User talk:Location/Sandbox21

On the CIA-drug pages

Rather than clutter up the talk pages of the different articles, I'll start leaving comments here on the major revision you sketched out the other day.

It is possible to try for a grand merge of all the CIA-Drug pages, but I frankly wonder if it's possible to make it into a single coherent article. I'm now thinking along these lines: start with articles on events with begin and end dates, and with some sort of reality check like investigations or at least well defined books into an article. If this could be done, these could later be merged one by one into a truly complete article (until the next scandal blows up). Here are some claims with begin-end dates.

• Southeast Asian opium, 1950s to 1975. McCoy tries to make it a much broader thing, with roots in Sicily and Mafia ties with OSS, but this is a small part of the story, and when people mention it, it's mostly a rehash of McCoy. The heart of the case is the CIA in Laos; Air America is also an important thread running through the whole thing with branches involving the 'KMT' drug armies in Burma in the 50s and 60s, and French Indochina in the 1950s. McCoy apparently lost interest in Southeast Asian after 1975, and the second revised edition of his book switches after this to the War on Drugs, and then Afghanistan, which is where he left off the story in 2003.
• Central America, 1979 to 1990. The center of this is Nicaragua, but it spills into El Salvador, Costa Rica, Panama, etc. When this began to be a subject of CIA-Drug tie claims is unclear to me. The Christic Institute is a part of this, and there were one or two articles by Brian Barger of the AP in late 1985-early 1986, which in some versions are also credited to Robert Parry. The heart of the story though is the 1989 Report of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee's Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics, and International Operations, 'Drugs, Law Enforcement, and Foreign Policy' (DLF). This is where Gary Webb started, and the CIA OIG report part 2 is, in my opinion, answering some of the questions posed in this, rather than anything Webb wrote. Without having read DLF, Part II is hard to figure out. Another interesting book that came out of this report is Cocaine Politics, by Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall. I find this to be completely different from most of Scott's other books; I assume the difference is due to Marshall.
• Afghanistan is the latest enthusiasm, due largely to McCoy's focus on it, but with Scott contributing much hot air. I'm very jaundiced on this subject; the begin date is when the CIA entered, but there's no clear end date, and there's very little decent material on this; no investigations, no lightning rod books like McCoy 1972.

These are the only places I have seen that have any real content. Marshall has a 2012 book on Lebanon that I've read a few interesting passages from, but why drag in more when the current articles are such a mess. Three subsections in one article is not excessive, but it will take many hundreds of pages of reading to get something coherent. I regard this then as a long term project. Rgr09 (talk) 14:09, 2 November 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for the feedback! If you are OK with it, this works as a central discussion area for me. No one else seems to have much interest in it right now.

There are so many facets to the topic that I do not think it is possible to merge everything into one article; however, I do think it is possible to summarize the major allegations that have received significant responses from the media and the government. I have attempted to arrange these, as you have suggested, in chronological order. I'm not quite sure where to take this after the Hitz report in that secondary coverage on later allegations has not taken those reports as seriously. Now and then, a media outlet or two will report on some figure rehashing one of the allegations that has already been made (e.g. [1]). While I am not against including things that are reliably sourced, I prefer not to create a dumping ground for those types of things. - Location (talk) 18:08, 2 November 2015 (UTC)

I agree. This is one way articles get hopelessly confused, by bringing up 'tertiary' coverage of things that are not even the putative main subject of an article. In your example, Al Jazeera mentions Webb's Dark Alliance series as part of a 2012 story about drugs in Mexico. For the Gary Webb article, I would call this 'quaternary coverage', something that has no earthly reason for being in the article. But the 'Dark Alliance' series is embedded in the Gary Webb article, so if the quote is somehow connected to the Dark Alliance series, it becomes tertiary coverage. The Webb article used to be full of this kind of thing. Tertiary coverage is greatly overrated in Wikipedia, in my disgruntled opinion. It usually comes from people who have bookmarked an article that refers to some event they were previously unaware of, and so as a public service they add it as a contribution to some already poorly structured and sourced article, sometimes without any attempt to even fit it in. The Webb article got into a terrible state because of this. Tertiary coverage doesn't contribute to the development of an article, it impedes it. Rgr09 (talk) 02:38, 3 November 2015 (UTC)

How should we handle incidents like the arrest of Ramon Guillen Davila and the operation that he was involved in?[2][3] The cocaine shipment was part of a sting operation. Saying that this is evidence of CIA drug trafficking is like saying the ATF gunwalking scandal is evidence of FBI arms trafficking. - Location (talk) 03:48, 3 November 2015 (UTC)

I looked at that one. It is a tangled mess. I wound up with dozens of references, and still couldn't put the whole story together. What is clear is that the DEA was HOPPING mad at the CIA. The CIA produced a suitably grovelling apology, the agent who came up with the idea resigned, and the Venezuela station chief retired. But after November 1996 who else was charged, what were the actual statements in court, and what was the final resolution of the case are in a half dozen newspapers I don't have ready access to. After spending three days on this one short section, I decided that it was not my business to do the research needed to actually make sense of the whole thing, threw up my hands, and left it there.

My approach to this kind of thing now is first to ask 'how does the article support the claim'? and second to ask 'how does the edit fit into the article'? For support, the NYT article is okay, but doesn't cover the whole story. The Russ Kick book is not okay. Seems to be self-published, features a long section on CIA involvement in drugs sourced to Webb, Scott, McCoy et al, has noticeable editing problems, and as a source for this anecdote, cites Dan Russell, from what also looks like a self-published book called "Drugwar: Covert money, power and politics." Big no there.

