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La Guerra Falsa: Fraude mortífero de la CIA en la guerra a las drogas

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El libro La Guerra Falsa (The Big White Lie), escrito por el autor de mayor venta del New York Times y antiguo agente secreto de la DEA, es una observación imperceptible de la operación profundamente encubierta y altamente secreta que destapó el sabotaje de la CIA sobre la guerra contra las drogas. El periódico New York Times describió este libro como "espeluznante", no ficticio, y que se "mueve con la velocidad de una novela de supenso de la más alta calidad". Publishers Weekly le otorgó una calificación de varias estrellas llamándolo “una revelación impactante”. Aquí hace su aparición Levine, llamado el "agente secreto más importante de los Estados Unidos" por el programa 60 Minutes, en un mundo de implacables narcotraficantes, asesinos sin piedad, policía secreta y funcionarios de gobierno corruptos. El rastro conduce hacia la increíblemente hermosa mujer a quien Pablo Escobar llamó "la Reina de la cocaína": Sonia Atala. Levine, posando como el amante de Sonia, apenas escapa vivo de esta operación, sabiendo de antemano que los verdaderos enemigos de la guerra contra las drogas no se encuentran en las selvas de América del Sur, sino que en los sótanos y cuartos secretos de las oficinas centrales de la CIA.
La operación Hun empieza cuando Sonia Atala, considerada como demasiado poderosa dentro de la aristocracia de la cocaína dominada por hombres, es amenazada de muerte. Ella concreta un trato secreto: a cambio de su protección, ella le ofrecerá a la DEA un primer vistazo del funcionamiento interno de las organizaciones que controlan la fuente de la cocaína que ingresa a los Estados Unidos. Levine, posando como el amante mafioso, medio siciliano, medio puertorriqueño y socio comercial de Sonia, ahora es amenazado por sus enemigos. Habiendo recibido una mansión, una flota de automóviles de lujo, una tripulación encubierta de la mafia, y una carga de avión de cocaína como apoyo, los atrae hacia su hogar de lujo para ajustar cuentas mientras es filmado en un video oculto de la DEA. Esto debió haber constituido suficiente evidencia para condenar a aquellos que controlan el flujo de cocaína hacia los Estados Unidos. Pero nada era lo que aparentaba. Levine descubre que Sonia tiene un secreto: ella está manipulando a la DEA con la ayuda de poderosas fuerzas encubiertas dentro del gobierno de los Estados Unidos para selectivamente destruir a sus enemigos mientras mantiene intacto el suministro de la cocaína.
Lea el libro La Guerra Falsa y descubra por sí mismo los secretos más oscuros de la guerra contra las drogas a través de alguien que lo vivió en carne propia. NOTICIAS RECIENTES: Durante una conferencia de la prensa mundial el 3 de marzo de 2011, el presidente de Bolivia, Evo Morales, levantó una copia de La Guerra Falsa (traducción del libro en inglés The Big Whitel Lie) frente a las cámaras de los noticieros reclamando que el libro era una de las razones por las que él había prohibido la entrada de la DEA en su país. La fotografía del presidente Morales con el libro en la mano circuló rápidamente alrededor del mundo. Cuando fue entrevistado, Levine indicó que si el presidente Morales hubiera realmente comprendido el libro, habría desterrado a la CIA de su país y dado la bienvenida a la DEA como héroes. Ahora que el libro ha sido publicado de nuevo como libro electrónico, los lectores pueden decidir cuál es la verdad por sí mismos.

