Ex-CIA Officer Miles Copeland : Secret Agent Man – Rolling Stone
▻https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/secret-agent-man-52557
1986
You’ve got to know who [the terrorists] are. You’ve got to know their reasons for doing it. And you’ve got to manipulate them in one way or another. We have to somehow come to grips with the problem. The Israelis went in to Lebanon and killed tens of thousands of people. They say, “That’s exaggerating, we didn’t kill but 5,000 people.” Okay, let’s say they killed only 2,000 people, which is a very modest estimate. But they destroyed Lebanon. They then set up groups against each other, made chaos ten times worse than it already was. Instead of helping the Shiites — the Shiites welcomed the Israelis in — we, the United States, gave a billion dollars to the Israelis. One billion we gave because it costs a lot of money to destroy someone else’s country. We gave peanuts — Red Cross supplies — to the Shiites. What we should have done is gone in there and said to the Shiites: “Look, a lot of injustice has been done. We’re going to put your orange groves back and put you back commercially. . . . “
[...] Let’s get back to the reason these guys are terrorists. They’re terrorists because their orange groves have been destroyed and they’ve got nothing to do. They can’t even get to their farms because the Israelis have declared them out of bounds and destroyed a lot of them. Now, the CIA’s job is to explain all of this to our government. That’s the main job of the CIA — to go to the White House and explain to the president that the only reason these terrorists are terrorists is because of the way they’ve been treated, and they’ve got nothing else to do. In fact, I’ll tell you quite frankly, if people came into Alabama, my home state, and destroyed my farms and kicked me around and kicked my children around, I’m going to become a terrorist, just as the French became terrorists under the Germans in World War II. It’s understandable. The CIA understood this and understood it very well and explained it to the president. But we had pressures from Congress. The members of Congress don’t give a damn about foreign affairs. They give a damn about their next election. They have to do what makes them popular enough with their constituents to get reelected. And their constituency cares about one place in this world, and that’s the United States.