Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press

By Jeffrey St. Clair, Alexander Cockburn, Jeffrey St. Clair

Book Overview

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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1859842585
• ISBN13: 9781859842584
• Release Date: November 1999
• Publisher: Verso
• Length: 418 Pages
• Weight: 1.03 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 5.1" x 7.8"

Customer Reviews

A disturbing paradigm-shifting vision of 20th cen. history

"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 andJefferey St. ClairWHITEOUT: THE CIA, DRUGS AND THE PRESSFrom 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 th

Expansive and authoritative

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.

The Real CIA: Crime, Drugs, Assassination

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.

A Superbly Researched Account of Some Unpleasant Events

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.

Unforgettable, and very important.

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.