598 pages, Kindle Edition

First published March 14, 1993

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Michael Levine

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5 stars
245 (44%)
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203 (36%)
3 stars
83 (14%)
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18 (3%)
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7 (1%)
Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews
47 reviews1 follower
August 25, 2019
Interesting Read

It has been widely established that U.S. government agencies have been complicit in the illicit drug trade. This book provides examples of specific cases where drug dealers were allowed to participate in the drug trade with impunity. Levine is a bit strident at times. He's a true believer. However, he brings up a good point; as long as American citizens create a multi-million dollar demand for drugs somebody will create the supply.
Profile Image for Justin Tapp.
715 reviews89 followers
October 7, 2023
The Big White Lie: The Deep Cover Operation That Exposed the CIA Sabotage of the Drug War by Michael Levine

I had several problems with this book. First, it could have been much more succinct and more effective accomplishing what the author states he wanted in writing it if he'd simply written what happened instead of recounting every sentence of every conversation, every emotion he felt, every nuance or hunch that he sensed, etc. Second, the reader has to get through hundreds of pages of a walking anxiety attack. Is he being followed and watched? Is the DEA sending him on a high-profile mission while also just hoping to arrest him in the middle of it? Is he being persecuted because he's Jewish? Will his world really come to an end if he leaves after 17 years of service instead of waiting it out a full 25 for a larger pension? It gets exhausting for the reader, and much of it just seemed irrelevant and absolutely distracted from the larger story he wanted to tell. Just flip to the last chapters of the book for the gist of what really mattered-- with actual trial transcripts.

Other problems: I saw an online interview with Levine that mentioned he first dealt with CIA interference while serving as an agent in Thailand at the beginning of his career. Thus, after 15 years it strikes me odd that he'd either be surprised or trying to blow a proverbial whistle about it. He also laments that he didn't get to spend the rest of his career in Buenos Aires. The Foreign Service Act of 1980 makes that impossible-- the longest he could have been posted in any country by the DEA was five years. Nobody appears to have done a FOIA search on Operation Hun, as you can't find any references to it online (unlike other major DEA cases). Levine mentions CIA-backed efforts to prop up right-wing regimes in South America to combat Communism, but never mentions Operation Condor or Operation Charly (Argentina) that were already known by 1993 (Noam Chomsky wrote about it). Argentina put its junta on public trial in 1985, and that information was available at the time of his writing and could have supported his earlier chapters.

This paragraph from his time at Embassy Buenos Aires strikes me as authentic:

"Week after week I attended top-level Country Team meetings with Ambassador (Raul) Castro...during which the number of desparacidos from the previous week would be announced. Ambassador Castro was grieved by what was going on, and we always discussed how we could pressure the Argentine government into changing its ways. The CIA representatives...in stony silence, never offering a single suggestion. The U.S. government was not resolved to end the mass murders, so the prevailing feeling at the embassy was one of helplessness and hopelessness...Some of the Argentine officers and agents upon whom I depended might have been cold-blooded murderers...in some cases there was little doubt."

Spoiler alert: The book is basically about how the DEA was kept from prosecuting major Bolivian drug traffickers like Roberto Suarez, Jose Gasser, Luis Arce-Gomez, who became the Minister of the Interior under the junta of General Luis García Meza, and others because they were CIA assets involved in the "Cocaine Coup" in Bolivia. The later prosecutions of these individuals (and various Colombians after the extradition treaty) came late in the game, and many were not the high-profile traffickers the DEA trumpeted them to be. Levine more or less accuses the Assistant U.S. Attorney who authorized Jose Gasser's release from a Miami jail to return to Bolivia despite overwhelming evidence against him as being corrupt. Another federal judge in Miami -- later impeached by Congress for unrelated reasons-- also granted bail to a Bolivian drug trafficker who went straight back to Bolivia to join the junta. Sonia Atala, the Bolivian "Queen of Cocaine," turned DEA informant along with her husband-- who was also part of the junta-- only after Sonia had already been muscled out of the cocaine business. It was basically a revenge play on her part, and she and her husband used taxpayer money and witness protection to prosecute rivals, reclaim their assets in Bolivia, and continue their drug trafficking from the United States.

"The notion that there were dealers whom I could easily indict and arrest next door in Bolivia getting ready to take over their country and not a single high-ranking DEA bureaucrat or Justice Department attorney seemed interested enough to make a move to stop them just wouldn't sink in." Once in power, now-Interior Minister Arce-Gomez made good on his promise to flood the US with cocaine.

