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John you were in Vietnam for the CIA, and as I understand you were up country. What years were you there?
73–75. RIght after the troop evacuation, and I came out in the evacuation of April 75.
How long were you with the CIA?
13 years. I was a field case officer, served in Africa and Vietnam, and then, eventually, on a subcommittee of the National Security Council in Washington.
You were in Angola, were you not?
Well I ran the Angolan covert action, but I ran it from Washington. These things are global, and as chief of the Angola task force my office was in Washington.
When did you leave the CIA?
March 1977, I left to testify to the senate and go public and try to write a book, which I did.
I'll get into that a little later, I'd like to talk to you about what kind of experiences one has when one leaves the CIA and begins to talk. It must be very very interesting. Let's talk about the function of the CIA. I think a lot of us have an impression that all the CIA does is gather intelligence. Intelligence is information of course. One would think that if you obtained information that was based upon fact, and if that is so, what did you do with it?
Well, one of the four principle functions of the CIA is to gather intelligence, and ideally forward it to the president, the users of information, the policymakers as they say. There are other functions however, some of them more legitimate than others. One is to run secret wars. The covert action that's written and talked about so much, like what's happening in Nicaragua today from Hondoras. Another thing is to disseminate propaganda, to influence people's minds. And this is a major function of the CIA. And, uh, unfortunately of course it overlaps into the gathering of information. You have contact with a journalist, you will give him true stories, you'll get information from him, you'll also give him false stories.
Did you buy his confidence with true stories?
You buy his confidence and set him up — we've seen this happen recently with Jack Anderson, for example, who has his intelligence sources, and he has also admitted that he's been set up by them. Every fifth story just simply being false. You also work on their human vulnerabilities to recruit them, in a classic sense, to make them your agent so you can control what they do, so you don't have to set them up sort of, you know, by putting one over on them, so you can say "here, plant this one next Tuesday."
Can you do this with responsible reporters?
Yes. The Church committee brought it out in 1975 and then Woodward and Bernstein put an article in Rolling Stone a couple years later. Um. Four hundred journalists cooperating with the CIA, uh, including some of the biggest names in the business, to consciously introduce the stories into the press.
Well give me a concrete example of how you use the press this way, how a false story is planted and how you got it published.
Well, for example, in my war, the Angola war that I helped to manage, uh, one third of my staff was propaganda. Ironically, it's called covert action inside the CIA, outside that means the violent part. I had propagandists all over the world, principally in London, Kinshasa, and Zambia. We would take stories which we would write and put them in the Zambia times. And then pull them out and send them to a journalist on our payroll in Europe. But his cover story, you see, would be that he'd gotten them from his stringer in Lusaka who had gotten them from the Zambia times. We had the complicity of the government of Zambia, Kenneth Kaunda if you will, to put these false stories into his newspapers. But after that point, the journalists at Reuters and AFP, the management was not witting of it. Now our contact manager was. And we pumped just, just, dozens of stories about Cuban atrocities, Cuban rapists, uh, in one case we had the Cuban rapists caught and tried by the Ovimunda maidens who had been their victims, and then we ran photographs that made almost every newspaper in the country of the Cubans being executed by the Ovimunda women who had supposedly been their victims.
These were fake photos?
Oh, absolutely. We didn't know of one single atrocity committed by the Cubans. It was pure, raw, false propaganda to create an illusion of communists, you know, eating babies for breakfast and that sort — totally false propaganda.
John was this sort of thing practiced in Vietnam?
Oh. Endlessly, a massive propaganda in Vietnam in the 50s and in the 60s, including the thousand books that were published, several hundred in English, that were also propaganda books, sponsored by the CIA. Give some money to a writer, write this book for us, write anything you want, but on these matters make sure, you know, you have this line.
Writers in this country?
Sure
Books sold and distributed in this country?
Sure. English language books, meaning an American audience as the target, on the subject of Vietnam and the history of Vietnam and the history of Marxism and, supporting the Domino Theory etc.
Without opening us up to a lawsuit, could you name of one them?
[Pause] ... No I could not, uh, the Church Committee, when they found this out, demanded that they be given the titles so that the university libraries could at least go and stamp inside "CIA's version of history," and the CIA refused because it's been commissioned to protect its sources and methods, and the sources would be the authors [laughs] who wrote these false propaganda books, some of whom are now distinguished scholars [laughs again] and journalists.
Well, doesn't the CIA flatly deny — they've admitted that there is some propaganda at first, but, their position is that those are all *outside* the United States, not inside the United States. Isn't that true?
Absolutely. While we were running this Angolan operation in pumping these stories into the world and US press, exactly that time, Bill Colby, the CIA director, was testifying to Congress assuring them that we were extremely careful to make sure that none of our propaganda spilled back into the United States. And the very days that he was giving this false testimony, we were planting stories in the Washington Post. By that I mean not through Lusaka but we actually flew a journalist from Paris to Washington to plant a false story — I mentioned it, I give the text of the story in my book.