1 00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:12,840 One of the four principal functions of the CIA is to gather intelligence and ideally forward it to the president, the users of information, the policymakers, as they say. 2 00:00:13,340 --> 00:00:17,300 There are other functions, however, some of them more legitimate than others. 3 00:00:17,860 --> 00:00:25,240 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 Honduras. 4 00:00:25,940 --> 00:00:34,820 Another thing is to disseminate propaganda to influence people's minds, and this is a major function of the CIA. 5 00:00:35,880 --> 00:00:40,960 And unfortunately, of course, it overlaps into the gathering of information. 6 00:00:40,960 --> 00:00:48,960 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. 7 00:00:49,100 --> 00:00:51,440 Did you buy his confidence with true stories? 8 00:00:51,660 --> 00:00:53,600 You buy his confidence and set him up. 9 00:00:53,600 --> 00:01:02,560 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. 10 00:01:03,080 --> 00:01:05,460 Every fifth story just simply being false. 11 00:01:05,460 --> 00:01:19,620 You also work on their human vulnerabilities to recruit them in a classic sense to make them your agent so that 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. 12 00:01:19,620 --> 00:01:22,120 So you can say, here, plant this one next Tuesday. 13 00:01:22,880 --> 00:01:25,760 Can you do this with responsible reporters? 14 00:01:25,760 --> 00:01:46,680 Yes, the church committee brought it out in 1975, and then Woodward and Bernstein put an article in Rolling Stone a couple of years later, 400 journalists cooperating with the CIA, including some of the biggest names in the business to consciously introduce the stories into the press. 15 00:01:46,680 --> 00:01:55,640 Well, give me a concrete example of how you used the press this way, how a false story is planted, and how you got it published. 16 00:01:55,640 --> 00:02:05,020 Well, for example, in my war, the Angola War that I helped to manage, one-third of my staff was propaganda. 17 00:02:05,200 --> 00:02:08,020 Ironically, it's called covert action inside the CIA. 18 00:02:08,280 --> 00:02:09,900 Outside, that means the violent part. 19 00:02:10,460 --> 00:02:15,840 I had propagandists all over the world, principally in London, Kinshasa, and Zambia. 20 00:02:15,840 --> 00:02:28,040 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. 21 00:02:28,800 --> 00:02:35,160 But his cover story, you see, would be that he had gotten them from his stringer in Lusaka, who had gotten them from the Zambia Times. 22 00:02:35,700 --> 00:02:41,860 We had the complicity of the government of Zambia, Kenneth Kaunda, if you will, to put these false stories into his newspapers. 23 00:02:41,860 --> 00:02:49,620 But after that point, the journalists, Reuters and AFP, the management was not witting of it. 24 00:02:49,860 --> 00:02:58,480 Now, our contact man in Europe was, and we pumped just dozens of stories about Cuban atrocities, Cuban rapists. 25 00:02:59,240 --> 00:03:08,080 In one case, we had the Cuban rapists caught and tried by the Ovimbundo maidens who had been their victims. 26 00:03:08,080 --> 00:03:18,120 And then we ran photographs that made almost every newspaper in the country of the Cubans being executed by the Ovimbundo women who supposedly had been their victims. 27 00:03:18,380 --> 00:03:19,520 But these were fake photos? 28 00:03:19,740 --> 00:03:23,980 Oh, absolutely. We didn't know of one single atrocity committed by the Cubans. 29 00:03:24,040 --> 00:03:34,540 It was pure, raw, false propaganda to create an illusion of communists, you know, eating babies for breakfast and that sort of totally false propaganda. 30 00:03:34,540 --> 00:03:39,900 John, was this sort of thing practiced in Vietnam? 