التحالف الأسود .. وكالة الاستخبارات المركزية والمخدرات والصحافة

by Alexander Cockburn, ألكسندر كوكبرن, جيفري سانت كلير

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.

Genres: History, Politics, Nonfiction, Drugs, The United States Of America, True Crime, Crime

516 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1998

About the author

Alexander Claud Cockburn was an American political journalist. Cockburn was brought up in Ireland but has lived and worked in the United States since 1972. Together with Jeffrey St. Clair, he edits the political newsletter CounterPunch. Cockburn also writes the "Beat the Devil" column for The Nation and a weekly syndicated column for the Los Angeles Times as well as for The First Post, which is syndicated by Creators Syndicate.

Reviews

[John Banks · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliantly written, very factual, exposing the corruption not only of the CIA but also of the American Justice System!!
Leading the reader step by step through the dark world of "black money for black operations" that still continues today.
How various Federal agencies are muted by the CIA "In The Interests of National Security", even though theose "interests" bring misery to many tens of thousands of citizens!

[Roger Booth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Like many US citizens, I prefer insulation. I avoid real news.
Establishment media realizes this and gives us plausible news that won't makes us feel bad about ourselves or our country. The result is that we're floating on our backs in a pool of total bullshit.
Read this book and take a look under the surface.
Without real journalism, and people willing to read it, we can only pretend to have democracy.

[Dan · Rating 5 out of 5]

An absolute must read for anyone wanting to understand the workings of the CIA and the broader national security state. Cockburn and St Clair manage to pack more of the crimes of the CIA into one concise, meticulously sources volume than most of the other longer works I've read on the subject and make it extremely readable, though the subject matter is often disturbing. In the vital canon of secret histories of the 20th century crimes of the US alongside Blum's Killing Hope.

[sologdin · Rating 3 out of 5]

love this guy. a great loss when he died.

text is a tidy history of the CIA and crack, including the cocaine coup that placed NSDAP war criminal on the bolivian throne.

[Byron · Rating 3 out of 5]

Only the first part of this is about the CIA secretly supplying drugs in the hood, as discussed in the landmark "Dark Alliance" series of articles and any number of subsequent books, movies and what have you. It's more detailed than the initial series of articles, and covers some of the fallout from them (though it was written before Gary Webb supposedly committed suicide by shooting himself in the head twice), but presumably not as detailed as the Dark Alliance book.

The rest of this book consists of articles originally published in '90s-era issues of CounterPunch that cover similar topics—drug trafficking, Latin American politics, CIA wrongdoing and what have you. They're only tangentially relevant, at best, but I found them interesting nonetheless. They're admirably thorough, for articles that few people would ever read, with lengthy-ass works cited inconveniently located at the end of each chapter.

[Jessica · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book had so much to unpack, I feel like I need to read a book about each chapter's topic. It was absolutely horrifying and terrifying to learn about the CIA's history of abuse of power and connection to drugs since its inception. A must-read.

[Ryan Woods · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent, thorough history of the lies, hypocrisy and crimes of the CIA. A fantastic read for anyone interested in the truth about the War on Drugs and how insidious its origins are. Gary Webb would've been proud.

[Roger Shaw · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating, shocking

[Gage Hoefer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Initially I was feeling confused about the structure of this book, as it seemed to be relaying anecdotes about misdeeds of the CIA throughout history and that felt a bit weak as an organizing principle; however, after the first few chapters things really come into focus. The main thesis of the book is investigating how the CIA has been complicit in the drug trade, and how the funding and training by the US government and intelligence agencies used ostensibly for the “war on drugs” is really often used for counterinsurgency efforts in foreign countries. There are a litany of crimes committed by the CIA that have gotten a lot of attention throughout the years, but Whiteout thankfully skips over an in depth coverage of the most well known ones and focuses on potentially lesser known areas of malfeasance. Particularly insightful for me were the chapters detailing the drug trade in Afghanistan by the mujahideen, the covert operations training and drug running in Arkansas, and the discussion of the drug trade and the Mexican government in the 1990’s.

