or something? I'm not sure how things like this are done in transcriptions). “I have never talked or corresponded with a person knowledgeable in Indochinese affairs who did not agree that had elections been held as of the time of the fighting, possibly 80 per cent of the population would have voted for the Communist Ho Chi Minh as their leader.”

Well, the CIA was ordered for two basic reasons to create a non-communist alternative government in Vietnam. One, we wanted the markets, the minerals, the manpower of Vietnam in America's economic sphere of influence. Two, if the domino fell it South Vietnam, then it would fall all the way throughout Europe. As Patrick Buchanan is saying now, there'll be bear bombers flying over San Diego if we don't support the Contras. The same old theory.

So the Agency was ordered to create a non-communist alternative government. Now, what did we do? How did we go about it? Well, we went up to the Maryknoll seminaries in New York. Now, I have to admit the Maryknolls at that time were quite belligerent, but now Patrick Buchanan, the White House public relations director calls them the Marxist Maryknolls, and the liberated nuns. They've really turned around, as I have turned around. But up there in the Maryknoll seminaries in New York, Ngo Dinh Diem was living. We went up to Ngo Dinh Diem, and said, "Mr. Diem, how would you like to be premier of South Vietnam?" He was a Catholic, and he allowed that that wouldn't be a bad idea.

So we sent them off to Saigon, and our guy met him there and said, "you'll go sit in the palace." There's nobody there to meet him. Got off the plane here. I am South Vietnam. I am your premier... and just the CIA guy there to meet him. He said, "Now, if you'll go to your palace and sit still," and I'm simplifying a bit, but not too much. "If you go sit in your palace, we'll go about creating a government for you."

Now, the plan was in North Vietnam, there were a few provinces. There are a group of Vietnamese who had joined the Catholic church, and they had fought with the French against the Viet Minh. So the plan was to get these Vietnamese to move to the South, and then they would encadre an army and a government and a military for Diem.

So that was the plan. Well, how do you go about getting these people who are so attached to the land, and through their ancestors, to move to the South? Well, here's where the Agency's dirty tricks come in. They went up to the North, and they distributed leaflets around those areas showing the circumference of destruction, should the United States decide to use nuclear weapons in Vietnam. They forged documents in the name of the Communist Party of Vietnam. I believe at that time, it was called the Lao Dong Party, explaining the conditions that the North Vietnamese Catholics would be required to live under once the 300-day truce period expired. They offered those, and I'm just hitting it very lightly. Many, many things went on, but I'm just hitting the basic things. They offered those who would agree to go to the South, money, land, jobs, and transportation south on its Civil Air Transport (CAT) airline. Dr. Tom Dooley, working with the US Navy out of Haiphong was doing the same thing.

So all of these efforts created a flood of approximately 800,000 Vietnamese moving from the North to the South. Now, I think here's the critical point because here's what's happening to us today. The level of our media coverage was “here are the diseased, mutilated, tortured, starving bodies of the Vietnamese voting with their feet and escaping from the godless cruelties of communism.” They weren't escaping from the godless cruelties of communism, they were escaping from the CIA covert operations. But I think that sort of put in concrete forever the American perception, not only the communist movement in Vietnam, but communism generally.

So they came to the South and the CIA formed a palace guard, the US military trained an army, navy, and air force for Diem, and a government. Now we have a non-communist alternative government in Saigon. There's one problem, however. The French still had their guy, their Bao Dai. And we had our guy, Diem.

So the Agency and the National Security Council said, "Get rid of the French and take over this thing." The French have lost their will. Take over this battle on your own. We'll take over this on our own. So how do you do that? Well, you hold an election, obviously. If the Agency has done anything around the world over the years, its rigged elections, and they're really masters at this.

So we held a plebiscite between Bao Dai and Diem. Diem was rather popular. He got 98 point some percent of the vote, and he had more votes than there were registered voters. Now we had a non-communist alternative government of Saigon. Then Diem, of course, went about imposing his government over the rural areas, and they massively resisted the imposition of this government. Remember Eisenhower said if a legitimate election was held, 80% would have voted for Ho Chi Minh. But we were told 98% were for Diem.

