The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has seriously threatened the political stability of certain Third World countries and is a major cause of the world's move towards nuclear war, a former CIA agent said last night.

John Stockwell, the highest-ranking former CIA official to speak critically of the agency, told a supportive Sanders Theater audience of 200 that the CIA's covert actions "disrupt the political and social fabric" of developing countries and threaten "the fate of the earth."

Stockwell said the government should ultimately "abolish" the agency, but he did not say what would take its place.

Stockwell, who directed the CIA's covert war in Angola before quitting in 1977, reiterated some of the ideas set forth in his recent book. "In Search of Enemies," denouncing the U.S.'s involvement in a number of Third World nations. He also criticized President Reagan's interventions in Nicaragua and Grenada.

The former agent recounted the deterioration of his faith in the CIA over the course of his 13 year career.

"Ninety-eight percent of the CIA operations in Vietnam were total fabrications," he said. Stockwell served as a case officer in Saigon during the Vietnam War.

"The case officers had to publish, so you'd recruit one of the townsmen to go out and pretend to get the news you wanted to print," he said, adding that when the U.S. effort reached its nadir, officers were ordered to stop reporting on the corruption of the South Vietnamese army.

"The point was not that you dissemble the facts and then figure a way in which to articulate them to the public. It is, rather, that you determine what you want them to hear, formulate it, and announce it," he explained.

Stockwell said that throughout the Vietnam War. CIA officials tried to rationalize the bloodshed He recalled one high-ranking official telling him. "It isn't our fault these people had the misfortune of being born Vietnamese."

"My mind was tucked," he said.

In 1975, soon after leaving Vietnam, the CIA moved into Angola. Stockwell said.