[Arvydas · Rating 3 out of 5]

Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair expose the CIA’s drug empire with surgical precision. They begin with the shattering 1998 admission by CIA Inspector General Fred Hitz, who confirmed under oath that the agency knowingly collaborated with drug traffickers, and even got a 1982 Justice Department waiver to avoid reporting drug crimes by its own assets. Cockburn traces the roots of this corruption back to World War II, when OSS operatives cut deals with Lucky Luciano in Sicily, and later imported Nazi scientists from Dachau and Buchenwald to conduct chemical and biological experiments on Black Americans—some in state mental hospitals.

From Mediterranean mobsters to Southeast Asian opium barons, the CIA built alliances that crossed every line of legality and morality. In Afghanistan, operatives armed mujaheddin heroin traders; in the Golden Triangle, they flew opium under military cover; in Central America, they backed Contra-linked cocaine lords who flooded U.S. cities—dramatically increasing cocaine shipments from 900 to 5,000 kilos annually by ‘83. Meanwhile, government agencies like the BNDD and DEA seized CIA-associated drug planes—only to have them quietly released under political pressure.

Cockburn doesn’t spare the press: mainstream outlets mercilessly destroyed Gary Webb and buried the explosive Dark Alliance series, even as CIA operatives like Walter Pincus—formerly CIA—led attacks from inside newsrooms. For Webb’s Minnesota-sized scoop, a mob of 1,500 black activists confronted CIA Director John Deutch in LA—yet the media collectively yawned.

Add to this the tales of CIA safe houses in Greenwich Village, where agents watched agency-paid prostitutes feed LSD to unsuspecting visitors; alliances with Klaus Barbie and Manuel Noriega; secret LSD programs; and labor suppression in New York, Marseilles, and Shanghai. Whiteout is data-heavy, explosive, and relentless: in 1997 alone, the UN estimated that the global drug trade reached $500 billion—six times its size a decade earlier . Cockburn makes it clear: this isn’t fringe recklessness—it’s state policy wrapped in bureaucratic lies and press complicity.

This book is a mirror of organized duplicity—where democracy, national security, and journalistic integrity were sold off for covert wars and unaccountable power.

[Derek Baldwin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mind blowing. The torrent of names and organisations is barely comprehensible at times, which can make this a hard read, but to be confronted with these levels of duplicity, brazen dishonesty, disregard for common decency, and outright cruelty... it's a lot to take in.

I've never been naive about how certain people get to be so wealthy and powerful but this is still really shocking. That the USA presumes to be the "leader of the free world", or in fact the leader of anything, with this and doubtless way much more on its conscience (not that the state has one) is nothing short of parody.

All the things that the USA says it's enemies do, it does. Any attempt to create a society that is not based on Wild West brutality, it overturns, any hint that the Mafia state is corrupt from the very top downward, it doubles down. And people like Pompeo, Eliot Abrams, Bolton, rest assured they're doing these exact same sorts of things right now.

Despicable evil scum of the earth. A reckoning has to come.

If you think this review is overblown: read the book.

[Patrick · Rating 4 out of 5]

A sterling indictment of the CIA, which isn't that hard to do. But it was the sections devoted to the cowardly and craven journalists that really struck home. All these snakes got by with their "anonymous sources," while a real journalist like Gary Webb had his name dragged through the mud. It was also fascinating to see how all the press was so dismissive of African Americans. Just brushing off their concerns as "black paranoia," seemed to be the order of the day.

