White is Black (Whiteout: the CIA, Drugs and the Press - Alexander Cockburn, Jeffrey St Clair)

Member Name: amygdala

Product:	Whiteout: the CIA, Drugs and the Press - Alexander Cockburn, Jeffrey St Clair
Date:	11/10/00 (30 review reads)
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Advantages: Detailed history of the world's biggest terrorist organization.

Disadvantages: References are to entire books rather than chapters and pages within books.

Because his manner was so assured and friendly and his ability to read from a script so well-honed from Hollywood days Ronald Reagan was known as “the Great Communicator” during his presidency, but he had enormous difficulty in communicating one simple but very important message to the American public: the wickedness of the Sandinista government running Nicaragua and the urgent need to overthrow it before its army had smashed its way through Honduras, Guatemala, and Mexico, and was rumbling across the Texan border. Try as he might, the American public stubbornly refused to accept this. One night he went on national television to try again, and he must have thought that this time people would sit up and take very serious notice, because he had something very serious to tell them.

The Sandinistas were involved in DRUGS. They were actually helping South American drug-dealers fly cocaine and marijuana into the United States. Reagan even had film to show his audience of a plane taking off from a Nicaraguan airfield loaded with drugs. What further proof could anyone need of the depravity of the Sandinistas than this? Surely now everyone would accept that the Contra-Sandinista army fighting to overthrow them must be backed properly by the United States and not have to struggle for the money it needed to wage war against this atheistic Communist menace barely two thousand miles from Los Angeles and Houston.

Unfortunately for Reagan, even this revelation did not convince the American public of the need to overthrow the Sandinistas, and the Contras continued to struggle for money. Quite how hard they had been struggling before then the American public wouldn't learn for some time, but many members of Reagan's government knew perfectly well when he went on national television to reveal that the sandiistas were involved in drugs. And they must have found it hard to keep a straight face as they watched Reagan's righteous denunciation of
this wickedness, for it was the exact opposite of the truth.

Because the sandiistas were not involved in drug-running but the Contra-sandiistas were. They were making many millions of dollars running cocaine into Los Angeles to supply the crack market, and while one arm of Reagan's government, the Drug Enforcement Administration or DEA, was working to stop them, another arm, the Central Intelligence Agency or CIA, was working to stop them being stopped. After all, the CIA and its predecessors had a long tradition of helping friendly right-wing lunatics make money from drugs and this book describes how they did so all over the world, from China in the 1940s through Italy and France in the 1950s and '60s to Bolivia and Mexico in the 1970s, '80s, and '90s. The American government's offical "War on Drugs" took place during a whole series of smaller wars on drugs, that is, wars financed by drug-running, as the CIA helped a variety of vicious criminal organizations and political groups to fight against Communism.

The Italian Mafia, for example, had been almost wiped out by Mussolini, but it had proved a useful ally during the Second World War so the CIA helped it re-establish itself and its various money-making schemes when the war ended and Italy's people seemed in danger of electing a Communist government. The Mafia shadowed the official election campaign with an unofficial one of assassination and intimidation, and Italy was saved. Identical techniques were then tried by allies of the CIA in South Vietnam but despite being applied even more vigorously they failed there. In the meantime the CIA's own airline, Air America, was flying raw opium from the Golden Triangle in Indo-China for refinement into heroin and smuggling into Europe and the United States.

That story may already be familiar to some readers from a famous book on the subject, Christopher Robbins' *Air America: The Story of the CIA's S
ecret Airlines*, as may other parts of the book, for *Whiteout* is a compendium of other people's research into the life and crimes of the CIA, drawing on books like Gary Webb's *Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion*, Bob Woodward's *VEIL: The Secret Wars of the CIA 1981-87*, and Gordon Thomas's *Journey into Madness: Medical Torture and the Mind Controllers*. That is what makes it so valuable, for it collects fifty years of writing into a single readable volume, creating a complete picture from the detailed pieces painted by other writers. The CIA is not a rogue agency and when it commits crimes and allies itself with criminals it is acting with the full knowledge and support of the American executive arm, as it is when it resists attempts to control it and uncover what it does:

‘Lying is part of the job description at the CIA, where falsehoods are regularly peddled to allies, the press, other federal agencies and Congress. “We'd go down and lie to them consistently,” says former CIA officer Ralph McGeehee. “In my 25 years, I have never seen the agency tell the truth to a congressional committee.”’

But the truth is out there, and this book collects a lot of it between two covers.

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