-Caveat Lector- from: http://www.pir.org/books17.html Click Here: <A HREF="http://www.pir.org/books17.html">Elites / Personalities</ A> ----- Take a look at our social network diagram that displays connections among the 100 names that appear most frequently in the books described below. You may also get a name index and availability information for any of these books. Elites / Personalities Bellett, Gerald. Age of Secrets: The Conspiracy that Toppled Richard Nixon and the Hidden Death of Howard Hughes. Ogdensburg NY: Voyageur North America, 1995. 320 pages. Gerald Bellett is a reporter for the Vancouver Sun in British Columbia. When John Meier, a former aide to Howard Hughes, moved there from the U.S. in the early 1970s, Bellett began writing about Meier's struggle with the White House, the CIA, and the Howard Hughes organization. This is an authorized biography, and while it helps fill in some historical gaps about Watergate and the Hughes-CIA connection, it is still history as told by yet another insider-victim, with possible axes to grind. It's a bit suspicious. Even though he was wheeling and dealing with the spookiest and most duplicitous people on the planet, it seems that for Meier, these were the good old days. There is not a single mea culpa in this entire book . But another grinding fact is that Meier was a victim of CIA and Canadian collusion to put him behind bars. This included charges of tax evasion, obstruction of justice, and ultimately a charge of murder. He spent five years in prison before prosecutors emptied out their bag of tricks. Meier argu es that Watergate was a classic set-up, and it appears that the CIA thought he had a stash of Hughes documents that might prove his point. According to Meier, when he refused to cut a deal with the CIA to produce the documents and keep his mouth shut, his legal problems began. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Bird, Kai. The Chairman: John J. McCloy, The Making of the American Establishment. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992. 800 pages. John McCloy (1895-1989) is the archetype of twentieth-century power and influence; his wide-ranging activities offer ample evidence for anyone who has ever felt that U.S. policies are designed by and for a tiny Yankee aristocracy. A sampling of his career: assistant secretary of war (1941- 1945), high commissioner of Germany (1949-1952), president of the World Bank (1947-1949), chairman of Rockefeller's Chase Manhattan Bank (1953- 1960), chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations (1953-1970), chairman of the Ford Foundation (1953-1965), disarmament advisor (1961-1974), Warren Commission appointee, Wall Street attorney for the seven sister big oil companies, and director of numerous corporations. It's almost redundant to add that McCloy was also well-connected to U.S. intelligence agencies. This first major biography of McCloy was written over a ten-year period. Special emphasis is given to several controversies in his career: the internment of the Japanese in WW2, the decision not to bomb Auschwitz, his cle mency for Nazi war criminals, the use of Nazis by U.S. intelligence, and the Warren Commission (nothing new on the WC). The book is based on over a hundred interviews (including nine with McCloy), several hundred Freedom of Information Act requests, McCloy's private papers, and material in numerous archives and libraries. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Cooney, John. The American Pope: The Life and Times of Francis Cardinal Spellman. New York: Times Books, 1984. 364 pages. Author John Cooney interviewed dozens of priests who worked with Cardinal Spellman, many of whom would only speak on background. He also filed the usual FOIA requests with the FBI and State Department. The records of the Archdiocese of New York, where Spellman reigned for 28 years, are closed to researchers, but one priest slipped Cooney a copy of Spellman's diary. This is the first major biography of Spellman (1889-1967), who was a major figure in American politics during the first half of the Cold War. A consummate politician, Spellman laid low at first and cultivated key people in Rome. After his friend Cardinal Pacelli became Pope Pius XII in 1939, Spellman was appointed an archbishop. During the war, he travelled to war zones and acted as FDR's secret agent. After the war he allied himself with Joseph McCarthy and Roy Cohn, and became a kingmaker in New York City politics. He continued to support U.S. military adventures by visiting the troops, attending Pentagon briefings, discussing strategy with generals, and gathering intelligence for the CIA and State Department. Were it not for Spellman's early (beginning in 1950) efforts to support Ngo Dinh Diem, South Vietnam's puppet government might not have emerged. Ultimately the Vatican became wary of Spellman's power. So did antiwar activists, who demonstrated against "Spellman's War" outside his residence and cathedral. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Cummings, Richard. The Pied Piper: Allard K. Lowenstein and the Liberal Dream. New York: Grove Press, 1985. 569 pages. Until his tragic death in 1980, Allard Lowenstein was an ex-congressman from New York who was best known as a pro-civil rights and anti-war "dump Johnson" activist. He gave charismatic speeches to legions of well-scrubbed idealistic white students during the mid-1960s; his basic message was to work within the system rather than subscribe to the politics of alienation and confrontation. This was fine as far as it went. But the evidence shows that until the 1967 National Student Association scandal, which revealed a long history of CIA funding and put Lowenstein on the defensive, he was working for what he might have called the "good-wing" of the CIA. This "good-wing" funded culturally-diverse (and divisive) democratic left movements in the Third World in order to present an alternative to Communist organizing and a politics based on class analysis. Lowenstein spent time in Africa, Spain, and Portugal meeting with various left-wing reformers. Ironically, by 1974 he had become interested in the RFK assassination. Cummings' biography will be regarded as the seminal work on Lowenstein for years to come. He had access to Lowenstein's papers, spent hundreds of hours in interviews, and demonstrates a broad familiarity with the literature on the CIA. Further revelations that might outdate this monumental effort could come from the CIA's files, but that isn't likely anytime soon. