Whiteout

by Alexander Cockburn

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  Reeves, Jimmie, and Richard Campbell. Cracked Coverage: Television News, the Anti-Cocaine Crusade and the Reagan Legacy. Duke Univ. Press, 1994.

  Ridgeway, James. “Prisons in Black.” Village Voice, Sept. 19, 1988.

  St. Clair, Jeffrey. “Germ War: The US Record.” CounterPunch, Feb. 15–28, 1998.

  ——. “A Brazen Racial Animus.” CounterPunch, Feb. 15–28, 1998.

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  4

  Introducing the CIA

  Even as John Deutch was flying back to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia from his town meeting in South Central Los Angeles, the US Department of Justice was preparing to file an indictment that shed a most unflattering light upon Deutch’s protestations that, as he put it in an op-ed article in the New York Times, the CIA had never “directly or knowingly condoned drug smuggling into the United States.”

  On November 22, 1996, the US Justice Department indicted General Ramón Guillén Davila of Venezuela on charges of importing cocaine into the United States. The federal prosecutors alleged that while heading Venezuela’s anti-drug unit, General Guillén smuggled more than 22 tons of cocaine into the US and Europe for the Calí and Bogotá cartels. Guillén responded to the indictment from the sanctuary of Caracas, whence his government refused to extradict him to Miami, while honoring him with a pardon for any possible crimes committed in the line of duty. He maintained that the cocaine shipments to the US had been approved by the CIA, and went on to say that “some drugs were lost and neither the CIA nor the DEA want to accept any responsibility for it.”

  The CIA had hired Guillén in 1988 to help it find out something about the Colombian drug cartels. The Agency and Guillén set up a drug-smuggling operation using agents of Guillén’s in the Venezuelan National Guard to buy cocaine from the Calí cartel and ship it to Venezuela, where it was stored in warehouses maintained by the Narcotics Intelligence Center, Caracas, which was run by Guillén and entirely funded by the CIA.

  To avoid the Calí cartel asking inconvenient questions about the growing inventory of cocaine in the Narcotics Intelligence Center’s warehouses and, as one CIA agent put it, “to keep our credibility with the traffickers,” the CIA decided it was politic to let some of the cocaine proceed on to the cartel’s network of dealers in the US. As another CIA agent put it, they wanted “to let the dope walk” – in other words, to allow it to be sold on the streets of Miami, New York and Los Angeles.

  When it comes to what are called “controlled shipments” of drugs into the US, federal law requires that such imports have DEA approval, which the CIA duly sought. This was, however, denied by the DEA attaché in Caracas. The CIA then went to DEA headquarters in Washington, only to be met with a similar refusal, whereupon the CIA went ahead with the shipment anyway. One of the CIA men working with Guillén was Mark McFarlin. In 1989 McFarlin, so he later testified in federal court in Miami, told his CIA station chief in Caracas that the Guillén operation, already under way, had just seen 3,000 pounds of cocaine shipped to the US. When the station chief asked McFarlin if the DEA was aware of this, McFarlin answered no. “Let’s keep it that way,” the station chief instructed him.

  Over the next three years, more than 22 tons of cocaine made its way through this pipeline into the US, with the shipments coming into Miami either in hollowed-out shipping pallets or in boxes of blue jeans. In 1990 DEA agents in Caracas learned what was going on, but security was lax since one female DEA agent in Venezuela was sleeping with a CIA man there, and another, reportedly with General Guillén himself. The CIA and Guillén duly changed their modes of operation, and the cocaine shipments from Caracas to Miami continued for another two years. Eventually, the US Customs Service brought down the curtain on the operation, and in 1992 seized an 800-pound shipment of cocaine in Miami.

  One of Guillén’s subordinates, Adolfo Romero, was arrested and ultimately convicted on drug conspiracy charges. None of the Colombian drug lords was ever inconvenienced by this project, despite the CIA’s claim that it was after the Calí cartel. Guillén was indicted but remained safe in Caracas. McFarlin and his boss were ultimately edged out of the Agency. No other heads rolled after an operation that yielded nothing but the arrival, under CIA supervision, of 22 tons of cocaine in the United States. The CIA conducted an internal review of this debacle and asserted that there was “no evidence of criminal wrongdoing.”

  A DEA investigation reached a rather different conclusion, charging that the spy agency had engaged in “unauthorized controlled shipments” of narcotics into the US and that the CIA withheld “vital information” on the Calí cartel from the DEA and federal prosecutors.

