In Search of Enemies - A CIA Story - John Stockwell

The Angola Program (45]
I kept expecting Bantam to withdraw into the sanctuary of his
senior rank, but he seemed to feel close to me, as though we had been
friends for a long time.
He looked at me absently.
"I tried to retire in June, when I came back from Djakarta," he
said finally. "That's how tired I was of this sort of thing."
"What happened?"
"They turned me down."
"But at fifty you can retire whenever you want to."
"I'm only forty-seven," he said wryly.
Ouch, I thought. Open mouth and insert foot! He looked more like
fifty-five.
"I started young," he said, letting me off the hook. We both knew
that the intelligence business uses case officers harshly, burning them
out at an early age.*
"What are we expected to do with the fourteen million?" I asked.
"The best we can. The 40 Committee paper reads that we are to
prevent an easy victory by Soviet-backed forces in Angola."
"No win?" I enunciated each word.
worded charter to launch thousands of covert actions in every comer of the world.
Most of them had dubious justification in terms of the United States security. (See
the Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Government Operations with
Respect to Intelligence Activities [also called the Church Committee Report]. April
26, 1976.) The Hughes-Ryan Amendment to the National Assistance Act of 1974
required that no funds be expended by or on behalf of the CIA for operations abroad,
other than activities designed to obtain necessary intelligence, unless two conditions
are met: (a) the president must make a finding that such operation is important to
the national security of the United States; and (b) the president must report in a ...
timely fashion a description of such operation and its scope to congressional committees.
Theoretically the Senate has controlled the agency budget since 1947 but
CIA funds were buried in the Department of Defense budget, and without detailed
knowledge of CIA activities, the Senate could make little practical use of this power.
*The CIA has a special arrangement which permits any employee who has three
years of overseas duty to retire at age fifty, with as much as s20,ooo per year in
retirement pay. The stresses that shorten case officers' lives are not what one might
guess, certainly not those of James Bond-like danger and intrigue. Most case officers
work under official (State Department) cover, and circulate after hours in the world
of cocktail and dinner parties. They become accustomed to a life-style of rich food,
alcohol, and little exercise. At work they are subject to bureaucratic stresses comparable
to a sales office or a newsroom, with publishing deadlines and competitive
pressures to produce recruitments.