31 00:03:40,260 --> 00:03:55,660 Oh, endlessly a massive propaganda effort 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. 32 00:03:55,660 --> 00:04:02,500 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. 33 00:04:02,620 --> 00:04:05,380 Writers in this country, books sold and distributed in this country? 34 00:04:05,380 --> 00:04:15,320 Sure, yeah. English language books, meaning an American audience as a target, on the subject of Vietnam and the history of Vietnam and the history of Marxism and supporting the domino theory, etc. 35 00:04:15,320 --> 00:04:18,980 Without opening us up to a lawsuit, could you name one of them? 36 00:04:18,980 --> 00:04:35,380 No, I could not. The church committee, when they found this out, demanded that they be given the title so that the university libraries could at least go and stamp inside Central Intelligence Agency's version of history. 37 00:04:35,380 --> 00:04:49,620 And the CIA refused, because it's been commissioned to protect its sources and methods, and the sources would be the authors who wrote these false propaganda books, some of whom are now distinguished scholars and journalists. 38 00:04:50,020 --> 00:05:03,520 Well, doesn't the CIA flatly deny, they've admitted that there is some propaganda efforts, but their position is that those are all outside the United States, not in the United States. Isn't that true? 39 00:05:03,520 --> 00:05:21,260 Absolutely. While we were running this Angolan operation and pumping these stories into the world and U.S. 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. 40 00:05:21,780 --> 00:05:28,320 And the very days that he was giving this false testimony, we were planting stories in the Washington Post. 41 00:05:28,320 --> 00:05:37,860 By that I mean not through Lusaka, but we actually flew a journalist from Paris to Washington to plant a false story. I mention it. I give the text of the story in my book. 42 00:05:39,260 --> 00:05:44,380 So you planted a story in the Washington Post by bringing a man from abroad. 43 00:05:45,420 --> 00:05:47,640 You had no difficulty? You got right past the editor with it? 44 00:05:48,000 --> 00:05:48,180 Yeah. 45 00:05:49,080 --> 00:05:50,520 Is this common? Is it easy? 46 00:05:50,520 --> 00:05:53,580 It's easier than you would think, yes. 47 00:05:53,580 --> 00:06:04,100 Yes. If it's on the line of, for example, if it's on the line of Grenada being radical today, we've had articles in the Washington Post, The Star Before It Closed, Time Magazine, 48 00:06:04,780 --> 00:06:10,960 that could only have been written by, originally by the CIA, Soviet submarine base, terrorist training. 49 00:06:10,960 --> 00:06:19,540 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. 50 00:06:20,060 --> 00:06:30,280 Tiny little island, 15 miles by 10 miles across with 70,000 people with U.S. medical students and their cutaways in sandals and their noses in books wandering all over the island. 51 00:06:30,980 --> 00:06:36,440 And yet, major press organs, Time Magazine, running stories about their being so radical. 52 00:06:36,440 --> 00:06:42,240 In Vietnam, John, what was your relationship, what was your role in relation to the press? 53 00:06:42,760 --> 00:06:46,360 Well, mine being, the CIA's role, it was multifaceted. 54 00:06:46,500 --> 00:06:50,200 There were officers in the embassy, CIA officers, high-ranking officers. 55 00:06:50,900 --> 00:06:58,060 Frank Snipp was one, not high-ranking, but he was in the chief of station's office, who met with the press regularly. 56 00:06:58,920 --> 00:07:03,500 It shared information with them, gave them information, and got information from them. 57 00:07:03,500 --> 00:07:09,340 And then, periodically, would put some story into that that would be false. 58 00:07:09,580 --> 00:07:14,120 But also, in other cases, very valuable to the journalists. 