Only years later did I realise that I had obtained the best half-education available. They taught me the classics; we studied philosophy and history with award winning professors. But my generation didn't question. We scribbled furiously in our notebooks, trying to capture the professors exact words so we could regurgitate them faithfully back to them (there were no women professors in my program at the time f the examinations. Throughout my school years I never had a conversation with a liberal, much less a radical critic of the system, or even a serious questioner.

We have not met and will not have the opportunity of working together, as you are coming into the Central Intelligence Agency when I am leaving. Although I am disassociating myself from the Agency, I have read with considerable interest about your appointment and listened to some of your comments.

You have clearly committed yourself to defending the Agency from its detractors and to improving its image, and this has stirred a wave of hope among many of its career officers. However, others are disappointed that you have given no indication of intention, or even awareness of the need, for the 'internal housecleaning that is so conspicuously overdue the Agency.

You invited Agency officers to write you their suggestions or grievances, and you promised personally to read all such letters. While I no longer have a career interest, having already submitted my resignation, numerous friends in the DDO (Deputy Directorate for Operations) have encouraged me to write to you, hoping that it might lead to measures which would upgrade the clandestine services from its present mediocre standards to the elite organization it was once reputed to be.

While I sympathize with their complaints, I have agreed to write this letter more to document the circumstances and conditions which led to my own disillusionment with CIA.

First, let me introduce myself. I was until yesterday a successful GS 14 with 12 years in the Agency, having served seven full tours of duty including Chief of Base, Lubumbashi; Chief of Station, Bujumbura; Officer in Charge of Tay Ninh Province in Vietnam; and Chief, Angola Task Force. My file documents what I was told occasionally, that I could realistically aspire to top managerial positions in the Agency.

I grew up in Zaire, a few miles from the Kapanga Methodist Mission Station, which was recently `liberated' by Katangese invaders, and I speak fluent English and Tshiluba, `High' French and smatterings of Swahili and other dialects.

My disillusionment was progressive throughout four periods of my career. First, during three successive assignments in Africa from 1966 through 1977 I increasingly questioned the value and justification of the reporting and operations we worked so hard to generate.

In one post, Abidjan, there was no Eastern bloc or Communist presence, no subversion, limited United States interests and a stable government. The three of us competed with State Department officers to report on President Houphouet-Boigny's health and local politics.

I attempted, to rationalize that my responsibility was to contribute, and not to evaluate the importance of my contribution which should be done by supergrades in Washington. However, this was increasingly difficult as I looked up through a chain of command which included, step-by-step: (a) the Branch Chief, who had never served in Africa and was conspicuously ignorant of Black Africa,; (b) the Chief of Operations, who was a senior officer although he had never served an operational overseas tour and was correspondingly naive about field operations; and (c) the Division Chief, who was a political dilettante who had never served an operational tour in Africa... Their leadership continuously reflected their inexperience and ignorance.

Standards of operations were low in the field, considerable energy was devoted to the accumulation of perquisites and living a luxurious life at the taxpayer's expense. When I made Chief of Station, a supergrade took me out for drinks and, after welcoming me to the exclusive inner club of `chiefs', proceeded to brief me on how to supplement my income by an additional $3,000 to $4,000 per year, tax-free, by manipulating my representational and operational funds. This was quite within the regulations. For example, the COS Kinshasa last year legally collected over $9,000 from CIA for the operation of his household...

The organization currently belongs to the old, to the burned out. Young officers, and there are some very good ones, must wait until generations retire before they can move up. Mediocre performances are guaranteed by a promotion system wherein time in grade and being a`good ole boy' are top criteria, i.e., there are no exceptional promotions and the outstanding individual gets his promotions at the same time as the 'onlygood' and even some of the 'not-really-so-good' officers, and he must wait behind a line of tired old men for the truly challenging field assignments.

These young officers are generally supervised by unpromotable middle-grade officers, who for many years have been unable to go overseas and participate personally in operational activity. These conditions are obviously discouraging to dynamic young people, demoralizingly so, and several have told me they are also seeking opportunities outside the Agency.

With each new Director they hope there will be a housecleaning and reform, but each Director comes and goes, seven in my time, preoccupied with broader matters of state, uttering meaningless and inaccurate platitudes about conditions and standards inside the DDO. The only exception was James Schlesinger, who initiated a housecleaning but was transferred to the Department of Defence before it had much effect.