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Drosnin, Michael. Citizen Hughes. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1985. 532 pages. On June 5, 1974, Howard Hughes' Hollywood headquarters was burglarized. Over $60,000 and some souvenirs were missing, but the press didn't mention that boxes of secret papers were also taken. It looked like an inside job. A large team of FBI men, CIA agents, and LAPD detectives made no headway in solving the case, and soon it began to look like they preferred to leave it unsolved. Two years later Michael Drosnin, a former Washington Post and Wall Street Journal reporter, found the person who stole the papers and gained his confidence. Drosnin was given access to 10,000 documents, including more than 3,000 in Hughes' own handwriting. Then he spent seven years authenticating these documents and interviewing hundreds of people. The result is this highly-credible description of the Hughes empire and its role in American politics. With Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey both accepting money from Hughes, and DNC chairman Larry O'Brien on the Hughes payroll at the time of the Watergate break-in, and the CIA using Hughes for top-secret projects such as the Glomar Explorer, this role was significant. But if it was decisive, it was probably due to serendipity. Hughes was a manipulative megalomaniac, and also a drug addict with a phobia of germs and radiation. It appears, however, that his goals were modest: Howard Hughes desperately wanted the AEC to stop underground nuclear testing in Nevada. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Epstein, Edward Jay. Dossier: The Secret History of Armand Hammer. New York: Random House, 1996. 418 pages. The dust cover shows Edward Jay Epstein sitting at a table with reels of tape in front of him. Like Nixon, Armand Hammer felt the need to secretly chronicle his wheeling and dealing, much of it illegal. But he was rich, and and spent plenty on public relations and self-aggrandizing philanthropy. The obituaries in 1990 spoke of him as a crusader for peace and someone who financed cancer research, even though enough information about Hammer's thuggery was already on the record by then. No question about it, Hammer was ruthless and deceptive. Those who knew lacked the guts to say so until after Hammer's death (except for biographer Steve Weinberg). Epstein's access to Hammer's tapes, some Soviet intelligence files, and interviews with family and friends, make this biography fairly impressive. The only criticism is that Epstein is still fighting the Cold War, and concentrates too much on Hammer's role as an agent of influence for the Soviets. There were other capitalists, such as Ford and the Rockefellers, who were just as willing to cut deals with bad guys. Rather than concluding that Hammer hoodwinked the West by helping the East, it makes more sense to conclude that the stinking rich are always able transcend international conflicts when it suits their interests. This ought to put a whole new slant on Epstein's politics, but it doesn't. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Finder, Joseph. Red Carpet. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston (A New Republic Book), 1983. 372 pages. This book began in 1981, when author Joseph Finder, a graduate student at Harvard's Russian Research Center, interviewed Armand Hammer, who was then 83 years old. After failing to bribe Finder's faculty advisor at Harvard to stop the project, Hammer tried to buy up as many copies as he could find. After this book was published, two biographies appeared on Hammer that are even more devastating (by Steve Weinberg and Edward Jay Epstein). Since both of these were already indexed in NameBase, this book was mainly of interest for the other aristocrats profiled by the author: W. Averell Harriman, Cyrus Eaton, Donald Kendall, and David Rockefeller. Finder's point is that when big money was involved, both the U.S. and Russia overlooked their ideological differences, even at the height of the Cold War, and cooperated in the interests of higher profits. The Kremlin has always given distinguished U.S. millionaires access to the inner sanctum. From the other end, no one in Washington tells a Rockefeller or a Harriman what they can and cannot do. (Apparently the Cold War wasn't really a war at all. Sure, the little guy was expected to kill and be killed in Vietnam, and World War III nearly started more than once. And yes, the taxes we paid for all this excitement made the folks behind the U.S. defense industry richer, as the middle class went into decline. But it kept us busy and distracted.) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Harris, David. Dreams Die Hard. New York: St.Martin's/Marek, 1982. 341 pages. David Harris's affecting memoir of the 60s and their aftermath tracks the lives of three men: Allard Lowenstein, promo man for inside-the-system social change; his protege Dennis Sweeney, who became a civil rights hero, a draft resister, and finally a casualty of the times; and Harris himself, another Lowenstein protege turned charismatic, high-profile resister, jail- bird, and finally disabused mainstream journalist. The human drama centers on Sweeney, who got "freedom burned" in Mississippi, declined from isolation into paranoid schizophrenia -- and in 1980 assassinated his former mentor Lowenstein. By that date, Harris was divorced from Joan Baez ("the first family of the Resistance," they had once styled themselves) and writing for the New York Times Magazine. Harris's political revelations concern Lowenstein, remembered today (if at all) for starting 1968's "Dump Johnson" movement. But before that, Lowenstein channeled innumerable young men into the civil rights movement and into the liberal National Student Association -- later revealed to be CIA-funded. Harris makes a persuasive case that the complex, brilliant Lowenstein, despite his repeated denials, knew the score. A later book on Lowenstein (The Pied Piper by Richard Cummings) confirms the Harris thesis with solid research. -- Steve Badrich ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Hersh, Seymour M. The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House. New York: Summit Books, 1983. 