John Stockwell on Angola

John R. Stockwell is a former CIA officer who managed the U.S. involvement in the Angolan Civil War as Chief of the Angola Task Force during its 1975 covert operations. When America lost interest in Africa, he resigned and wrote In Search of Enemies, an insider's account of a major CIA "covert action." The Amazon review says it is mostly a dry account of meetings and bureaucratic decision making, and about the boring financial and logistic aspects of CIA operation.

Stockwell claims that the CIA was counterproductive to national security, and that its "secret wars" provided no benefit for the United States. The CIA, he stated, had singled out the MPLA to be an enemy in Angola despite the fact that the MPLA wanted relations with the United States and had not committed a single act of aggression against the United States.