You, sir, have been so bold as to state your intention to abrogate American constitutional rights, those of freedom of speech, in order to defend and protect the American intelligence establishment. This strikes me as presumptuous of you, especially before you have even had a good look inside the CIA to see if it is worth sacrificing constitutional rights for.

If you get the criminal penalties you are seeking for the disclosure of classified information, or even the civil penalties which President Carter and Vice-President Mondale have said they favour, then Americans who work for the CIA could not, when they find themselves embroiled in criminal and immoral activity which is commonplace in the Agency, expose that activity without risking jail or poverty as punishment for speaking out. Cynical men, such as those who gravitate to the top of the CIA, could then by classifying a document or two protect and cover up illegal actions with relative impunity.

I predict that the American people will never surrender to you the right of any individual to stand in public and say whatever is in his heart and mind. That right is our last line of defence against the tyrannies and invasions of privacy which events of recent years have demonstrated are more than paranoiac fantasies. I am enthusiastic about the nation's prospects under the new administration, and I am certain President Carter will reconsider his position on this issue.

And you, sir, may well decide to address yourself to the more appropriate task of setting the Agency straight from the inside out.

"So, what happened was a team of what they call ‘CIA renegades' - because it wasn't the coat-and-tie people inside the building like myself, and David McMichael I think is sitting in the back - CIA officers who were of the establishment inside. It was the renegades down in Florida, who were working this destabilization activity against Cuba, working with Cuban exiles, overlapping greatly with the Mafia, which was involved in this flow of drugs from Cuba into the United States.

These people plotted a military style ambush in Dallas, and they set up a team of shooters on the top of buildings. They had the cooperation of someone in the Secret Service. They had the cooperation of the Dallas police. They got the parade route redirected. They got Kennedy into this � the car into this place where he would have to make a 120-degree turn. The Secret Service driver stopped when the bullets began flying, and anyone who's been through that kind of training � and I've been through their bang-and-burn courses � they drill it into you that when the bullets start flying in a situation like, you have a president or yourself or something, you mash down on the gas, and you get the hell out of there. You don't stop and look around as a seasoned Secret Service driver did in fact. And Kennedy was shot down short distances from shooting stations, probably four of them, firing probably seven shots. He was hit twice � once in the back, once in the front of the neck � and twice in the head. Connally was hit once or twice. Two bullets were fired on each side of the thing. The convoy then blasted away and got out of there.

Immediately, the FBI launched a cover-up, the announced purpose by the people in the establishment being to prove � to reassure, as they put it � the nation that it was the work of the lone assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald. The evidence was tampered with massively. The president's body was altered. The photographs of the autopsy were altered, and 49 witnesses were killed so they could not blow the whistle and testify and blow this thing open. Until this day, despite the fact that the House committee in 1979 concluded that it was a conspiracy, there has been no formal investigation by the Justice Department of the conspiracy to kill our president. This was nothing less than a coup d'etat. They were faced � they, the conservatives, the ones that hated John Kennedy, were faced � with his reelection and possibly his brother's after that, and they could not be bothered to wait for democracy to take its course.

So, they plotted an ambush, and they killed him. And their choice � a man who was playing ball with them, who was accepting money from the Mob � Lyndon Johnson moved right into the presidency, and the oil depletion allowance, the Vietnam War, the essential things they wanted they got immediately. The crusade against organized crime was dropped, and world went on as they wanted it to, according to their wishes, without their having to bother with an election. Read for yourselves. We've got a number of meticulously researched books out on the market now and a bunch of people who are determined to bring this out, and finally, two and a half decades later, make it clear to the people that the government must sooner or later face the truth."

The President was perfunctorily warned of the threats against him, but the usual vigilant efforts to protect him were not taken. The Secret Service, FBI, and local police certainly can protect presidents. They do it continuously not only inside the United States but in foreign capitals around the world. Numerous, almost routine, techniques are involved, like bringing extra security forces to blanket problem areas, moving in caravans of cars at a brisk 45 miles an hour, and using, whenever possible, unannounced routes that do not include sharp, slow turns.

