Daniel Brandt
Pipe Dreams: the CIA, Drugs, and the Media
Thu Feb 19 00:25:20 2004
64.140.158.199

Pipe Dreams: the CIA, Drugs, and the Media
by Daniel Brandt and Steve Badrich
From NameBase NewsLine, No. 16, January-March 1997

... Consider media treatment of Jack Blum, former special counsel to John Kerry's
Senate subcommittee that investigated the CIA-contra-drug connection. ...

http://www.namebase.org/news16.html

Like some Russian high official come to treat with Chechen rebels, CIA Director John Deutch arrived in force -- by heavily-armed motorcade, and with helicopter cover. SWAT teams swarmed over the building that was Deutch's destination.


But on November 15, 1996, Deutch's destination was in fact only the auditorium of Locke High School in the beleaguered South Central neighborhood of Los Angeles: for a U.S. public servant, not officially enemy territory at all. Still, the citizens who showed up to hear and question Deutch were searched with a metal detector in return for the privilege.

And privilege it was. The post-Cold-War world had become so threatening to the CIA that Deutch was taking the unprecedented step of showing up in public -- of walking, in fact, directly into a popular firestorm. That evening, Deutch emphatically claimed that the CIA had no involvement whatsoever with the crack-cocaine epidemic that is battering South Central. It was a message Deutch's audience wasn't buying.

This event and its aftermath are well worth reflecting upon. Unfortunately, the defense of Deutch and his agency by major U.S. media has proved far less illuminating than the narrow and ahistorical way these same media have defined and framed the relevant issues. The ability of well-paid media people to vaporize the known history of the CIA, to turn this history into a non-issue, is scary -- scarier, almost, than the long, lamentable, but extremely well-documented story of CIA involvement with drug traffickers on four continents.

This essay will attempt to say something, yet again, both about the major media and about some of the many mind-bending episodes, already on the public record, of CIA-drug-trafficker complicity.

The CIA's latest trials on this issue began in August 1996 with the now-notorious series on crack cocaine in the San Jose Mercury News. In this series, reporter Gary Webb made the case that the CIA, through the actions of several drug-dealing Nicaraguan contras it had funded, was involved in the introduction of crack into Los Angeles during the 1980s.

Parallel stories have appeared in provincial papers before, and been ignored. But San Jose isn't in Silicon Valley for nothing; the Mercury News boosted Webb's stories with its state-of-the-art website, and a popular firestorm ensued. Soon Maxine Waters of the Congressional Black Caucus was calling for an investigation, and the Senate Intelligence Committee had scheduled hearings.

Belatedly, the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and New York Times all recognized that, this time around, they couldn't ignore the story. But instead of investigating the CIA, they investigated their fellow journalists at the Mercury News. Quoting each other's stories to strengthen their common case, editorialists, reporters, and columnists from all three papers attacked Webb's reporting -- or what they claimed Webb had reported -- as well as his ethics, his talk-show appearances, his book proposal, his movie deal, his editors, and even a graphic on his newspaper's website. Gary Webb, after all, is neither a Washingtonian nor a New Yorker.

There was nothing casual or accidental about this bashing. The L.A. Times had 25 reporters on the story. The Post refused to print a reasoned letter from Mercury News editor Jerry Ceppos defending the series, even after Ceppos provided a requested revision. Perhaps the low point of this campaign was a story by Tim Golden of the New York Times, which explained that African-Americans are more susceptible than their fellow citizens to conspiracy theories and paranoia.

But it's not necessarily paranoid to note what crack has done to our cities, or that the U.S. prison population has tripled over the past 14 years, or that California now spends more on prisons than it does on colleges and universities. And as the Mercury News noted: in 1993, snorters of powdered cocaine drew an average sentence of three months, whereas crack smokers got an average of three years. And 83 percent of those sent to prison for crack trafficking were African-American. If present trends were to continue for another 14 years, a majority of African-American males between the ages of 18 and 40 would be locked up.

Deutch's audience at Locke High, furthermore, had a more appropriate response than the Washington Post did to Deutch's promise that the CIA would investigate itself: hoots and howls. After all, the last internal CIA report on contras and drugs, completed in 1988, is still secret. "I don't know why [Rep. Julian] Dixon is saluting Deutch's courage for coming here today," someone from the audience complained at the floor microphone, "when everybody knows this building's got hundreds of pigs in it. There's pigs behind those curtains, there's pigs on top of the roof. We're not going to get no justice here today -- we're going to need a revolution."