Levine's frantic cables and phone calls to DC, and later offering himself to Newsweek as a source, bring him under internal investigation and removal from Buenos Aires. Despite what he describes as being constantly followed and surveilled by suits in vehicles and monitored by his bosses in DC, he's tapped to do a deep-cover sting operation with Sonia Atala in Tucson, AZ. While the workings of the high-profile deep cover operation might seem interesting, Levine's paranoia about whether each individual member of the DEA team is working with him or against him, and his own desire to flee this life soak up every page and kill the facts. The supposedly high-value cocaine the DEA had supplied is apparently deadly low-value and Levine implies someone at DEA was skimming cocaine from the evidence stashes. At trial, the surveillance tapes in the undercover house have significant portions of missing sound. Ultimately, the damage they do is minimal and the one trafficker that Levine develops sympathy and an outright crush on takes the biggest fall.

By 1983, the one person in the book that Levine seems to admire is able to push forward the indictment of Suarez, Arce-Gomez, and others. In 1989, the now-democratic Bolivian government decided to strip Arce-Gomez of his citizenship in order for the U.S. to extradite him to the United States. "He would be the perfect symbol to show the world that Bolivia was as serious about its war on drugs as Colombia. He would be worth at least $50 million in U.S. aid." He received a 30 year sentence. "He was truly an evil man...but when you consider that (he) would have had no drug customers were it not for Sonia (Atala), and that the coup that gave him power might never have occurred were it not for covert U.S. support, it's difficult to conceive of his extradition and conviction as a victory in the drug war."

I give the book 2 stars out of 5. It is perhaps an important story but told very badly.
11 reviews
July 25, 2021
Truth of the corruption of the fed agencies feckless war on drugs

Levine hits the nail on the head, being a retired federal agent ( from another agency) I believe that everything he says rings true, his depiction of the “suits” (the bureaucratic sycophantic hacks ) that populate these federal agencies & usually rising to management positions. Is dead on the money
Profile Image for Vince.
157 reviews
July 8, 2021
Gripping story about a man’s fight against the system

Holy cow this is a very well written story of the drug war. Mr. Levine builds momentum in telling his story so that it is very difficult for the reader to put down this book.
Profile Image for Sherri Stotler.
1 review
June 6, 2018
Great Read!

This is a great read. The cover up by the government is unreal. Once I started reading I couldn't put it down.
Profile Image for Robin Catton.
17 reviews
May 9, 2026
This is one of the most irritating books I've ever read. A rambling, disconnected hodge podge of situations, and irrelevant occurrences.
I will bet the house, that ML's wife wrote most of this book, as she's listed as "the ghost writer" here, I'll collect on the bet?!
Never, have I read a true crime book that was supposed to focus on corruption in various agencies, for example The Company, the DEA, and DoJ, that had so many people smoking cigarettes, blowing smoke in certain directions, piles of cigarette butts in ashtrays, excruciating details of a DEA suit sucking on a cigar, chewing it, and making it a soggy mess (how TF did we get here?!) looking sideways at others, making coffee, lazing by the pool, Sonia walking to the phone from the pool, Sonia talking, Sonia not talking, Sonia discussing sleeping arrangements with the other girls, people sweating on every other page, choosing and buying t-shirts, confused about buying shirts, being gifted shirts, cowboy boots on the desk, minute details of handmade suits, and shoes, throwing off sweaty shirts, going to the gym, hands shaking, heart beating, heart going-quote "pitter pat", headaches, more headaches...FK me?! This dude was supposed to be a street Narc of some 15 or so years, there is no way Jose, that he was such "wilting flower" as he is described here, after spending years of smashing through doors in New York busting drug dealers. He has been done a disrespectful dis-service here describing him as some simp who is nearly pissing his pants every time he has to make a move. Very contrived bullshit, IMO. He was a hard-arsed narc of the best kind, to be relied on when the chips were down, and the job needed to be finished?!
He was, talking to some old dudes at the gym about some guys doing (non drug) business in Harlem that had zero to do with the investigation in any way???
Pages of conversation bet. the females in the book, laughing, joking, drinking, eating, talking on the phone. Going dancing, going shopping, sitting around doing nothing in particular, going to tourist attractions, more shopping, eating, more dancing. It reads like a Mills & Boon with some kilos of cocaine, and a few bad guys in the distance thrown in for a bit of entertainment.
And....finally, in the last twenty or so pages, we get to a related court case alluding to inter agency collusion....dugh?!
Unbelievably badly written, and edited, resembling a first draught...and, as Ernest Hemingway said about first draughts, "...they are always shit?!"
68 reviews
November 5, 2025
The Big White Lie was a really interesting look into the inner workings of the DEA, and how they handled undercover drug operations in South America during the 1980s. The story is told in a thriller-style through the eyes of Micheal Levine, and it's split up into 2 parts. The first part of the narrative focuses on Micheal Levine's motivation, and his time stationed in Argentina, and the second part focuses on Operation Hun, an undercover operation undertaken in partnership with Sonia Atala, a drug kingpin known as the "Queen with the Snow Crown".