[Bloblo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Drugs and CIA complicity, beginnings of CIA and its WW2 predecessor the OSS dealing with the mafia, mind control experiments, helping NAZI war criminals escape so they could be employed by Uncle Scam. And what little media coverage these documented items got. Enjoy

[Andrew Rasmussen · Rating 4 out of 5]

great book on a fairly wide look at outrageous things our government is doing , and even more outrageous ways the press defends and cooperates with the organized criminals who carry out these programs

[Matt Lanka · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reads like a series of magazine articles that details sometimes circumstantial, sometimes damning evidence of collusion between the US federal government (especially the CIA) and war criminals, drug cartels, and organized crime.

[lindsi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lots of great info, but much like Operation Gladio, which covers a lot of the same material, it suffers greatly from poor organization. This is another one I would love to see re-published with the help of a really good editor!

[drew · Rating 3 out of 5]

educational, but slightly dry.

[Ian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Details CIA involvement in the explosion of illegal drugs in America. An eye-opener.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good stuff. Covers the contra-cocaine importing connection in relation to the wars in Central America in the '80s.

[Khaled Abu-Romman · Rating 2 out of 5]

نظرية المؤامرة تتجلى بابها صورها من خلال ربط وكالة المخابرات الامريكية بالمخدرات والدعارة وتجارة السلاح لدعم ديكتاتوريات العالم أجمع

[Sylvia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Compelling and painstakingly researched, a detailed look at the CIA's involvement with illicit drugs.

[Denny Hunt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very well written. Really good overview of the Gary Webb story.

[Twain · Rating 5 out of 5]

“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 officers; 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. The specific techniques of the uncover-up vary From instance to instance, but the paradigm is constant, as Far back as Frank Wisner and his “mighty Wurlitzer” of CIA friendlies in the press. 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. Publicly, the Agency continues to deny what its report has reluctantly admitted. The accusations are initially referred to in the CIA-Friendly press as “unfounded” or “overblown” or “unconfirmed,” or – the Final twist of the knife – “an old story.” “ (98%)

Opens on the Gary Webb CIA-Contra-crack cocaine story and goes into the coordinated media attack that came as it gained notoriety.

9% “The CIA’s most effective friends have always been the liberal center, on the editorial pages of the Washington Post and the New York Times and in the endorsement of a person like the Washington Post’s president, Katharine Graham. In 1988 Graham had told CIA recruits, “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”

Does a brief history of the CIA and delves into the ONI and OSS relationships with the Mob during World War II. Creates a strong link between the workings of intelligence and organized crime and how the former has no problem working with and protecting the latter if it furthers their goals.

Spends a chapter going through Operation Paperclip and some of the human testing that was done by the CIA post-WWII in terms of radiation, mind control, biological warfare and things of that nature.

All of this really does well to paint a picture of the evil and depravity the CIA employed to maintain US hegemony and global capitalism. All of this is intertwined into Klaus Barbie, a Nazi the CIA helps escape to Bolivia. In Bolivia he works for a number of strongmen and dictators, often becoming an important military or police advisor under a junta or dictator. This intertwines all of the chapters well as one of the US backed Bolivian dictators pivots the country into coca paste, which makes cocaine, as a way to make money. The country becomes a major cocaine producer under the rule of US backed regimes and under the supervision of intelligence assets. Two of the coups happen because the nationalist president is too economically left wing or is friendly with Cuba or Allende, and the dictatorial regimes coming in often do mass torture, murder, suppression, etc. Really lays out that the CIA and US would rather work with murderous drug lords than allow a center left leader in South America.

Then we take a look at the CIA’s own purchase and use of drugs for mind control. Looks at the MK-ULTRA program and the different torture, psychological, and drug testing the CIA did and had done on unwitting patients and people. Invariably, the press immediately treated these revelations lightly or treated them as old news and basically ignored them.

Then we get into the KMT and Chaing Kai-shek. The KMT were selling most of the opium in Eastern Asia and allied with the CIA against Mao and the communists. The CIA helped fly the opium to Thailand, Laos, etc. and was happy to have a source of funds for the war that were not tied to any congressional oversight or whims. The DEA in this time often found themselves after CIA assets (a battle the DEA typically lost). US intelligence worked with the head of Chaing’s security forces Tai Li, who had concentration camps and worked with the Japanese occupation.