We just denied reality. This was in its propaganda operations aimed at the American people. Just stood reality on its end. But at this particular point, we have to give the Agency credit. They wrote a national intelligence estimate about the situation in South Vietnam. Now they're going to tell you the truth. This is a document that's going to go to the policymakers that are going to have to implement further policies about Vietnam. Here's what the national intelligence estimate says. It's available in the Pentagon Papers. Ngo Dinh Diem is winning the loyalty of the South Vietnamese, and he's done it virtually all on his own without any outside support. Here are the two roles of the Agency in sharp delineation. Its intelligence role was completely bastardized by its policy role of creating a non-communist alternative government in Vietnam.

Well, its intelligence from that point forward, and its propaganda aimed at the American people was nothing more than a creation of illusion that had absolutely nothing to do with the reality of the situation. Well, Diem obviously was not a viable leader. In cooperation with the CIA, in 1963, he's removed and assassinated.

In 1965 - this is the last incident I'll talk about Vietnam. It was decided that there was only one way to save Vietnam for democracy. That was to introduce American troops. Now, we had been told all along that the war in Vietnam was an invasion of the legitimate government of South Vietnam by the North Vietnamese. When the opposite, of course, was true. I mean, it was more true. There was only one problem with the story. There were no North Vietnamese in South Vietnam. There were no communist weapons in South Vietnam. So how do you have an invasion when there's no invasion? Simple. I mean, the Agency's responsible for black operations, according to the Senate Report on the Agency. According to the House Report on the Agency, if it were an army based on all the weapons it has in its various arsenals around the world, it would be one of the strongest armies in the world.

So the CIA loaded up a Vietnamese junk with communist weapons, ammunition, demolitions, and forged a few documents, put them on the junk, floated up against the coast of South Vietnam, shot it up to make it look like a firefight had occurred, and brought in the international media and the International Control Commission said, "here's evidence of the invasion. Here's the communist weapons. Here's the communist documents." All this sort of stuff. So now we're in good shape.

Almost immediately, the US government wrote a white paper. A white paper is an official policy statement. Here's how we perceive a situation; here's what we're going to do about it. Of course, we had one in '81 in El Salvador. I don't know if you recall that one. Pretty similar situation. The title of this white paper this time was “An Invasion from the North: The Account of North Vietnam's Attempts to Conquer South Vietnam.” Almost all of the evidence of the white paper were photographs of the junk, the documents, the weapons that had all been planted on it by the CIA.

A week or so later, we began Operation Rolling Thunder, the sustained bombing of North Vietnam. A week or so after that, we introduced two American battalion landing teams into South Vietnam. Very shortly thereafter, we were in active combat operations in South Vietnam.

Let me read you just a couple of little statistics on the Vietnam War. This was all brought to us by this little CIA covert operation. Dead: 2,221,000 Indochinese. 58,000 Americans. Destruction: 15,500,000 tons of firepower were used by US forces, which equals 600 Hiroshima type atom bombs. It's interesting to note that it was 15,500,000 tons, that the US used only six million tons of firepower in World War II. Now, this was the firepower expending in Vietnam by itself.

Firepower expended by the US and allies in Indochina exceeds the total firepower used by humanity in all wars. The cost in the United States was something like, they don't have a positive figure, somewhere between $350 to $900 billion dollars. At the upper levels of the estimate, it's almost half our national debt. This is a statistic printed in the Indochina Newsletter of December/November '82.

Now this is one CIA covert operation, and it's interesting to note that the Senate Report said that the Agency conducted over a 14-year period, 900 major covert operations and several thousand minor covert operations, including domestic operations. The CIA, by its charter, is explicitly prohibited from being involved in domestic covert operations. Of course, President Reagan has changed all that with Executive Order 12333. But until that time, this had been explicitly prohibited.

