A Colossal Wreck

by Alexander Cockburn

  Thanks ever so, Ms. Mackris. It must have been just horrible for you, but it was in a good cause. You gave us a bright moment in a dark year.

  December 14

  Few spectacles in journalism in the mid-1990s were more disgusting than the slagging of Gary Webb in the New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times. Squadrons of hacks, some of them with career-long ties to the CIA, sprayed thousands of words of vitriol over Webb and his paper, the San Jose Mercury News, for besmirching the Agency’s fine name by charging it with complicity in the importing of cocaine into the US.

  There are certain things you aren’t meant to say in public in America. The systematic state-sponsorship of torture by the US used to be a major no-no, but that went by the board this year. A prime no-no is saying that the US government has used assassination down the years as an instrument of national policy; also that the CIA’s complicity with drug-dealing criminal gangs stretches from the Afghanistan of today back to the year the Agency was founded in 1947. That last one is the line Webb stepped over. He paid for his presumption by undergoing one of the unfairest batterings in the history of the US press, as Whiteout, by Jeffrey St. Clair and myself, attests.

  Friday, December 10, Webb died in his Sacramento apartment by his own hand, or so it certainly seems. The notices of his passing in many newspapers were as nasty as ever. The Los Angeles Times took care to note that even after the Dark Alliance uproar Webb’s career had been “troubled,” offering as evidence the fact that “While working for another legislative committee in Sacramento, Webb wrote a report accusing the California Highway Patrol of unofficially condoning and even encouraging racial profiling in its drug interdiction program.” The effrontery of the man! “Legislative officials released the report in 1999,” the story piously continued, “but cautioned that it was based mainly on assumptions and anecdotes,” no doubt meaning that Webb didn’t have dozens of CHP officers stating under oath, on the record, that they were picking on blacks and Hispanics.

  There were similar fountains of outrage in 1996 that the CIA hadn’t been given enough space in Webb’s series to solemnly swear that never a gram of cocaine had passed under its nose but that it had been seized and turned over to the DEA or US Customs.

  In 1998 Jeffrey St. Clair and I published Whiteout, about the relationships between the CIA, drugs and the press since the Agency’s founding. We also examined the Webb affair in detail. On a lesser scale, at lower volume, the book elicited the same sort of abuse Webb drew. It was a long book stuffed with well-documented facts, over which the critics lightly vaulted to charge us, as they did Webb, with “conspiracy-mongering” though also, sometimes in the same sentence, with recycling “old news.” Jeffrey and I came to the conclusion that what really affronted the critics, some of them nominally left-wing, was that our book portrayed Uncle Sam’s true face. Not a “rogue” Agency but one always following the dictates of government, murdering, torturing, poisoning, drugging its own subjects, approving acts of monstrous cruelty, following methods devised and tested by Hitler’s men, themselves transported to America after World War II.

  One of the CIA’s favored modes of self-protection is the “uncover-up.” The Agency first denies with passion, then later concedes in muffled tones, the charges leveled against it. Such charges have included the Agency’s recruitment of Nazi scientists and SS officers; 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.

  True to form, after Webb’s series raised a storm, particularly on black radio, the CIA issued categorical denials. Then came the solemn pledges of an intense and far-reaching investigation by the CIA’s Inspector General, Fred Hitz. On December 18, 1997, stories in the Washington Post by Walter Pincus and in the New York Times by Tim Weiner appeared simultaneously, both saying the same thing: Inspector General Hitz had finished his investigation. He had found “no direct or indirect” links between the CIA and the cocaine traffickers. As both Pincus and Weiner admitted in their stories, neither of the two journalists had actually seen the report.

