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Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press

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"Down the decades the CIA has approached perfection in one particular art, which we might term the 'uncover-up.' This is a process whereby, with all due delay, the Agency first denies with passion, then concedes in profoundly muffled tones, charges leveled against it. Such charges have included the Agency's recruitment of Nazi scientists and SS officials; experiments on unwitting American citizens; efforts to assassinate Fidel Castro; alliances with opium lords in Burma, Thailand and Laos; an assassination program in Vietnam; complicity in the toppling of Salvador Allende in Chile; the arming of opium traffickers and religious fanatics in Afghanistan; the training of murderous police in Guatemala and El Salvador; and involvement in drugs-and-arms shuttles between Latin America and the US.... Charges are raised against the CIA. The Agency leaks its denials to favored journalists, who hasten to inform the public that after intense self-examination, the Agency has discovered that it has clean hands. Then, when the hubbub has died down, the Agency issues a report in which, after patient excavation the resolute reader discovers that, yes, the CIA did indeed do more or less exactly what it had been accused of."

Alexander Cockburn and
Jefferey St. Clair
WHITEOUT: THE CIA, DRUGS AND THE PRESS
From Chapter 15: "The Uncover-up"

Two strange feelings came over me as I finished this book, which I could not put down when I picked it up until I spent an entire weekend devouring and digesting its contents until my eyes hurt. First was a complete and total numbing. No matter politically sophisticated or cynical you think you are, left, right or center, the contents of this book will kick you in the stomach repeatedly. The next feeling that comes however, is similar to the feeling of spending time in a foreign country and beginning to learn the language by rote and exposure; hearing familiar words and sounds and piecing together their meaning and social context. Only it is even more subtle. It is like traveling to England or Scotland, and hearing people speak English, but not an English to which you are accustomed... realizing that a "fag" for them is a cigarette and a "shag" is anything but a carpet...knowing that some of the most familiar words and phrases mean something totally different to what you know them to mean.

After reading WHITEOUT: THE CIA, DRUGS AND THE PRESS you will have no choice but to listen to the rhetoric of politicians and the catch phrases that dominate the airwaves like "War on Drugs," "War on Terrorism," "Operation [fill in the blank] Freedom" and know that you are not just being lied to: A FAMILIAR SOUNDING BUT ENTIRELY DIFFERENT LANGUAGE IS BEING SPOKEN. Politicians and the CIA don't just simply tell lies. They SPEAK the LANGUAGE *lie*. And though it as a language sounds like English, without a book of definitions and catch phrases the likes of which you would buy for your trip through Italy or France (Which is what WHITEOUT becomes by the third chapter), this secret dialect of English that the CIA speaks would never reveal itself. "War on Drugs," for example, is a catch phrase for social control, along socio-economic and racial lines...created by the most powerful drug dealers on earth. Nothing else.

"This is largely a story of criminal conduct, much of it by the Central Intelligence Agency. It is a story of how many in the US press have been complicit in covering the Agency's tracks. When compelled to concede the Agency's criminal activities such journalists often take refuge in the notion of 'rogue agents' or, as a last resort, of a 'rogue agency.' we do not accept this separation of the CIA's activities from the policies and directives of the US government. Whether it was Truman's meddling in China, which created the Burmese opium kings; or the Kennedy brothers' obsession with killing Fidel Castro; or Nixon's command for 'more assassinations' in Vietnam, the CIA has always been the obedient executor of the will of the US government, starting with the White House."

From the Preface

Chapter One of WHITEOUT sets the theme and tone of the entire book via describing the career assassination attempts on Gary Webb, an investigative journalist for the San Jose Mercury News who uncovered unavoidable proof of the CIA's involvement in the Nicaraguan Contra drug trade of the 80's. They, with the help of the CIA, deliberately planted tons of cocaine into the Black communities of Los Angeles which became converted and marketed in its cheap, hard rock form--ushering in the Crack era from which the whole of Black America has never recovered. (The leading newspapers of our nation, from the New York Times to the Washington Post, as opposed to supporting his work, attacked him; purposely ignoring his evidence and his sources proving the validity of his findings.) From there journalists Alexander Cockburn and Jefferey St. Clair give a fifty year history of the CIA that indirectly redefines both world history and current events and becomes more and more disturbing--even stomach turning--with every page. Collusion with and protection of Nazis; drug trading throughout the world; partnerships with the Mafia; leader assassinations and destabilizations of democracies that didn't support US interests; efforts at mind control and the testing of chemical/biological weapons on prisoners of war AND unknowing US citizens; and more. This book in fact obliterates so many Pollyanna and racist views of history since World War Two that the views themselves are revealed to be more catch phrases and ideas in this language of lies; phrases meant only to be defined according to the propagandistic symbolism of the secret society for which they were actually developed at the expense of the common people--and democracy itself.

