Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs, and the Press torrent

Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press - Alexander Cockburn, Jeffrey St. Clair [epub]

On March 16, 1998, the CIA’s Inspector General Fred Hitz told a Congressional Hearing 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 admissions, 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, Cockburn and 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. 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.

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 Medellin Cocaine Cartel. We learn of DEA agents whose careers were ruined because they tried to tell the truth.

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