by Philip Giraldi, The Unz Review:
Fake foreign threats are used to validate poor policy choices
Does anyone really think that Iran threatens the United States? It’s only plausible if you can be convinced by a congenital liar and war criminal like Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu or by a buffoon like Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. My head was still throbbing recently due to the damage done while watching Netanyahu’s 56 standing ovations from a bought and paid for Congress when I came across among my old books a volume bearing a title that summed up what I have been thinking about. It was called “In Search of Enemies: A CIA Story” and was written by a former Agency colleague named John Stockwell back in 1978.
TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/
Stockwell spent part of his high school years with his Presbyterian missionary father in the Belgian Congo. He then graduated from the University of Texas followed by three years in the United States Marine Corps. He joined the CIA in 1964 and earned respect as an experienced “Africa Hand,” as the expression was commonly used, during his twelve years in the Agency’s Operations Deputy Directorate that ended when he resigned in 1976. Stockwell served as a case officer through three wars: the Congo Crisis, as chief of the Agency “task force” in the Angolan War of Independence, and Vietnam. Six of Stockwell’s years were in Africa, as Chief of Base in Katanga, then Chief of Station in Bujumbura, Burundi in 1970, before being transferred to Vietnam to oversee intelligence operations in Tay Ninh province where he received the CIA Intelligence Medal of Merit for keeping his post operating until just before the fall of Saigon to the communists in 1975.
In his resignation letter, Stockwell cited deep concerns over the methods and results of CIA paramilitary operations in Third World countries and he subsequently testified to that effect before Congressional committees. Two years later, he wrote In Search of Enemies, about that experience and its broader implications. He claimed that the CIA was damaging national security, and that its “secret wars” provided no benefit for the United States. The CIA, he stated, had singled out the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) to be an enemy in Angola despite the fact that the MPLA wanted good relations with the United States and had not threatened the US in any way. In 1978 he appeared on the American television program 60 Minutes to discuss his book, inter alia claiming that CIA Director William Colby and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger had systematically lied to Congress and the public about the CIA’s operations in Africa and elsewhere.
Stockwell played a major role in a war that America later chose to forget. It was a conflict full of lessons about the tyranny of bureaucracy run amok and the force of habit driving a bloody process that had no end game. Indeed, the top secret presidential finding authorizing the covert war in Angola explicitly directed the CIA to avoid victory — the goal was instead “to hemorrhage Russian coffers and bleed Angolan bodies, all to keep Russia ‘on its toes’” after the US abandonment of Vietnam the year before. Though no American troops were on the ground in Angola, only “advisors,” many millions of dollars were spent, many thousands died, and many lies were told to the American people in waging a war without any relationship to American vital interests and without hope of victory. In many ways it was makes one think of the tragedies involving US foreign and national security policies that are playing out today. If it sounds a lot like the aftermath of the disengagement from Afghanistan more recently, it should. One needs an enemy to justify a bloated defense establishment and if there is no enemy available one will be invented just as Senator Lindsey Graham has already introduced Senate Bill SJ106, which authorizes in advance war with Iran even if Iran does nothing to provoke it. It is a declaration of war in advance against an “enemy” that will be convenient when needed!