59 00:07:14,600 --> 00:07:21,560 So, even hard-nosed journalists who would never willfully cooperate with the CIA would consider it a useful source. 60 00:07:21,560 --> 00:07:32,160 At the same time, there are all kinds of people, you know, as journalists and case officers, many other case officers, were really quite afraid of the press. 61 00:07:32,860 --> 00:07:39,240 We, up country, when journalists would come up nosing around, we would hide and let the AID officer talk to them. 62 00:07:39,240 --> 00:07:46,300 Because we were simply afraid they would photograph us and write some article and have some allusion to what we were doing that would be unfortunate to our careers. 63 00:07:46,300 --> 00:07:47,140 They knew who you were? 64 00:07:47,200 --> 00:07:48,040 They knew you were CIA? 65 00:07:48,140 --> 00:07:51,140 Everyone always knows who the CIA people are. 66 00:07:51,220 --> 00:07:53,100 Let there be no doubt whatsoever. 67 00:07:53,380 --> 00:07:58,000 This is one of the biggest farces that the CIA and Congress have put on the American people. 68 00:07:58,000 --> 00:08:06,180 We, as Moynihan said, Patrick Moynihan said in testifying against this Official Secrets Act recently, he said at the UN, he said, 69 00:08:06,260 --> 00:08:10,580 they swaggered around like Texas cowboys in 10-gallon hats and high-heeled boots. 70 00:08:11,300 --> 00:08:16,060 In Vietnam, we had yellow Datsuns and sequential license plates. 71 00:08:16,060 --> 00:08:23,280 So if you had a yellow Datsun and 144 on your license plate, you had to be CIA, and everybody knew it. 72 00:08:23,320 --> 00:08:30,500 Up country, we had emerald green Jeeps, and the Army had olive drab, and AID had gray Jeeps. 73 00:08:30,580 --> 00:08:33,240 And if you had a green, green Jeep, you had to be CIA. 74 00:08:33,960 --> 00:08:37,620 And any denial of that was only tongue-in-cheek perfunctory. 75 00:08:37,760 --> 00:08:39,280 Certainly journalists knew the difference. 76 00:08:39,400 --> 00:08:40,520 What a disillusionment. 77 00:08:40,580 --> 00:08:43,160 You're telling us that a spook is not a spook. 78 00:08:43,160 --> 00:08:47,560 Alan Dulles wrote in his book, The Craft of Intelligence, you know, the famous CIA director. 79 00:08:47,680 --> 00:08:53,760 In the foreword of his book, he says, an intelligence agent, contrary to popular opinion, has to be known as such. 80 00:08:53,840 --> 00:08:56,380 Otherwise, people with secrets won't know where to take them. 81 00:08:57,060 --> 00:09:05,460 He set up the policy, the precedent of traveling the world each year and assembling his case officers in hotels 82 00:09:05,460 --> 00:09:08,640 and having what you could only describe as a sales conference. 83 00:09:08,640 --> 00:09:13,800 Meetings in the hotel rooms, breakfast, lunch, and dinner and drinks together in the hotel rooms. 84 00:09:16,360 --> 00:09:16,760 John? 85 00:09:16,760 --> 00:09:19,740 So you're talking about not an underworld. 86 00:09:19,980 --> 00:09:25,540 You're talking about ranking privileged members of the police brotherhood of the world. 87 00:09:26,200 --> 00:09:27,880 CIA officers are not in danger. 88 00:09:28,040 --> 00:09:29,020 Tourists don't hit them. 89 00:09:29,020 --> 00:09:32,920 In every country where they can, they establish liaison with the local police. 90 00:09:33,580 --> 00:09:38,060 And inside the veils of, you know, their secrecy and protection, 91 00:09:38,420 --> 00:09:41,360 they're not fearful and they're not playing cover games. 92 00:09:41,460 --> 00:09:43,200 They're having lunch with the police chief. 93 00:09:43,200 --> 00:09:43,420 They're not aware of. 94 00:09:43,540 --> 00:09:43,800 They're not wearing ain't anything. 95 00:09:43,800 --> 00:09:44,600 They're not wearing it. 96 00:09:44,780 --> 00:09:57,420 They'reapaug 97 00:09:57,420 --> 00:09:58,280 It's showing up. 98 00:09:59,860 --> 00:10:02,320 Our quasi рекorn