698 pages. Until this book came out, the only people who had critical words for Henry Kissinger were the right, what was left of the left, and an occasional author such as William Shawcross in 1979 (Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon and the Destruction of Cambodia). Hersh's work is the standard for mainstream Kissinger criticism, against which all other efforts are measured. It includes an entire hamper of laundry: his stranglehold on foreign policy, the wiretaps on reporters, and his policies on Southeast Asia, China, and SALT. Two of the best chapters are on the coup in Chile, which NameBase indexed from their appearance in The Atlantic Monthly in December, 1982. Hersh has over a dozen journalism prizes and numerous scoops to his credit: the My Lai massacre (1969), the secret bombing of Cambodia (1973), CIA domestic spying (1974), Edwin Wilson and Libya (1981), and Manuel Noriega (1986). In 1972 he began working for the New York Times from Washington. On rare occasions his byline still appears on their front page or in their Sunday magazine, but these days he mostly free-lances. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Judis, John B. William F. Buckley, Jr.: Patron Saint of the Conservatives. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988. 528 pages. When William F. Buckley, Jr., founded The National Review in 1955, U.S. conservatives were our "stupid party" (as J.S. Mill called England's Tories). Real intellectuals, it seemed then, derived from the New Deal -- or the left. Conservative thinking, such as it was, had mixed and mostly dubious antecedents: e.g., American nativism; pre-"Vatican II" Catholicism; the mystical anticommunism of Whittaker Chambers; or the cultish (as it seemed then) laissez-faire of Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek. Buckley and his magazine changed all that. John Judis's massive biography details how Buckley helped create conservative readers and institutions (e.g., Young Americans for Freedom) that made politicians like Goldwater and Reagan possible. As a Yalie and a CIA agent, and as the dutiful son of a rich oil wildcatter who was also a devout Catholic, Buckley's own life bridged many of the varieties of conservatism that later would fuse in the Reagan 80s -- and which now may once again be coming apart. Judis's account also suggests (to me, at least) that politics remains for Buckley the intellectual game he first practiced as a brilliant, devout, eager-to-please child on his father's estate. -- Steve Badrich ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Kessler, Ronald. The Richest Man in the World: The Story of Adnan Khashoggi. New York: Warner Books, 1986. 274 pages. One example of wretched excess in the twentieth century is wheeler- dealer Adnan Khashoggi. He liked to throw extravagant parties for beautiful people and classy prostitutes at one of his twelve fully-staffed residences, on his $70 million yacht, or on one of his three commercial-size airplanes. His wealth, estimated at $4 billion in 1986, came from hefty commissions for arranging deals between U.S. defense contractors and the Saudi royal family. For years our mass media favored him with fawning reports on his lifestyle. Author Ronald Kessler does some of this, but fortunately this book is redeemed with a significant amount of investigative material. Kessler wrote this at the peak of Khashoggi's career. Soon Khashoggi found himself in the middle of the Iran-contra scandal because of his work with Manucher Ghorbanifar in setting up several of the arms-for-hostages deals. Some of these deals were connected with BCCI, where Khashoggi was a major client. In 1988 he and Imelda Marcos were indicted in Manhattan for helping her late husband hide assets that belonged to the Philippine people. Khashoggi was arrested in Switzerland and extradited, but he and Imelda were acquitted in 1990. At last report (March 1992), Khashoggi sold his yacht and creditors impounded his jet. He lives mostly in Spain, is still fighting his legal battles, and was down to his last $54 million. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Kessler, Ronald. The Sins of the Father: Joseph P. Kennedy and the Dynasty He Founded. New York: Warner Books, 1997. 463 pages. Joseph Patrick Kennedy (1888-1969) made big money by running booze during Prohibition with Frank Costello and other Mafia heavies, and by manipulating Wall Street with insider trading that would be illegal today. Next came $5 million from the movie business, using equally dubious methods, and a new girlfriend, Gloria Swanson. When the 1929 crash arrived, Joe made more money -- he had already sold off most of his holdings, and was selling short on the Street. His political career began in 1934, when Roosevelt appointed him to head the SEC on the theory that it takes a thief to catch one. In 1938 Joe became U.S. ambassador to Britain, but resigned in 1940 due to his Cliveden Set sympathies for a policy of appeasement toward Hitler. After the war, Joseph Kennedy arranged favorable publicity and purchased votes for his son John. After JFK won in 1960, Joe instructed him to appoint Bobby as attorney general. Judging from this excellent biography, throughout his life Joseph Kennedy was a philanderer, an unprincipled manipulator, and a power-hungry wheeler-dealer, who supervised and financed the careers of his compliant sons. In 1961 he suffered a stroke. For the next eight years, he watched speechlessly from a wheelchair, with questionable comprehension, as one tragedy after another destroyed the dynasty he had created. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Maheu, Robert (with Richard Hack). Next to Hughes. New York: Harper Paperbacks, 1993. 