  The actual report itself, so loudly heralded, received almost no examination. But those who took the time to examine the 149-page document—the first of two volumes—found Inspector General Hitz making one damning admission after another including an account of a meeting between a pilot who was making drug/arms runs between San Francisco and Costa Rica with two Contra leaders who were also partners with the San Francisco-based Contra/drug smuggler Norwin Meneses. Present at this encounter in Costa Rica was a curly-haired man who said his name was Ivan Gomez, identified by one of the Contras as the CIA’s “man in Costa Rica.” The pilot told Hitz that Gomez said he was there to “ensure that the profits from the cocaine went to the Contras and not into someone’s pocket.” The second volume of CIA Inspector General Fred Hitz’s investigation, released in the fall of 1998, buttressed Webb’s case even more tightly, as James Risen conceded in a story in the New York Times.

  So why did the top-tier press savage Webb, and parrot the CIA’s denials? It comes back to this matter of Uncle Sam’s true face. Another New York Times reporter, Keith Schneider, was asked by In These Times back in 1987 why he had devoted a three-part series in the Times to attacks on the Contra hearings chaired by Senator John Kerry. Schneider said such a story could “shatter the Republic. I think it is so damaging, the implications are so extraordinary, that for us to run the story, it had better be based on the most solid evidence we could amass.” Kerry did uncover mountains of evidence. So did Webb. But neither of them got the only thing that would have satisfied Schneider, Pincus, and all the other critics: a signed confession of CIA complicity by the DCI himself. Short of that, I’m afraid we’re left with “innuendo,” “conspiracy-mongering” and “old stories.” We’re also left with the memory of some great work by a very fine journalist who deserved a lot better than he got from the profession he loved.

  2005

  January 11

  These days a very large number of Americans live about 500 dollars from disaster (and often a tenth of that sum) on their monthly budgets. They’re mostly not more than fifty miles from a new prison and a couple of percentage points from a boost in their mortgage payments that would spell ruin. They think both major political parties are worthless. Their main enemies are often cops, social workers and family courts.

  January 13

  Imagine, in the same month as the death of the muse of high camp, Susan Sontag, we have England in an uproar about Prince Harry and his silly swastika armband. All this while The Producers is playing to packed houses in London. They’re even talking of banning the swastika. That’ll be one in the eye for Indian symbols! The airlines will have to start handing out reminders to the Navajo before they land at Heathrow.

  The theme of the party where some jerk snapped Harry was Colonialists and Natives. I suppose the lad could have gone as Lord Curzon or Lord Kitchener, but most of Harry’s male relatives still have to dress like that anyway for formal military occasions. The Afrika Korps uniform was a nice idea and a lot more original than putting some shoeblack on his face and going as a native.

  How bitterly Harry must regret not dressing up as Captain Cook. Then he could have had an enjoyable Tour of Contrition to the Antipodes and the Pacific region, apologizing to the Maoris and Hawaiians for insensitivity to genocide. Who wants to go to Auschwitz at this time of year?

  “Where do you stop with the taboos?” wrote David Ball of Milton Keynes to the Daily Telegraph. “Do you not dress as a Dominican Friar, whose order was responsible for the persecution and death of thousands of ‘Heretics’ i.e. people with different views, in the Middle Ages? Do you not dress as a US cavalryman,
who assisted in the systematic destruction of the indigenous native population of America, or as a conquistador, who decimated the Inca population? History is full of evil-doers. Do we try and ignore their existence or accept them for what they were? I don’t think Harry was going around shouting neo-Nazi slogans and giving Heil Hitler salutes. He was just dressed as a soldier, complete with all the insignia, swastika included, that the uniform entailed. An insensitive choice but probably only youthful indiscretion. To bar him from Sandhurst would be crass. If anything, the training is likely to teach him some values and a better appreciation of the influence his position has got.”

  I’ll buy that, same way as I buy the view of the Pravda editorialist who wrote: “Prince Harry turned up in an Afrika Korps uniform—who better to mock than the German colonials under Hitler, the greatest imperialist project of murder in human history since perhaps Genghis Khan? … If this young man was invited to a Colonials and Natives party, what was he supposed to wear? A pink ballet dress, to be accused of being a fairy, a transsexual or a cross-dresser?”

