Items related to Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press

Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press - Softcover

 
9781859842584: Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press
View all copies of this ISBN edition:
 
 
On March 16, 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 US Reps that the CIA had maintained relationships with companies and individuals 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 admisstions, Hitz definitively sank decades of CIA denials, many of them 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 Senator John Kerry.

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 finally 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 basis in truth. After the San Jose Mercury News 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 weapons, tested on black Americans, 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 docks of New York, or of Marseilles and Shanghai. They trace how the Cold War and counterinsurgency led to an alliance between the Agency and the vilest of war criminals such as Klaus Barbie, or fanatic heroin traders like the mujahedin in Afghanistan.

Whiteout is a thrilling history that stretches from Sicily in 1944 to the killing fields of South-East Asia, 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 Medillin Cocaine 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 many American journalists have not only turned a blind eye on the Agency’s misdeeds, but helped plunge the knife into those who told the real story.

Here at last is the full saga. Fact-packed and fast-paced, Whiteout is a richly detailed excavation of the CIA’s dirtiest secrets. For all who want to know the truth about the Agency this is the book to start with.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

Review:
Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair take the revelations of the links between the Central Intelligence Agency, the Nicaraguan Contras, and the Los Angeles crack market that journalist Gary Webb exposed in 1996--revelations that are the basis of Webb's book Dark Alliance--and use them as a springboard for a tale of the U.S. government's involvement with the illegal drug trade that extends much further back than Webb's tale.

The specific revelations are not, perhaps, entirely new; many know, for example, that even before there was a CIA, the WWII-era Office of Strategic Services enlisted the aid of gangster "Lucky" Luciano in arranging support among the Sicilian Mafia for the American invasion of Italy, or that the CIA was actively involved in the Southeast Asian opium trade during the Vietnam War. But Cockburn and St. Clair persuasively argue that the traditional explanation for such events--"rogue elements"--is deliberately misleading, and that the mainstream "liberal" press plays an active role in this obfuscation (noting, for example, that Webb's three biggest attackers were the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Washington Post). By providing an overarching narrative rather than treating these incidents as isolated, the authors present a damning indictment of the CIA--but one that fully admits that the agency was not acting on its own, but was merely fulfilling the mandates of the American government. --Ron Hogan

About the Author:
Alexander Cockburn co-edits CounterPunch with Jeffrey St. Clair. Together they have written Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press and A Dime’s Worth of Difference: Beyond the Lesser of Two Evils.

Jeffrey St. Clair co-edits CounterPunch with Alexander Cockburn. Together they have written Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press and A Dime’s Worth of Difference: Beyond the Lesser of Two Evils.

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.

  • PublisherVerso Books
  • Publication date1999
  • ISBN 10 1859842585
  • ISBN 13 9781859842584
  • BindingPaperback
  • Number of pages418
  • Rating

Other Popular Editions of the Same Title

9781849350082: Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press (Counterpunch)

Featured Edition

ISBN 10:  ISBN 13:  9781849350082
Softcover

Top Search Results from the AbeBooks Marketplace

Stock Image

Cockburn, Alexander; St. Clair, Jeffrey
Published by Verso Books (1999)
ISBN 10: 1859842585 ISBN 13: 9781859842584
New Paperback Quantity: 1
Seller:
GoldBooks
(Austin, TX, U.S.A.)

Book Description Paperback. Condition: new. New Copy. Customer Service Guaranteed. Seller Inventory # think1859842585

More information about this seller | Contact seller

Buy New
US$ 24.96
Convert currency

Add to Basket

Shipping: US$ 4.25
Within U.S.A.
Destination, rates & speeds
Stock Image

Cockburn, Alexander; St. Clair, Jeffrey
Published by Verso Books (1999)
ISBN 10: 1859842585 ISBN 13: 9781859842584
New Softcover Quantity: 1
Seller:
Front Cover Books
(Denver, CO, U.S.A.)

Book Description Condition: new. Seller Inventory # FrontCover1859842585

More information about this seller | Contact seller

Buy New
US$ 24.91
Convert currency

Add to Basket

Shipping: US$ 4.30
Within U.S.A.
Destination, rates & speeds
Seller Image

Cockburn, Alexander
Published by Verso 11/17/1999 (1999)
ISBN 10: 1859842585 ISBN 13: 9781859842584
New Paperback or Softback Quantity: 5
Seller:
BargainBookStores
(Grand Rapids, MI, U.S.A.)