Well, this did absolutely nothing to stop the Agency because it operates in secrecy. It just went about violating the law. It almost immediately began opening mail, ten million pieces of mail they looked at, and opened some of these and photographed and indexed names and it's indexed in academia. It had approximately 5,000 administrators and academicians who had three basic functions for the CIA. One, they were spotting American students who had the proper ideological outlook who would make good CIA case officers. They were spotting foreign students who had the same ideological outlook who would make good spies when they went back to their native countries, and were writing some of the intellectual tomes that had the proper ideological slant on it in the media.

I think this is a sort of a critical area. They had in the US approximately 350 American reporters, television newsmen, executives of media, who were working in some capacity for the CIA. They were doing basically three things. Planting information in the media that we wanted planted. I shouldn't use the term, "we." Suppressing information that the Agency didn't want to get out, and then exchanging information.

Now this 350-man media group within the United States was part of a larger worldwide group that the Agency called its Mighty Wurlitzer. It had media representatives in virtually every country in the world, many in some of the countries. They called it a Mighty Wurlitzer because it was like an organ on which they could play any propaganda tune they wanted anywhere in the world at any time in the world. This was a constant process. Maybe they'd plant an article, and they'd pick it up and they'd air mail it to 200 other news institutions. It gets picked up and replayed. They send out editorial guidance constantly. This just goes on over and over and over again. It's all propaganda.

One of the conclusions of the Senate Report was that a major responsibility of the CIA was the creation of an international anti-communist ideology. Why did we want to create an international anti-communist ideology? Because then any time you want overturn to the government, you can shout, "Communist." Then you shoot down the straw man. You can't say we're fighting the poor people of that country. Anyone who fights our dictatorship is a communist, obviously. So that goes to lend credence to the story.

Well, let me give you just one example how this propaganda mechanism worked, because it demonstrates what goes on all along. I'm using John Stockwell's example here. Yeah, he may have talked about it. He was task force chief of the Angola task force as we were going to overturn the Angolan government. Same thing we're doing now, except now we're getting in bed with the South Africans. Insane, absolutely insane. What are the blacks in this country going to think? Here's the United States joining with the apartheid government of South Africa in overturning a black government of Angola. I just can't understand this. It just blows my mind.

Well, John said, "Here's what we did in Angola. The Cubans were holding the government together there. So we decided to call attention to their presence there, at the same time to try to discredit that presence." Well fortunate for us, some Angolan troops went into an isolated village and raped some Angolan women. So the women got together, organized themselves, took the weapons from the men, marched them off to jail over an extended period of time. A trial was held, and the men were taken out, and I believe they were executed with their own weapons. This story was covered in international and American media over a period of months. Only one problem with this story: none of it ever happened! It was just the American psywar officer sitting there in his office writing, and I think it was being passed to the Reuters representative, and then got distributed around the world. None of it ever happened. That sort of thing goes on constantly and just goes on over and over again.

Other domestic operations. Drug testing. The CIA used 80 institutions and 185 individuals, doctors and technicians in testing illegal drugs on unwitting and unconsenting Americans. At least two people committed suicide because of these tests, that we know of. One of the more pernicious of all of these activities is what they established in New York and San Francisco safehouses, where they installed one way mirrors, and they hire prostitutes to go out and bring Johns back. They would drop LSD in their drinks, and watch and film the ensuing action.

The Agency was involved in of course student groups, youth groups, labor groups, religious groups, and the foundations. The financial foundations. They virtually owned the financial foundations. Who would then sponsor academic research? The book publishing field. The Agency published something like 1,250 books, 250 in the English language. You can almost bet, it's almost a sure bet that every time you read a book by a defector from either communist China or the Soviet Union, and he came to this country and within a matter of a year or so, he had a book on the bestseller list. You can just bet that the book had either been written by the CIA or had been completely facilitated by the CIA.

