Coke & the CIA: The real thing?

Behind a veil of secrecy, the evil Empire is creating a doomsday army, one that if finished, will become the final cog in the Empire's arsenal of terror and domination.

--Internet promo for Dark Forces, "a Star Wars, 3-D action/adventure game"

When I asked about Gary Webb's book Dark Alliance at my neighborhood bookstore, the clerk, no Gen-Xer, replied, "Oh, is it based on that new computer game? There's a movie, too, isn't there?" At first I found her confusion of the journalist' s controversial investigation of the cocaine trade with LucasArts' Star Wars spinoff, Dark Forces, rather surprising-especially since the front window of this Berkeley independent sported a large poster for a "Dark Alliance" forum featuring Webb. But perhaps it shouldn't have been After Webb's reports of connections between Los Angeles crack dealers, Nicaraguan contra forces and the CIA were published in the San dose Mercury News in August 1996, most of the US press acted as though he had concocted a fictional scenario. Of "dark forces" better suited to a computer game than the pages of serious newspapers. Webb was vilified in a campaign led by the New York Times, Los Angeles Times and Washington Post and was eventually driven to quit his Merc News reporter job.

Webb's detractors called the charge that the CIA was "involved with" drug trafficking a "conspiracy theory." At the same time, however, others, particularly some black leaders, pointed to the series as evidence that the CIA was somehow "responsible for" the US crack "epidemic," which had especially devastating effects on black communities. Two years later, what can we make of all this? Do the charges against the CIA have anything useful to tell us about the so-called War on Drugs, an effort on which the United States expends many billions a year?

Webb's book Dark Alliance is an expansion of the Merc News series, including new material from research done since the series was published. Despite the accusations of Webb's original critics that his reporting suffered from inaccuracies, exaggeration and worse, I found his argument to be very well documented, very careful and very convincing. In fact, the readability of the book suffers a bit from what seems to have been a fear that if he didn't include absolutely every bit of evidence he had unearthed, he would open himself up to new criticisms of inadequate reporting--but this editor's quibble shouldn't stop anyone from buying and reading Dark Alliance. Long-time followers of the contra tale are likely to find new revelations in the book, and even those who were politically comatose or too young to read the newspapers during Reagan's Central American enterprises will find that the historical background Webb provides makes his story easy to follow, from the contra camps of Honduras to the courtrooms of California.

What Webb found, in essence, is that a good deal of the crack retailed on Los Angeles streets in the eighties was made from cocaine that had been bought wholesale from Nicaraguan dealers who had in turn used the proceeds to fund the contra forces then working to topple the Sandinista government. Since the contras were almost entirely a CIA creation, and the forces operated under tight and continuing agency supervision, this finding inevitably pointed toward some kind of agency "involvement" with cocaine trafficking. Though Webb never claimed, either in the series or now in the book, that the CIA--acting either through individual agents or as an institution--had itself arranged drug deals (that is, that it had actively conspired to deal coke), he does present evidence that the agency had taken very concrete steps to protect contra-connected drug dealers. In fact, he had stumbled on his story after a California street dealer's girlfriend tipped him to the fact that the government had protected her boyfriend's wholesale connection from prosecution while the boyfriend sat in jail awaiting trial. Webb found that the CIA had taken steps to suppress legal records concerning the wholesaler--he turned out to be a Nicaraguan and a contra supporter.

Despite the ruckus Webb's story caused, many aspects of it were far from new: Robert Parry and Brian Barger of the Associated Press had first reported on a contra/cocaine link in 1985, and a Congressional investigation headed by Senator John Kerry had concluded in 1989 that it was clear that individuals who provided support for the contras were involved in drug trafficking; that the supply network of the contras was used by drug trafficking organizations; and that elements of the contras themselves knowingly received financial and material assistance from drug traffickers. In each case, one or another agency of the US government had information regarding the involvement either while it was occurring or immediately thereafter.