This book is not for the faint of heart--and that includes more people than you think. And because of it, and the painstaking, probably dangerous research these journalists took on to write this, I cannot recommend it enough.

The CIA has always been a very secretive organization, and remains one today. In 1996, the publication of Gary Webb's "Dark Alliance" series threatened the CIA with unwelcome public scrutiny by exposing its complicity in the drug trade: the CIA-created Nicaraguan contras were funding their operations, in part, by selling crack cocaine on the streets of Los Angeles, with the agency's knowledge.

Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair's "Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press" jumps off from here. Wisely, Cockburn and St. Clair do not make Webb's story the core of their book; Webb's own book does that job admirably. What they do contribute to this story is a devastating account of the shameful way that the mainstream press, led by former intelligence officer Walter Pincus of the Washington Post, turned on Webb in an effort to discredit him and his story. Cockburn and St. Clair repeatedly expose the flaws in mainstream efforts to "debunk" the Dark Alliance series, and catch many reporters acting as little more than flacks for the CIA, often writing stories that said little more than "we know Webb's story is false because the CIA told us so."

But the core of "Whiteout" has a more historical perspective, as the authors set out to review the underside of the history of the CIA and its precursor, the OSS. And an ugly picture it is, too, as we see these agencies:

-recruiting the Mafia to assassinate foreign leaders.

-recruiting Nazi scientists to conduct experiments (often on blacks) in torture and mind control.

-helping war criminal Klaus Barbie escape Europe, and justice, to become a South American drug lord, arms dealer and apparent CIA operative.

-allying with the opium and heroin traders of Southeast Asia.

Working with drug dealers and other criminal elements is so common for the CIA that it would appear from this account to have been standard Agency procedure.

"Whiteout" is a well-written and well-researched book. Helpfully, the authors end each chapter with an annotated guide to further reading on the subject.

"Whiteout" is not pleasant reading; I could only take so much at a time before having to put it aside for the day. But it is necessary reading. In a democratic society, an agency such as the CIA, if it must exist, must be under constant scrutiny or it will lapse into lawlessness (the same is true of law enforcement agencies). It is clear that the mainstream media are not going to provide such scrutiny, so we must turn to independent journalists like Cockburn and St. Clair and others like them for the accurate information we need.

In Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press, authors Alex Cockburn and Jeff St Clair have synthesized a vast amount of information into an easy to read, cogent history of the CIA's involvement in the illicit trafficking of narcotics.

This unforgettable and very important book proves several things. First, that the CIA has been the world's biggest drug trafficker for the past 50 years. Second, that the major newspapers and TV networks have always known about it, but have chosen not to report it, under the aegis of national security. Third, that the end result of CIA drug dealing and the attendant media "whiteout" is the pacification of minority communities in America. And last but not least, Whiteout proves that when independent journalists like Gary Webb report the truth, they are inevitably smeared by the same powerful forces that put this unjust system into motion.

Whiteout is a volatile book and is sure to arouse the wrath of both Big Media and Big Brother. But it has been meticuously researched, and it is so well written that the case it makes is beyond any reasonable doubt. Authors Cockburn and St Clair are to be commended for their courage in providing such a valuable public service. Five stars for covering all the bases.

Whiteout, by investigative journalists Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, begins with the CIA's attempts, largely successful, to smash the career of a California reporter, Gary Webb, who had exposed the agency's ties to a ring of Nicaraguan exiles who were running a cocaine enterprise and sending some of the profits to the Contras in the 1980s. But that's just the beginning. Whiteout is really an alternative history of the CIA and other American intelligence outfits, beginning w/ the OSS and Office of Naval Intelligence's ties to Nazi spies, scientists and the doctors who performed heinous experiments on Jews and Gypsies at Dachau. It traces the agency's reliance on criminal gangs in France and an Italy, often invovled in the heroin trade, to bust striking dockworkers. It tells of the fixing of elections in Italy and Greece. The backing of drug gangs in Burma, Thailand, Laos and Afghanistan. The support for Klaus Barbie and generals behind the Cocaine Coup in Bolivia. It tells how US supported generals in South Vietnam made millions selling heroin to US troops. And it explores the mysteries of Mena airport and its sister operation in El Salvador. All in all horrifying and exhaustively documented expose. And a fast, if uncomfortable, read. Highly recommended.

First published in 1998, "Whiteout" is a meticulously documented account of the CIA's decades long role as an international drug peddler and of the surprising support it received in this capacity from America's purportedly liberal press. Authors Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair provide a detailed history of the CIA's drug business and its alliance with organized crime around the globe beginning with its precursor organizations in World War II (Naval Intelligence and the Office of Strategic Services) through the mid nineties.