It's been alleged that Arkady Shevchenko's book, that more recent one, “Breaking with Moscow”. The guy who was with the United Nations, the Soviet mission in the UN, who came out and had this book, “Breaking with Moscow.” He's on the cover of Time, he was on “Sixty Minutes” and all of this sort of stuff. It was noted that back in 1980, the CIA was calling around to publishers to see who would like to sponsor this book. You ought to read the book. It's got all those nice propaganda themes oven in there. He happens to be talking to Brezhnev or Khruschev at critical moments. Boy, it's really sexy reading. Recently in book publishing at Harvard, there were two Harvard professors. There've been four professors I think, identified who have been writing books. Now these are the four that we've uncovered. And that means, as the old saying goes, that's the tip of the iceberg. Here's something out of The Washington Post. Samuel Huntington, who was the head of the pacification program in Vietnam one time, head of Harvard's Center for International Affairs examined and recommended the minds of dictators in research secretly funded by the CIA. Two professors, Harvard professors in four months were involved in controversy over CIA funding. Professor Huntington's article in the winter edition of the Harvard quarterly International Security was titled “Dead Dictators and Rioting Mobs.” And he said, one of his conclusions, one of the reasons for the study, "American interests would best be served if longstanding dictators die in bed, soon."

Of course, American interests being what they are that doesn't mean we're going to have democracy following it, but it was kind of interesting to relate this to recent events in the Philippines and Baby Doc in Haiti and all that. And no, it's my impression that nothing's changed there, he just put a new face on a very bad situation. These are pretty much domestic operations. I'd like to talk about Central America. And then, I'll come to my conclusions. El Salvador, Grenada and Nicaragua. El Salvador in ‘81, we wanted to change our policy because Carter had cut off aid to the Salvadoran government because of human rights violations. I mean, before we initiate aid, you have to convince the American people of the nature of the goals, of the legitimacy of your goal, the humanity of your goals. So, we're going to write a white paper to publicize to the American people.

Before you write the white paper, you got to get your evidence in a row. And lo and behold, a refrigerator truck was driven across Honduras and was apprehended at the Salvadoran border. They rolled back the roof. And what did they find in there? Communist weapons. It's almost an invariable rule that you're always going to find communist weapons when you're going over or change your policy towards the government. It's almost automatic. I haven't seen the exception. In the Philippines, you know what the saying was, because there is no, absolutely no evidence that the communist USSR is supplying weapons to the Communist Party of the Philippines, it's quite obvious that there's a massive weapon supply because they're being so careful. And we can't find any evidence. Now, you've got a piece of evidence one, now a piece of evidence two.

Schafik Handal, the leader of the communist party of El Salvador went on a trip. He traveled to all of our perceived enemies, PLO, Qaddafi, North Korea, USSR, East Germany, Cuba, and each and every place along the route, he kept a very meticulous diary. And he noted in those diary entries, his conversations with the leaders of these countries and how they had promised him military equipment. They're all going to plan to give him military equipment. The head of the PLO was going to give him some airplanes. He didn't have any airfields, he didn't have any pilots, but he's going to get airplanes. Well, the State Department guy was wondering around in El Salvador one day and he went into a police station and he saw this box of documents and he looked through them and he said, "Oh, geez. They're communist documents. Can I have them? Oh please, guys?" "Oh, sure. Take them away."

Have you ever tried to get documents out of a police station? So, he went back to the State Department and he comes across this document, this diary, "Oh my God, what have I got here? What more do we need?" And this was broadcast to the world. Well, later on, when we were able to get photocopies of the documents, a few very impolite people, myself being one of them, noted that wasn't it rather strange that this diary, this one man, as he traveled around the world, that his handwriting changed three times. It was maintained in three distinct handwriting styles. And he misnamed people and elements with his own government. An obvious forgery. The Agency is not used to having its misinformation ops revealed. So, you got piece of evidence two. Pieces of evidence three, all you need is one more piece of evidence.