The Kerry Committee report, dismissed by the Washington Post et al. as the ravings of conspiracy buffs, is no such thing and still makes edifying reading. Webb brought the story closer to home, literally to the Los Angeles street comers where crack sellers did their business. I won't rehash here precisely what Webb's critics had to say about this, since a number of writers have already dissected the media responses. Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair are the latest to jump into the fray, with their Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press. They provide a good review of how the campaign against Webb evolved, and the forces behind it. I will return to their book in a bit; but I suggest you not overlook two briefer works on the subject, Peter Kombluh's extensive Columbia Journalism Review piece (January/February 1997) and Peter Scott's article in Tikkun (July/August 1997). What seems clear in retrospect is not that Webb got the story wrong but that he told the wrong story--one revealing that the US government's commitment to the War on Drugs was not quite as total or as consistent as official declarations made it seem.

All the same, it's a bit hard to understand both why the story was, in 1996, so explosive and how the powers that be, in Washington and the media, managed to make Webb's contentions seem so overblown. For as more than a few people knew, the contra/cocaine connection is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to CIA relations with druggies. It's hardly a secret that planes and pilots on hire to the CIA from a supposedly private company--really an agency "proprietary"--were used to smuggle heroin during the Vietnam War. The 1990 movie Air America told this tale--it was a heavily Hollywoodized version, to be sure, starring Mel Gibson, but a sign that the CIA drug link story had penetrated popular consciousness. Far more was involved than a few high-spirited boys making extra bucks by selling a spot of smack: US allies in the Southeast Asian conflict, the so-called hill tribes, had supported themselves by growing opium poppies, the source of heroin, and turning them into drugs for the international market. The same had been true earlier of US allies against Mao's revolution in China and, more recently, of US-backed forces in Afghanistan, as well as a wide range of other cases in between. What becomes clear, in piecing these cases together--as Cockburn and St. Clair do in Whiteout--is that US interventions in Asia's politics played a major role in shaping trends in the world heroin industry.

When it comes to cocaine, relatively less has been uncovered, though there is one possible case of a CIA/cocaine link--so far not well investigated-that potentially dwarfs the contra connection in importance: In this alleged "dark alliance," the CIA provided support for the military men who carried out Bolivia's 1980 "Cocaine Coup." At the time, a variety of US Congressional and press reports linked coup leaders to Bolivia's then-still-adolescent cocaine industry and to the industry's leading figure, Roberto Suarez. In the wake of the coup, Bolivia became a--some say the--major supplier of the Medellin cartel. What those who have become (understandably) inured to reports of CIA involvement in South American coups may not appreciate is the novelty, and the gravity, of the charge that the CIA backed this particular Bolivian golpe. In 1980 the Carter Administration was encouraging a return to elected government in those Latin American nations that had, in many cases with the assistance of the CIA and the approval of Henry Kissinger's State Department, acquired military regimes over the previous two decades. Carter withdrew the US ambassador and cut aid to Bolivia immediately following the July coup, and his stance convinced even the Bolivian left--the main target of the takeover--that the United States was genuinely opposed to the new regime. Thus, if the CIA did back the military action, it seems to have done so in defiance of the White House and the State Department. Hints of this seeped out during the Kerry Committee investigations (as David Corn reported in The Nation of October 7, 1991). A more extensive account is contained in Michael Levine's The Big White Lie. This book received little attention when it came out in 1993, but deserves a closer look now.

Levine is an ex-Drug Enforcement Administration agent, a twenty-five-year veteran of the agency who was playing a key role in DEA operations in Bolivia in 1980. His version of the CIA's role in that year's coup is only partly based on first-person knowledge, but it is chilling and convincing enough that it should have provoked widespread demands for further investigation. The same is true of his account--based largely on his experience--of the failure or a major DEA operation aimed against Bolivian Sonia Atala and her associates. Atala, according to Levine, was the main link between Bolivian cocaine producers and the Colombian cartels and was "responsible for shipping more cocaine into the United States than any one person I had ever known of." The CIA, he charges, helped Atala by "destroying her competitors, protecting her from prosecution as she sold drugs to Americans, and paying her a small fortune in tax dollars for her 'services.'" Levine's prose tends toward the sensational, and his book needs to be read in the light of the long and bitter rivalry between the CIA and the DEA. Yet he provides a vivid picture of how international cocaine distribution actually works--and yields some important insights into why US drug control efforts have consistently failed.