While the authors span the CIA's fifty-year history of assassination, gruesome torture, and collaboration with evil figures such as drug lords and Nazi war criminals, the principle villain in this book is actually the American liberal press and not the agency itself. To be sure the agency has done some horrific things, but to anyone who has read their history, little of this is new or surprising and believers in "realpolitik" may even find them justifiable according to America's national interest. The latter point is often shallow and difficult to hold up under scrutiny but probably not worth examining here. Perhaps the only readers who'll find this book's portrayal of the CIA offensive are those whose view of the agency has been formed by James Bond movies and popular television shows such as "JAG", "Alias", and "The Agency". Sorry to burst your bubble folks, but don't worry, the tooth fairy isn't real either.

The centerpiece of whiteout is veteran San Jose journalist, Gary Webb who in 1996 broke the story that:

"For the better part of a decade, a San Francisco Bay Area drug ring sold tons of cocaine to the Crips and Bloods street gangs of Los Angeles and funneled millions in drug profits to a Latin American guerrilla army run by the US Central Intelligence Agency."

Webb had stumbled on this story almost accidentally, but could verify it with irrefutable evidence including the sworn grand jury testimony of one of the drug dealers who was also on the DEA payroll, as well as DEA and FBI documentation. One of the most damning aspects of Webb's story was not so much that the CIA subverted congress by funding a secret war that the legislature had refused to, but that it knowingly-and with great indifference-launched a drug epidemic that ravaged America's inner cities with addiction, violence, and murder.

Despite such hard evidence, which the San Jose Mercury News made available on its Web site, Webb and his paper were hounded mercilessly by liberal publications such as The Washington Post, The New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times. At first Webb's editor supported and encouraged him, but soon he caved in to the mounting pressure from these other publications and subsequently retracted the story. After bravely enduring an unprecedented attack on his work and professional qualifications, and after finally losing the support of his own paper, Web subsequently resigned and went on to publish his findings in book form.

Why, one might ask, would the liberal press go after one of its own instead of picking up the story and perhaps supplementing it with additional research? Cockburn and St. Clair argue that for a variety of reasons the liberal press-its reputation aside-is and always has been extraordinarily cooperative with the CIA. Several senior editors at the Washington Post, for example, make no secret of the fact that for years they have acted as agency "assets" and continue to collaborate with it to this day. Add to this the attitude of individuals such as the Washington Post's Katherine Graham who believe that most Americans are infants whose perceptions need to be managed by self appointed media parents such as herself. (Graham once stated: "We live in a dirty and dangerous world. There are some things the general public does not need to know, and shouldn't. I believe democracy flourishes when the government can take legitimate steps to keep its secrets and when the press can decide whether to print what it knows.")

Whether it collaborates directly with the government or simply takes it upon itself to manage our perceptions on its own, the press hardly serves a democratic or informative purpose in matters such as its treatment of Webb's story. And when you factor in the press's complacency regarding the three most important stories of the past few years (The attacks of September 11th, the colonization of Iraq, and the wave of corporate crimes) it becomes evident that the press is a prime contributor to the "dirty" and "dangerous" aspects of the world we live in.

This book is a summary of horrific CIA shenanigans which can be of interest to government watchdogs and ethics buffs. In particular, Cockburn and St. Clair attempt to sum up the story of the CIA's long-term involvement in the drug trade, often in direct opposition to the efforts of the DEA or rhetoric from two-faced politicians. This is all extremely hard to dismiss, given the enormous volume of evidence presented here and elsewhere. The problem with this book is that it's just an extensive list with almost no analysis whatsoever, and mostly rehashes work that has been done by stronger investigative journalists. Among many examples, Chapter 1 is based almost entirely on "Dark Alliance" by Gary Webb; and Chapter 8 is very heavily indebted to "Acid Dreams" by Martin Lee and Bruce Schlain.

This type of summarization shows all the weaknesses of conspiracy theories, complete with inflammatory language and far-reaching accusations. Though the authors try very hard not to give this impression, they assume that by piling on huge amounts of specific events and examples that are correlated (but not necessarily causal in the supposed direction), they are proving the existence of a large conspiracy by the CIA, or at least a higher plan. Meanwhile, one-third of the book's supposed goal of implicating the press in unethical CIA behavior is almost totally missing, except for occasional potshots at particular sympathetic journalists. There is no systemic evidence given of media complicity even though, once again, convincing evidence of this can be found elsewhere.