  Disingenuous denial has long been a specialty of the Central Intelligence Agency. Back in 1971, one of Deutch’s better known predecessors as director of intelligence, Richard Helms, addressed the American Newspaper Editors Association at a moment when the Agency had been accused of infiltrating new organizations and of running a domestic spying operation for President Richard Nixon. The nation, Helms told the assembled editors, “should take on faith that we too are honorable men, devoted to her service.” Helms was scarcely in hostile territory, any more than was Deutch in the New York Times, the venue for his article asserting the innocence of the CIA. More than any other director, Helms was part of the Georgetown circuit, on close terms with such journalists as Joseph Alsop, Ja
mes Reston, Joseph Kraft, Chalmers Roberts and C. L. Sulzberger. Helms would often boast of his days as a reporter for United Press, during which he had gotten exclusive interviews with Adolf Hitler and the ice-skater Sonja Henie.

  Less than two years after his denials to the Newspaper Editors Association, Helms went before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and was grilled about the Agency’s involvement in Watergate. In response, he lied brazenly about Howard Hunt and Gordon Liddy’s ties to the CIA. Though the chairman of the committee, Sen. William Fulbright, was rightly incredulous, Helms was not formally put on the spot.

  This wasn’t the first time Helms, who led the Agency from 1966 through 1972, had lied, nor was it his most devious statement. Throughout the Vietnam War, Helms had withheld from Congress crucial information on the troop strength of the Vietnamese National Liberation Front (NLF, aka Viet Cong) developed by a young CIA analyst named Sam Adams. Adams’s numbers showed that support for the NLF in South Vietnam was much greater than the military’s estimates, so strong, indeed, that the war seemed to be unwinnable. Helms, however, sided with the military and sought unrelentingly to hound Adams out of the agency.

  Later in 1973 the dapper spook again gave false testimony to Congress, this time about the CIA’s part in overthrowing Salvador Allende’s government in Chile. Of course, support for the coup against Allende was undertaken at the insistence of American corporations such as ITT and Anaconda Copper. The Agency is reported to have sent a drug smuggler to Santiago with a cash payment for a Chilean hitman endeavoring to assassinate Allende. In 1977 the Justice Department, headed by Carter appointee Griffin Bell, reluctantly charged Helms with perjury. The former CIA director took the advice of Washington superlawyer Edwin Bennett Williams and entered a plea of no contest. He was fined $2,000 and received a suspended sentence.

  There were other historical counterpoints to Deutch’s protestations. In 1976, at one of the most fraught moments in the Agency’s relationship to Congress since its inception, Director William Colby (who had earlier blown the whistle on Helms’s lies about Chile) went before the Select Committee on Intelligence being run by Senator Frank Church of Idaho. This time the mood of Congress was sharper, prompted by Seymour Hersh’s exposés in the New York Times of domestic spying and also by charges that the CIA had been running an assassination program overseas.

  Yes, Colby said, the possibility of using assassination had been entertained at the Agency, but at no time had it ever reached the level of successful practical application. As for domestic spying, there had been programs of mail surveillance and the like, but they were far from the “massive” operations alleged by Hersh, and they had long since been discontinued.

  Colby was being typically modest. The CIA, through Operation CHAOS and similar programs, had compiled files on more than 10,000 Americans and kept a database with more than 300,000 names in it. It had wiretapped the phones of American reporters, infiltrated dissident groups and tried to disrupt anti-war protests. It spent $33,000 in support of a letter-writing campaign in support of the invasion of Cambodia.

  As with the charges of complicity in drug running, the CIA’s role in assassination is one of those topics gingerly handled by the press or Congress from time to time and then hastily put aside, with the habitual claim that the CIA may have dreamed of it, thought about it and maybe even dabbled in it, but had never actually gone successfully all the way. But in fact the Agency has gone all the way many times, and we should look at this history in some detail since the pattern of denial in these cases strongly parallels the CIA’s relationship with the drug business.

  There’s no dispute that the CIA has used assassination as a weapon lower down the political and social pecking order, as no one knew better than William Colby. He had, by his own admission, supervised the Phoenix Program and other so-called “counter-terror” operations in Vietnam. Phoenix was aimed at “neutralizing” NLF political leaders and organizers in rural South Vietnam. In congressional testimony Colby boasted that 20,587 NLF activists had been killed between 1967 and 1971 alone. The South Vietnamese published a much higher estimate, declaring that nearly 41,000 had been killed. Barton Osborn, an intelligence officer in the Phoenix Program, spelled out in chilling terms the bureaucratic attitude of many of the agents toward their murderous assignments. “Quite often it was a matter of expediency just to eliminate a person in the field rather than deal with the paperwork.”

  Those killed outright in Phoenix operations may have been more fortunate than the 29,000 suspected NLF members arrested and interrogated with techniques that were horrible even by the standards of Pol Pot and Mobutu. In 1972 a parade of witnesses before Congress testified about the techniques of the Phoenix interrogators: how they interviewed suspects and then pushed them out of planes, how they cut off fingers, ears and testicles, how they used electro-shock, shoved wooden dowels into the brains of some prisoners, and rammed electric probes into the rectums of others.