358 pages. There are two reactions when people think of Howard Hughes. The average person thinks of Hollywood, the Spruce Goose, Las Vegas, and an old man who wasted away in a well-guarded suite somewhere, paranoid of germs, who for decades did not show himself to even his closest aides. Others react by thinking of the CIA, Mafia, and Watergate connections, and those spooky Intertel agents. These people tend to be suspicious of all the news stories. Robert Maheu wrote this book for the average person; either he doesn't know all that much or he's still not willing to tell. Maheu, who never saw Hughes, was his Number One wheeler-dealer from the late 1950s until 1970. By that time Hughes' paranoia played into the hands of other aides, who used his isolation to manage the information he received and the documents he signed. They took him out of the country and effectively captured his empire. Maheu tells about his work for the CIA (he was the CIA-Mafia liaison for the assassination attempts on Castro), and mentions the Hughes cash contributions to Hubert Humphrey and Richard Nixon. His narrative also paints a fascinating picture of how the powerful get things done by dropping a word to various well-placed elites. But in the end Maheu sees himself as just another nice guy who got taken for a ride, and many of his readers will feel that there's still plenty he'd prefer not to share with commoners like us. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Tarpley, Webster Griffin and Chaitkin, Anton. George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography. Washington DC: Executive Intelligence Review, 1992. 659 pages. The Lyndon LaRouche organization has a thing about George Bush. One reason is that Bush personifies the sort of Anglo-American, Ivy League elitism -- from "old boy" family connections to "old boy" spook connections -- that has occupied LaRouche for the past two decades. Another is that LaRouche was a federal political prisoner during Bush's tenure, after having been targeted by the feds and railroaded on flimsy evidence. This book, published just before the 1992 election, gets weird at the end (LaRouche claims that Bush's hyperactive thyroid led us into Panama and the Gulf). But the previous 600 pages are a massive compendium of elitist connections not found elsewhere. Though a bit wobbly, perhaps, the book manages to stand on its own, if mainly by default. It's also fair to ask what makes LaRouche tick. One theory is that he may be secretly sponsored by the Vatican. How else does one explain the tantrums against Freemasonry and secret societies (such as Bush's Skull and Bones), against Anglican apostasy (dope-pushing British imperialism), and against anything that smacks of planned parenthood or population control (the Malthusian activism of the Rockefellers)? When these tirades are occasionally juxtaposed with respectful quotations from His Holiness, it makes us wonder. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Thomas, Evan. The Man to See: Edward Bennett Williams -- Ultimate Insider; Legendary Trial Lawyer. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991. 587 pages. Edward Bennett Williams (1920-1988) was often described as "the consummate Washington insider who played to win." After battling cancer for eleven years, the obituaries began on page one and his funeral was attended by 2000 mourners. Williams declined invitations from two presidents (Ford and Reagan) to become CIA director, and Lyndon Johnson once asked him to be the mayor of Washington. He was the owner of the Baltimore Orioles, controlled the Washington Redskins for years, sat on the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, and was national president of the Knights of Malta since 1984. Williams was best known for his skill as a trial lawyer. His clients included Senator Joseph McCarthy, Jimmy Hoffa, Adam Clayton Powell, mobster Frank Costello, Sugar Ray Robinson, LBJ aide Bobby Baker, John Connally, the Democratic National Committee, and the Washington Post. Frequently Williams picked up the phone solved his client's problems before they went to trial, and sometimes an exasperated judge would discover that his far-flung law firm represented interests on both sides of a civil case. Biographer Evan Thomas is the assistant managing editor and Washington bureau chief at Newsweek magazine. Thomas had access to Williams's papers and the cooperation of his widow. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Weinberg, Steve. Armand Hammer: The Untold Story. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1989. 501 pages. This biography of Armand Hammer is one of five, but the first that is unauthorized. Reviewer Anthony Sampson thought even this one was overly kind, but that was before the ever-litigious Hammer filed a nuisance suit in England alleging 173 instances of defamation. Until Hammer died in December 1990, Steve Weinberg -- a journalism professor at the University of Missouri and director of Investigative Reporters and Editors -- was looking at what could have been the most expensive defamation trial in British history. Hammer's self-celebrated career began at a meeting with Lenin, and blossomed into a long series of insider business deals in the USSR. Soviet documents reveal that he ferried $34,000 from the Soviets to the American Communist Party in 1921. But Hammer wasn't one to let ideology get in the way of business -- in 1976 he pleaded guilty to charges of trying to conceal a $54,000 contribution to Nixon's reelection campaign, and received a tiny fine (and eventually a pardon from George Bush). Hammer's control over his $20 billion Occidental Petroleum was so firm that stockholders complained about picking up the tab for his art collections. Although he was frequently under SEC investigation, his lawyers and connections always came through. Before the "Teflon tycoon" died at age 92, many were beginning to worry that the hyperactive Hammer was not only untouchable, but might even be immortal ===== Drugs / CIA Bain, Donald. The Control of Candy Jones. Chicago: Playboy Press, 1976. 