In the end, after piling on huge mountains of evidence about CIA drug running around the world and throughout history, again summarized from other sources, Cockburn and St. Clair completely forget to delve into the obvious conclusion promised by their summarization. That would be how the CIA, under the guise of protecting American security, is actually in the business of ideology, installing conservative-friendly dictators in weak nations and financing those regimes in any way possible, including getting involved in the drug trade. This has caused all kinds of serious ethical lapses, cover-ups, government lies and misinformation, and suffering for millions of Americans. After reading this book, you'll wish that the authors had reached that obvious conclusion. [~doomsdayer520~]

Whiteout expertly puts together a lot of the stories you may be vaguely familiar with and condenses them all down into one mesmerizing book. Ranging from Lucky Luciano and his vicious control of the New York City dockworkers to Barry Seal (the portly narcotics pilot who ended up being gunned down in the late 1980s when it appeared he was going to implicate the CIA and upper federal government conspirators in cocaine smuggling) and "Freeway" Ricky Ross, Whiteout succinctly organizes and presents all the stories pertaining to U.S. intelligence and national security state operatives cultivating and often dealing in heroin and cocaine trafficking.

Cockburn and St. Claire throw an array of sleazy characters into the mix which makes it read in parts like good fiction as opposed to actual American history, of course much of it hidden history.

The finest and most astounding chapter deals with the mainstream press and their treatment of Gary Webb -- the heroic journalist who broke the initial story of CIA complicity in introducing crack cocaine into the California underworld in the early 1980s -- and their reaction and damage control attempts towards his explosive story. So called "black paranoia" is also touched on in this section, specifically the way in which the corporate owned media labeled angry blacks as being irrationally paranoid for correctly being up in arms over Webb's startling tale.

All of this is presented in more of structural analysis and academic style, as opposed to a conspiratorial spin, with a myriad of sources to back up and document every assertion. For those naive enough to believe organized crime doesn't exist anymore, all they need to do is read Cockburn and St. Clair's Whiteout to realize it's thriving and sometimes reaches into the highest areas of the Executive branch. Truly frightening stuff. You'll leave the book hoping retribution eventually catches up with all those involved in profiting from the decimation of once relatively vibrant communities.

For those who laugh out loud when they see the pop quiz question: Are we winning or losing the war on drugs, this is the book. For those who have been living on mars for the last several decades and have missed the connection between big government, big money and drugs, check this book out. And for those who need only the most minimal reminder of how the bad guys (read CIA) have teamed up for fun and profit with other bad guys (read organized crime), this is your book. If you have ever wondered how hegemony works, or why the poor and people of color are increasingly on the receiving end of government tyranny, or when the pattern of imprisonment for drug abusers began, pick this book up. You won't be able to put it down. A great addition to the contemporary literature, and to those earlier works such as Braverman's Labor and Monopoly Capital and United Electrical's Labor's Untold Story. A deeply researched, lively work, often reading like a snappy who-done-it. The real mystery though is how one could not appreciate this brilliant work.

Are you interested in finding out the TRUTH about the CIA? Well look no further as Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair presents the critical information which Ronald Kessler(Inside The CIA) left out. "Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press" goes into detail about events which most Americans are unaware of such as the relationship between the CIA and Ex-Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie(an important figure in the Bolivian drug trade). For those of you who are war historians, have you ever wondered why the morale was so low among the US troops during the Vietnam War? Of course drug use was one factor which contributed to the decrease of morale among the US troops. However, during the war, very few Americans knew that the CIA was responsible for the shipment of drugs to our troops. In fact, the CIA made huge profits off of the drug trade which took place during the Vietnam War. Do you remember when former President Richard Nixon started the "war on drugs?" The "war on drugs" was nothing more than a hoax. As yourself this question, how can a country proclaim to have a war of drugs, when a certain sector of its government is helping to bring the drugs in? The reason why this country continues to hold the title of being the "greatest illicit drug importer," is because the CIA makes it possible. One thing that all concern Americans must realize is that there has never been a real war on drugs, and considering the fact that the CIA continues to bring in millions off of the drug trade, it is very unlikely that there will ever be one. If you know someone who as died or is currently suffering from the use of illicit drugs, you can thank the CIA for helping to bring the drugs in. Now don't me wrong, the CIA has not (and is not) responsible for all of the illicit drugs which come into this country. However it would not be far-fetched to say that the CIA is responsible for the majority of illicit drugs which come into this country. Do you remember the Iran-Contra affair, well the CIA's main role in that "little dirty war" was about setting up a drug trade in Cental America. Many of the things within this book may shock you, however this book will provide you with the facts about the US involvement in the international drug trade.

As a person who grew up in the fifties, one of the myths I have found most painful to let go of is, "our government would not do anything dishonorable and whatever course of action our leaders choose is not only for the best, but is right and just." This book is a 'MUST READ' for any still laboring under that delusion.

Cockburn and St. Clair are brilliant political analysts whom I have enjoyed reading in their newsletter, Counterpunch, and other venues. Their work consistently portrays the devastating reality behind the fifties myth, and this book is the latest example of that. Based on thorough and convincing research and absorbing to read, Whiteout presents a picture not easy to come by and without which the story of the CIA's role in drug-trafficking is incomplete at best.