From there we move to the Golden Triangle, Vietnam, Laos, the Hmong, Thailand, etc. Given some of the US war crimes and a long list of people who worked with the US or CIA that were deeply involved in the opium trade.

Then we move to the Middle East in the late 70s, early 80s where the US chose to back a large amount of opium producers to take out reformers and left wing governments that might be sympathetic to the Soviets.

From there we move to the media reports about the Contras selling drugs, a prominent DEA agent who got in trouble for reporting it, the 1986 AP report. The AP report twas getting red taped by the higher ups in the states until someone at the Latin American station accidentally translated it and printed it out and then AP in English had to produce a watered down version of it. This caught a lot of flak and propaganda and smear campaigns from the Reagan White House. There’s the stories of Cele Castillo, a DEA agent who reported on a lot of Contra drug smuggling, and US accommodations given to these smugglers, before being reprimanded and pulled out of Latin America. The Post, which worked so hard to discredit the Gary Webb story, had no problem contradicting their criticisms of Webb to discredit Oliver North’s senate run. There’s stuff from the Kerry report in here, and the companies known by Customs to be drug smugglers who got State Department funding for humanitarian aid.

There’s an in depth look at a contra weapon supply line out of Mena Arkansas run by the CIA, where drugs came back to the US from the contras. Gets into a number of cases, admissions, attempts to investigate and cover it, and the seeming idea Clinton was in the know about it.

The final chapter gets into Mexico and how the CIA, far from being a “rogue agency” is typically working at the behest of the interests of the US executive branch. From the murder of a DEA agent by drug lords to Mexico’s secret police the DFS which was partially funded by the CIA, to the CIA stopping a US investigation into DFS head Nazar who was running a crime ring in the US and protecting drug dealers. But the US elites and media backed right wing leader Carlos Salinas for president. Salinas was influential in getting NAFTA done, massively privatizing the Mexican economy, and saw a huge proliferation of the Mexican drug trade, which enjoyed support and protection from the Judicial Police. In the Salinas regime the presidents brother got praise from the WSJ, got a spot on the board of Dow Jones Company, and was the heavy favorite to head the WTO until he was implicated in the murder of a reformer running for president. The brother, Carlos Salinas, was arrested, and it was found out that he had amassed a fortune taking bribes and selling access that he laundered through Citibank, who seemed to give him great service and preferential treatment.

There’s other great stuff in the Mexico chapter about the US government and NAFTA. The US government did not allow drug concerns to factor into NAFTA.

“The Clinton administration did everything in its power to conceal the criminality saturating the Mexican state apparatus. In October 1996, the Clinton White House invoked executive privilege to keep from turning over to Congress an April 1995 memo written by FBI director Louis Freeh and DEA administrator Thomas Constantine. The memo excoriated the administration’s drug policy, particularly regarding Mexico. According to a report in the New York Times, Freeh and Constantine charged that the Clinton drug policy was “adrift,” “lacked any true leadership,” and was being sabotaged by competing agencies, including the CIA, the Department of Commerce and the NSC. An internal State Department memo written two years after the passage of NAFTA reached similar conclusions. It identified Mexico as “one of the most important money laundering centers in the West..”” (92%).

