Rodney Stich
Diablo Western Press,
PO Box 5, Alamo, CA 94507, USA
$28 plus $4 shipping in the US. Outside the US inquire first at 1-800-247-7389 (phone) 925- 295-1203 (fax)
This is the successor to Stich’s Defrauding America, reviewed in Lobster 34. As with the earlier work, it is impossible to verify and difficult to even assess many of the claims made by Stich’s informants; but even if only part of it is true, it is an extraordinary portrait of judicial and political corruption.
Stich’s thesis is that the CIA and many other federal bureaucracies, as well as chunks of the party political machines, have been wholly corrupted by drug money. Or something like that. Some of the people named – like Ted Shackley – have been cited before in similar contexts. Quite what ‘the CIA’ means to Stich isn’t always clear. Some of the time ‘the CIA’ means a kind of secret team to Stich: this is the Christic Institute thesis with bells on. At other times he seems to be suggesting that the entire agency has become infected with this.
His evidence is chiefly the testimony of former DEA and CIA officials, contract personnel – or drug smugglers turned informants. Do you believe George Bush was a big wheel in a thirty year-old CIA operation to run drugs into America? Stitch does – at any rate he quotes people who make this claim. The evidence does not convince me – or is it just that I find it hard to believe?
I find the Scott-Marshall-McKoy thesis more plausible: that for short-term strategic reasons the CIA as an institution has consistently ended up in bed with drug-runners; and has either ignored the drugs or helped the drug-runners ship their goods. Thus, further down the road, when the local crisis is over (Cuba, Laos, Nicaragua, Afghanistan), the agency has become bound together with the drug-runners. In effect, some of the world’s major drug-dealers have become immune to serious prosecution by US authorities. National security (covering the CIA’s bureaucratic ass) overrides the DEA, FBI, Department of Justice etc.
Inside this overall structure some CIA personnel have become corrupt, just as some politicians have taken drug money. The combination of national security and political parties’ escalating funding requirements has been a deadly one for all those other people engaged in the absurd ‘war on drugs’. This book is partly the story of people, working for Uncle Sam, who ended up ruined, dead, or in jail, because they became an embarrassment to ‘national security’ while trying to prosecute the ‘war on drugs’. It also contains the best account I have read of how the actions of the intelligence agencies in the United States, chiefly the CIA, produce unanticipated consequences. I will try to summarise this.
A group of Cuban Bay of Pigs veterans created a money-laundering operation called Sea Crest. When the the US decided to covertly fund the Afghanis against the Soviet Union, the CIA used this Cuban money laundry to finance the Mujahedeen. Now the Cuban money laundry is protected: it can’t be prosecuted for fear of political exposure of the Afghani funding.
The Cuban laundry serves the whole community, including anti-American Muslims in America raising funds by running various frauds. US money flows, via the Cuban laundry, to people who are the enemies of the United States. Some of these people have been trained and armed by the US – some in the US – while fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan. Eventually some of these people, trailing all these politically embarrassing connections to the US intelligence community, bombed the World Trade Centre.(1) None of this can be stopped because of the spook connections. The Cubans have their get-out-of-jail-free card; and, as a result, their clients are also protected from routine investigation and prosecution.
The Cuban money laundry is also handling the money made in the US by Dominican drug dealers. In traditional fashion the Dominican drug dealers are paying off the cops and the local Democratic Party. Unaware of the intelligence connections of the laundry, or the money (and votes) given by the Dominicans to the New York Democratic Party, the head of the anti-smuggling unit of the Immigration and Naturalisation Service (INS) in New York leads a multi-agency task force to investigate the Dominicans and comes across the Sea Crest money laundry.
The Dominicans – no fools – play the race card and begin screaming racism. This gives the Democratic Party in New York the pretext to halt the invetigation. The INS official becomes the first person in US history to be charged with a particular minor technical offence connected to ‘consensual searches’ and is sentenced to three years in prison; the FBI Special Agent in Charge of the New York office, who comes to the defence of this INS official, is suspended two months before he was due to retire. And so on.
I come back to my resistance to believing that George Bush is a major drug-importer. At one level my resistance is clearly irrational. Narcotics is big – huge – international business; and as one of the Congressmen busted with John De Lorean in the FBI sting said, on tape: money talks and bullshit walks. Of course, yes; but George Bush?
A fascinating book: I just can’t tell how much of it is true.
On the Web information about this book is at www.druggingamerica.com
Note
- Though I am aware that there is controversy about the guilt of those charged with the bombing, I am not competent to comment on this; and for the purposes of this anecdote it doesn’t matter much