It's a well-known incident, seems like there should be some mention of it somewhere, but I don't have RS references for the final result; it's just a head, with no tail. It is also a big question why it should be in THIS article: why not put it under well-known law enforcement screw ups for example? I don't really care if it goes or stays, I guess.

Anyway, it shows how far the idea of CIA 'involvement' in drug trafficking can be stretched. One could even say that CIA attempts to stop drug trafficking are a kind of involvement, no? 'Involvement' is one of the weaseliest of words. Perhaps a sentence or two in the article's intro could plug this particular hole: "participated in drug trafficking to further intelligence or political goals" or something like that? But doesn't that still fit this event? Rgr09 (talk) 09:01, 3 November 2015 (UTC)

Regarding "involvement" as a weasel word, I agree. Unfortunately, I cannot think of a better title or one that more accurately represents what all of "this" is about. As you know, some people say that the CIA was actively trafficking drugs while others were say they were letting drug trafficking occur. If a drug dealer was a CIA asset, then some think that points to CIA "involvement" in trafficking. I'm not sure how to handle the Ramon Guillen Davila-thing either, however, I think it may need to be addressed somewhere given that it has been cited by Wikipedia editors who think it points to something nefarious. This is one big draft, so feel free to insert anything into it that you wish. - Location (talk) 17:03, 4 November 2015 (UTC)

@Rgr09: I'm not asking you to chime in, but there is an interesting inquiry at Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Noticeboard#Is the CIA a reliable source on par with the NY Times.3F. -Location (talk) 19:24, 15 June 2017 (UTC)

@Rgr09: Well said. My opinion would have been some form of "It depends"; however, I don't think it would make a difference to the discussion. -Location (talk) 03:52, 17 June 2017 (UTC)

@Location: I missed some important points. I would especially defend citing the CIA-OIG report in Gary Webb, but the CIA-OIG is actually not part of the CIA, and it seemed too complicated to go into. I would also defend citing the books that CIA historians have written, such as the four volume study of the Bay of Pigs, or the recent biography of John Cone; these books are cited in a number of Wikipedia articles, and I think they are perfectly legitimate sources. The CIA's in-house journal, Studies in Intelligence, is as good a reference as any of the other intelligence-oriented journals out there, and so are the proceedings from conferences which CIA has sponsored for events such as its release of Ford and Nixon era presidential daily briefings. Let me know if the subject comes up again elsewhere. Rgr09 (talk) 04:16, 17 June 2017 (UTC)

I really enjoy your feedback and observing your input in various articles. If the inquiry at RSN was related to a specific source, I might have chimed in; however, it looked as though someone was involved in a dispute in one of the active current event articles and just wanted verification of his or her own POV... one that might have arisen from watching too many spy movies. Cheers! -Location (talk) 04:28, 17 June 2017 (UTC)

Hey, ditto for your work. I've learned a lot from it, not just the info you found, but how you found it, and wrote it up. And whenever I'm trying to figure out how to do something wiki style, I always check to see how you did it. Rgr09 (talk) 23:51, 17 June 2017 (UTC)

Christic Institute

Not sure how far you want to get into the Christic Institute claims. This is the 1987 version of Sheehan's affidavit to get the Avirgan-Hull suit going. It is of some help if you really want to jump into this thing, but beware, it is 60+ pages of very turgid stuff, ranging up and down forty or fifty years, with all the 'informants' refered to as numbers. Having plowed through it, it seems that Webb got a lot of stuff from Christic, and I can recognize the influence in other works as well. In March 1988, Sheehan produced a second affidavit, this one over 300 pages long. I have not yet found a copy of this. It doesn't seem to be on the Christic archives. The second affidavit was the subject of David Corn's article, "Is there a secret team"? I have access to Corn's article, but it is not available on the internet as far as I can tell. Corn treated the suit as a 'tactic' and was dubious it would succeed, but the future collapse of the case was clearly not something he (or other people) anticipated. He mentions one putative witness who denied he said the things the first affidavit attributed to him, so this was a known problem even before the suit was tossed. Chip Berlet wrote on the suit after the collapse in Right Woos Left; this is an incredibly long article, with only about 2-3 pages on the Christic Institute, which Berlet felt had been influenced by LaRouche et al.; it has almost nothing about the particulars of the suit. Rgr09 (talk) 05:20, 3 November 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for the pdf. It is something I had read about, but had not actually read myself. (I also found a version on in the Harold Weisberg collection that is a few pages shorter, but loads more quickly: [4].) (According to the cover pages, this version appears to have been updated January 31, 1987 and the version you linked to appears to have been updated April 1, 1987.) Do you know where to find a list of the 79 sources? Given that reliable secondary sources refer to the affidavit, it should at the very least be included in the EL section.