  The English have always had a soft spot for Rommel, the Desert Fox, the Good German outgeneraled by Montgomery and then forced to commit suicide by Hitler. Actually Rommel was outgeneraled by the Matrons who ruled over matters of hygiene at the schools attended by the British officer class. How well I remember Matron at my own school, Heatherdown, who used to line us little boys up and then clasp our testicles in her chill hand and demand we cough. I’m never quite sure why; maybe to detect signs of incipient syphilis in case we eight-year-olds had been infected by the girls at Heathfield, the other side of a forbidding wall.

  Why those boyish testicles in Matron’s chill hand? Here is one answer.

  Dear Mr. Cockburn,

  The nominal answer is: to detect inguinal hernias. The Freudian analysis is more complex.

  Daniel Wirt MD, Houston

  February 7

  I was prowling the other day through a box of old Communist Party literature belonging to the late Dick Criley, sent me by his niece, Honey Williams. Among predictable pamphlets on Lysenko, Dimitrov, and other celebrities of the period I came across Fighting Words, published in 1949, being selections from twenty-five years of the Daily Worker.

  There were many very fine pieces of reporting, from Abner Berry on a cotton plantation in Alabama; from William Allan in Michigan about 288 black workers “sold” to a canning company for $35, shipped up from Georgia to farm camps, separated from the pigs by straw bales.

  On October 16, 1947, there was a proud bulletin, titled “Socko!,” about the achievement of the Worker’s handicapper, Al. On his second day on the job Al picked “a phenomenal total of six winners in the seven races at Jamaica yesterday.” Readers putting $10 on each of Al’s picks would have cleared $116. Al’s feat on behalf of the toiler-punters reminds me of the services done to party members in the UK in 1949, most of whom probably put their money on Russian Hero, who won the Grand National at Aintree that year against odds of sixty-six to one, the fifth-longest odds in the history of the race since it began in 1837.

  Dipping further into Fighting Words I found an enthusiastic news lead on May 14, 1948: “The sun is rising on a new nation, a new state in Palestine … history marches on—in Palestine no less than in Greece, China, or Indonesia. In Palestine, it is the Haganah and its allies; in Greece, it is the heroic guerilla movement; in China it is the mighty and victorious People’s Army, led by the Communists. In every case, the enemy is the same—the imperialism of London and Wall Street …”

  Oh well. Small wonder it was hard, even in the ’80s, to get many old Lincoln Brigaders and kindred comrades, to speak up on behalf of the Palestinians.

  Further into Fighting Words my eye was caught by the title, “A Trotskyite Slumming Trip,” published on November 26, 1947. It was by Samuel Sillen, and took the form of a robust attack on Edmund Wilson. Here it is:

  The editors of The New Yorker, with grotesque humor, financed a sort of intellectual slumming trip by Edmund Wilson through postwar Europe. He left his Baedeker home, but not his Trotskyism. His report, published in his new book, Europe Without Baedeker, unutterably dull, is worth nothing except as a symptom of the moral decay of capitalist apologists.

  Wilson felt most at home in a convent cell at the Hospital of the Blue Nuns in Rome, where he discussed with George Santayana his quaint “weakness for Mussolini.” Wilson’s militant, unabashed hatred of people naturally accompanies a hatred of the democratic upsurge in post-Hitler Europe. The author laments his departed friends Trotsky and Tukhachevsky, waxes homesick for Alexander Barmine, consoles himself that De Gaulle’s big brain, André Malraux, is one of “the most valuable forces still alive on this devastated continent.”

  Then he scoots back to America with a dazzling proposal. He wants us to set up a Board of Breeding. We should not be so “foolish” as to allow Nazi failures to “discourage us with eugenics.” Wilson offers this bright vista: “If we can produce, from some cousin of the jackal and the wolf, the dachshund and the Great Dane, the Pekinese and the poodle, what should we not be able to do with man?”