267 pages. This is a classic, one-of-a-kind study of the use of hypnotic manipulation for intelligence purposes. Candy Jones was America's leading cover girl during the forties and fifties. In 1960 she fell on hard times and agreed to act as a courier for the CIA. She was also a perfect subject for hypnosis. Without understanding what was happening, she began a 12-year relationship with a CIA psychiatrist who used her to exhibit his mastery of mind control techniques. He nurtured a second personality within Candy, which he could trigger at will. The first personality could not recall later what the second had been doing, as the second traveled to distant countries on courier missions. Even under experimental torture, the CIA's secrets were safe with this "Manchurian Candidate" courier. In 1972, Candy married New York radio talk-show host Long John Nebel. Concerned over her mood shifts and insomnia, Nebel, an amateur hypnotist, tried to help her sleep. Over many sessions Candy's story emerged and the second personality was exposed. Author Donald Bain, a friend of the couple, compiled this book from more than 200 hours of taped sessions between Nebel and Candy. Although this book is not fiction, unfortunately Bain does not reveal the name of the CIA psychiatrist. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Central Intelligence Agency. Allegations of Connections Between CIA and the Contras in Cocaine Trafficking to the United States. 96-0143-IG. Volume II: The Contra Story. Issued on 1998-04-27 as a classified report, and 1998-10 in declassified form. 236 pages. (This page count depends on the printout; the report itself uses paragraph or item numbers instead. NameBase also used these, resulting in numbers from 1 to 1148, new numbers for appendices A to E, and again for graphical reproductions of documents in G1 to G14.) In August 1996, Gary Webb and the San Jose Mercury News sparked a frenzy about the CIA's role in 1980s cocaine trafficking in Los Angeles. After the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Washington Post savaged Webb's story in three-part harmony, the Mercury News caved and Webb was out of a job. Four so-called "investigations" were launched on the issue of CIA, contras, and cocaine: two by Congress, one by Justice, and one by the CIA's then-Inspector General, Frederick Hitz. Two years later, it looked like a fizzle. Then Volume II of the Hitz report was posted on the web, and quite unexpectedly, it was full of names. Hitz lacked subpoena power, but he had a 17-person team dig out old CIA records. This report reviews the record of CIA message traffic, letters, and documents. There are no stunning conclusions, merely an overwhelming impression for anyone who reads it: CIA consistently dropped the ball on this issue, and rarely ran with it to begin with, except to neutralize external pressure. Their only concern was the contra war effort, and everything else took a back seat. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Lee, Martin A. and Shlain, Bruce. Acid Dreams: The CIA, LSD, and the Sixties Rebellion. New York: Grove Press, 1985. 343 pages. Marks, John. The Search for the "Manchurian Candidate": The CIA and Mind Control. New York: McGraw-Hill Paperback Edition, 1980. 242 pages. MK-ULTRA was a CIA "mind-control" project backed up by the usual Cold War rationale. Because the Soviets were supposedly on the track of a "truth serum," the CIA set out to beat them to the punch with heavily- funded research into hypnosis, electroshock, mind-bending drugs, and other techniques of behavioral control. According to Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, MK-ULTRA's resident Dr. Strangelove, the CIA's grail was discovering how "to modify an individual's behavior by covert means." But Gottlieb's gray language disguises what this quest meant in practice: e.g., dosing unwitting subjects with LSD, and then standing back to watch them lose it. MK-ULTRA compromised scientists, and left behind both scrambled psyches and a full- blown counterculture -- all without adding to our real knowledge of the human mind. NameBase indexed two books that deal extensively with MK-ULTRA. Drawing on 16,000 pages of once-classified documents, John Marks's "Search for the Manchurian Candidate" provides a pioneering overview of CIA efforts to control human behavior. Lee and Shlain's "Acid Dreams," a compulsively- readable history of LSD culture, details how the CIA, apparently by accident, promoted LSD from a chem-lab curiosity to an American folkway. -- Steve Badrich ------------------------------------------------------------------------ McCoy, Alfred W. The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade. Brooklyn: Lawrence Hill Books, 1991. 634 pages. When Noriega was delivering Medellin cartel competitors to the DEA, he may not have known that he was the latest in a long line of officials performing such a function. Alfred McCoy, professor of history at the University of Wisconsin, recounts how Hong Kong law enforcement similarly protected their favored heroin dealers in the 1970s, as did the new York branch of the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs in the 1960s. The symbiotic relationship between drug merchants, and intelligence and law enforcement, is examined in detail by McCoy. From Southeast Asia, to Central America, to Afghanistan, the trail of CIA covert action and drug smuggling runs parallel. McCoy also examines the banks that preceded BCCI as havens for tax evaders and criminals protected from prosecution because they banked with covert operators, and pinpoints critical historical periods when the narcotics trade might have been stopped had it not been for U.S. intelligence agencies. There are two versions of this book, the classic first edition (1973), and an expanded second edition (1991) that includes Afghanistan. -- Lanny Sinkin ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Parry, Robert. Lost History: Contras, Cocaine and Other Crimes. The Media Consortium (Suite 102-231, 2200 Wilson Blvd., Arlington VA 22201, Tel: 703-920-1802, [EMAIL PROTECTED]), 1997. 