FORMER CIA AGENT BLASTS REAGAN'S MOTIVES IN NICARAGUA

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CIA-RDP91-00587R000201100021-7
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December 22, 2016
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June 17, 2010
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21
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Approved For Release 2010/06/17: CIA-RDP91-00587R000201100021-7 HUTCHINSON NEWS (KS)~~~ ONLY 20 April 1985 Former cIA agen t blasts Reagan's motives in Nicaragua B y Duane Schrag The Hutchinson News NORTH NEWTON - The United States, led by a president with a "fixation on Armageddon," and an intelligence gathering organization responsible for the deaths ? of mil- lions of people, is carefully lay- ing the ground- work for war in Central America, a former CIA agent said in a speech Thursday ..', night. John Stock- = I w i o spoke as a guest in the Stockwell Betel Colle a Peace Lecture Series, sai of deen"~' eA' agars in- n to have the Nicaraguan gov- ernment overthrown. "There's not a prayer that he is going to go out of office without ousting the Sandinistas," Stockwell said. "They want to build tensions are trying to do is methodically rip apart the social and economic fabric of the country." American-backed Contras - Rea- gan likes to call them freedom fight- ers, he said - have killed 8,000 people, most of them women and children, he said. It is not unusual for the Contras to pull a family from its hut and force members to watch the father, mother or child be tortured to death, he said. "Sometimes for variety they will put (a) grenade in a 7-year-old's mouth and pull the pin," he said. "I suggest to you it is not the Sand- inistas that are responsible for the misery (in Nicaragua) - it is the United States." He talked of American advisers coaching rebels in torture tech- niques. "We are taught in our ideology that it is the Gestapo or the KGB that does hideous things to other people " he said , . to the point where they send in the In reality, all humans - including Marines -' this is Vietnam in 1964. Americans, are capable of such This is the establishment saying acts, he said. we've got to go in and get it over Stockwell grew up in the Belgian with. We are in fact poised on the Congo in a conservative family and brink of the next war." then joined the Marines, a young Stockwell, who resigned from the man eager to serve his country, he CIA in 1977 to write a book highly said. In 1964, he was recruited by critical of the agency, has been in the CIA because of his military Nicaragua recently investigating background and upbringing in Af- American involvement in Central rica. America. The information presented When he first began to notice the Thursday night is fully documented, agency's questionable activities he he told the audience. rationalized it by telling himself At the end of his hour-long that he was not responsible for oth- speech, he received a standing ova- ers' actions. tion from the audience of several But after serving in Vietnam and hundred. witnessing the CIA's bungling America is involved in "raw ter- there, he became disillusioned. rorism," he said. ' Even so, he was asked to head the "There can be no other word for CIA's covert activities in Angola, what the CIA has been doing in where the CIA was trying to fight Nicaragua," he said. "What they the spread of communism. He decided to play along for a while, to see for himself just how corrupt things were inside the se- cretive agency. "I just made a deal with the devil at that point," he said, admitting there was "no honor or nobility" in what he did. He resigned in 1977 and the fol- lowing year published "In Search of Enemies," which became a best- seller. Because he wouldn't submit the manuscripts to the CIA for cen- sorship, he was barred by court or- der from receiving royalties. At Thursday night's meeting he told the audience the CIA receives 65 cents per copy sold and urged members of the audience not to buy the book. He did suggest, jokingly, that copies might be shoplifted-from prosperous bookstores or that people check the book'out of local li- braries. Stockwell said the CIA today is trying to "destabilize" the govern- ments of 50 countries. But the agency has not limited its influence to overseas countries, he said. He reminded the audience of the M.K. Ultra project, the CIA se- cret experiment in which diseases were spread in American cities and drugs secretly administered. When the project was exposed, the public outcry forced the CIA to scale back its activities. But the Reagan administration has given the green light to the agency and is proposing laws that would allow for the creation of "death squads," Stockwell said: Secretary of State George Schultz has for a year been trying to get Congress to approve a "pre-emptive strikes" bill, he said. The bill would allow the government to move against terrorists - in America - before they had'a chance to act. Approved For Release 2010/06/17: CIA-RDP91-00587R000201100021-7