I like the way Micheal Levine told his story, and I was disgusted by the many coverups the government perpetrated in an effort to protect special interest groups and the covert operations of some 3 letter agencies.

The American people were lied to and deceived. The War on Drugs was a government operation shrouded in secrecy, and the truth is far from what the American people were told.

I feel like even today, in 2025, many people are unaware of the role 3-letter agencies played in the drug epidemics of the 80s and 90s. In fact, the role that these agencies played in the proliferation of drugs in our communities that exists, to this day!

I hope that we get more accountability and that books like these continue to come out. As a proud American, I am disillusioned and disappointed with the actions taken by the government.
Profile Image for jared ackerman.
37 reviews3 followers
June 24, 2017
Stunning eye opener

It's weird to know beyond the shadow of a doubt that the drug war is the biggest scam ever pulled on the American people.
To see it in writing with proof from a former agent just solidifies what everyone already knows.
41 reviews
March 27, 2020
Excellent Read!

Very well written with a good story flow which makes it easy to follow with do many different characters involved. What an incredible waste of tax payers money and a huge insult to the agents in charge.
6 reviews
November 13, 2017
GREAT BOOK !

GREAT BOOK, MUST READ FOR ONES SELF. A TRUE STORY OF SELF SACRIFICE TO DO "THE RIGHT THING" , AGAIN ALL THE ODDS , AND SOME .
Profile Image for Arthur Stevenson.
1 review1 follower
March 12, 2018
Enjoyed the book and all of the goings on. Fairly realistic description of the view from Michael's World
7 reviews
April 25, 2020
Very good book. Everything in their favour was against them. Very informative well written could have read more more more.
1 review1 follower
February 13, 2022
The war on drugs is a sham.

This is not a conspiracy theory. This fake war on drugs is costing the American tax payer billions , not counting the human toll.
1 review
July 14, 2022
The Truth

It truly shows the lengths that governments will go to in misleading us, the people!! America is the worst of all, but don't think you're is any better!!
Profile Image for Filip Stefanovski.
4 reviews3 followers
September 28, 2023
Amazing Book,Real life can be more captivating than fiction sometimes..
Enjoyed every moment of it!
5 reviews
November 29, 2025
It’s good, gives a good demonstration of how useless the dea and cia was in the drug war and how the basically created it, told through a narrative perspective of a man trying to fight it for the right reasons, how he slowly realises it’s futile which is the annoying bit as there is no true ending or payoff which i think is his point but I would’ve enjoyed seeing someone get their comeuppance although that would be rewriting history.
Profile Image for Boris Miranda.
Author 4 books11 followers
February 12, 2014
Final algo moralista, aunque con grandes revelaciones. Algunos detalles son refutados por la viuda del rey de la cocaína de Bolivia en otro libro editado en 2012.
Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews