Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press by Alexander Cockburn, Jeffrey St. Clair Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press
Book Review: Superb study of US state involvement in drug-running
Summary: 5 Stars
This fascinating book describes an international criminal conspiracy specialising in drug-running, union-busting and murder, the Central Intelligence Agency. The Agency is directly controlled by the US Government, starting with the Presidency, so the CIA?s story reveals much of the USA?s real foreign policy.The authors document many CIA activities, including the following. In 1945, the Office of Strategic Services, the CIA?s predecessor, got Mafioso ?Lucky? Luciano, the USA?s premier gangster and drug trafficker, released from jail and protected him while he organised an enormous increase in the global heroin trade. The CIA then worked with the Mafia to break trade unions in the USA, Italy and France. ...
Book Review: One of the most important books in my library
Summary: 5 Stars
This is a story that can't be told too many times by too many people. It's volatile, it's important, and there are still too many people who don't know anything about it at all.The most crucial aspect of this book and the clearest documentation I have yet to find, regards OPERATION PAPERCLIP and the birth of CIA generated projects MK-ULTRA and BLUEBIRD. While this is only the tip of the iceberg of what the CIA has done and is doing to this country, it is imperative that people understand this part of the story in order to believe any of the rest of it. To that end, Whiteout is one of the most important books in my library. If there is better documentation of MK-ULTRA, Bluebird, CHATTER, MKSEARCH, SPELLBINDER, ARTICHOKE, and ultimately, MONARCH, I want to know about it.
Book Review: The Real CIA: Crime, Drugs, Assassination
Summary: 5 Stars
Whiteout, by investigative journalists Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, begins with the CIA's attempts, largely successful, to smash the career of a California reporter, Gary Webb, who had exposed the agency's ties to a ring of Nicaraguan exiles who were running a cocaine enterprise and sending some of the profits to the Contras in the 1980s. But that's just the beginning. Whiteout is really an alternative history of the CIA and other American intelligence outfits, beginning w/ the OSS and Office of Naval Intelligence's ties to Nazi spies, scientists and the doctors who performed heinous experiments on Jews and Gypsies at Dachau. It traces the agency's reliance on criminal gangs in France and an Italy, often invovled in the heroin trade, to bust striking dockworkers. It tells of the fixing of elections in Italy and Greece. The backing of drug gangs in Burma, Thailand, Laos and Afghanistan. The support for Klaus Barbie and generals behind the Cocaine Coup in Bolivia. It tells how US supported generals in South Vietnam made millions selling heroin to US troops. And it explores the mysteries of Mena airport and its sister operation in El Salvador. All in all horrifying and exhaustively documented expose. And a fast, if uncomfortable, read. Highly recommended.Book Review: Useful overview
Summary: 5 Stars
*Whiteout* is a valuable addition to that growing documentation of crimes committed against people of all kinds by US intelligence agencies. As the book shows but does not state, agencies such as a CIA have a single primary mission. They must do whatever is necessary to neutralize enemies of America's empire - or as propaganda puts it, protect the Free World from its enemies everywhere. These agencies do the undercover dirty work that rarely reaches the headlines, yet amounts to a level of covert warfare that has gone on for fifty-five years without respite. As the authors show, this mission may utilize Nazis, dangerous drugs or assassination squads. In practice, nothing is off limits, since it's power and wealth on a global scale that's at stake.Americans know little of these horrors because when it comes to empire's vital interests, politicians, media, and other imperial managers cooperate in keeping the lid on. When word leaks out, as occasionally happens - the case of the contra-cocaine connection, for example - the managers close ranks, call out damage control, and tell us what a dangerous world it is. I don't believe *Whiteout* breaks any new ground. It's not that kind of book. Rather it's an invaluable secondary source, whose annotated bibliography refers readers to other, primary expose's. Here it is then in *Whiteout* - for those who can stomach it - the evil underside of empire, part of a complete story that only heaven knows.
Book Review: Leftists question government power
Summary: 4 Stars
Since the collapse - partly from exhaustion, partly from boredom, partly from the process of progressive de-politization known in the US as "growing up" - of the Left in the US, most voices raised against the tyranny of government power have come from the Right. Get gubmit off our backs, and put it on the backs of leftist activists instead. (How many of these Sons [sic] of Liberty raised a fuss over Reagan's persecution of CISPES?) With this book, and moreso with their newsletter Counterpunch (http://www.counterpunch.org), Cockburn and St. Clair remind us that the charge for liberty usually comes from the Left. They also remind us that liberal-bashing is traditionally a Leftwing occupation, though in the current atmosphere of extreme infantilization such distinctions are often overlooked. 'Whiteout' focuses on the history of dirty tricks and dirty dealing by America's foreign intelligence services from the 40s to today. Forget Camelot, forget the communist menace, forget "clear and present dangers" - the conduct of the OSS, the CIA, the DEA, and even customs shows that our various "wars on xxxx" are veils to hide the real motivation behind our disasterous foreign policy: the accumulation of power and the protection of priviledge. The book does not attempt to show that the drug trade is basically a government conspiracy (it's not), but rather that even the holy grail of drug policy is "flexible" before the mandates of America's grim Higher Calling.