  For many of the Phoenix raids the agency employed the services of bandit tribes and ethnic groups, such as the Khmer Kampuchean Kram, the KKK. The KKK was comprised of anti-communist Cambodians and drug smugglers who, as one Phoenix veteran put it, “would kill anyone as long as there was something in it for them.” The KKK even offered to knock off Prince Sihanouk for the Americans and frame the NLF for the killing.

  These American death squads were a particular favorite of Richard Nixon. After the My Lai massacre, an operation with all the earmarks of a Phoenix-style extermination, there was a move to reduce the funding for these civilian killing programs. Nixon, according to an account by Seymour Hersh, objected vociferously. “No,” Nixon demanded. “We’ve got to have more of this. Assassinations. Killings.” The funds were promptly restored, and the death toll mounted.

  Even at the senior level of executive action Colby was being bashful about the CIA’s ambitions and achievements. In 1955 the CIA had very nearly managed to assassinate the Chinese Communist leader Chou En-lai. Bombs were put aboard Chou’s plane as he flew from Hong Kong to Indonesia for the Bandung conference. At the last moment Chou changed planes, thus avoiding a terminal descent into the South China Sea, since the plane duly blew up. The role of the CIA was later described in detail by a British intelligence agent who defected to the Soviet Union, and evidence recovered by divers from portions of the plane, including the timing mechanisms for two bombs, confirmed his statements. The Hong Kong police called the crash a case of “carefully planned mass murder.”

  By 1960 Rafael Trujillo, president of the Dominican Republic, had become irksome to US foreign policy makers. His blatant corruption looked as though it might prompt a revolt akin to the upsurge that had brought Fidel Castro to power. The best way to head off this unwelcome contingency was to ensure that Trujillo’s political career cease forthwith, which in early 1961 it did. Trujillo was gunned down in his car outside his own mansion in Ciudad Trujillo. It emerged that the CIA had provided guns and training to the assassins, though the Agency took care to point out that it was not absolutely 100 percent sure that these were the same weapons that ultimately deposed the tyrant (who had been originally installed in power by the CIA).

  At about the same time, CIA director Allen Dulles decided that the leader of the Congo, Patrice Lumumba, was an unacceptable threat to the Free World and his removal was “an urgent and prime objective.” For assistance in the task of banishing this threat the CIA turned to its own Technical Services Division (TSD), headed by that man of darkness, Sidney Gottlieb (whose career is detailed further in Chapter 8). Gottlieb’s division housed a horror chamber of labs whose researches included brain-washing, chemical and biological warfare, the use of drugs and electro-shock as modes of interrogation, and the development of lethal toxins, along with the most efficient means of applying these to the victim, such as the notorious poison dart gun later displayed before the cameras by Senator Frank Church.

  In Lumumba’s case Gottlieb developed a bio-poison that would mime a disease endemic t
o the Congo. He personally delivered the deadly germs along with a special hypodermic syringe, gauze masks and rubber gloves to Lawrence Devlin, the CIA chief of station in the Congo. The lethal implements were carried into the country in a diplomatic pouch. Gottlieb instructed Devlin and his agents how to apply the toxin to Lumumba’s toothpaste and food. However, the CIA’s bio-assassins couldn’t get close enough to Lumumba, so the “executive action” proceeded by a more traditional route. Lumumba was seized, tortured and murdered by soldiers of the CIA’s selected replacement, Mobutu Sese Seko, and Lumumba’s body ended up in the trunk of a CIA officer who drove around Lumumbashi trying to decide how to dispose of it.

  When it came to Fidel Castro, the Agency has spared no effort across a quarter of a century. Colby admitted to the Church committee that the agency had tried and failed to kill Castro several times, but not nearly as often as its critics alleged. “It wasn’t for lack of trying,” Colby observed. “Castro gave McGovern in 1975 a list of the attempts made on his life – there were about thirty by that time – as he said, by the CIA. McGovern gave it to me and I looked through it and checked it off against our records and said we could account for about five or six. The others – I can understand Castro’s feeling about them because they were all ex-Bay of Pigs people or something like that, so he thinks they’re all CIA. Once you get into one of them, then bingo! – you get blamed for all the rest. We didn’t have any connections with the rest of them, but we’d never convince Castro of that.”

  Five or six assassination plots is a sobering number, especially if you happen to be the intended target of these “executive actions.” But even here Colby was dissembling. He certainly had the opportunity to consult a secret 1967 report on the plots against Castro by the CIA’s Inspector General John S. Earman, and approved by Richard Helms. The CIA had in fact hatched attempts on the Cuban leader even prior to the revolution. One of the first occurred in 1958, when Eutimio Rojas, a member of the Cuban guerrillas, was hired to kill Castro as he slept at a camp in the Sierra Maestra.