CIA Dirty Secrets? Why, I'm SHOCKED! SHOCKED!!



On March 18, 1998, the CIA's Inspector General, Fred Hitz,  finally let the cat out of the bag in an aside at a  Congressional hearing. Hitz told the astounded US Reps that the  CIA had maintained relationships with companies and individuals  that the Agency knew to be involved in the drug business. 

Even more astonishingly, Hitz revealed that back in 1982 the CIA  had requested and received from Reagan's Justice Department  clearance not to report any knowledge it might have of  drug-dealing by CIA assets.                            

With these two admissions Hitz definitively sank many years'  worth of CIA denials, much of it under oath to Congress. Hitz's  admissions also made fools of some of the most prominent names  in US journalism, and vindicated investigators and critics of  the Agency, ranging from Al McCoy to Gary Webb.                  

The involvement of the CIA with drug traffickers is a story that  has slouched into the limelight every decade or so since the  creation of the Agency. Most recently, in 1996, the San Jose  Mercury News published a sensational series on the topic, Dark  Alliance, and then helped destroy its own reporter, Gary Webb. 

In WHITEOUT, Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair at last  put the whole story together, from the earliest days, when the  CIA's institutional ancestors, the OSS and the Office of Naval  Intelligence, cut a deal with America's premier gangster and  drug trafficker, Lucky Luciano. 

They show that many of even the most seemingly outlandish  charges leveled against the Agency have a basis in truth. After  Webb's series, for example, outraged black communities charged  that the CIA had undertaken a program, stretching across many  years, of experiments on minorities. 

Cockburn and St. Clair show how the CIA imported Nazi scientists  straight from their labs at Dachau and Buchenwald and set them  to work, developing chemical and biological agents, tested on  blacks, some of them in mental hospitals.                        

Cockburn and St. Clair show how the CIA's complicity with  drug-dealing criminal gangs was part and parcel of its attacks on  labor organizers, whether on the New York docks, or on the docks  of Marseilles and Shanghai. They trace how the Cold War and  counter-insurgency led to an alliance between the Agency and the  vilest of war criminals like Klaus Barbie, or fanatic opium  traders like the mujahedin in Afghanistan.                      

WHITEOUT is a thrilling history that stretches from Sicily in  1944 to the killing fields of Laos and Vietnam, to CIA safe  houses in Greenwich Village and San Francisco where CIA men  watched Agency-paid prostitutes feed LSD to unsuspecting  clients.                            

We meet Oliver North, as he plotted with Manuel Noriega and  Central American gangsters. We travel to little-known airports  in Costa Rica and Arkansas. We hear from drug pilots and  accountants from the Cali Cartel. We learn of DEA agents whose  careers were ruined because they tried to tell the truth. 

The CIA, Drugs and the Press. Cockburn and St. Clair dissect the  shameful way American journalists have not only turned a blind  eye to the Agency's misdeeds, but helped plunge the knife into  those who tried to tell the truth.                            

Here at last is the full story. Fact-packed and fast-paced,  WHITEOUT is a richly detailed excavation of the CIA's dirtiest  secrets. For anyone who wants to know the truth about what the  Agency has really been about, this is the book to start with.