On October 8 1998 the CIA’s Inspector General published a report on the recent CIA-cocaine controversy which – apparently – more or less copped the lot, acknowledging that the CIA had ignored drug smuggling by its Contra allies. (See for example The Independent 7 November 1998, ‘CIA turned a deliberate blind eye to Contras’ drug smuggling’.) I say ‘apparently’ above because I have not read the report in question.
There is even a reliable report of evidence implicating a CIA employee in a plot to smuggle cocaine into Los Angeles. According a story from Robert Parry’s The Consortium, the CIA employee under suspicion was connected to the CIA’s Los Angeles ‘station’ having previously worked with the Nicaraguan contra rebels. According to one senior government official, the evidence of this 1988-90 pipeline was included in the classified appendix to the October Inspector General’s report.
According to Parry, CIA headquarters refused to confirm or deny the existence of the classified appendix. But former Inspector General Frederick Hitz acknowledged that the allegations are under current review.
The Consortium is at http://www.consortiumnews.com
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Gary Webb, whose articles on the ‘Dark Alliance’ kicked the contra/CIA/cocaine story into public consciousness and his career as a journalist into the shithouse, said of the IG Report in an interview with The Konformist (http:// www.konformist.com) on 28 January 1999:
‘The problem is you haven’t seen these stories in the paper because they contradict everything they were writing two years ago. The agency has basically confessed and nobody wants to hear the confession because [the big papers] had all declared them innocent‘ (emphasis added).
Thus is confirmed another set of ‘paranoid fantasies’.
The Gringo doctrine
If the major American media seem to be trying to ignore the CIA’s ‘confession’, even less attention has been paid to revelations of the retired Uraguyan Admiral Eladio Moll, one time head of Uraguay’s intelligence service. In July last year Moll testified before a Uraguayan congressional commission about ‘the gringo doctrine’ – ie the instructions from the US to its ‘allies’ in South and Central America. He said,
‘The guidelines that were sent from the US were that detained guerillas, once information was extracted from them, did not deserve to live. The gringos wanted us to kill all the guerillas.’
Moll says that the Uraguyan armed forces rejected these instructions and consequently killed fewer guerillas than other Latin American countries who followed the instructions.
Reported in Counterpunch, Vol 5. No 21 (December 1-15, 1998) PO Box 18675, Washington DC 20036.
Another cunning Commie plot
Erstwhile Director-General of MI5, Stella Rimington, was the subject of a long profile in the Sunday Telegraph, 21 June 1998. Rimington said that when she became D-G she
‘tried to get into the public domain a better understanding of what the Service did. In part, this was to compensate for the image that had prevailed before. It was being portrayed as if it were run by fascist swine, which wasn’t the case.’
Much of this prevailing imagery, was, she believes, put about in the 1980s by ‘communist sympathisers posing as conspiracy theorists’.
Huh?