118 pages. Robert Parry was a reporter for Associated Press, Newsweek, and the Public Broadcasting System's "Frontline" program in the 1980s and 1990s. Disenchanted with mainstream reporting, by 1996 he started a newsletter and website to support independent journalism. Parry and Brian Barger broke the story of contra drug-smuggling in 1985, while working for AP. Despite hearings in Congress during the 1980s, and numerous instances of drug smuggling by contra supporters, the story remained on back pages until August, 1996. That's when the San Jose Mercury News ran a three-part series on the CIA and contra cocaine in south-central Los Angeles. It was widely noticed, primarily because of SJMN's high-tech website . The mainstream press, in synchronized harmony, savaged the Mercury News for its overreaching journalism. In the process, they neatly managed to sidestep the real issue -- forget Los Angeles, what about the tons of other contra-coke and CIA-drug evidence that our puppet press deliberately buried over the years? In this little self-published book, Parry reviews this evidence, as well as some of the media's outright lies and manipulations that kept this story from the American people. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Scott, Peter Dale and Marshall, Jonathan. Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies, and the CIA in Central America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. 279 pages. Periodically during the contra war in Nicaragua, stories would surface about the contra-drug connection. In some cases, planes flying south with arms would return with marijuana or cocaine. Rumors suggested that the CIA might even be using drug money to promote a war that Congress at one point refused to fund; at best the CIA seemed blissfully ignorant and forgiving when a number of their contra contract agents were reported to be involved with the drug trade. By the time of the Iran-contra hearings in 1987, it was clear that a number of the principals in Oliver North's network had been aware of contra drug smuggling for some time. DEA agents and prosecutors who went after certain dealers would discover that they had a "get out of jail free card" because of their CIA connections, and in 1985 two journalists who filed a contra-drug story for Associated Press were heavily edited. By 1989, three years after it began its investigation, the Senate Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics, and International Operations, headed by John Kerry (D-MA), released a 144-page report that confirmed most of the suspicions. "Cocaine Politics" draws on this report and a wealth of additional research and evidence to present the most complete picture that has yet been published. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Webb, Gary. Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion. New York: Seven Stories Press, 1998. 548 pages. As a reporter for the San Jose Mercury News, Gary Webb created a firestorm in 1996 with a three-part series that led to this book. The series was popular on the Mercury website, where it was backed up with a massive collection of documents, just a mouse-click away. Then the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, and the New York Times seemingly got marching orders, and bashed the story in three-part harmony. This story is about Norwin Meneses, Danilo Blandon, and Ricky Ross, and the arrival of crack in Los Angeles. Behind these three, to some extent, was the CIA's contra war against Nicaragua. The original series was poorly edited, and cut to fit. The CIA angle was overplayed to suggest that without the CIA, crack in Los Angeles could have barely existed. Some of the more imaginative web surfers then came close to concluding that the CIA was trying to exterminate blacks. After reading this book, with its shoe-leather reporting and 68 pages of end notes, no one can deny that Webb is a capable journalist (he lost his job anyway; the Mercury couldn't take the East Coast heat). In the end, the CIA's motives and its control over its own contra agents are still open to question. But don't expect any answers. Just before this book appeared, it was revealed that in 1982, the CIA was exempted by the Attorney General from reporting on the drug activities of its agents, assets, and contractors. ==== Take a look at our social network diagram that displays connections among the 100 names that appear most frequently in the books described below. You may also get a name index and availability information for any of these books. Drugs / Global Duzan, Maria Jimena. Death Beat: A Colombian Journalist's Life Inside the Cocaine Wars. New York: HarperCollins, 1994. Translated and edited by Peter Eisner. 282 pages. In 1990, an average of 15 people were murdered every day in Medellin, Colombia. There were more than 100,000 unemployed, and at least 140,000 children had no access to education. Some children became professional assassins, a career-track that was respected by the locals. An official engaged in the war against the cartels, the incorruptible General Miguel Maza Marquez, would say to journalists: "I admire people like you because I am a professional trained to face death and deal with that. But you are not trained; you are willing to face death all the same." Colombia is a country where journalists don't go anywhere without their bodyguards. Maria Jimena Duzan, 34, saw her house bombed, El Espectador's offices blown up, the murder of her publisher Guillermo Cano, the murder of her sister who made documentary films, and the assassination of numerous reformist politicians and presidential candidates. This account, which was first published in Spanish in 1992, begins with M-19 and continues through the rise and decline of the Medellin cartel. (The Cali cartel, which has become dominant in the last few years, is mentioned only occasionally.) Duzan was exiled from Colombia in 1990. She received a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard, and in 1992 returned to Colombia to continue her reporting. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ EIR. Dope, Inc.: The Book That Drove Kissinger Crazy. Washington DC: Executive Intelligence Review, 1992. 