Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press

by Alexander Cockburn (Author), Jeffrey St. Clair (Author)

34 ratings

ISBN-13: 978-1859842584

ISBN-10: 1859842585

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On March 16, 1998, the CIA’s Inspector General, Fred Hitz, finally let the cat out of the bag in an aside at a Congressional Hearing. Hitz told the US Reps that the CIA had maintained relationships with companies and individuals the Agency knew to be involved in the drug business. Even more astonishingly, Hitz revealed that back in 1982 the CIA had requested and received from Reagan’s Justice Department clearance not to report any knowledge it might have of drug-dealing by CIA assets.

With these two admisstions, Hitz definitively sank decades of CIA denials, many of them under oath to Congress. Hitz’s admissions also made fools of some of the most prominent names in US journalism, and vindicated investigators and critics of the Agency, ranging from Al McCoy to Senator John Kerry.

The involvement of the CIA with drug traffickers is a story that has slouched into the limelight every decade or so since the creation of the Agency. Most recently, in 1996, the San Jose Mercury News published a sensational series on the topic, “Dark Alliance,” and then helped destroy its own reporter, Gary Webb.

In Whiteout, Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair finally put the whole story together from the earliest days, when the CIA’s institutional ancestors, the OSS and the Office of Naval Intelligence, cut a deal with America’s premier gangster and drug trafficker, Lucky Luciano.

They show that many of even the most seemingly outlandish charges leveled against the Agency have basis in truth. After the San Jose Mercury News series, for example, outraged black communities charged that the CIA had undertaken a program, stretching across many years, of experiments on minorities. Cockburn and St. Clair show how the CIA imported Nazi scientists straight from their labs at Dachau and Buchenwald and set them to work developing chemical and biological weapons, tested on black Americans, some of them in mental hospitals.

Cockburn and St. Clair show how the CIA’s complicity with drug-dealing criminal gangs was part and parcel of its attacks on labor organizers, whether on the docks of New York, or of Marseilles and Shanghai. They trace how the Cold War and counterinsurgency led to an alliance between the Agency and the vilest of war criminals such as Klaus Barbie, or fanatic heroin traders like the mujahedin in Afghanistan.

Whiteout is a thrilling history that stretches from Sicily in 1944 to the killing fields of South-East Asia, to CIA safe houses in Greenwich Village and San Francisco where CIA men watched Agency-paid prostitutes feed LSD to unsuspecting clients. We meet Oliver North as he plotted with Manuel Noriega and Central American gangsters. We travel to little-known airports in Costa Rica and Arkansas. We hear from drug pilots and accountants from the Medillin Cocaine Cartel. We learn of DEA agents whose careers were ruined because they tried to tell the truth.

The CIA, drugs… and the press. Cockburn and St. Clair dissect the shameful?way many American journalists have not only turned a blind eye on the Agency’s misdeeds, but helped plunge the knife into those who told the real story.

Here at last is the full saga. Fact-packed and fast-paced, Whiteout is a richly detailed excavation of the CIA’s dirtiest secrets. For all who want to know the truth about the Agency this is the book to start with.

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Editorial Reviews

Review

“Cockburn and St. Clair present a litany of CIA misdeeds, from the recruitment of Nazi scientists after WWII to the arming of opium traffickers in Afghanistan. All of this is extremely well documented ... A chilling history that many will take issue with of what the CIA has been up to in the past 50 years.”—KIRKUS

“A solid, pitiless piece of muckraking, ... Cockburn and St. Clair raise troubling questions about the role of a largely secretive government agency in a democratic society.”—San Diego Union Tribune

“A probing examination of the CIA’s chilling history of coddling major drug traffickers, gangsters and Nazi psychopaths.”—Philadelphia Tribune

“A convincing, well-researched, comprehensive condemnation of the CIA.”—Maximum Rock 'N Roll

About the Author

Alexander Cockburn co-edits CounterPunch with Jeffrey St. Clair. Together they have written Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press and A Dime’s Worth of Difference: Beyond the Lesser of Two Evils.

