So you planted a story in the Washington Post by bringing a man from abroad. You had no difficulty, got right past the editor with it?

Yeah.

Is this common? Is it easy?

It's easier than, than you would think, yes. If it's on the line — for example, if it's on the line of uh, Grenada being radical today, we've had articles in the Washington Post, the Star before it closed, Time Magazine, that could only have been written by, originally by, the CIA. Soviet submarine base... terrorist training... here's a little island where the major source of income is selling spice to the west, western tourism, and a large United States medical school. Tiny little island, 15 miles by 10 miles across, with 70,000 people, with US students in their cutaways and sandals and their noses in books wandering all over the island, and yet, major press organs, Time Magazine, running stories about their being so radical.

In Vietnam, John, what was your relationship, what was your role, in relation to the press?

Well, mine being the CIA's role, it was multifaceted, there were officers in the embassy, CIA officers, high-ranking officers, uh, Frank Snepp was one, not high-ranking, but he was at the, in the Chief of Station's office, who met with the press regularly. Uh, it shared information with them, gave them information, and got information from them. And then periodically would put some story into that that would be false. But also, in other cases, very valuable to the journalist. So even hard-nosed journalists who would never willfully cooperate with the CIA would consider it a useful source. At the same time, there are all kinds of people, you know, as journalists, and uh, case officers — many of the case officers, really quite afraid of the press. We upcountry, when journalists would come up nosing around, we would hide and let the AID officer talk to them. Because we were simply afraid that they would photograph us and write some article and have some allusion to what we were doing that would be unfortunate to our careers.

They knew who you were, they knew you were CIA?

Everyone always knows who the CIA people are. Let there be no doubt whatsoever. This is one of the biggest farces that the CIA and Congress have put on the American people. We, as Moynihan said, Patrick Moynihan said in testifying against the Official Secrets Act recently, he said at the UN, he said they swaggered around like Texas cowboys in 10 gallon hats and high heel boots. In Vietnam we had yellow Datsuns and sequential license plates. So if you had a yellow Datsun and 144 on your license plate you had to be CIA, and everyone knew it — upcountry we had, uh, emerald green jeeps, and the army had all of them drab and AID had grey jeeps, and if you had a green, green jeep you had to be CIA, and any denial of that was only tongue in cheek, perfunctory, certainly journalists knew the difference.

What a disillusionment! You're telling us that a spook is not a spook!

Alan Dulles wrote in his book "The Craft of Intelligence," a famous CIA director, in the forward of his book he says "an intelligence agent, contrary to popular opinion, has to be known as such, otherwise people with secrets won't know where to take them" [laughs]. He set up the policy, the precedent of traveling the world each year and assembling his case officers in hotels and having what you could only describe as a sales conference. Meetings in the hotel rooms... breakfast, lunch and dinner and drinks together in the hotel rooms. [Pause] Talking, so you're talking about, not an underworld, you're talking about ranking, privileged, members of the police brotherhood of the world. CIA officers are not in danger, terrorists don't hit them, and every country they can, they establish liaison with the local police, and inside the veils of, you know, their secrecy and protection, they're not fearful and they're not playing cover games, they're having lunch with the police chief.

John, I'd like to, I'd like to find out what makes a man like John Stockwell tick. One, why were you in the CIA, two, uh, why did you *quit* the CIA, and I'd like to find out what has happened since you quit the CIA and began speaking as openly as you've spoken to us.

Well, certainly that's a question as complicated as the dilemma facing this society about the CIA today. I went in, uh, marines, army, marine captain, conservative background, my father was an engineer in Africa, contracting to build for a Presbyterian mission, and I grew up in the Belgian Congo. Uh, about as conservative as you can get, I guess.

Missionary atmosphere?

On a mission station with an engineering father, but uh, humanist principles, high ideals, false, unrealistic ideals for the world, uh, education at the university of Texas. My service in the marine corps, active duty, all very exciting between wars. I was in a forest reconnaissance company, parachuting and locking out of submarines, very glamorous, but between wars no one getting shot. No moral issues, if you will. And then the CIA recruited me right at the end of the Kennedy era, he had just been shot, ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country. And all of the propaganda that had been put out on the American people against communism, the height of the Domino Theory, and my own naivete, thinking I was educated when in fact I was not. And uh, I thought going into the CIA that I was doing the best thing I possibly could with my life, in the noblest ideals of our society, thinking I was bettering mankind by making the world free for democracy and... it just took me 13 years and three secret wars to realize how absolutely false that was, and the Church Committee's revelations, simultaneously to the Vietnam and the Angolan thing... it just took me that long to see the thing from a totally different light. And my basic ideals have certainly never changed, in terms of basic humanism, basic sympathy for the people of the world. [Pause] Service to this country that goes back so far I don't even have to deal with detractors, I feel, who say I'm a traitor or whatnot, that's silly, with you know, with the things I've done with my life. But I think we are drifting from the values that we, we teach ourselves in school, of, of democracy, of freedoms, I think we're selling out to a very small police organization who is absorbing American principles about as fast as the judicial and legislative processes can absorb them, freedoms of speech and press, and at the same time are continuing policies of killing in every corner of the world, right now in Nicaragua and El Salvador. I think I deplore that morally, but I also think it's extremely dangerous because it can flash so easily into a world confrontation, and... with the Soviets... to the holocaust, to the nuclear war.

Well, what has happened to uh, to you since you left the CIA and started speaking like this?

Well I've been sued by the CIA, I've been threatened by the FBI, uh, I have not been beaten and mauled, I have exercised my right as I see it to speak out, and lectured at length. They've made it very clear they don't appreciate it, and like I say I've been warned that dire things could happen to me, but uh, I don't know if these were bluffs or not, nothing has yet. I've been sued for damages by the CIA, which is certainly an irony when you think about it.