Ambassador Robert White was sitting in his embassy in San Salvador. And somebody comes running in and said, "Oh my God, El Salvador is being invaded on the beach down here." So, he gets in his vehicle and he runs down to the beach. And there indeed, are the spent shell casings and grenades laid strewn along the beach, running off into the jungle, kind of like a trail of jelly beans, not an entirely inappropriate simile. So he rushes back to the embassy and says, “My God, El Salvador been invaded and the only country without a joint land border nearby is Nicaragua. So obviously, the invasion came from Nicaragua." Only later he left the State Department, he admitted that he had been duped. There hadn't been an invasion, but now we got our story all lined up and we write a white paper.

The diary, the weapons shipment and the invasion and we send $50 million down there and 55 military advisers and the whole situation is, we're supplying the napalm and the bombers and all this sort of thing. The beat goes on. Only one problem. We want to support democracy. You’ve got to sell a program to the American people. You can't sell military dictatorships to American people. Well, how do you support democracy? We had an election, of course. So, D'Aubuisson and Duarte did a runoff. D'Aubuisson had worked with us and he learned a lot of our tricks and it came out a virtual putsch. So Casey was called on the carpet and he said, "For Christ's sake, Casey. Do it again and this time, would you do it right?" So, we held another election and lo and behold, Duarte won.

And it was at the flaming liberal, Jesse Helms. He said, the Agency did everything in that second election in El Salvador, except stuff the ballot boxes because he was upset because his guy, D'Aubuisson didn't win, but it was true. They pretty much managed the elections. Alright, now we're supporting democracy in El Salvador and we've got our policy changed. We've got our military equipment down there and everything. Grenada, and I watched this one and I said, "I admire this one." I had a sick feeling in my stomach. But I said, "Oh my God, they're really doing a tremendous job on this." Remember, 271 Marines had been killed in Lebanon two days before, in the bombing in Lebanon, the real malaise and the American people. Why do we always have to take it?

Why can't we strike back? We're always on the receiving end. Can't we do something? So, we readied a naval armada, and we sent it off towards the Mediterranean. Well, at that time, Maurice Bishop was killed by the military leadership in Grenada. And, I really felt badly because Maurice was, I had talked to him when I was in Grenada and I really felt he was a fine, charismatic leader. Now, normally this is the sort of situation that the CIA generates where leaders get killed by the military. But, I have absolutely no evidence that this was the case here. I suspect that I have no evidence. So in this period, the armada was directed to go off to Grenada and lo and behold, our president went on and of course, we landed in all of this and our president went on television and he told us, now you have to realize that Grenada is an Island nation of 110,000 people.

It's one of the poorest nations in the world. Its major export is nutmeg and people are uneducated. They have no communications at all. No roads, just virtually nothing. But our president went on television and he warned us. He said, "We got there just in time." The story was so ludicrous. It was almost sublime. We found six warehouses loaded to the rafters with communist weapons. The inevitable rule that's right there, you know, communist weapons. Grenada was going to sponsor a revolution throughout all of Central America, up into Mexico, possibly up into our own borders. They were lining the tanks up along the Mexican border, afraid of this invading force from Grenada. Well, as you recalled, and the media was kept out of the operation for 48 hours. This was a critical period.

Well, it took them that long to load up the two. When they got on the Island, they went to these six warehouses, there turned out to only two. They were only partially filled with weapons and only some of them were communist weapons. There were some American weapons there. Of course those weapons, according to the story, had been left behind in Vietnam. How we knew that I wasn't quite sure, but as I say, we needed that 48 hours to load those things up. Well, the weapons had an interesting followup. We went down to Washington, DC and we all went down, oohed and aahed at the communist weapons picked up in Grenada. Then later on, when the interest died down a bit, they were given off to Fort Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland. And then about a year ago, I read in the back of The Washington Post.

I'm so glad I saw this two lines. The weapons picked up in Grenada had been given to the CIA, back to that place from whence they came. One dumb Admiral, the head of the task force, decided he wanted some souvenirs of the operation. So, he scarfed up a couple dozen of these automatic weapons. He's going to give them out to his buddies and they would have a real commemoration of this glorious victory. He didn't realize when the Agency started toting up on his computers, all the weapons that he'd put there, they were going to get upset that they didn't get them all back. And, he got in some trouble. Then one night on television, that same 48-hour period. I watched as the artillerymen, the American artillerymen loaded up their pieces and fired up on this mountain side.