And it's the major media, rather than the folks who turned out at Locke High, that are guilty of what amounts to suppression of evidence on this issue. Consider media treatment of Jack Blum, former special counsel to John Kerry's Senate subcommittee that investigated the CIA-contra-drug connection. If senators will listen to anyone who can speak authoritatively on this issue, it's Blum. On October 23, 1996, Blum told the Senate Intelligence Committee that although the CIA had not itself sold crack in the inner city, it had "ignored the drug problem and subverted law enforcement to prevent embarrassment and to reward our allies in the contra war.... A careful review of covert operations in the Caribbean and South and Central America shows a forty-year connection between crime and covert operations that has repeatedly blown back on the United States.... I would hope that this inquiry goes beyond the narrow questions posed in the San Jose Mercury News story."

Blum's statement reviewed the same history of CIA complicity with drug traffickers that will be touched on in this essay: CIA ties to the Mafia during World War II; its role in Burma in the 1950s; in Laos in the 1960s; in Argentina and Bolivia in the 1970s; and in Central America and Afghanistan in the 1980s. But Blum's 3,700 words of historical perspective raised the specter of exactly the kind of inquiry that the major media don't want. ABC's Peter Jennings crunched Blum's reflections down to a single sound bite, perversely out of context, in which Blum absolved the CIA of directly selling drugs in Los Angeles. The two sentences on CNN's U.S. News Story Page on their website were equally shameless: "Jack Blum, a former Senate investigator who looked into the matter during the 1980s, defended the CIA. 'No members of the staff of the CIA ... (were) in the cocaine business,' he said."

In fairness we may note that the media were only following the government's lead on this issue. CIA Inspector General Frederick Hitz lacks subpoena power and must produce a declassified report; for additional powers, he must petition Congress. But Congressional "oversight" over the CIA is unfortunately just that. The House Intelligence Committee is now chaired by Porter Goss (R-FL), a former CIA operations officer who still hangs out with Agency friends. Its Senate counterpart is under Arlen Specter (R-PA), whose major contribution to investigative history to date is the Warren Commission's "magic bullet" theory.

Put simply, neither the major media nor Congress has the will, perhaps not even the power, to pursue the real history of CIA activity. Maxine Waters (D-CA) fears that the investigations now in train will fade away unless public pressure is maintained. To this end, Waters plans teach-ins on California campuses this spring. A fourth contra-crack investigation is being conducted by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Bromwich, a former narcotics prosecutor. But even though Bromwich's intentions seem good, he can subpoena only Justice Department documents, and cannot compel witnesses to testify.

Jack Blum is surely right to want to pursue all CIA-drugs investigations within the framework of the larger history of the CIA -- even though one must surely question Blum's assumption that established agencies are capable of doing this. Since the 1960s, evidence of corruption and official lies has periodically made it onto the public record, but the worse the news, the more intense official resistance has become.

What follows, nevertheless, is a quick sketch of what all such investigators -- and the public -- ought to have firmly in mind. A variety of sources have been assembled here into a rough chronological narrative. But the scope of this narrative is so great that only major chapters in the CIA's long association with drugs can be mentioned. Still, as a big picture, it's better than nothing -- which is what official sources and investigations, and well-heeled publishers and producers, threaten to give us.

Back in 1936, Lucky Luciano, the boss of Mafia drug and prostitution rackets in New York City, was finally convicted as a result of Thomas Dewey's prosecution, and sentenced to thirty to fifty years. But in 1942 the Office of Naval Intelligence asked Meyer Lansky to seek Luciano's assistance in getting New York waterfront workers to watch out for enemy agents and activity. Soon Luciano's friends in Sicily, who had been severely repressed by Mussolini, were helping with the American invasion there. In 1946 the ONI appealed to Luciano's parole board. He was released from prison and deported to Italy -- where he built up a heroin syndicate.

The immediate postwar problem in places like Italy and France, from the point of view of both the CIA and entrenched interests such as the Mafia, was that many Communists had been anti-fascist Resistance fighters, and as such were attractive to voters. The Marshall Plan aimed not merely to rebuild a war-torn Europe; it aimed to rebuild Europe in such a way that no Communists could ever win an election. To this end, the CIA played a major role in administering Marshall Plan aid.

In Italy the CIA spent money to deny the 1948 elections to the Communists. By 1950 the Mafia again controlled Sicily. The CIA was also paying the Corsican Mafia in Marseilles to undermine Communist influence with striking workers. These Mafia syndicates were sufficiently well-protected that in 1951 they opened their first heroin lab. By 1965 there were two dozen labs in Marseilles, which together exported nearly five tons of heroin to the U.S. during that year.[1]

Heroin trafficking shifted in the 1960s and 1970s from the Turkey-Marseilles connection to the Asian connection. For decades until the 1950s, the opium trade was sanctioned by colonial administrations in Asia. By the early 1960s, the mountain areas of Southeast Asia -- the Golden Triangle region -- produced most of the world's opium. Northeastern Burma was particularly productive.