Regarding Chip Berlet's piece, I have not read through the entire article but I did read the parts applicable to Sheehan and the Christic Institute. Some people have strong opinions regarding Berlet, so I think we need to be careful how he is used as a source (e.g. use in-text attribution for his opinions). Thanks again! - Location (talk) 16:43, 3 November 2015 (UTC) edited 13:11, 3 December 2015 (UTC)

Just a drive-by note; Daniel Brandt's NameBase lists names from both affidavits (see the source list), 131 and 389 respectively (of course the 1987 affidavit has a nice index of its own). Brandt does not list things like 'Source # 74' and I don't believe anyone ever bothered to try and figure out who these people were, though if you had the second affidavit some of them would probably be obvious. Don't hold your breath on this; some of the people cited in the suit may have been non-existent. The supposedly murdered chauffeur 'David' has never been identified, and it seems likely that there was no such person. Rgr09 (talk) 02:53, 4 November 2015 (UTC)

Drive-by drive-by note: the issue of who the names were was part of the trial and part of the reason that Sheehan was fined. See here.

last one, I promise. The June 1991 Court of Appeals judgment against Avirgan et al (here) cites the district court's ruling:

After all the appeals were exhausted and plaintiffs complied with the order to reveal the names of their witnesses, the reason for the plaintiffs' adamant refusal became apparent. Specifically, the names and identities of approximately twenty of the seventy-nine witnesses were totally unknown to Mr. Sheehan or the plaintiffs. Several of the disclosed witnesses later stated under oath that they did not know Mr. Sheehan, had never spoken to him, or flatly denied the statements he had attributed to them in his affidavit. The remaining witnesses did not furnish any statements that would be admissible. Much of the testimony of these witnesses involved conversations they allegedly had with other people, which is the hearsay testimony inadmissible at a trial.

The Court of Appeals observes ' Avirgan and Honey do not dispute the district court's statements. The other appellants, in the fee portion of the case, do not dispute the statements.' Rgr09 (talk) 03:26, 4 November 2015 (UTC)

New addition: found the March 25 1988 document from Christic here (300+pages). If you don't have a subscription to Mary Ferrell, it is also on Archive.org, together with two other Iran-Contra reports. After looking at the intro, I see this is not a new affidavit. It is a request to extend discovery beyond what the time period originally granted (1982-1986) and beyond the original subject areas. It is based mostly on books and newspaper stories, but also cites depositions from Edwin Wilson and Gene Wheaton, Christic's main investigator. I have not read most of it. I assume that the judge rejected the request to extend discovery, demanded that they put up what they had, and when he found they didn't have anything, dismissed the case. It ranges far beyond the CIA-drug thing, but does have a number of useful citations for various claims.

The district court's original dismissal of the suit is here. It gives a detailed description of what Christic alleged and why the judge dismissed the suit. Rgr09 (talk) 01:06, 13 November 2015 (UTC)

Thanks again. - Location (talk) 19:48, 18 November 2015 (UTC)

@Rgr09: I found a quote from William Safire referring to the Christic Institute's suit which stated: "Perot later took some of those phony allegations to the F.B.I.; its inquiry cleared Armitage."[5] Do you have any more information about this or the FBI inquiry? Thanks! - Location (talk) 22:18, 20 November 2015 (UTC)

I looked at the Safire article, but I'm not sure what he's referring to. Armitage is in the Sheehan affidavit (pp 36-39), acting as 'bursar for Vang Pao's opium funds', setting up secret accounts in Nugan Hand Bank, smuggling weapons for assassinations and so, but he was not one of the 29 people named in the suit. (He was also investigated in connection with Iran-Contra, but was not indicted.) One possibility: Armitage was involved with MIA issues in the late 70s; Perot was extremely interested in MIAs, and it is possible this has something to do with it. Armitage is mentioned quite a bit in Kiss the boys goodbye, a very problematic MIA book by Monika Jenson-Stevenson. I wonder if Safire is confusing the MIA complaints with the Christic stuff. Rgr09 (talk) 01:07, 21 November 2015 (UTC)

I found an article in The New York Times that gives a decent summary. It states:

Daniel Sheehan, the head of a left-wing Washington-based group called the Christic Institute, has said that Mr. Perot was receptive to his theory that United States officials were involved in an intrigue of drugs and weapons sales in Southeast Asia and Central America.

Mr. Sheehan and several colleagues say Mr. Sheehan played a central role in convincing Mr. Perot in 1984 that Richard L. Armitage, a top Department of Defense official, was involved in a vast, shadowy drugs-and-guns smuggling scheme that Mr. Sheehan called The Enterprise. The accusations against Mr. Armitage have been dismissed as false by a number of present and former Government officials, and an inquiry by the Federal Bureau of Investigation resulted in no criminal charges.

I was hoping to find more specific information on what the FBI had to say about this. Bo Gritz appears to tie-in with this, too.[6] The FBI probably took one look at that and said "whatever". - Location (talk) 01:29, 21 November 2015 (UTC)

An interesting article, thanks for the link. It gives quite a confused version of the Christic story. The 1984 date is surely a mistake for 1986, as the story itself later makes clear. Armitage was NOT named in the suit, nor was he the central figure in the affidavit as of 12 December 1986 (minor revisions 1 January 1987); still, the suit was filed 20 May 1986, and may have undergone some development before or after that. Is it possible to look up civil suit filings online? I'll poke around in the somewhat mid-term future. FYI, both Sheehan and Martha Honey have things to say about the suit in books:

• Honey, Martha (1994). Hostile Acts: U.S. Policy in Costa Rica in the 1980s. University Press of Florida. ISBN 978-0-8130-1249-0. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |1= (help)
• Sheehan, Daniel (13 December 2013). The People's Advocate: The Life and Legal History of America's Most Fearless Public Interest Lawyer. Counterpoint Press. ISBN 978-1-61902-253-9.

