In Search of Enemies - A CIA Story - John Stockwell

Footsoldiers of Foreign Policy
been a sop to appease her anger, and perhaps it had worked. She
seemed cheerful as well as knowledgable as she answered my questions.
And, as I said, she was good. "G, P, SWISH?" her laughter could
be heard all over the branch. "That's Tom Killoran, the consul
general in Luanda. A dear man, but he doesn't have much use for
the CIA."
Brenda and I both knew that State Department principal officers
often view their parasitic CIA stations as unnecessary liabilities.
Generally the CIA station chief is the second or third secretary of
the embassy, but he always has considerably more free funds to
spend than the ambassador and all of the legitimate State Department
officers together. For example, as COS in Bujumbura I had
s900 per year in "representational" funds, plus an unlimited amount
of "operational entertainment" funds, plus a virtually unlimited fund
for agents' salaries, bribes, and gifts. Altogether I had about s30,ooo
cash each year to dole out or spend to enhance my effectiveness. The
ambassador and three foreign service officers had a total of s2,ooo
between them, not enough to cover the Fourth of July reception. The
extra money translates into greater social and operational activity,
making the CIA man more visible and seemingly more important
than the State Department officers. Often the CIA man will even
establish a direct contact with the chief of state, leading him to
believe that through the CIA he has the more authentic contact with
the American government. At the same time, while the CIA station
rarely produces significantly better or more timely intelligence than
the embassy obtains through overt sources, it always represents a
liability to the United States embassy as CIA officers scurry about
with their semicovert operations, bribing and corrupting local officials.
Since the Kennedy administration, the State Department chief
of mission (the ambassador, consul general, or charge d'affaires) is
the president's official representative in a given country and all other
agencies are subordinate to him. A strongly antiagency ambassador
can make problems for the CIA chief of station, although any effort
to evict a CIA station altogether is impossibly restricted by politics
and bureaucratic inertia back in Washington.
MacElhinney predicted that GPSWISH would be greatly exasperated
when he learned about the IAFEATURE program. SWISH so
far had not been briefed, not even told of the 40 Committee's decision