The contras, then, appear to be only one group on a long list of CIA assets and allies who have, over the course of the century, dealt drugs with impunity under some form of agency protection. Whiteout provides a wealth of examples--including all the cases cited above--along with extensive lists of the books and articles that originally documented these sundry connections to the international drug trade. (Many of these works were first published in the seventies, suggesting that anyone over 30 shocked by Webb's claim that the CIA had some sort of tie to drug dealers had just not been paying attention.) Whiteout similarly sums up CIA adventures in political pharmacology, the most notorious of these being MK-ULTRA, a program in which agency scientists tested--usually without the knowledge of the human subjects and with disastrous results--LSD as a possible "truth drug."

If Cockburn and St. Clair had been content to thus catalogue all the CIA ventures that could, in general terms, be dubbed "drug-related," their book could have served as a useful reference work and ready counter to the disingenuous claims of CIA officials that the agency is not and has not ever--no, never!--been "involved with" illegal drugs or drug traffickers. But the authors push the point much further than this, arguing that the CIA should be held institutionally responsible for the huge influx of cocaine into the country in the eighties; indeed, that because of historical links to foreign drug producers and to the Mafia, which controlled US drug distribution for decades, the agency and its predecessors should be held accountable for virtually all the drug trafficking into the country through most of this century. They even posit, a bit indirectly, that the eighties cocaine influx and the resulting "crack epidemic" was the conscious product of a CIA bio-research program, a racist experiment in social control of minority communities. A conspiracy theory? With a vengeance. But as Cockburn and St. Clair would be the first to declare, when it comes to the CIA, conspiracy theories are not always wrong.

Unfortunately, Cockburn and St. Clair's overall approach to demonstrating these propositions is, to say the least, unsatisfying, and consists mostly of a historical roundup of CIA high crimes and misdemeanors, and of its alliances with a long list of nasty folks: Nazis, Mafiosi and a vast number of coup-crazy generals (many of whom also dabbled in drug dealing) and with murderers and torturers of various sorts (ditto on the drugs). This breathless survey works mainly to caricature the CIA as, yes, the secret "doomsday army" of an "evil empire." I wouldn't deny either US imperial designs (better known to some as "national interests") or the CIA's key role in carrying these out. But in striving to make a case for the CIA as the world's biggest drug dealer, Cockburn and St. Clair have resorted to an ad hominem argument that their university rhetoric profs would surely have frowned upon--as if to say, "an agency with such a history of perfidy is surely capable of pushing crack to black children!" Much more serious, in their drive to single out the CIA and its allies as the main source of the US "drug problem," they avoid any coherent critique of US drug control policy and end up--ironically--shoring up the ideological pillars that support it.

Of course, Cockburn and St. Clair are far from alone these days in pointing to CIA allies--and thus, at least indirectly, the CIA--as a key "source" of drugs in the United States "The contras and some of their Central American allies," Michael Levine claims, were responsible for "at least 50 percent of our national cocaine" supply in the eighties (a figure he says is "documented by the DEA"). "The rest of the [US] drug supply," Levine contends, "came from other CIA-supported groups." But such numbers--indeed, any statistics connected to the illegal drug trade, however official their source--are notoriously unreliable and, like the body counts of the Vietnam era, can be massaged to support any political or institutional agenda (something Webb learned to his sorrow when critics savaged his figures on the percentage of the local cocaine supply that he said key actors in his series had brought into LA). Cockburn/St. Clair don't bother to tote up specific figures; they simply point to the long list of traffickers who have, since the thirties, received aid or comfort from the CIA and conclude that we should place primary responsibility on the agency for allowing drugs into the United States.

