Former CIA Agent John Stockwell on media manipulation — I transcribed the entire interview, there are some great quotes

I'll put the transcript in the comments. I just stuck the vid at 50% speed and typed along. I'm not that weird, do not make fun of me!

The transcript still has some ums, uhhs, and you-knows in it, might want to clean those up before you paste excerpts anywhere.

and uh shoutout to emizeko, who apparently posted this video a month ago

videos @hexbear.net

emizeko [they/them] @hexbear.net

2y ago

Former CIA Agent John Stockwell Talks about How the CIA Worked in Vietnam and Elsewhere

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one of many standout quotes:
And we pumped just, just, dozens of stories about Cuban atrocities, Cuban rapists, uh, in one case we had the Cuban rapists caught and tried by the Ovimunda maidens who had been their victims, and then we ran photographs that made almost every newspaper in the country of the Cubans being executed by the Ovimunda women who had supposedly been their victims.
These were fake photos?
Oh, absolutely. We didn't know of one single atrocity committed by the Cubans. It was pure, raw, false propaganda to create an illusion of communists, you know, eating babies for breakfast and that sort — totally false propaganda.
- Another good snippet, just before that quote:
  We would take stories which we would write and put them in the Zambia times. And then pull them out and send them to a journalist on our payroll in Europe. But his cover story, you see, would be that he'd gotten them from his stringer in Lusaka who had gotten them from the Zambia times. We had the complicity of the government of Zambia, Kenneth Kaunda if you will, to put these false stories into his newspapers. But after that point, the journalists at Reuters and AFP, the management was not witting of it.
  And this one:
  You have contact with a journalist, you will give him true stories, you'll get information from him, you'll also give him false stories.
  Did you buy his confidence with true stories?
  You buy his confidence and set him up — we've seen this happen recently with Jack Anderson, for example, who has his intelligence sources, and he has also admitted that he's been set up by them. Every fifth story just simply being false. You also work on their human vulnerabilities to recruit them, in a classic sense, to make them your agent so you can control what they do, so you don't have to set them up sort of, you know, by putting one over on them, so you can say "here, plant this one next Tuesday."
  Can you do this with responsible reporters?
  Yes. The Church committee brought it out in 1975 and then Woodward and Bernstein put an article in Rolling Stone a couple years later. Um. Four hundred journalists cooperating with the CIA, uh, including some of the biggest names in the business, to consciously introduce the stories into the press.
  
  The story about the connections between the CIA and journalists was written by Bernstein by himself. It's a decent read:
  https://www.carlbernstein.com/the-cia-and-the-media-rolling-stone-10-20-1977