John Stockwell wasn't some basement-dwelling conspiracy theorist with a ham radio and a grudge. He was a guy with a silver star, a guy who ran the CIA’s Angola Task Force during one of the messiest proxy wars of the 1970s. When he walked away and wrote In Search of Enemies, he didn't just leak a few documents; he essentially ripped the roof off the Langley headquarters and invited everyone to look inside at the rot.
It’s a brutal read. Honestly, it’s a miracle the book ever saw the light of day considering how aggressively the agency usually guards its secrets. Stockwell describes a world where the United States didn't just observe foreign conflicts—it manufactured them because it quite literally needed an enemy to justify its own budget and existence.
Think about that for a second.
We’re talking about a period where the Cold War was the only lens the American government could see through. If there wasn't a communist threat in a specific corner of Africa, the CIA's job was to find a way to invent one or provoke a local group until they started acting like one. Stockwell’s account of the 1975 Angolan Civil War serves as the primary skeleton for the book, and it’s a skeleton with a lot of skeletons in its closet.
What In Search of Enemies Exposed About the Angola Mess
The book centers on Operation IA FEATURE. That was the code name for the CIA’s covert program to provide money and arms to the FNLA and UNITA, two groups fighting the Marxist-leaning MPLA. But here’s the kicker: Stockwell argues the MPLA wasn't even that committed to the Soviet Union until the U.S. started messing around.
The agency lied to Congress. They lied to the 40 Committee. They even lied to each other. Stockwell makes it clear that the goal wasn't a "free Angola." It was about sticking a finger in the eye of the Soviets, regardless of how many Angolan lives were chewed up in the process. He recounts how the CIA's propaganda department would literally fabricate stories about Cuban "atrocities" and feed them to the international press. These weren't just exaggerations; they were complete fictions written in a basement in Virginia and printed as "news" in Kinshasa or Lusaka.
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It's sort of haunting to realize how much of what we consider "history" from that era was just a script written by bored intelligence officers.
Stockwell describes a culture of "program managers" who viewed foreign countries as nothing more than squares on a game board. There was no cultural nuance. No one cared about the tribal histories of the Bakongo or the Ovimbundu. They just wanted to see "their" guys winning so they could get promoted. He writes with the weary tone of a man who realized too late that he was the bad guy in someone else’s story.
The Problem with Covert Action as a Business Model
One of the most chilling parts of the book is Stockwell's breakdown of why the CIA needs enemies.
If the world is at peace, what happens to the billions of dollars flowing into clandestine services? What happens to the thousands of jobs dedicated to subversion? They vanish. Therefore, the "Search of Enemies" isn't a quest for security; it's a quest for institutional survival.
He points out that the CIA often worked at cross-purposes with the State Department. While diplomats were trying to build bridges, the CIA was busy blowing them up (metaphorically and sometimes literally). This internal friction meant that American foreign policy was often schizophrenic. One hand would offer aid while the other would fund a coup against the person receiving the aid. It was chaos.
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The High Cost of Blowing the Whistle
Stockwell paid a massive price for this. He was the first mid-level CIA officer to go public with such a detailed, firsthand account of a specific operation. The agency tried to ruin him. They sued him for the profits of the book, citing he had violated his secrecy agreement. This wasn't about the information being "classified" in a way that hurt national security—it was about the agency being embarrassed.
The Supreme Court eventually weighed in on similar cases, like Snepp v. United States, which basically gave the government the right to seize money from whistleblowers who don't get their books pre-cleared by the agency.
Stockwell’s book is a messy, angry, deeply detailed account. It’s not a polished piece of academic history. It’s a field report from a man who saw the sausage being made and realized the meat was rancid. He details the logistics of the arms shipments, the secret flights, and the casual way officers talked about the deaths of "indigenous" allies.
It makes you wonder. If this was happening in 1975, what does the modern version of "searching for enemies" look like?
Why We Still Talk About Stockwell in 2026
The reason In Search of Enemies hasn't disappeared into the "bargain bin" of history is that the patterns haven't changed. The names of the countries change—from Angola to Nicaragua, from Afghanistan to Libya—but the methodology of the "permanent war" remains the same.
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Stockwell’s work provided a roadmap for understanding the "Deep State" before that term became a weird political buzzword. He wasn't talking about a secret cabal of lizard people; he was talking about a massive, un-elected bureaucracy that functions with zero oversight and its own set of morals.
The book forces the reader to confront a painful reality: the U.S. government often creates the very monsters it later claims it must protect us from.
When you read through the chapters on "The CIA and the Press," it feels eerily modern. Stockwell explains how they would "plant" stories in foreign newspapers knowing they would be picked up by the Associated Press or Reuters and "replayed" back into American newsrooms. It’s a feedback loop of disinformation. It makes you question every headline you see about foreign conflicts today.
Lessons for the Modern Reader
If you're going to dive into Stockwell’s world, keep a few things in mind. First, he has an axe to grind. He’s a defector. But even the agency’s own internal reviews (many of which have been partially declassified since) confirm the broad strokes of his claims. The Angola operation was, by almost any measure, a total disaster that resulted in decades of civil war and millions of landmines still buried in the soil today.
Actionable Insights for Navigating Geopolitical Information:
- Audit your news sources. When a new "enemy" appears in the media overnight, look for who is funding the opposition groups and where the original reports are coming from.
- Read the declassified record. Visit the CIA Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) Reading Room to see how operations from 30 or 40 years ago are described in their own internal memos. It's often very different from the public narrative of the time.
- Understand the "Blowback" effect. Recognize that current foreign policy decisions usually have a 20-year "tail." The enemies of tomorrow are often the allies of today who were given weapons and training without a long-term plan.
- Support transparency legislation. The only thing that stopped the Angola madness was the Clark Amendment, which was passed only because people like Stockwell made it impossible for the government to keep lying.
The search for enemies is a self-fulfilling prophecy. As long as there is a budget for conflict, conflict will be found. Stockwell’s book is the manual on how that machine works. Read it not just as a history of the 70s, but as a warning for the present.