Underlying all these claims one can detect the desire, seemingly shared by those with political agendas as different as George Bush and Alexander Cockburn, to find somebody--some identifiable human villain(s)--to blame for the US "drug problem" in general and the "crack epidemic" in particular. The Usual Suspects the press and politicians like to roust out on on these charges are Colombian "drug lords"--the supposedly omnipotent directors of an international cocaine cabal with tentacles stretching from Medellin to Miami. Urban "gang members" and local dealers like Freeway Ricky Ross, one of the antiheroes of Webb's series, are other standard bad guys in drug reporting. Webb simply added a new set of villains to the usual scenario, the contras, and implicated the CIA as a silent partner. Cockburn/St. Clair take it further and describe a natural bond between the CIA and drug traffickers, a kind of "narco-spy" alliance that turns out to be, curiously, merely the obverse of that quintessential construction of the Reagan age, the "narco-terrorist" alliance, a supposed joint venture between international drug traffickers and leftist insurgents.

The fear that evil enemies are trying to flood the nation with drugs in order to sap our "moral fiber" or destroy our youth is one that "drug czar" Harry Anslinger played on during the Second World War, and one that has underlain US drug policy ever since. But no force other than good old supply and demand drives this flow, or needs to. No single human, or set of humans--not the Mafia, not the Medellin cartel, not the CIA--can completely control it or is to be blamed entirely for its existence. Throughout the history of US drag control efforts, each time one drug producer or trafficker or group of producers or traffickers has been put out of business, another has arisen to replace it. Drug control experts refer to this as the "balloon theory" Squeeze the trade in one place and it pops up in another. This will always be true as long as someone demands the drugs the traffickers provide. Thus, though it may well be that CIA backing gives certain traffickers a competitive advantage, those who think that without the CIA the United States would be drug-free, or nearly so, are simply deluding themselves.

I certainly laud those, like Webb, who have at great personal cost made concrete contributions to our knowledge of the international cocaine trade and of the CIA's connections to it, and I hope they continue their work. They might, in fact, want to turn to a close examination of why Clinton drug control officials seem so enamored of Vladimiro Montesinos, a key adviser to Peruvian president Alberto Fujimori. Peruvian investigative journalist Gustavo Gorriti has described Montesinos as a "narco-lawyer, traitor, human rights violator, former soldier, [and] spy" who "used close links to drug trafficking organizations, and then to the CIA, to become not only the country's de facto drug czar, but perhaps the most powerful person in Peru." (Gorriti's report can be found online at www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/9968/gorriti_article.html.) They might also want to study current US relations with Bolivia's elected president, Hugo Banzer, who, after he first took power in a 1971 CIA-backed coup, was reliably reported to have close personal and family ties to the cocaine industry.

All the same, I have more than a few doubts about a critique of US drug policy that focuses almost exclusively on, as a popular Berkeley bumper sticker puts it, the "CIA: Cocaine Import Agency." This excessive emphasis on the CIA's secret activities and shadowy alliances leads to a misrepresentation of both the reality of life in cocaine producing countries and of the nature of the mostly very public US drug control efforts in those countries. These operations are conducted by national police and military forces trained by the DEA and, increasingly, the Pentagon. They are aimed, US drug policy-makers say, at "going to the source" by wiping out production facilities and, particularly, fields of coca. Growing coca and processing it into cocaine paste employs hundreds of thousands of people in Bolivia, Peru and Colombia--and these mostly poor people, not wealthy, powerful traffickers, bear the brunt of the operations.