In the case of Burma, production before 1945 was insignificant -- as a province of India under the British, most of the opium traded in Burma was produced in India. But in 1949, Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist Forces retreated from Mao's army to the mountains of northeast Burma. The CIA helped maintain these troops, and sponsored two invasions of China. During their stay in Burma, the Nationalist Chinese exacted opium quotas from Burma's peasants; failure to pay was punished by the cutting off of fingers, hands, and feet. By the time the Nationalists fled in 1961, Burma had gone from producing about seven tons of opium per year to producing as much as a thousand tons, or about sixty percent of the world's production.[2]

In French-occupied Indochina, meanwhile, the Corsican syndicates were operating the opium trade out of Saigon under the protection of French military intelligence. When France withdrew in 1955, the U.S. inherited France's colonial politics and infrastructure. The U.S. worked with the same peoples -- the Hmong in Laos -- that the French had used. And again, the American Mafia was involved through their Corsican contacts. From Tampa, Florida, Santo Trafficante ran the Marseilles connection in Cuba during the 1950s. In 1968 he visited Saigon to meet with Corsican syndicate leaders. After 1970, Asian heroin began showing up in the U.S.

After the Cuban revolution, Trafficante's Mafia foot soldiers were mainly Cuban exiles.[3] In a 1982 interview, former CIA commando leader Grayston Lynch described what had once been the largest CIA station in the world, located south of Miami from 1961-1964. This station issued orders to 400 case officers and 2,000 exiles, dispersed in "safe houses" from Miami to Tampa. Lynch concedes that after the CIA cut off support, many of these exiles, trained in covert operations and smuggling, turned to narcotics trafficking.[4] Given that the CIA had worked with Trafficante to assassinate Castro in 1961,[5] the agency lacked sufficient ethical intelligence to worry that these Trafficante-associated exiles might pose a criminal problem. They were considered merely a "disposal problem," an institutional nuisance.

At the time all of these events were unfolding, they were secret history, unavailable in books and newspapers. Then one day in 1970, the poet Allen Ginsberg stumbled onto the CIA-heroin connection while sorting his files of clippings. He noticed that when sorted chronologically, U.S. advances into the opium-producing areas of the Golden Triangle were followed, a few months later, by clippings that reported a rise in heroin overdose deaths in American cities. The alternative press fleshed out Ginsberg's insight, and the May 1971 Ramparts magazine featured a cover story on South Vietnam's "Marshal Ky: The Biggest Pusher in the World." The major media ignored everything until Sen. Ernest Gruening, a maverick from Alaska, opened hearings. At that point the Washington Post and NBC News "discovered" this story, but soon buried it. Only the alternative press kept it alive.[6]

South Vietnam was completely corrupted by a heroin trade whose immediate origin was in Laos. The Hmong culture in Laos provided 30,000 men for the CIA's secret Laotian army under General Vang Pao. But in the process, opium production took over Hmong culture; the Hmong grew only enough rice for subsistence. To support the Hmong economy, the CIA's Air America transported raw opium out of the Laotian hills to the labs. At this point the CIA begged off, and let the syndicates and South Vietnamese officials take care of distribution. Double UOGlobe no.4 heroin, produced at a Laotian lab owned by Gen. Ouane Rattikone, became particularly famous. By mid-1971, Army medical officers estimated that fifteen percent of American GIs were addicted.

Veterans of Vietnam and Laos with intelligence connections, men such as Theodore Shackley (former chief of the Miami station), his deputy Thomas Clines, Richard Secord, Oliver North, and Felix Rodriguez, later became familiar names during the Iran-contra scandal of the 1980s. More obscure was one Michael Hand, who had been a CIA contract agent in Laos. In 1973, Hand and his partner Frank Nugan established the Nugan Hand Bank in Sydney.

A slew of top-level retirees from the CIA and U.S. military intelligence were associated with this bank; William Colby served as its attorney. Nugan Hand collapsed spectacularly in 1980. After three major investigations, Australian officials concluded that the bank had been primarily involved in laundering money for arms and drug traffickers.[7] Apparently the CIA's infamous "disposal problem" -- what to do with those nasty, well-trained former assets -- extends to its top-level former executives and administrators.

Then there is the horrible tale of Afghanistan. Heroin there was also a well-kept secret, at least until the Soviet withdrawal in 1989. Then the Washington Post was free to "di

• Cont'd -Then there is the horrible tale of Afghanistan. — Daniel Brandt, Thu Feb 19 00:31
• Cont'd - House Select Committee on Narcotics Abuse — Charles Rangel (D-NY), Thu Feb 19 00:38