We'd see them loading up. The focus would shift up to the mountain side, we'd see the exploding area on the mountain. In the story that came along with it here, hardly the American troops wiping out pockets of Cuban resistance. Now all of a sudden, this massive Grenadian revolutionary force seemed to be nowhere on the Island. And the only thing we were fighting in Grenada were Cubans. Well, unfortunately for this story, there seems to always be a catch. This was exposed during a Frontline PBS program, TV program. A reporter had been on the Island when all this occurred and he was smart enough not to make his presence known. So that one of the first days, he had wandered up and he took a bottle of wine and a sandwich and he went up on the side of the mountain and he was up there all by himself and sitting there drinking his wine and eating a sandwich and watching the helicopters land in the LSTs go, all this frantic activity going on.

And, he was up there by himself. And finally, he'd wander on down. And he got down a little while later, he walked over to the artillerymen who are firing up the mountain, where he had just been. So, what are you doing? We're wiping out pockets of Cuban resistance, obviously. Nobody up there. But now, that D grade movie actor was the producer of the evening news. Then we saw on television, you would pan on the walls of Grenada, the houses of Grenada. You could see signs, “Thank God for the Americans” for saving us from this terrible oppression and all these sorts of things. And I could just see in my mind's eye, at dawn's early light, the CIA case officer out there, (Seems he's probably miming out a writing on the wall here, not sure how to express that) "thank God, for..." the story goes on and on. But, those are some of the basics.

Nicaragua. And this was a sad tale, of course, because I think something like 5,000 Nicaraguans had been killed by the Contras. And that's the equivalent in our terms, of something like several million, but we had to. When we want to change our policies, when we want to sponsor the Contras, when we want to overthrow the government of the Sandinistas, we have to convince the American people of the legitimacy and the humanity of our humanitarian goals. So president Reagan went on television, and I think you all know the story if you listen to David MacMichael, "We are sponsoring the Contras to halt the flood of communist weapons that are coming from Nicaragua to El Salvador's leftists."

Where of course, we had democracy down in El Salvador. After a while, David who was responsible for monitoring all this information, all the land, sea and air and technical intelligence, the sensors, electronic sensors and all of this, probably the most watched border area in the world said, "You couldn't drop a gum wrapper in the Bay down there without it being picked up by a CIA collection effort." He was monitoring all of this.

And, he finally left in disgust. He said, "There hasn't been a flood of weapons." In early ‘81, there were a couple of little weapon shipments. Since that time, we have not uncovered a single weapon. Yet, our president went on television in ‘80, late ‘81, ‘82 and ‘83 and was telling us that there are a flood of weapons. And that's why we're sponsoring the Contras, because we want to force the Nicaraguans to stop supporting revolution in the neighboring countries. Of course, you had the Agency mining of the harbors. The chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Barry Goldwater, he called in Bill Casey. He wrote him a very scatological letter. I won't quote him exactly, "What in the hell is the matter with you guys? This is an act of war. He did write: “Bill, this is no way to run a railroad and I find myself in a hell of a quandary. . . This is an act violating international law. It is an act of war.”

They have to brief them on their covert operations. "And you didn't tell us anything about this mining operation. What's the matter with you guys?" And I think, this brings up another point where just congressional oversight, and I think it can be summed up in one quote by Representative Norman Mineta. I've talked to Norman individually, but he was quoted in The Washington Post. And he said, "Serving on the house intelligence committee and being briefed by the CIA is like being the proverbial mushroom. You're kept in the dark and you're fed manure." Congressional oversight. And of course, you had two pilots, American pilots shot down on bombing runs over Nicaragua. And, it was said that they had absolutely no relationship to the CIA.

