In Search Of Enemies

~The CIA and the Third World War~

by-John Stockwell
(former station chief-angola task force)

My expertise, as you know, is CIA, Marine Corp, three CIA secret wars. I had a position in the National Security Council in 1975 as the chief of the Angola task force running the secret war in Angola. It was the third CIA war I was part of.

The National Security law creating the National Security Council and the CIA, as you know, was passed in 1947. The CIA was given its charter to perform such other duties and functions as might be necessary to national security interests and given a vague authority to protect its sources and methods. I think it was in the mid '80s that I coined this phrase the 'Third World War' because in my research I realized that we were not attacking the Soviet Union in the CIA's activities, we were attacking people in the Third World. And I am going to Just quickly, in the interest of time, Just give you a little sense of what that means, this 'Third World War.'

Basically, its the third, I believe in terms of loss of life and human destruction, the third bloodiest war in all of history. They undertake to run operations in every corner of the globe. They also undertook the license of operating Just totally above and beyond US law. They had a license, if you will to kill, but also they took that to a license to smuggle drugs, a license to do all kinds of things to other people and other societies in violation of international law, our law, and every principle of nations working together for a healthier and more peaceful world.

Meanwhile, again, they battled to convert the US legal system in such a way that it would give them control over our society. Now we have massive documentation of what they call the 'Secret Wars of the CIA'. We don't have to guess or speculate, we had the Church Committe investigate them in 1975 which gave us our first really in-depth powerful look inside this structure.

Senator Church said in the 14 years before he did his investigation, that he found that they had run 900 major operations and 3,000 minor operations. And if you extrapolate that over the whole period of the 40 odd years that we've had a CIA, you come up with 3,000 major operations and over 10,000 minor operations. Every one of them illegal, every one of them disruptive of the lives and societies of other peoples and many of them bloody and gory beyond comprehension, almost.

Exstensively, we manipulated and organized the overthrow of functioning constitutional democracies in other countries. We organized secret armies and directed them to fight in Just every continent in the world. We encouraged ethnic minorities to rise up and fight, people like the Mosquito Indians in Nicaragua, the Kurds in the Middle East, the Hmongs in South East Asia.

And of course, we have organized, and still do, fund death squads in countries around the world. Like the Treasury Police in El Salvador which are responsible for most of the killings of the 50,000 people Just in the '80s and there was 70,000 before that.

An orchestration of CIA secret teams and propaganda led us directly into the Korean war. We were attacking China from the Islands of Quemoy and Matsu, Thailand, Tibet (a lot of drug trafficking involved in this by the way), until eventually we convinced ourselves to fight the Chinese in Korea and we had the Korean war and a million people were killed.

Same thing for the Vietnam war and we have extensive documentation of how the CIA was involved at every level of the National Security Complex , because its a very cooperative thing into manipulating the nation into the Vietnam war. And we wound up creating the Golden Triangle in which the CIAs Air America Airplane's were flying in arms to our allies and flying back out with heroin.

We launched the largest--this is something that Jimmy Carter did, Admiral Turner brags about it--the operation in Afghanistan. The biggest single operation I am told in the history of the CIA's secret wars and sure enough very quickly we produced the Golden Crescent which is still the largest source of heroin perhaps in the world today.

Trying to summarize this Third World War that the CIA, the US National Security Complex with the Military all interwoven in it in many different ways, has been waging, let me Just put it this way, the best heads that I coordinate with studying this thing, we count at least minimum figure, six million people who've been killed in this 40-year long war that we have waged against the people of the Third World.

These are not Soviets, we have not been parachuting teams into the Soviet Union to kill and hurt and maim people, especially not since 1954 when they actually developed the capability of dropping atomic weapons on the United States.

They aren't British, French, Swedes, Swiss, Belgians, we don't do bloody gory operations in the countries of Europe. These are all people of the Third World. They are people of countries like the Congo, Vietnam, Kampuchea, Indochina, Nicaragua, where conspicuously, they nor their government's, do not have the capability of doing any physical hurt to the United States.

They don't have ICBM's, they don't have Armies or Navies. They could not hurt us if they wanted to. There has rarely been any evidence that they really wanted to. And that, in fact is perhaps the whole point. If they had ICBM's we probably wouldn't have done those things to them for fear of retaliation.

Cheap shots, if you will, killing people of other countries of the world who cannot defend themselves under the guise of secrecy and under the rubric of national security...

(John Stockwell is the highest-ranking CIA official ever to leave the Agency and go public. He ran a CIA Intelligence gathering post in Vietnam, was the task-force commander of the CIA's secret war in Angola in 1975 and 1976, and was awarded the medal of merit before he resigned. Stockwell's Book, ''In Search of Enemies' is an international best seller)