“ In late January 1997, McCaffery invited his Mexican colleague, General Gutierrez Rebollo, to Washington, D.C. The Mexican general toured the capital, met with members of Congress, visited the Pentagon and lunched at the White House. At a White House ceremony, McCaffery stood shoulder to shoulder with the general from Mexico City. “General Gutierrez Rebollo has a reputation of being an honest man who is a no-nonsense field commander of the Mexican army who’s now been sent to bring the police force the same kind of aggressiveness and reputation he had in uniform,” McCaffrey said. “We are not unaware of the progress that they have made at enormous personal sacrifice” “ (95%). But then about a week later this dude was arrested for taking a 7 figure bribe from a cartel head. And it wasn’t exactly a surprise… “But neither the US nor Zedillo were being entirely forthright. Both had plenty of advance warning about the general. Indeed, Zedillo’s attorney general, Antonio Lozano, said that he had warned Zedillo personally about Gutierrez Rebollo’s ties to the Juárez cartel before the general was appointed to head Zedillo’s National Institute to Fight Drug Trafficking. While the CIA prepared highly complimentary profiles of Gutierrez Rebollo, calling him a “soldier’s soldier,” the DEA had compiled a much different assessment of the general. It had amassed evidence showing that his drug suppression strikes had almost exclusively targeted small operators or Carillo Fuentes’s hated rival, the Tijuana-based Arellano-Félix gang” (95%)

“Six weeks after his report (heavily censored in its declassified version) was released, Inspector General Hitz went to Capitol Hill to testify before a House committee. There he made even more damaging admissions. For the first time the Inspector General of the CIA disclosed that his Agency knew that “dozens of people and a number of companies connected in some fashion to the Contra program” were involved in the drug trade. He said the CIA knew that drugs had been going back along the Contra supply lines into the United States and added, “Let me be frank. There are instances where the CIA did not in an expeditious or consistent fashion cut off relationships with individuals supporting the Contra program who were alleged to have engaged in drug trafficking activity or take action to resolve the allegations.” Even more damaging was Hitz’s revelation that in 1982 the CIA had signed a memorandum of understanding with Ronald Reagan’s attorney general, William French Smith, freeing the Agency from any requirement to report allegations of drug trafficking involving non-employees. The non-employees, according to Hitz (who refused to release the entire memo), were described as paid and non-paid “assets, pilots who ferried supplies to the Contras as well as Contra officials and others.” Thus, in 1982, as it was mounting its covert Contra supply operation, the CIA was evidently aware enough of the nature of the traffic it was supervising to make sure that it would not have to report the drug-trafficking activities of any Contra leaders, contract pilots, businessmen, etc. with whom it was doing business. Only in 1986, after the flow of congressional funds to the Contras had been restored, was the agreement with the Justice Department modified to require the Agency to stop paying “assets” whom it believed to be involved in the drug trade.” (99%)

[Gabriel Morgan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just recalling how important Cockburn's Whiteout and Out of control were to me right after the Reagan years...i'd just got back to NYC in the mid nineties after three years abroiad. I was reading in cockburn post mjortem about the orgy of criminality which had coincided with lower east side gentrification and the Thompson st. riots, which were of course police riots. Black culture was changing, commodified in a completely new way. I remember taking my first long walk through Brooklyn and playing pick up basketball in South street Seaport, looking at the changes in hairstyle...the t-shirt "it's a Black thing you Wouldn't Understand", and reading Out of Control...every page was dog eared. Then would come Whiteout and Gary Webb's book. The truth is so hard to ferret out. Then it changes nothing.

[Ellenore Clementine Kruger · Rating 4 out of 5]

not too detailed

This did add some pieces to the puzzle. I just want to say though the class war is real and electing a face is just a very small part of what you really want to get in the long run. We got a peaceful presidency in SOME ways from a state but there was a history matching up to some scandal read by a survivor previously in my studies. I have no ability to do too much about these scandals at all, and though some people may want activism, we do end up getting in trouble sometimes. I was not a lucky one, but this book is incredibly tame compared to others. If you want support or perspective on suspicions, there is some retro vision here. Things seem very different now, though.

Edit: this book does provide some info about mostly reagan, and if you think about his secret war on central america, then you see the suppression of darker skinned places like nicaragua… so if you saw belize or nicaragua you would see everything had a naval or sailing basis for migration but it is extreme risk. Already so much propaganda is controlled. But its all controlling the market from south america to united states.