697 pages. The first edition of this book was published in 1978, and updated editions appeared in Spanish and English in 1985 and 1986. This new edition contains four appendices, including a fairly decent report on the Anti- Defamation League (pages 603-651). EIR is the research and intelligence wing of the Lyndon LaRouche organization. Their publications reflect a curious blend of facts and research not available elsewhere, mixed together with an Anglophobia that sometimes borders on the hysterical. This book is dense with the names of elites and their corporate and banking connections, from Hong Kong to New York to London. That alone made it worth inputting, even though I'm not convinced by their conclusions about the world order. Nor do I think LaRouche is a crank who believes that the Queen of England pushes drugs. In certain areas, EIR research is too substantive for such easy dismissal; something else is going on here. This book claims that a network of British aristocrats and their foreign cronies have been laundering drug money since the days of the Opium Wars. That's probably true. But has EIR uncovered Britain's conspiracy to destroy the world, or have they merely found some loose connections between various high-flying transnational profiteers, who happen to have interesting family histories? -- D.Brandt ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Ehrenfeld, Rachel. Narco-terrorism. New York: Basic Books, 1990. 225 pages. Rachel Ehrenfeld is an Israeli who lives in New York. She has a Ph.D. in criminology, and was a research scholar at New York University's School of Law during the early 1990s. A conservative who frequents the anti- terrorism lecture circuit, Ehrenfeld is interested in the links between leftist and pro-Arab governments (Cuba, Nicaragua, Colombia's M-19, Syria, Lebanon, etc.) and drug trafficking. If you don't mind the occasional unsubstantiated statement, Ehrenfeld does a passable job of presenting this half of the story. The other half of the story doesn't show up on Ehrenfeld's radar. Apparently it's all Soviet disinformation, or otherwise unworthy of her scholarly efforts. The heroin and hashish trafficking of the Afghan resistance is never mentioned, nor is the contra-cocaine connection, the CIA in southeast Asia, or the CIA's Nugan Hand Bank that laundered drug money. Ehrenfeld probably hasn't heard about DEA agents who complain that the traffickers they arrest are protected by the CIA. And what about Michael Harari, the Mossad agent who served as a close advisor to Manuel Noriega? Or Israeli arms sales to numerous other sleazy governments that wouldn't hesitate to turn a profit on drugs? Ehrenfeld could have improved this book by spending less time with the suits in Washington, and more time doing field research. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Kruger, Henrik. The Great Heroin Coup: Drugs, Intelligence, and International Fascism. Boston: South End Press, 1980. 240 pages. (Originally published in Denmark as "Smukke Serge og Heroinen" in 1976.) Henrik Kruger spent five years as a correspondent in Bangkok, Santiago, and Washington for the Copenhagen daily "Politiken," and has written or co-authored eight books. His work on what is today called "narcoterrorism" began more than ten years before the term was used in the U.S., and without the anti-Soviet baggage that became obligatory under the sponsorship of Reagan-era think tanks. Unfortunately this book is one of a kind and is invariably ignored by today's mainstream writers. The Great Heroin Coup raises awkward questions. The first half of the book concerns French intelligence, the OAS, the Corsican Mafia and the CIA, the Ben Barka affair, and the story of Christian David; the second half examines the CIA and Mafia in the Golden Triangle, Cuban exiles in Florida, the Nixon-Vesco connection, and the CIA's infiltration of the DEA in Latin America. The conclusion is not essential to the rich detail and dense footnoting throughout the book, but here it is: Nixon's war against the Turkey-Marseilles heroin allowed Trafficante's marketing "coup" using heroin from Southeast Asia, and for Kruger it appears that there may have been passive collusion in high places. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Lintner, Bertil. Burma in Revolt: Opium and Insurgency Since 1948. Boulder CO: Westview Press, 1994. 515 pages. The Golden Triangle stretches into Thailand, Laos, and southern China, but it is the Burmese portion that is, according to the U.S. State Department, the "undisputed leader" of world opium production and the source of two-thirds of the heroin on American streets. In 1989, a New York court charged Khun Sa with attempted smuggling, and in 1994 DEA chief Thomas Constantine called him the "most important drug lord on the entire globe." Others disagree, pointing out that Khun Sa has frequently offered to grow substitute crops in exchange for Shan independence. This book shows that particular drug lords are not the problem. Rather, a massive economic and organized-crime infrastructure, combined with corruption, repression, and insurgent nationalism, has been behind the opium trade for decades. Since 1994 Khun Sa has been squeezed by the Burmese army and the rival Wa faction, and weakened by defections. By now he's almost out of the picture, but this won't have much impact on smuggling. Although the Chinese Triads are still the biggest players, other syndicates have begun cashing in on the Golden Triangle, including the Russian mafia, Nigerian smugglers, North Korean agents, and Japanese thugs. Meanwhile, the Burmese junta has sidetracked foreign criticism of its repressive policies merely by opening up their country to foreign investment. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Marshall, Jonathan. Drug Wars: Corruption, Counterinsurgency and Covert Operations in the Third World. Forestville CA: Cohan & Cohen Publishers, 1991. 