I'm especially interested in Sheehan's book; the suit seems to be a major topic in this. The Google book preview shows 8 pages with Perot on them. Should be an interesting read, but I'll keep a shakerful of salt on my reading desk. Rgr09 (talk) 08:44, 21 November 2015 (UTC)

Yes, my understanding is that Armitage was referred to in the suit but not named as a defendant. I was turned on to this angle of the conspiracy theory based on recent edits to the articles on Armitage and Theodore Shackley that refer to allegations from Khun Sa (likely via Bo Gritz).

Exploring another angle: Chip Berlet does suggest that Christic was influenced by LaRouche/EIR. "Some critics of the Christic Institute say undocumented conspiracy theories, perhaps first circulated by the LaRouchians and the Spotlight, were inadvertently drawn into Christic's lawsuit against key figures in the Iran-Contra Scandal."[7] Do you happen to be aware of any primary or other secondary sources discussing CIA-drug allegations from the LaRouche side? - Location (talk) 17:16, 21 November 2015 (UTC)

I know almost nothing about LaRouche. Tried "cia and drugs site:www.larouchepub.com" in google. There are quite a few references, mostly in Executive Intelligence Review, which fortunately dates them and apparently has been archived back into the 1980s. I believe the LaRouche organization wrote a lot of material on Iran-Contra. Supposedly they helped National Security Archives figure out the "codes" Oliver North used in his notes. Another right wing source is Liberty Lobby, which L. Fletcher Prouty was associated with. The "secret team" terminology of course came from him, but using similar googling (site:libertylobby.org searches the online issues of "Spotlight") doesn't turn up very much. Interesting material you found on Armitage. The Belanger book on Khun Sa is very hard to find, amazing someone used it in a Wikipedia article. Also amazing it was actually reviewed; good find on that. Rgr09 (talk) 00:16, 22 November 2015 (UTC)

I, too, know very little about LaRouche or his movement other than some of their conspiracy theories seem to take "wacky" to an entirely new level (i.e. see Dope, Inc.). Unfortunately, the wackier the allegations, the less coverage they get in reliable secondary sources.

Thanks for noting the Prouty-Christic link. I am familiar with Prouty, his book The Secret Team, and The Spotlight, but I don't think I made the connection to Christic. Knowledge of that pointed me to this source, written by Berlet, in which reading the passage gave me one of those "Ah, ha!" moments. (Related to a different "Spotlight", last night I went to see Spotlight and saw promotional material for Truth which was a poster size reproduction of this review in The New York Times. At the bottom it refers to "...the smearing of the San Jose Mercury News journalist Gary Webb after his articles about cocaine smuggling and the funding of Nicaraguan rebels by the C.I.A.")

Given the credentials of the author and the nature of the claim, the Belanger book should probably not be used in Wikipedia unless those claims have been addressed in secondary sources. It is interesting how people dig up the most unusual things, though. - Location (talk) 17:32, 22 November 2015 (UTC)

Did a little more digging in google books, and I think I see what happened. Belanger was cited in the 1990 book Kiss the Boys Goodbye: How the United States Betrayed Its Own POWs in Vietnam by Monika Jensen-Stevenson as a source on Khun Sa. It disappeared for 20 years (in books) until it was cited by Peter Dale Scott in his 2010 book American War Machine. It's reappearance in the Armitage article is simply evidence that a fair number of Wikipedia articles are edited by Scott's readers. The Jensen-Stevenson book (she was also a 60 Minutes reporter/producer) is prominent in the CIA-drug literature. She worked with Gritz, and through Perot met Sheehan as he was putting Avirgan v. Hull together (according to Sheehan's autobiography). Simply don't have time to read through most of this stuff, the list just gets longer and longer. Rgr09 (talk) 00:48, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

Ugh. The angle that government officials were covering up POW/MIA investigations in order to not reveal a drug smuggling operation used to finance a secret war in Laos[8] is one that I was hoping not to tackle. I think I would need to be a professional author/investigator to write a worthy synopsis of all of this. (Regarding my comment at the top of this part of the thread, I found a July 6, 1992 article by Sidney Blumenthal in New Republic that touches on the FBI's investigation of Perot's allegations towards Armitage. It also mentions Nugan Hand Bank, Bo Gritz, Scott Barnes, Christic, and Sheehan.[9] Also found article by Michael Isikoff in WaPo discussing Perot's belief that war in Laos may have been tied to drug trafficking by US officials.[10]) - Location (talk) 05:09, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

Blumenthal article quite interesting, clarifies some of the Armitage claims. Just to make sure everyone gets credit where credit is due, here is what Max Holland has to say about Blumenthal. Backtracking a bit, you mentioned Stephen Holden's comments on Kill the Messenger. Here is a link to David Carr's review of KTM, titled Movie Recalls a Reporter Wrongly Disgraced. Carr's review particularly surprised me, since he wrote it despite what sounds like a very blunt email from Tim Golden. C'est la vie. I would not hesitate to cite the reviews by Carr and Holden in the Wikipedia article on the movie, but since neither Holden nor Carr ever did investigative reporting, or reporting on Central America, or the CIA, or drug trafficking, I would not cite them in the articles on Gary Webb, or on his book Dark Alliance. Rgr09 (talk) 07:49, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

I am not familiar enough with Carr to know if I should be surprised by his review but he does seem to accept the main premise behind Webb's work. Perhaps the same could be said for Holden and his comment. It's not something I would want to expand upon in this article, but it appears as though there are plenty of others aligning with Webb who believe Golden's own reporting was not that stellar or that he had his own axe to grind. - Location (talk) 17:30, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