The distortion caused by trying to force a new critique of drug control policy into old molds is apparent in Whiteout, especially in a chapter on Bolivia in which Cockburn and St. Clair make a striking number of errors in their rush to portray the country as stereotypically groaning under the sway of evil forces led by the CIA. Indeed, the authors frequently seem unable to distinguish Bolivia from its neighbors. A single "soccer stadium" in which "thousands" of leftists were rounded up and murdered in the weeks following Bolivia's 1980 coup? The "Cocaine Coup" was far more brutal and bloody than previous Bolivian military takeovers, with the brunt of the violence directed, yes, against the left, but guys--the stadium you seem to be talking about was in Chile, in 1973. In Bolivia, 1980, the most horrific instances of "extrajudicial execution" took place outside the jails, and while even one such murder is too many, those did not occurr on the massive scale they did in Chile or Argentina. "Indian insurgents" under attack from US-trained drug police? Plenty of 'em--next door in Peru. In Bolivia, insurgent sightings--"Indian" or otherwise-have been, since Che Guevara's death there in 1967, exceedingly rare, most the product of intelligence agency fantasy (or, more likely, disinformation). That may change, though, as the current Bolivian government, under US orders to get coca eradication figures up, pushes forward with a campaign of militarization and forced eradication in the Chapare coca growing zone. This campaign has, over the past few months, led to violent confrontations between heavily armed eradicators and unarmed growers' groups and to at least three deaths.

These coca farmers are and always have been politically combative and well organized into legal unions that currently form the activist heart of Bolivia's national labor federation. The coca growers' unions have an alliance--a "fruitful partnership"--not, as Cockburn and St. Clair explicitly claim, with the US-created Leopard drug police force but with the Bolivian left. Indeed, far from being allies, there is bitter enmity between Leopards and growers, caused in large measure by police abuses amply documented in recent reports by Amnesty International and Americas Watch.

Some of these errors may be due to an over-hasty reading of source material (Levine seems to be a prime source), but others seem less explicable and aimed primarily at supporting a scenario in which the forces of good--leftist insurgents a la Che--do noble battle against the allied dark forces of military dictators, the CIA and drug traffickers. Bolivia's leftist coca growers, who do indeed play a key role in the cocaine industry, if one rather different from that of classic "drug traffickers," simply don't fit into such a simplistic schema. Cockburn and St. Clair choose to ignore almost entirely the even more complex situations in Peru and Colombia. In both, leftist guerrilla groups are active in coca growing zones and do profit from the drug trade, if hardly in as straightforward a manner as the "narco-guerrilla" model favored by Reagan-era officials implied. The only Latin American country where leftist insurgents untainted (so far) by the drug trade can be found facing down counterinsurgent forces equipped with US drug control dollars is Mexico--which is probably why Mexico is the focus of the chapter that Cockburn and St. Clair dedicate to a critique of current international drug control policy. A more realistic assessment of the social conditions in cocaine-producing countries and a more basic assessment of the effects of US drug control programs can be found in the continuing series of reports by the Washington Office on Latin America (see the list at www.wola.org).

It seems safe to say that the CIA's main relation to the cocaine industry is not one of pushing drugs to Americans, of whatever color, via a conscious and purposeful institutional program but rather one of protecting the drug dealers it is allied with for other political reasons. This certainly calls into question the single-minded dedication US officials claim to have for their War on Drugs. But the question remains--what should we want? Are the CIA critics asking for the agency to get on board the war as it is currently being fought? In Cockburn and St. Clair's case it is rather hard to tell, given their confused analysis--although, from their consistently critical stance on US policy in the past, this seems unlikely. And as they point out, this particular US-funded war has resulted in increased power for local military and paramilitary forces in Latin America and in jails filled with poor black people in the United States. But the War on Drugs continually escalates, at home and abroad, not because of CIA machinations but because US voters--black and white--continue to demand such escalation. It is time, then, for all of us to think again about what the real source of the US drug crisis is and what we care to do about it.

Even Michael Levine, at the end of a book whose main aim is to show how the CIA has supported drug traffickers, declares that "the key" to solving his own daughter's drug addiction was "ignoring everything our government has been telling us...that our children are victims of a drug epidemic caused by the 'availability of drugs' and evil, dark foreigners." He calls the drug war that he fought for twenty-five years "phony" and says his daughter had to see that drug use was "her choice," that she was "not a victim of an inert powder, nor of drug dealers."