90 pages. This is a short book on an important topic. The 264 end notes, in addition to the fact that this is not Jonathan Marshall's first book on this topic, mean that there is a lot packed into these 90 pages. His main point is that the war against drugs can never succeed, due to the laws of supply and demand. Yet it continues, because the massive infrastructure of drug enforcement, anti-organized crime efforts, money laundering detection, counterinsurgency, and military special forces have become addicted to the battle nonetheless. Caught in the middle are the poor countries. On one side they are destabilized with narcodollars and criminal syndicates, while on the other side the U.S. bankrolls powerful security forces that shift the balance from elected parliaments to military elites. Examples are noted from Argentina, Bolivia, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, Thailand and Burma. Since the end of the Cold War, there is a dangerous new tendency for U.S. counterinsurgency elites to substitute "drugs" as the new enemy, now that "communists" are hard to sell at budget time. The CIA supposedly joined the drug war in 1969, but their role is still unconvincing. The worst aspect of this "drugs as the enemy" tendency might be yet to come in America: counterinsurgency not merely as foreign policy, but also as domestic policy. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Messick, Hank. Of Grass and Snow: The Secret Criminal Elite. Englewood Cliffs NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1979. 190 pages. This book is Messick's attempt to expose the new elements behind the drug trade: blacks and Cubans, South Americans, and the counterculture. He describes the trade in marijuana, cocaine, and heroin, and the efforts of U.S. federal and local authorities to curb the supply. Richard Nixon's war on drugs -- which involved Lucien Conein and 14 ex-CIA agents assigned to him, all operating through the DEA -- is discussed in one chapter. Rumors that this was some sort of assassination squad are still circulating today. Hank Messick's many books on organized crime are widely respected. In 1965 he was hired by the Miami Herald for a series on Meyer Lansky, and his first book, The Silent Syndicate (1967), reported on crime and gambling in Kentucky and Ohio. Messick makes a distinction between the syndicate and the Mafia. The former is international and multicultural, and often includes the latter as a subset. But beginning with the Joseph Valachi hearings in 1963 and J. Edgar Hoover's "La Cosa Nostra" hype, the Mafia got all the attention while Lansky was left alone. Messick was the first to hint at the reason for this: Hoover had been compromised by Lansky, as Anthony Summers recently confirmed in "Official and Confidential" (1993). This debate is significant today for assassination theorists, because most "Mafia did it" authors still give Lansky a mere footnote or two at best. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Mills, James. The Underground Empire: Where Crime and Governments Embrace. Garden City NY: Doubleday, 1986. 1165 pages. James Mills spent five years on four continents hobnobbing with DEA agents to come up with this massive book. Even without footnotes or an index, and more flashy dialogue than historical perspective, it's quite impressive. The overworked DEA agents are Mills' heroes, working long hours with minimal resources in their war against the "Underground Empire" of internationally- organized heroin and cocaine producers and distributors. DEA has a low opinion of the CIA -- which either mucks up the DEA's priorities through incompetent meddling, or perhaps has their own agenda. So the war continues against the "sovereign, proud, expansionist" Empire, which "has become today as ruthlessly acquisitive and exploitative as any nineteenth-century imperial kingdom, as far-reaching as the British Empire, as determinedly cohesive as the states of the American republic. Aggressive and violent by nature, the Underground Empire maintains its own armies, diplomats, intelli- gence services, banks, merchant fleets, and airlines. It seeks to extend its dominance by any means, from clandestine subversion to open warfare." Okay, so we invest the muscle needed to stop all this, and no doubt the world's trains will soon run on time also. But why not legalize drugs, and tax them at a rate that reflects their social costs? No comment on this, because Mills is content with his story of good guys vs. bad guys. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Stich, Rodney. Drugging America: A Trojan Horse. Diablo Western Press (P.O. Box 5, Alamo CA 94507, Tel: 800-247-7389), 1999. 519 pages. A former FAA inspector turned whistleblower, Rodney Stich publishes name-intensive tomes that detail instances of corruption within the U.S. federal government. His shotgun-like prose blasts away at the CIA, DIA, DEA, FBI, INS, Customs, Secret Service, prosecutors, and judges who go along. In this book he adds international drug traffickers and corrupt Mexican officials to his list. Many of his sources are former adventurers, opportunists, CIA spooks, gunrunning pilots, agents, informers, assorted hucksters, and con artists. Some once saw themselves as commie-kicking patriots, but now they feel more like victims. Others ran afoul of someone higher up, and are now behind bars. Rodney Stich is their court of last resort -- he is willing to listen, and willing to spend time and effort confirming their stories and petitioning officials on their behalf. Stich sees the U.S. as massively corrupt, and the war on drugs as the most corrupt and wasteful enterprise of all. In addition to his own sources, he is also beginning to dig out anti-establishment research from the 1960s and 1970s. (Unlike most of his cowboy sources, Stich now feels that the U.S. had no business in Vietnam to begin with.) Our "Entertainment Tonight" monoculture has no room for Rodney Stich's energetic moral outrage; he'll always have to publish his own books. That's why he's welcome in NameBase. ----- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, All My Relations. Omnia Bona Bonis, Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. Roads End DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance�not soapboxing! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright frauds is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credeence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. 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