@Rgr09: I didn't realize that Sheehan was tied to the James Sabow conspiracy theory. Although a separate case of its own, I'm wondering if that should be a sub-section under the Christic Institute's suit. - Location (talk) 02:34, 12 December 2015 (UTC)

I read your section on the Sabow case today. Great digging and very interesting case, especially how it has persisted over the years (with help from various congressmen). If one were writing up the Sabow case for a biography of Daniel P. Sheehan, the remarkable similarity of Sheehan's conspiratorial approach to both Sabow and Avirgan v. Hull would certainly be worth noting. (According to Jonathan Kwitny, Sheehan also had a conspiracy theory in the Silkwood case, involving a scheme to transfer uranium to Israeli.) But the 'black box' evidence of drug running and hit teams was rigorously excluded in the 2000 Sabow case, so even if Sheehan wanted to tie it to Avirgan v. Hull, that link wasn't made, either in court or in later stories. This being the case, I wouldn't link the two without notable (and specific) claims somewhere else.

Anyway, Avirgan vs. Hull is complex enough. More suprising connections there: according to the FBI file on the Christic Insitute (4th page in the pdf, numbered 51), Barger and Parry's 1985-86 stories on contra cocaine were based on information from ... Avirgan & Honey. According to the same source, the Kerry investigation was also sparked by .... Avirgan and Honey. I've ordered Sheehan's autobiography, REALLY curious to see what he has to say about all this. Rgr09 (talk) 09:43, 12 December 2015 (UTC)

It would be interesting to visualize all of these connections and interconnections with some sort of tree! I have not read all of the articles related to Sabow yet. Where did you see that congressmen were involved in spreading the theory or commenting on it? - Location (talk) 04:34, 13 December 2015 (UTC)

From the 2003 OC Weekly article by Nick Schou: "Dr. Sabow wants to force Sheriff Mike Carona to re-open the 12-year-old case. He has powerful friends on his side, including Representative Duncan Hunter (R-San Diego), chairman of the House Armed Services Committee. It was Hunter who wrote into 2004's massive National Defense Authorization Act a line item directing the Secretary of Defense to conduct a new investigation into Col. Sabow's death. Acknowledging Dr. Sabow's frustration with the military, not to mention the obvious conflicts of interest, Hunter's item requires the participation this time of "medical and forensic experts outside the Department of Defense." Rgr09 (talk) 10:39, 13 December 2015 (UTC)

Thanks. I looked for reliable secondary source material that would tie this in with the allegations of government involvement and the closest I could find was in one of Schou's articles. I found material about the Sabow conspiracy in Senate hearings here, but there doesn't appear to be much on the drug trafficking allegations. At the bottom of page 235 and top of page 236, Sabow's brother briefly refers to Gene Wheaton and allegations of a CIA link to a shadow government.[11] I seem to recall stumbling across Wheaton's name in connection with something to do about Iran—Contra (maybe claims in the Richard Secord article) and he struck me as sort of a nut. [The article was Project Dark Gene. Sorry for the tangent.] - Location (talk) 17:58, 13 December 2015 (UTC) edited 18:02, 13 December 2015 (UTC)

The 2004 investigation mandated by Hunter's line item amendment was done by Jon Nordby, a forensic pathologist who has written several books. His entire report is available online here. Beware, it includes autopsy and scene of death photos. Like all the other investigations, his 83 page report found Sabow's death a suicide. The page also has links to responses by David Sabow and 'Bryan Burnett', who seems to have done his own study of Sabow's death, available here. Gene Wheaton was Sheehan's main investigator for Avirgan v. Hull. A hostile description of his work on this is here. I think it very likely that the conspiracy claims over Sabow's death is a sequel of sorts to Avirgan v. Hull, worked up by the same people operating under the same assumptions, but without direct claims to this effect on their part (Sheehan specifically), I wouldn't put it into the article. I'll let you know what Sheehan's book says. Rgr09 (talk) 23:39, 13 December 2015 (UTC)

I agree with your assessment and that there really isn't much here to connect to this article. I'm not about to spend hours pouring over details of the reports, but this reminds me of the JFK conspiracies where people argue the qualifications or lack thereof of various expert or accuse them of being involved in a cover-up. How did Hunter become aware or involved with this? - Location (talk) 00:24, 15 December 2015 (UTC)

Sabow does not appear in Sheehan's autobiography. The narrative seems to end in the early 90s. I used up my shaker of salt on the book in one day, so I've arranged for a friend to send me a couple of 20 lb bags from Wisconsin, where the mild winter has left them with a surplus. Rgr09 (talk) 05:41, 30 December 2015 (UTC)

@Rgr09: The Wikipedia page about Danny Casolaro refers to an article in The Nation by David Corn. On the second full paragraph on page 525, Corn writes about Casolaro: "His notes show that he was influenced by the silly 'secret team' theory of the Christic Institute." As far as CIA drug trafficking allegations are concerned, I think this is a throw away comment in that I don't see any reliable coverage directly connection Casolaro to those sort of claims. I do see one unreliable source stating that he was investigating Bo Gritz's claims: [12]. There are scattered bits about his "Octopus theory", but I just don't see whatever drug angle he may have had getting coverage. Does that sound about right? -Location (talk) 00:51, 12 May 2017 (UTC)