I think both of them had been former members of the Alabama National Guard. It's interesting to note that in the Bay of Pigs in Cuba, four American airman were shot down. They were all from the Alabama National Guard. And it was denied they had been members of the Alabama National Guard. He was denied that he any relationship to the CIA operation there, except some 20 years later they admitted, Oh yeah. He had been working for the CIA all along. So, these two were pretty much identical histories and it's denied they had any relationship to CIA.

Most recently, we find out David MacMichael shot down the president's story about Nicaragua supporting revolution around the surrounding countries. And then, the story came out about the M-19 guerillas that occupied the Supreme Court in Colombia and were invaded by the military which killed almost the hostages as well as the M-19 guerillas. And, the story came out that the M-19 guerillas were armed with weapons, of course, that came from Nicaragua. Of course the Colombians denied it, but that didn't make any difference. Elliott Abrams, the undersecretary of State for American affairs, still claims this is evidence that Nicaragua's supporting revolution. And then wouldn't you know it, that a vehicle, a car was loaded with communist weapons and demolitions and what all, and was driven across Honduras in an American dry dock aircraft carrier, if you will, and headed it enroute to El Salvador.

And, they happen to have a flat tire. So, some Honduran troops decided to go over and assist them with fixing the flat tire. And, they noticed some wires hanging out and they conducted a search. And lo and behold, here are all these communist weapons, very nicely wrapped in Nicaraguan newspapers. The beat goes on. So now, we're going to sponsor the Contras. We want a hundred million dollars to sponsor the Contras, to force them to stop subverting their neighbors by these weapons shipments. \

My conclusions of the CIA and we can go on and on, but my conclusion that the CIA is not now nor has it ever been a central intelligence agency. It's the covert action arm, the president's foreign policy. In its capacity, it supports or overthrows foreign governments. Misinformation is a major part of this covert action responsibility.

And you and I, and Congress are the major targets of its misinformation operations. The CIA goes around the world, overturning democratically elected governments and imposing in their stead, sometimes under the guise of democracies, brutal military dictatorships who torture and murder their own people. Well, why do we do all this? Why do we go around overturning all the ideals that we saw extensively, ostentatiously hold to be truthful or what we should be honoring - life, liberty, justice, all of these things? Why did we do that? And I think, you can find the answer in the economics. And in my estimation, you boil it down to the final area. The CIA is nothing more than the action arm of America’s transnational corporations. The CIA goes around the world, overturning these governments and then, it imposes these dictatorships.

Now, let me give you an example, the agribusiness, say in the Philippines, as an example, they will go in and say, "We will buy all of the products, all the beef you can grow, or all the products you can make, all the soybeans you can grow, if you will grow them. So the guy, the oligarchy, the landowner says, "Alright, but I only have 50,000 acres. I want a million acres. So, we'll send the troops and he's aligned with Ferdinand Marcos. We'll send the troops in and they'll drive the peasants off their land and any who protest are killed. Or if you try to develop a union or a cooperative here, you have the death squads. So I think what is happening, not only are we destroying the life, liberty and justice abroad. But we are destroying the American farmer by these activities, because now you can produce by these costs of labor that go from maybe a dollar a day, these immense profits for the transnationals. Now, the same thing happens in the manufacturing field.

Where do your clothes come from? Korea and Taiwan. We've got dictatorships and the people are earning just a fraction of the amount of money that American workers are earning. The Hyundai cars coming to the United States from Korea, the labor costs there are about two dollars an hour versus the American wage of $20 an hour. So what happens? The American industry shuts its plants down in the United States and transfers them overseas to Taiwan, to Korea, to the agribusinesses in Central American, Latin America. Their profits go up just exponentially.

The American worker, the American farmer, about a third of them are going to lose their farms this year, lose their jobs. I think what you're having now, here in the United States, is sort of the Central Americanization or the marginalization of the American worker, the American farmer. This process is beginning and it's accelerating. Now, I don't think that we can allow the CIA to go around the world, to continue to overturn popular and democratically run governments and destroying democracy, liberty, justice, religion, all of the things we hold so dear and expect that our freedoms and liberties can long exist here at home. Thank you very much.