Jeffrey St. Clair co-edits CounterPunch with Alexander Cockburn. Together they have written Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press and A Dime’s Worth of Difference: Beyond the Lesser of Two Evils.

Product details

Paperback: 418 pages
Publisher: Verso (November 17, 1999)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1859842585
ISBN-13: 978-1859842584
Product Dimensions: 5 x 1 x 8 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Customer Reviews: 34 customer ratings
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #786,951 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #911 in Political History (Books)
- #1583 in Social Services & Welfare (Books)
- #1552 in Organized Crime True Accounts

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Jacob Selchau

A book of horrors

Reviewed in the United States on December 15, 2013

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This is a horrifying book. Every reader has two options: Either he must decide that at least ninety percent of the contents of this book is lies, or they must concede that the US government is fundamentally corrupt. And sadly, all the major claims that I researched up on were well-documented.

The book contains accounts of the US government complicity in drug trade, state terror, torture, genocide and mass murder. Even its own citizens have been subjected to terrible crimes through grotesque biological, radiological and chemical experimentation. The book details many such cases and describe how politicians and the so-called "respectable" press often deliberately look the other way.

The book is also highly readable. The authors are good narrators and the absurdity of the subject matter comes through clearly. It does not contain much original research, but it does collect scattered and willfully-forgotten knowledge that is very valuable. Frankly, I know of no books which describes as many grotesque and absurd high crimes by various US administrations and institutions. It clearly shows that these actions are not performed for the sake of the US citizenry, which are among the victims of this book.

A highly recommended book.

13 people found this helpful

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Mark Wylie

A Superbly Researched Account of Some Unpleasant Events

Reviewed in the United States on March 10, 2000

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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.

82 people found this helpful

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One of the most important books in my library

Reviewed in the United States on March 10, 2001

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This is a story that can't be told too many times by too many people. It's volatile, it's important, and there are still too many people who don't know anything about it at all.
The most crucial aspect of this book and the clearest documentation I have yet to find, regards OPERATION PAPERCLIP and the birth of CIA generated projects MK-ULTRA and BLUEBIRD. While this is only the tip of the iceberg of what the CIA has done and is doing to this country, it is imperative that people understand this part of the story in order to believe any of the rest of it. To that end, Whiteout is one of the most important books in my library. If there is better documentation of MK-ULTRA, Bluebird, CHATTER, MKSEARCH, SPELLBINDER, ARTICHOKE, and ultimately, MONARCH, I want to know about it.

9 people found this helpful

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Robert W. Smith

outstanding

Reviewed in the United States on March 25, 2009

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I found this book very easy to read and devoured it quite briskly. I found the whole premise to be plausible and I believe that the conclusions were well supported with references to facts. It is a deeply disturbing conclusion. I think that this is a well written book that addresses US involvement in several geo-political regions. I think I say this of any book that's not 50,000 pages in length, but, it was certainly not comprehensive, providing only a smattering of conflicts about which the reader's whistle is whetted. This book might be interesting supplemental reading for an undergraduate political science course or simply an excellent read for novices (especially on raining weekends). I give the premise of the book an "A+" and I give the writing and scholarship an "A-". It is highly recommended.

4 people found this helpful

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RJ, Mesa, AZ

Arrived in the time and condition that was advertised . . . a good experience!

Reviewed in the United States on January 6, 2020

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Arrived as advertised!

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zansdor

Excellent and informative

Reviewed in the United States on January 7, 2017

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Excellent book. Found out things I had no idea happened. It also proved to me once again that the people who are responsible for tragic things are seldom held accountable.

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Bobby Phisher

Smoke and Mirrors really exist...

Reviewed in the United States on December 4, 2015

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Another reason to end the War on Drugs--how many reasons does it take?

2 people found this helpful

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Rick Davenport

Eye opening book about how the CIA is in bed ...

Reviewed in the United States on August 18, 2015

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Eye opening book about how the CIA is in bed with drug dealers or are in fact sponsoring their black ops with drug money.

One person found this helpful

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Top international reviews

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Three Stars

Reviewed in Canada on October 29, 2015

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Very difficult to get into, but interesting once you bury yourself into the materiel.

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