@Rgr09: Most of Casolaro's notes and materials have been posted to archive.org in the last year by a contributor named Michael Best, under the title "National Security Internet Archive." Casolaro had at least one of the depositions for the Christic case (Joseph Kelso). He also had a large number of newspaper clippings about drug smuggling in Burma and Laos, uploaded again by Best. Certainly Casolaro was interested in this sort of thing, but he never actually wrote any articles or books, so I see very little to do here, except trim back any citations about Casolaro's purported theories as much as possible, since there's nothing to back it up with. Rgr09 (talk) 01:38, 12 May 2017 (UTC)

I was curious, so I looked up those materials in an attempt to find out what Casolaro had collected or noted on the subject. There is so much that I didn't even know where to start! -Location (talk) 17:53, 14 May 2017 (UTC)

FYI, The Casolaro files has a copy of the Belanger book, and the entire section on the "Role of the CIA" is in one of the pdfs posted on Archive.org last year. As the review noted, no sources given at all, so not suitable for citing, but at least of some historical interest. Rgr09 (talk) 06:33, 25 May 2017 (UTC)

Air America, CAT, and a pause

There is a tremendous amount of material from the CIA on its proprietary companies, both in the special collections and in the FOIA reading room; most of it is from 2009-2011, and I know of no books that incorporate it. Most interesting to me is a four volume history of CAT (which only goes up to 1955). I think I will actually read this. There is also a very interesting Ramparts article called "The New Opium War" from May 1971, beating McCoy to the punch. The article thanks Peter Dale Scott for "permission to draw on unpublished research on Laos and the China Lobby". Interesting historical background.

It is also interesting to note that the Church committee's final report in 1976 says the Committee "found no substance" to "allegations that the Agency's air proprietaries were involved in drug trafficking." This information comes from McCoy 2003, page 386. That page is included in the amazon preview of McCoy's book. The reference for the Report is "Final Report of the United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (Church Committee), Vol 1 Section 11, p 205. This is available online here. I was certainly unaware of this. Nor does this information appear in any Wikipedia articles; perhaps this should be rectified. Unfortunately, McCoy's complete discussion is not available in the preview, so I will hold my tongue for now. He seems to say that there is another internal document from the CIA that confesses its crimes. All of this is missing from the 1991 edition of the book.

Unfortunately, I have extremely urgent business to take care of for the next couple of months, so I doubt I will have much to say here. I'll keep up with the page and see what interesting things you come up with. Rgr09 (talk) 15:26, 3 November 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for links. I also found the Church Committee material here on the Mary Ferrell site, but your link is better.

Thanks, too, for the assistance and pointers. Hope all is well. I may post questions here with the understanding that you may not be around for awhile. Cheers! - Location (talk) 16:55, 3 November 2015 (UTC)

Morton Kondracke Peter Dale Scott

Searching the foia.cia.gov links that you provided, it appears as though Morton Kondracke Peter Dale Scott in Earth magazine published allegations in March 1972 that predated those of Alfred McCoy.[13][14] It caught the attention of the CIA, but, unfortunately, the only coverage of his article appears to be among other alternative weeklies which are a bit sketchy for Wikipedia purposes.[15] I cannot even find any information about Earth (not the new Earth about geology which appears to be a renaming of Geotimes). - Location (talk) 21:04, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

Earth magazine seems to have been a west coast publication, running from 1970 to 1972. Here is a note on the magazine and its publisher Richard Brams and editor James Goode. Have not been able to find much else about them. A standard source on this sort of thing is the Alternative press index. I don't have access to this.

An interesting source for the early history of the drugs-CIA claim is a book called Insider Histories of the Vietnam Era Underground Press, Part 1 (Voices from the Underground). The book first came out in 1993, and has an article by Chip Berlet called 'Muckraking gadflies buzz reality', which discusses this history. Parts of this are available on Google books and Amazon. As Berlet says, the Ramparts article I mentioned above was the first extensive article on drugs-cia. This is a 1971 article, and credits Scott for research and material. I suspect that McCoy was actually following up on the Ramparts article when he began writing Politics of Heroin, but that's just my opinion, I don't know that McCoy has ever acknowledged this. If so, Scott deserves "credit" for being the one who got the ball rolling. Berlet's article also includes a reference to another possible source for the claim: Allen Ginsberg. Berlet's reference to events in 1970 is the earliest reliable mention I have found of Ginsberg as a source for drugs-CIA. Peter Dale Scott knew Ginsberg; is this where Scott got it? 100 percent idle speculation. One could dig around in Ginsberg biographies, but beware, some of these seem to be pretty crappy. The Wikipedia article on Ginsberg in a typically unannotated passage says he "worked closely with Alfred W. McCoy." I consider this whole section of the article unreliable. The final reference to Morgan's biography of Ginsberg, is not necessarily useful; apparently there were many problems with this book. In any case, there is a 1978 letter from C. L. Sulzberger to Ginsberg cited in the book Acid Dreams, in which Sulzberger apologizes to Ginsberg for disbelieving his claims that the CIA was involved in drugs, so certainly Sulzberger knew Ginsberg's views from an earlier period. [Ignore the Ginsberg biographical comments, I'll put up a note on this later.] Rgr09 (talk) 01:22, 24 November 2015 (UTC)

