Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press

394 Pages·1999·1.81 MB·English

by  Alexander Cockburn

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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US: 180 Varick Street, 10th Floor, New York, NY 10014-4606
Verso is the imprint of New Left Books
ISBN: 978-1-85984-258-4
eISBN: 978-1-78478260-3 (US)
eISBN: 978-1-78478-261-0 (UK) British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress
Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
v3.1
Preface
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 Agency’s tracks. When compelled to concede
the Agency’s 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 CIA’s activities from the policies and
directives of the US government. Whether it was Truman’s meddling in
China, which created Burmese opium kings; or the Kennedy brothers’
obsession with killing Fidel Castro; or Nixon’s 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 CIA’s darkest chapters, its efforts at mind control;
Christopher Simpson and Linda Hunt, who exposed the CIA’s 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 Buendía, who
have exposed the ties between Mexico’s drug lords and the government
and Mexico’s 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.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Preface
1 Webb’s Big Story
2 Counterattack
3 The History of “Black Paranoia”
4 Introducing the CIA
5 Lucky’s Break
6 Paperclip: Nazi Science Heads West
7 Klaus Barbie and the Cocaine Coup
8 Dr. Gottlieb’s House of Horrors
9 The US Opium Wars: China, Burma and the CIA
10 Armies and Addicts: Vietnam and Laos
11 Making Afghanistan Safe for Opium
12 The CIA, Drugs and Central America
13 The Arkansas Connection: Mena
14 The Hidden Life of Free Trade: Mexico
15 The Uncover-up
1
Webb’s Big Story
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 day’s headline was “America’s 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 Waters’s 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, Webb’s 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, Webb’s 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 Democrático Nicaragüense. The FDN was
headed by Enrique Bermúdez 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 El Rey del Drogas (the king of drugs).
Meneses worked with the approval of the Somoza clan, which duly
received its rake-off.
In 1977, Norwin Meneses felt it necessary to register his disquiet at a
Nicaraguan customs probe into his smuggling of high-end North
American cars from the US into Nicaragua. The Meneses gang murdered
the chief of customs. Owing to Norwin’s powerful family, the case was
never prosecuted.
The US Drug Enforcement Agency and other agencies had been
keeping files on Meneses since at least 1974. Yet he was granted political
refugee status in July 1979, when he and other members of Somoza’s
elite fled to the US. Meneses landed in San Francisco as part of what
became known locally as the Nicaraguan “gold rush.” Here he lost no
time in rebuilding his criminal enterprises in stolen cars and drugs.
Meneses’s contact in Los Angeles was another Nicaraguan exile, Oscar
Danilo Blandón. Blandón had left Managua in June 1979, a month
before Meneses, on the eve of Somoza’s downfall. The son of a Managua
slumlord, Blandón had earned a master’s degree in marketing from the
University of Bogotá in Colombia and had headed Somoza’s agricultural
export program. Agricultural exports were an important component of
the country’s mainly ranching-and coffee-based economy, with the
Somoza family itself owning no less than a quarter of the nation’s
agricultural land.
In his position as head of the export program, Blandón had developed
close ties to the US Department of Commerce and the US State
Department. He secured $27 million in USAID funding and was well
known to the US military and the Central Intelligence Agency, both of
which had a commanding presence in Somoza’s Nicaragua. (Somoza had
sent his officer corps for training in the US, and the CIA station chief was
the most powerful foreigner in Managua.)
Blandón’s wife, Chepita, also came from a powerful clan, the Murillo
family. One of her relatives was the mayor of Managua. Like many other
Somoza supporters, both the Blandón and Murillo families lost most of
their fortunes in the 1979 revolution and burned with the desire to evict
the popular government headed by the Sandinista commanders.
Blandón and his wife settled in Los Angeles, where he started a
usedcar business. He also began to involve himself in Nicaraguan émigré
politics. Testifying on February 3, 1994 as a government witness before
a federal grand jury investigating the Meneses family’s drug ring in San
Francisco, Blandón said he drove to San Francisco for several meetings
with Norwin Meneses “to start the movement, the Contra revolution.”
Blandón had known the Meneses family in Nicaragua. In fact, Blandón
said, his mother shared Meneses’s last name of Cantarero, “so we are
related.” He said he and Meneses “met with the politics people,” but
couldn’t find a way to raise big sums of cash.
In the spring of 1981, Blandón got a phone call from an old friend and
business associate from Managua named Donald Barrios. Barrios, then
living in Miami, was moving in high-level Nicaraguan émigré circles.
This group included General Gustavo Medina, once an important
intelligence officer in Somoza’s National Guard, a position in which he
had long-standing ties to the CIA. Blandón later testified that Barrios
“started telling me we had to raise some money and send it to
Honduras.” Barrios instructed Blandón to go to Los Angeles International
Airport to meet Meneses. Blandón and Meneses then flew to Honduras
and, in the capital city of Tegucigalpa, met with Enrique Bermúdez,
former National Guardsman and military commander of the FDN.
In Somoza’s final days, President Jimmy Carter had made a last-ditch
effort to maintain a US-backed regime in Nicaragua even if Somoza
should be forced to quit. The plan was to preserve the bloodthirsty
National Guard as the custodian of US interests. When this plan failed
and the Sandinistas swept to power, Carter ordered the initial
organization of what later became known as the Contras, operating out
of Honduras. The CIA mustered Argentinian officers fresh from their own
death squad campaigns, and these men began to organize the exiled
National Guardsmen into a military force.
Bermúdez was key to this CIA-organized operation from the start. He
had been a colonel in the National Guard, had trained at the US National
Defense College outside Washington, D.C., and had served from 1976 to
July 1979 as Somoza’s military attaché in Washington. Furnished with
$300,000 in CIA money, Bermúdez took command of the fledgling
Contra force in Honduras. In the summer of 1981, at the dawn of the
Reagan administration, Bermúdez held a press conference in Honduras.
In language drafted by his CIA handlers, Bermúdez announced the
formation of the FDN and his own position as commander of its military
wing. The CIA script later installed Adolfo Calero, formerly the Coca-
Cola concessionaire in Managua, as the FDN’s civilian head, operating