In Search of Enemies - A CIA Story - John Stockwell

IN SEARCH OF ENEMIES
Alarcon's speech was more than polemics. After the war we
learned that Cuba had not been ordered into action by the Soviet
Union. To the contrary, the Cuban leaders felt compelled to intervene
for their own ideological reasons.
We, on the other hand, were fettered by our secrecy and by the
fact that our program would be judged wrong by the American
people if they learned of it. When Savimbi began capturing Cuban
prisoners, we interrogated then in Silva Porto, unable to take them
even to Kinshasa for display to prove the Cuban presence in Angola.
When the FNLA captured a Soviet-built armored car, we promptly
flew it to Kinshasa for an FNLA-sponsored press conference. The
Soviet charge d'affaires angrily called on Mobutu, and he in tum
ordered a halt to the press conference. He wasn't exactly afraid of
the Soviets but he didn't really want to advertise Zaire's involvement
in Angola, he said. By comparison, when the MPLA captured two
South African soldiers, it promptly flew them to Lagos, Nigeria, and
then to Addis Ababa for display before the Organization of African
Unity.
All during the fall months our secret little drama of Angola was
played before a splashy backdrop of disclosures made by the Church
Committee. The former deputy director of plans (operations), Richard
Bissell, testified that feasibility studies of how to assassinate
Patrice Lumumba had been made in 1961. Sid Gottlieb, the CIA chief
of the Office of Technical Services had hand-carried poison to Kinshasa
for the Lumumba operation. Gottlieb himself testified that,
years later, the CIA director, Richard Helms, had ordered him to
destroy all records of the tests he had run of specific poisons to be
used in killing Lumumba. The CIA's Chile operation was further
exposed; its relationship with the Chileans who killed General
Schneider was admitted. Under intense pressure, Colby disclosed
CIA control of large supplies of deadly poison gases, which President
Nixon had ordered destroyed some months earlier. Director Colby
also testified about the CIA's development of exotic weapons, the
press was permitted to photograph Colby showing the committee an
electric pistol which fired dissolving poison pellets. The agency also
admitted, in a more bizarre vein, that it had conducted drug experiments
on hundreds of unwitting American citizens by hiring prostitutes
to lure them into apartments, feed them drugs and seduce them,