Earlier still: The February 1970 issue of Ramparts has an article by Scott, "Air America: Flying the US into Laos" which says "Air America's planes also serve to transport the Meo's main cash crop, opium". This is the earliest mention of drugs-CIA I've found in the US press. It's only one sentence (opium is not mentioned again), but it beats out the Berlet reference to Ginsberg by a whole year. (I thought Berlet's reference was to 1970, but after finagling more text from Amazon, I see that it was Feb. 1971). Rgr09 (talk) 08:33, 24 November 2015 (UTC)

Late sixties reference: The June 1968 Ramparts has an article titled "The CIA's flourishing opium trade." This is a very complete account of the CIA-drug claim, including an island on the Mekong that boasts "a factory run by an Austrian where the opium is refined to the powdery morphine base which takes up only a tenth of the space. Air America flies it to the giant United States base at Udon Thani or the smaller base at Nakhon Phanom in Thailand, to Chieng Mai, Bangkok, Danang, Saigon." There is no by-line for the story. Let's call up Warren Hinckle and ask! Given such a circumstantial account, I wonder why did this whole thing not take off until four years later. I'm going to have to think about that one. Rgr09 (talk) 09:39, 24 November 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for the links. According to the link provided in the article about him, McCoy stated: "In 1971 I was a graduate student doing Southeast Asian History at Yale University. An editor at Harper & Row, Elisabeth Jakab, read some articles in a volume I had edited about Laos, which made some general references to the opium trade in Laos. She decided this would be a great idea for a book and asked me to do a background book on the heroin plague that was sweeping the forces then fighting in South Vietnam." It would be interesting to know a) what was the "volume [he] had edited about Laos" or b) what were the "general references to the opium trade in Laos". That might verify whether his work was following-up on that of Scott. It was certainly McCoy's work that first received notice by mainstream sources. - Location (talk) 20:42, 24 November 2015 (UTC)

The Ramparts article appears to be following up on allegations published by The New York Times in April 1968. I cannot find the original article, but there appears to be an AP report here. One article by Jack Anderson attributes the source of those allegations to "SM Mustard"[16][17]. I think McCoy says Mustard was an employee of Vietnam Air Transport (VIAT). - Location (talk) 17:27, 28 November 2015 (UTC)

@Rgr09: I was attempting to wikilink "Meo" or "Meo tribesman" as mentioned in Scott's article, but in Hmong people and Miao people I ran across references to certain prejudices and derogatory connotations of the name that I don't fully understand. It appears you might have some expertise in SE Asia, so I was wondering about your thoughts on this. -Location (talk) 16:28, 26 July 2017 (UTC)

The whole Miao/Hmong distinction is very complicated. Miao is currently an ethnic designation used in China, but it includes groups who are not Hmong. Meo is no longer a current term (at least among Western writers); it may have been closer to a true synonym for the Hmong. I don't know when or why it came to be regarded as derogatory. Use Hmong for Meo, I guess, with an explanatory note that this is the group's own term for itself (similar to many Native American tribal names) and avoid Miao entirely. Rgr09 (talk) 12:54, 28 July 2017 (UTC)

Primary source material

You may have already seen this: In Thomas Ahern's 2006 report that was (mostly) declassified in 2009, Undercover Armies: CIA and Surrogate Warfare in Laos 1961-1973., I found some good information in the appendix, titled "The Narcotics Question", on pages 535 to 547. - Location (talk) 20:27, 24 November 2015 (UTC)

I had not seen this. This is not just a great source for the history of the CIA-drug claims, it is a solid basis for a real article on the CIA and opium in Laos.

Some more notes on other possible sources. Hamilton‐Merritt's Tragic Mountains: This has been mentioned several times in the McCoy article, and deleted each time, in some cases apparently by McCoy himself. (You seem to have met Professor McCoy on the talk page to his article.) Despite what McCoy says, as far as I know, there is no libel or other problem with Hamilton-Merritt's book; it was published by a reputable academic publisher, and McCoy himself reviewed it in the Journal of Asian Studies. His review does not say it was libel. It was in fact extensively reviewed, mostly positively. The Ahern book mentions a lengthy review by Hugh Tovar, former CIA country chief in Laos that should be quite interesting. I'll move these to the top of my reading list (meaning I'll look at them next year).

McCoy's book on Laos, mentioned in the interview, is Laos: War and Revolution, a 1971 collection of essays by members of the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars which was edited by McCoy and Cathleen Adams (apparently his wife at the time) and published by Harper and Row. Haven't seen it, in any case can't push CIA-drug claims earlier than Scott, or the puzzling Ramparts 1968. Ahern mentions articles in the Rolling Stone. I'll google this if I have time.

Regarding McCoy 1972 there is an interesting discussion of its publication here.

On Allen Ginsberg, it seems Bill Morgan's biography is not criticized as harshly as I remembered. I guess that was my own frustration with what I feel is Morgan's awful annotation. Anyway, Morgan says that Ginsberg talked to McCoy on May Day 1970, and McCoy told him he was going to write about drugs in Laos. Morgan also says that Ginsberg at one point thereafter (date uncertain) was working at the Institute for Policy Studies on the CIA-drug thing. I question the accuracy of the dating, and some of the facts. If people want to put it in, I guess there's no choice until my rebuttal of Morgan is published. Anyway, the passages in Morgan don't come close to supporting the text in the Wikipedia article on Ginsberg, but I'm not editing any articles until I've taken care of my own business. This page doesn't count, since it's not an article.

Miscellaneously, found another reference for Christic Institute: Susan Huck. Legal Terrorism: The Truth About the Christic Institute. New World Publishing, 1989. And where did I find this? NameBase.org (!?)