Book Description Paperback or Softback. Condition: New. Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press 1. Book. Seller Inventory # BBS-9781859842584

More information about this seller | Contact seller

Buy New
US$ 30.21
Convert currency

Add to Basket

Shipping: FREE
Within U.S.A.
Destination, rates & speeds
Seller Image

Cockburn, Alexander", "St. Clair, Jeffrey"
Published by Verso (1999)
ISBN 10: 1859842585 ISBN 13: 9781859842584
New Soft Cover Quantity: 1
Seller:
booksXpress
(Bayonne, NJ, U.S.A.)

Book Description Soft Cover. Condition: new. Seller Inventory # 9781859842584

More information about this seller | Contact seller

Buy New
US$ 33.59
Convert currency

Add to Basket

Shipping: FREE
Within U.S.A.
Destination, rates & speeds
Stock Image

Alexander Cockburn, Jeffrey St Clair
Published by Verso 1999-12-02, London (1999)
ISBN 10: 1859842585 ISBN 13: 9781859842584
New paperback Quantity: > 20
Seller:
Blackwell's
(Oxford, OX, United Kingdom)

Book Description paperback. Condition: New. Language: ENG. Seller Inventory # 9781859842584

More information about this seller | Contact seller

Buy New
US$ 29.26
Convert currency

Add to Basket

Shipping: US$ 5.68
From United Kingdom to U.S.A.
Destination, rates & speeds
Stock Image

Cockburn, Alexander
Published by Verso Books (2024)
ISBN 10: 1859842585 ISBN 13: 9781859842584
New Paperback Quantity: 20
Print on Demand
Seller:
Save With Sam
(North Miami, FL, U.S.A.)

Book Description Paperback. Condition: New. Brand New! This item is printed on demand. Seller Inventory # 1859842585

More information about this seller | Contact seller

Buy New
US$ 35.03
Convert currency

Add to Basket

Shipping: FREE
Within U.S.A.
Destination, rates & speeds
Stock Image

Cockburn, Alexander; St. Clair, Jeffrey
Published by Verso Books (1999)
ISBN 10: 1859842585 ISBN 13: 9781859842584
New Softcover Quantity: > 20
Seller:
California Books
(Miami, FL, U.S.A.)

Book Description Condition: New. Seller Inventory # I-9781859842584

More information about this seller | Contact seller

Buy New
US$ 37.00
Convert currency

Add to Basket

Shipping: FREE
Within U.S.A.
Destination, rates & speeds
Stock Image

Cockburn, Alexander; St. Clair, Jeffrey
Published by Verso Books (1999)
ISBN 10: 1859842585 ISBN 13: 9781859842584
New Softcover Quantity: 1
Seller:
Books Unplugged
(Amherst, NY, U.S.A.)

Book Description Condition: New. Buy with confidence! Book is in new, never-used condition. Seller Inventory # bk1859842585xvz189zvxnew

More information about this seller | Contact seller

Buy New
US$ 44.93
Convert currency

Add to Basket

Shipping: FREE
Within U.S.A.
Destination, rates & speeds
Stock Image

Cockburn, Alexander
Published by VERSO (1999)
ISBN 10: 1859842585 ISBN 13: 9781859842584
New Softcover Quantity: > 20
Seller:
Russell Books
(Victoria, BC, Canada)

Book Description Softcover. Condition: New. Special order direct from the distributor. Seller Inventory # ING9781859842584

More information about this seller | Contact seller

Buy New
US$ 34.95
Convert currency

Add to Basket

Shipping: US$ 9.99
From Canada to U.S.A.
Destination, rates & speeds
Stock Image

Cockburn, Alexander/ St. Clair, Jeffrey
Published by Verso Books (1999)
ISBN 10: 1859842585 ISBN 13: 9781859842584
New Paperback Quantity: 1
Seller:
Revaluation Books
(Exeter, United Kingdom)

Book Description Paperback. Condition: Brand New. 408 pages. 8.00x5.25x1.25 inches. In Stock. Seller Inventory # __1859842585

More information about this seller | Contact seller

Buy New
US$ 34.77
Convert currency

Add to Basket

Shipping: US$ 12.62
From United Kingdom to U.S.A.
Destination, rates & speeds

There are more copies of this book

View all search results for this book