When President Kennedy and his wife visited Dallas on November 22, 1963, nearly all of the protections were lifted. Available Texas Guard units were not called into the city and available Dallas policemen were temporarily released from duty. The result? A team of CIA, Cuban exile, and Mafia-related renegades organized a simple military ambush in Dallas and successfully gunned him down. The ambush and its coverup were brazen and astonishingly open. In fact several plots, in Chicago, Miami, and Houston, to kill Kennedy had misfired or been thwarted. The plot that succeeded in Dealey Plaza was so open that various people were reported prior to the event to have said that Kennedy would be killed with a rifle and a patsy would be blamed for the crime. Individuals like Joseph Milteer, the "umbrella man," and a CIA pilot Robert Plumlee went to Dealey Plaza on the 22nd of November to watch.

Obviously, most CIA personnel were not involved and did not know of the plot since sensitive operations are compartmentalized in order to protect their security. Moreover, the great majority of the coat-and-tie people inside CIA headquarters would never have put up with a hit on the President. A great deal of the success of the CIA is due to its ability to attract patriotic, good soldiers who believe in the general rightness of what they do, and then insulate them through compartmentalization from the heavier activities.

The OPMONGOOSE renegades, however, included assassins, terrorists, and people who had been involved in the drug traffic from Cuba into the United States. The team set up a military-style ambush in Dealey Plaza, with shooters on the tops of buildings and the famous grassy knoll. The route of the President's convoy included a 120-degree turn which slowed the car to a near stop. There was cooperation of elements of the Secret Service, of the Dallas Police, and of other law enforcement agencies.

When the shooting began, the Secret Service driver put on - the brakes (home movies of the scene show the brake lights on). Anyone who has been through that kind of training - and I have been through their "bang and burn" courses - is drilled to react. When the bullets start flying in such a situation, you mash down on the gas and you get the hell out of the area; you do not slow down and look around as the seasoned Secret Service driver in fact did. In ten seconds of rifle fire, only one of the Secret Service agents in the trail car moved to the President's aid. The one agent who did move was Jackie Kennedy's personal guard, in Dallas at her request, not part of the team that was there to protect the President.

Kennedy was shot at very close range from firing stations, probably four of them, where the assassins fired eight to ten shots. He was hit in the back, throat, and twice in the head, two bullets each from the front and from the back. Texas Governor John Connally was hit twice. Two bullets were fired into the concrete, one on each side of the convoy. After the shooting stopped, the convoy raced away. The FBI and other branches of the government immediately launched the coverup. The new President, Lyndon Johnson, ordered the limousine in which Kennedy was killed be flown to Chicago and destroyed. The announced goal of President Johnson was to "reassure" the nation by proving that the killing was the work of lone assassin Lee Harvey Oswald. It was variously suggested that an investigation that turned up Soviet involvement might lead to nuclear war; it might embarrass the Kennedy widow; it might lead to domestic unrest. In fact; it might have led to a sizeable number of very important people and organizations being implicated in a presidential assassination. That might very well have exercised the population sufficiently to provoke a serious investigation of CIA, FBI, and Mafia activities in the country, and to demand some changes.

The evidence was extensively tampered with. The President's body was altered; the photographs of the autopsy were altered; and over 100 witnesses were killed or died mysterious and violent deaths. To this day, despite the House Committee's 1979 conclusion that there was a conspiracy, there has been no formal, official investigation. Neither have all the documents been released.

Even among the majority that acknowledge that there was abroad conspiracy, many find it difficult to believe that the CIA itself could have been involved. Perhaps, they reluctantly concede, "renegades" might have had something to do with it.

In fact, there is strong evidence that both the FBI and the CIA high commands had prior knowledge of and direct involvement in the conspiracy. After the Dallas Police had arrested Lee Harvey Oswald, but before they could have positively identified him (he had false identification papers in his wallet) much less interrogate him and reasonably confirm his (alleged) guilt, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover telephoned Bobby Kennedy in Washington to tell him that the assassin had been caught. Hoover gave Kennedy biographic information that he could only have had prior to the assassination. Clearly he was waiting with information about Lee Harvey Oswald, to blame him for the killing.

