Alexander Cockburn - Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press

First published by Verso 1998
Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair 1998
Paperback edition first published by Verso 1999
Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair 1999
All rights reserved

Verso
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ISBN: 978-1-85984-258-4
eISBN: 978-1-78478-260-3 (US)
eISBN: 978-1-78478-261-0 (UK)

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A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

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This is largely a story of criminal conduct, much of it by the Central Intelligence Agency. It is a story of how many in the US press have been complicit in covering the Agencys tracks. When compelled to concede the Agencys criminal activities such journalists often take refuge in the notion of rogue agents or, as a last resort, of a rogue Agency. We do not accept this separation of the CIAs activities from the policies and directives of the US government. Whether it was Trumans meddling in China, which created Burmese opium kings; or the Kennedy brothers obsession with killing Fidel Castro; or Nixons command for more assassinations in Vietnam, the CIA has always been the obedient executor of the will of the US government, starting with the White House.

Whiteout is also a record of courageous men and women who would have no truck with such conduct or with any cover-up: former CIA agents like Ralph McGehee, still maintaining an invaluable database on his old employer, which still continues to hound him; historian Al McCoy, who put his life at risk in Southeast Asia and produced perhaps the finest single book on the Agency and its relationship with drug traffickers; Bob Parry; Brian Barger; Leslie and Andrew Cockburn; Martha Honey; former DEA agents Celerino Castillo III, Michael Levine and Richard Horn; John Marks, the former State Department official who excavated one of the CIAs darkest chapters, its efforts at mind control; Christopher Simpson and Linda Hunt, who exposed the CIAs recruitment of Nazis, including Klaus Barbie and the Nazi scientists; Gary Webb, a good reporter vilely treated by his colleagues in the profession; courageous Mexican journalists such as the late Manuel Buenda, who have exposed the ties between Mexicos drug lords and the government and Mexicos CIA-funded security apparatus, knowing that to do so was to court death.

We thank Peter Kornbluh and his colleagues at the National Security Archive for keeping the record of this era alive and available to researchers and reporters; the folks at the Sentencing Project for information on drug sentencing disparities; John Kelly; Terry Allen; Heber Jentzsch; Ralph McGehee; Douglas Valentine, who has written one of the best books on the CIA in Vietnam; Sue and Gary Webb for their hospitality; Nick Schou, an excellent reporter who generously shared information he had uncovered about the activities of CIA contractors in Southern California; Marianne McDonald; Nicholas Kozloff; Scott Handleman; Phil Connors; Becky Grant; Elinor Lindheimer; Craig Van Note; Bernardo Attias, for maintaining a useful web page on the CIA and drug trafficking; Steven Hiatt; Jonathan Lubell; Andrew Cockburn; JoAnn Wypijewski; Bryce Hoffman; Kimberly Willson-St. Clair for allowing this book to take over her house for a year and for her great skills in the library; Barbara Yaley; and Ken Silverstein, with whom we write our biweekly newsletter CounterPunch.

Sunday, August 18, 1996, was not a major news day for most American newspapers. The big story of the hour was the preview of the Democratic convention in Chicago.

About 2,500 miles west of Chicago lies Silicon Valley. Its big newspaper is the San Jose Mercury News, which has a solid reputation as a good regional paper. Like other Knight-Ridder properties, such as the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Detroit Free Press, it has a middle-of-the-road political cast slightly tilted to the Democratic side.

As the citizens of Santa Clara County browsed through their newspaper that Sunday morning, many of them surely stopped at the first article of a three-part series, under the slightly sinister title Dark Alliance, subtitled The Story Behind the Crack Explosion. The words were superimposed on a murky picture of a black man smoking a crack pipe, said image overlaid on the seal of the Central Intelligence Agency. The first days headline was Americas Crack Plague Has Roots in Nicaraguan War, just above the byline of the author of the series, a reporter in the Mercury News Sacramento bureau named Gary Webb.

Within a couple of weeks, the story that Webb laid across August 18, 19 and 20 in the San Jose Mercury News would convulse black America and prompt the Central Intelligence Agency first to furious denials and then to one of the most ruthless campaigns of vilification of a journalist since the Agency went after Seymour Hersh in the mid 1970s. Within three weeks, both the Justice Department and the CIA bowed to fierce demands by California Senator Barbara Boxer and Los Angeles Representative Maxine Waters for thorough a investigation. By mid-November, a crowd of 1,500 locals in Waterss own district in South Central Los Angeles would be giving CIA director John Deutch one of the hardest evenings of his life. In terms of public unease about the secret activities of the US government, Webbs series was the most significant event since the Iran/Contra affair nearly blew Ronald Reagan out of the water.

From the savage assaults on Webb by other members of his profession, those unfamiliar with the series might have assumed that Webb had made a series of wild and unsubstantiated charges, long on dramatic speculation and short on specific data or sourcing. In fact, Webbs series was succinct and narrowly focused.

Webb stuck closely to a single story line: how a group of Nicaraguan exiles set up a cocaine ring in California, establishing ties with the black street gangs of South Central Los Angeles who manufactured crack out of shipments of powder cocaine. Webb then charted how much of the profits made by the Nicaraguan exiles had been funneled back to the Contra army created in the late 1970s by the Central Intelligence Agency, with the mission of sabotaging the Sandinista revolution that had evicted Anastasio Somoza and his corrupt clique in 1979.

The very first paragraph of the series neatly summed up the theme. It was, as they say in the business, a strong lead, but a justified one. For the better part of a decade, a San Francisco Bay Area drug ring sold tons of cocaine to the Crips and Bloods street gangs of Los Angeles and funneled millions in drug profits to a Latin American guerrilla army run by the CIA. That San Francisco drug ring was headed by a Nicaraguan exile named Norwin Meneses Cantarero, who served as the head of security and intelligence for the leading organization in the Contra coalition, the FDN or Fuerza Democrtico Nicaragense. The FDN was headed by Enrique Bermdez and Adolfo Calero, who had been installed in those positions under the oversight of the CIA. Meneses came from a family intimately linked to the Somoza dictatorship. One brother had been chief of police in Managua. Two other brothers were generals in the force most loyal to Somoza, the National Guard. While his brothers were assisting Somoza in the political dictatorship that darkened Nicaragua for many decades, Norwin Meneses applied his energies mostly to straightforwardly criminal enterprises in the civil sector. He ran a car theft ring and was also one of the top drug traffickers in Nicaragua, where he was known as