  Fortified by this dog-theory of history, Wilson finds a new key to what is “wrong” with Socialist ideas. It is that Karl Marx was a Jew, “and, being a Jew, from a family that had included many rabbis, he identified the situation of the factory worker with the situation of the Jew.” Marx, says Wilson, mistakenly assumed that workers released from capitalism would behave in terms of “Jewish tradition.” He did not foresee that “what happens, when you let down the bars, is that a lot of gross and ignorant people who have been condemned to mean destinies before, go rushing for all they are worth after things that they can eat, drink, sleep on, ride on, preside at and amuse themselves with.”

  Thus, in one stroke, the Trotskyite tourist for The New Yorker combines the Nazi view of Marxism as a peculiarly “Jewish” philosophy, the Bourbons’ contempt for the masses as wild animals, and the hoary capitalist warning that we must not “let down the bars” to the working class.

  This leads up to the inevitability-of-war thesis. Wilson goes a step further than your run-of-the-mill warmonger. Not only can’t we get along with the Soviet leaders, but Americans “will never be able to cooperate as peoples” with the Russians. It is “ridiculous,” says Wilson, to think of the Russian people today as “civilized.”

  Wilson, borrowing a cue from De Gaulle’s Malraux, evidently aspires to be a braintruster of the fascist forces. It is not only moral and intellectual rottenness that we find in his book, but the savagery of desperation.

  One might have thought that Boards of Breeding would not have been on Wilson’s shopping list, only two years after the defeat of Nazism, but eugenic selection—ardently backed by American liberals from the start—was big in the late 1940s. In 1949 Garrett Hardin was writing about America’s declining IQ in his biology textbook. Malthus is never far away, nor the sterilizer’s toolkit, intellectual and physical.

  February 8

  Further memories of a Russian Hero. England in the late 1940s was famously grim. As I remember it, London back then was a very dirty place, from coal dust and smoke, from the grit stirred up every day by the jackhammers still clearing out rubble from the Blitz.

  No one had any money. Fun for millions was the weekly flutter on racehorses or football teams. “Is the Middle Class Doomed?” asked Picture Post in 1949, and answered its question in the affirmative. Labour’s National Health Service opened for business on July 5, 1948, and the great race for drugs, false teeth and spectacles was under way. Spending on prescriptions went from £13 million to £41 million in two years, prompting Rep. Paul Ryan’s ideological predecessors to howl that the NHS was on the edge of collapse.

  My father was edging his way tactfully out of the Communist Party, though he was still spending time at the Daily Worker. More than my father’s articles in the Worker, the NHS helped the masses see more clearly. Hundreds of thousands of poor people previously had recourse onl
y to prescriptionless specs from the tray in Woolworths. Now they perched on their noses prescription lenses in the 422 Panto Oval frame, as did I, though it took John Lennon, fifteen years down the road, to endow it with retro-chic.

  At the Daily Worker, with or without prescription spectacles, there wasn’t much sign of the fabled millions in Moscow gold supposedly sent by Stalin to foment revolution. In practical terms the most important fellow in the office was a scholarly looking Burmese man who toiled away behind a vast pile of books and manuals. My father reckoned he was set to turn in a particularly meaty series on Burma’s prospects after independence, won in 1948 from British colonial rule. In fact he was the Worker’s racing correspondent, working up forms for the coming season.

  The Burman was red-hot as a tipster and soon had a wide following. Once my father found the Worker’s manager half-dead from apprehension. He’d put the entire office Friday wage packet on a pick by the Burman, in the hope of getting the comrades something decent to take home to their wives. “Should that animal fail,” he said, trembling, “the lads’ll about kill me.” But the tipster came through, and that week everyone got full pay and even some arrears.

  The biggest day in the National Hunt Steeplechase in England is the Grand National, run at Aintree, outside Liverpool, typically in April; four miles, 856 yards, thirty fences, often lethal to horses and devastating to jockeys. In 1928 the winner, Tipperary Tim, ridden by Billy Dutton and carrying odds of 100 to one, was the only horse out of a starting field of forty-two that didn’t fall.

  Later, in Ireland, my mother bred horses. My father never cared for them, but he was pretty good at studying form and picking the odd winner, which was just as well because freelance earnings were scrawny, particularly if you were a well-known red.