In Search of Enemies - A CIA Story - John Stockwell

Propaganda and Politics [201]
see Mobutu. There would be no record. Chiefs of station are supposed
to have an instinct for such things.
Like magic, Germani was expelled from Kinshasa on November
22. Without any cables or memoranda being written at headquarters,
the string was pulled, the problem solved, and there was nothing in
CIA records prove how it had happened.•
Increasingly, the propaganda war became uphill work. On September
10, when the FNLA retreated from Caxito the second time,
it left behind crates of munitions which bore fresh U.S. Air Force
*This is the way the ouster of Nkrumah was handled in Ghana, 1966. The 40
Committee had met and rejected an agency proposal to oust Nkrumah. The Accra
station was nevertheless encouraged by headquarters to maintain contact with
dissidents of the Ohanian army for the purpose of gathering intelligence on their
activities. It was given a generous budget, and maintained intimate contact with the
plotters as a coup was hatched. So close was the station's involvement that it was
able to coordinate the recovery of some classified Soviet military equipment by the
United States as the coup took place. The station even proposed to headquarters
through back channels that a squad be on hand at the moment of the coup to storm
the Chinese embassy, kill everyone inside, steal their secret records, and blow up
the building to cover the fact. This proposal was quashed, but inside CIA headquarters
the Accra station was given full, if unofficial credit for the eventual coup, in
which eight Soviet advisors were killed. None of this was adequately reflected in the
agency's written records.
This technique has worked for the agency in many other situations. Perhaps an
irritating politician in a far comer of the world is magically eliminated, while the
CIA records show no evidence of involvement in the crime. When done skillfully
it is also the key to the individual case officer's rationalization of his conduct, his
.. plausible denial" to his own conscience, as though he were not responsible. He can
say, "We talked about the problem Germani was causing (or Lumumba, Trujillo,
Schneider, et al.). but it never even occurred to me to suggest that anything be done
about it . ., This is my own theory of what really happened in the assassination of
Lumumba. The CIA plotted to poison him, but lost its nerve. The now-public record
shows that CIA officers discussed the Lumumba threat with other Congolese politicians.
They did the rest.
But of course the case officers are responsible; the things wouldn't have been done
if they had not been there, setting the stage. For example, in Vietnam I inherited
an operational relationship with a sadistic police officer, who occasionally mutilated
prisoners in a CIA safehouse called the .. Pink House." The police officer was heavily
funded by the CIA, which vouched for him to his superiors in Saigon- without this
support he would not have held his post. But a succession of CIA case officers had
absolved themselves of responsibility for his sadistic orgies by rationalizing that they
were only supporting him for his intelligence activities and were not responsible for
his other actions.