Crack in America: Demon Drugs and Social Justice is a sane and measured antidote to the notion that the US drug problem stems from either evil individuals or "demon" powders. Editors Craig Reinarman and Harry Levine join pharmacologists, anthropologists, political scientists and other researchers in examining what really lay behind the "crack epidemic" -- they prefer the term "crack scare." The contributors argue that, while some of the pernicious social and physical effects attributed to the drug were quite real, others, especially claims that crack was "the most addictive drug known to man" and was spreading at an unstoppable pace through all regions and classes in the United States, were highly exaggerated, sometimes for political purposes.

Those with an aversion to academic tomes should not be put off by this book's citations and tables or by the weighty prose of a few of the contributors. Many of the articles are very readable, even absorbing - check out especially Sheigla Murphy and Marsha Rosenbaum on "Two Women Who Used Cocaine Too Much" and Phillipe Bourgois's up-close-and-personal study of Puerto Rican crack dealers in New York. The first is a thought provoker on why (some) people really use cocaine, the second on the reasons poor young minority men go into the crack business. Troy Duster on "Race in the Drug War" and John Morgan and Lynn Zimmer on "The Social Pharmacology of Smokeable Cocaine" are also essential reading for those who want to understand how the "crack attack" really affected us. The overall conclusion that can be drawn from their work is that the real source of our drug problem lies within ourselves, and our own society.

What kind of new drug control policy does such a critique suggest? In Crack in America, Reinarman, Levine and fellow contributor Ethan Nadelmann discuss some alternatives, in particular an approach that has been dubbed "harm reduction." Proponents of this policy advocate the abolition of most legal sanctions against drug users--though most don't support outright legalization--and emphasize ways to minimize the negative social and personal effects of drug use. The Lindesmith Center, a project of George Soros's Open Society Institute directed by Nadelmann, has been in the forefront of exploring and promoting such alternative policies. The Lindesmith Web site, www.lindesmith.org, which includes a wealth of references on the history of drug policy, is a valuable resource for those starting to mull over policy options on their own. (Caveat lector: I received a small Lindesmith travel grant in the course of my own drug policy research.)

In fact, there has recently been a mini-boom in works proposing a basic overhaul of drug policy. Two recent works are Mike Gray's Drug Crazy: How We Got Into This Mess and How We Can Get Out (Random House) and Dirk Chase Eldredge's Ending the War on Drugs: A Solution for America (Bridge Works). Though neither makes any resoundingly original proposals, both contain useful background information, and readers will be struck by the ultimate confluence between Gray's Hollywood liberal approach and Eldredge's conservative Republicanism.

This alliance across political lines has been characteristic of the whole movement to rethink US drug policy. Thus black mayors Kurt Schmoke of Baltimore and Willie Brown of San Francisco and alternative medicine guru Andrew Weil joined former Secretary of State George Shultz and free market economist Milton Friedman among the more than 500 signers of an open letter declaring that "the Global War on Drugs is now causing more harm than drug abuse itself." This still-nascent movement has caused consternation in traditional drug control circles, and caused drug czar Barry McCaffrey to warn against "a carefully camouflaged, exorbitantly funded, well-heeled elitist group whose ultimate goal is to legalize drug use in the United States."

This disparate lot of drug policy critics is today fairly united in the belief that we should simply Stop the War Now--and thus poses a threat to General McCaffrey and his fellow drug warriors. Down the road, though, it may well turn out that in order to minimize the harmful effects of drugs on individuals, communities and entire nations--our own and the "drug producers" -- we will have to undertake more sweeping economic and social reforms than critics like Friedman would favor. In the meantime, we need to do some hard thinking, lest drugs -- or, more precisely, our preconceptions about drugs and their source -- make us lose our minds.

Jo Ann Kawell worked as an editor and reporter in Washington, DC, and Latin America during the eighties and reported on the "drug war "from Peru and Bolivia for National Public Radio, the Worm Service of the Christian Science Monitor and others. She has recently completed a history of the Andean cocaine industry and US efforts to control it.