Similarly, CIA operatives far from Dallas were waiting with biographic information about Oswald to feed to the media. Some time after the Warren Committee hearings, journalist Seth Kantor found himself broadly suspected of being somehow a secret agent because, researchers found, the Warren Commission had classified part of his testimony. Puzzled, he checked and found that the Commission had in fact classified telephone calls he made during the afternoon of the killing. In addition to checking his own notes, he succeeded in forcing the Warren Commission to return his testimony to him, and identified the calls. One was to the managing editor of the Scripps-Howard news service bureau in Washington. Mid-afternoon, again long before the police could have interrogated Oswald, made a positive identification, concluded what had happened, and eliminated the possibility of accomplices in a conspiracy to kill the President, the editor told Kantor that Oswald had been identified as the assassin and instructed him to call Hal Hendricks, a journalist who gave Kantor detailed biographic information about Oswald. Years later, in the CIA-engineered coup in Chile, Hendricks was positively identified as a CIA operative working under journalistic cover. Moreover, the Warren Commission's move to classify the phone calls is proof positive that it knew there was an intelligence connection with Hendricks and strongly suggests that it was willfully covering up the assassination conspiracy.

In sum, the FBI Director and CIA media operatives were waiting, primed, before the assassination to launch the coverup and pin the blame on the pre-selected patsy, Oswald.

John Stockwell, who publicly resigned from the Central Intelligence Agency in 1977, accusing it of deceit and illegality, after a career as a covert operative in Vietnam and Africa, died this month in Austin, Texas. He was 88.

Mr. Stockwell's body was found in a wooded area near his home on June 14, one day after a bulletin known as a silver alert was issued asking for the public's help in finding a missing older adult, said Kristen Dark, a spokeswoman for the Travis County Sheriff's Office. She said there was no sign of foul play, but the sheriff's office was considering suicide as a possible cause of death in its investigation.

His wife, Virginia Stockwell, declined to provide information about his death or life.

Mr. Stockwell's break with the C.I.A. � during a period when several former officers published damning exposés of what was informally known as "the Company" � was public and showy.

His resignation letter ran in The Washington Post. He wrote a tell-all book, In Search of Enemies (1978), which the C.I.A. sought to suppress. He was interviewed on the CBS news program "60 Minutes" about his path from Cold War idealist to scathing critic of America's covert efforts at regime change abroad.

In the 1970s, congressional hearings and  press investigations  had exposed C.I.A. plots to assassinate foreign leaders, topple governments and illegally monitor the mail and phone calls of American citizens. Senator  Frank Church , Democrat of Idaho, who chaired a 1975 Senate investigation, described the agency as "a rogue elephant."

Mr. Stockwell's 12-year career as a case officer involved recruiting spies, bugging embassies and undermining foreign governments. He concluded that the C.I.A.'s covert operations had done next to nothing to protect the country's national security.

"Over the years, a profound, arrogant moral corruption set in," he wrote in his book.

"Eventually, like any secret police," he added, referring to the C.I.A.'s clandestine services, "they became abusive of the people: They drugged American citizens, opened private mail, infiltrated the media with secret propaganda and disinformation, lied to our elected representatives and set themselves above the law and our Constitution."

After resigning, he spent five days testifying before congressional committees.

Mr. Stockwell, who had spent much of his childhood with his missionary parents in the Belgian Congo (now the Democratic Republic of Congo), served for three years in the Marine Corps before being recruited by the C.I.A. in 1964, when he was 27.

"I was ripe for the picking," he told The Post in 1978. "I was terribly naïve. I saw the world divided between the good guys and the bad guys."

After a couple of low-stakes postings in Africa, he was sent to Vietnam in 1973 as the officer in charge of the Tay Ninh province. In Vietnam, the C.I.A. was dominated by "bungling and deceit," he later wrote. When South Vietnam fell to the Communists in 1975, C.I.A. leaders "fled in panic," according to Mr. Stockwell, abandoning thousands of Vietnamese operatives they had recruited and then left exposed.

He acknowledged, however, that his break with the C.I.A. was not a clean case of conscience triumphing over agency corruption. He waffled for years over whether to walk away, seduced by the job's prestige and the paycheck.

"I would like to present myself as a man of intense principle who saw bad things and immediately resigned in disgust," he  told  the filmmaker  Saul Landau  of the Institute for Policy Studies, a Washington think tank, in 1978. "But my career was obviously going quite well."

His ex-wife, Betty Jane, had a truer moral compass. "The business of the C.I.A is to go out and to corrupt individuals in their own country, and that is something that corrupts oneself," she said in the same 1978 film.

She repeatedly asked her husband to resign, she said. "It's going to be the C.I.A., or it's going to be our marriage," she recalled telling him. "And he chose the C.I.A."

In 1975, once their marriage had ended, Mr. Stockwell accepted what he considered a plum assignment: chief of the Angola task force, which meant running a covert C.I.A. war in southern Africa.

President  Gerald R. Ford  and Secretary of State  Henry A. Kissinger  had ordered the C.I.A. to  intervene  against a military force backed by the Soviet Union and Cuba in oil-rich Angola, which was emerging from colonial rule by Portugal.

From the C.I.A. headquarters outside Washington, Mr. Stockwell directed the organization and secret funding of pro-America paramilitary troops. The agency sent $32 million and a trove of weapons to the Angolan guerrillas, who were led by the brother-in-law of President  Mobuto Sese Seko  of neighboring Zaire, as Congo was known at the time.

As the U.S.-backed troops faltered, Mr. Kissinger ordered another $28 million to be sent in secret. In December 1975, Congress learned of the funding and passed a law to end it.

Well before that, it was evident to Mr. Stockwell that the C.I.A.'s actions in Angola were ill conceived and that the secret war had produced needless bloodshed.

"I attempted to count the hundreds, thousands of lives that have been taken in thoughtless little C.I.A. adventures," he wrote in his April 1977  letter of resignation .

John Robert Stockwell was born on Aug. 27, 1937, in Brazoria, Texas, one of three children of William F. Stockwell and Wilora (Baker) Stockwell.

His father, who had trained as an engineer, was contracted to build a hydroelectric plant for a Presbyterian mission in the Belgian Congo. The family moved there in the 1940s, and young Bob, as he was known, attended school with African classmates for a decade. His mother supervised the boarding school at the mission station in Mutoto.

He received a bachelor's degree in 1959 from the University of Texas and then enlisted in the Marine Corps. The same year, he married Betty Jane McCallum, a college classmate.

A complete list of his survivors was not immediately available.

The height of Mr. Stockwell's public prominence came in the wake of the publication of "In Search of Enemies."

In The New York Times Book Review, Kevin Buckley, a former Saigon bureau chief for Newsweek, described the book as "a consistently understated but powerful description of the changes in Mr. Stockwell's conscience, as well as an extremely useful account of a political and military failure."

The journalist Sally Quinn, profiling Mr. Stockwell for The Post, described him as "cleareyed, direct and humorless," adding: "He is quite handsome at 40. In fact, if you didn't know he was a former C.I.A. agent, you might take him for a country singer."

After leaving the agency, Mr. Stockwell settled in Austin to pursue a writer's life. He published a novel, "Red Sunset" (1982), about chess, infidelity and an American oil executive's wife in Africa; and "The Praetorian Guard: the U.S. Role in the New World Order" (1991), a collection of essays warning that the United States had continued to secretly support foreign wars after the end of the Cold War.

When Mr. Stockwell published "In Search of Enemies," the C.I.A. sued him, claiming a breach of secrecy. He filed for bankruptcy in an attempt to thwart the agency's efforts to impound his profits, but it won the right to collect 65 cents for every copy that was sold.

"For that reason," he told The Gazette of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in 1989, "I always urge people to get the book from the library."

Decorated former CIA operations officer John Stockwell passed away on June 14, 2026.

Stockwell worked for the Agency from 1964 until his resignation in 1977. An obituary at the website of FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting) says he was stationed in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo), Vietnam, and Angola, eventually quitting the CIA in disgust over the “brutal mass killing by US proxies.”

Having received the Intelligence Medal of Merit for his service, he later testified to the Senate Intelligence Committee on Agency abuses in 1978, on the eve of publishing a best-selling exposé entitled “In Search of Enemies.” The book prompted the CIA to sue him successfully for “not submitting to agency censorship.”

Stockwell then embarked on the college lecture circuit. In 1987, he delivered a talk entitled “The Secret Wars of the CIA,” in which he described the CIA’s purpose as “to keep the world unstable, and to propagandize the American people to hate, so we will let the establishment spend any amount of money on arms.”

He also became outspoken concerning CIA culpability over the Indonesian genocide of 1965 in which some 800,000 people were killed.