Rgr09 (talk) 02:27, 25 November 2015 (UTC)

I seem to recall that McCoy may have had an issue with some material on his page, so I took it to WP:NPOVN or WP:BLPN for additional opinions. What is the issue that McCoy has with Hamilton-Merritt's book?

Looking for what Ahern mentioned, I was not able to find a Rolling Stone article in 1968 that touched on the subject. Of course, it could be there and I'm not searching properly.

The Angus MacKenzie passage is interesting. Good background for the article on McCoy's book.

I'm not familiar with Bill Morgan (archivist). Is the anecdote about "Morgan says Ginsberg says McCoy says" in the book?

I haven't read Susan Huck's book, but I thought I recently came across when looking up material for the Christic Institute article.

Lots to chew on. - Location (talk) 05:25, 25 November 2015 (UTC)

Semi-related but not really usable in this article, I stumbled upon this November 1956 CIA report examining allegations that the Chinese were involved in trafficking: “There is no reliable evidence to indicate that the government of Communist China either officially permits or actively engages in the illicit export of opium or its derivatives to the Free World. There is also no reliable evidence of Chinese Communist control over the lucrative opium trade of Southeast Asia and adjacent markets." - Location (talk) 05:34, 25 November 2015 (UTC)

Morgan biography of Ginsberg mentions McCoy 2x, p. 469 and p. 477, both are available on the Amazon preview. I have found out that McCoy's 1971 book came out in November 1970, and must have been more or less complete by May 1970 (this from a May 1970 article by Noam Chomsky in the New York Review of Books). so Ginsberg talking with McCoy in May 1970 about CIA-drugs seems more plausible. The book has one article by David Feingold on "Opium and Politics in Laos", which, according to the Chomsky article, makes the CIA-drugs claim. This also gives some context to a McCoy - Ginsberg conversation, with the idea going from McCoy to Ginsberg, rather than the other way round. The book also features an article by Peter Dale Scott on Air America(!), so McCoy was aware of Scott's views, and vice versa. I'm now curious to see the book.

On Rolling Stone, I wonder if Ahern didn't simply confuse Ramparts and Rolling Stone. After all, they both start with an R.

Hard to say what McCoy is objecting to in the deleted paragraph. Perhaps it's not so much Hamilton-Merritt as the Hmong veterans' criticisms of McCoy. In McCoy's review of Hamilton-Merritt, he calls Vang Pao "a judas goat, leading his flock of Hmong sheep through a maze of stock pens only to jump aside at the last second as they tumble down the chute into the slaughterhouse of clandestine warfare." One would think that with such a sharp tongue he would expect the "sheep", who twice drove off numerically superior NVA regulars from the Plain of Jars, to harbor no tender feelings for him. But some academics are remarkably thin-skinned.

I agree allegations of China's role or lack thereof in drug trafficking doesn't really fit into the article. Rgr09 (talk) 15:55, 25 November 2015 (UTC)

Summary of Gritz for the Conspiracy Mill

This is an item in Beltway Bandits column written by David Corn and Jefferson Morley for the Nation:

 "The Christic Institute has found, in retired Col. James (Bo) Gritz, an unlikely supporter for part of its “secret team” theory. Over the past year Gritz, a former Green Beret ... has tried to publicize a series of allegations reminiscent of those made by the Christic Institute."

article's summary of Gritz's claims: In 1986, with White House blessing, Gritz met drug warlord Khun Sa in Burma for information about MIAs. Khun Sa had no MIA info but said he wanted to end the opium and heroin traffic in his territory and expose U.S. officials involved in drug smuggling. Gritz said gave message and was told by NSC's Tom Harvey that “there is no interest here” in Khun Sa’s overture. May [1987], Gritz again visited Khun Sa in Burma. Gritz said Khun Sa claimed he had once engaged in narcotics transactions with Richard Armitage, Theodore Shackley, and other U.S. officials. Gritz showed letter Khun Sa purportedly wrote to the Justice Department in 1987 stating all this. Gritz also said Khun Sa had proposed to surrender one metric ton of heroin as a demonstration of his willingness to help eradicate drugs:

 "Both Gritz and Khun Sa have some credibility problems. But their charges show that the idea of a “secret team” of drug-dealing rogue U.S. officials is not an obsession only of the left." Rgr09 (talk) 05:06, 25 November 2015 (UTC)

Do you have a link for this? - Location (talk) 15:41, 28 November 2015 (UTC)

War on Drugs

There appears to be some bits in War on Drugs, particularly War on Drugs#U.S. government involvement in drug trafficking, that need some fact checking. - Location (talk) 19:07, 26 November 2015 (UTC)

I don't understand why this section is in this article. What is the relevance of the claim of U.S. government involvement in drug trafficking to the subject of "the War on Drugs"? Do you see it? If there is some relevance, this needs to be spelled out in the section. Then a main article tag and a one to two sentence summary of the "Allegations of CIA involvement" article. That's it. Rgr09 (talk) 01:33, 27 November 2015 (UTC)

I don't see the relevance either. The allegations, particularly Webb's, have made their way into numerous articles that are only tangentially related. This is something that I've observed with JFK conspiracy material, too. It makes it difficult to patrol. In this case, virtually every mention of "CIA" refers to some negative action or allegation. There is essentially no discussion about the attempts of the CIA to curb the flow of drugs into the US. - Location (talk) 15:39, 28 November 2015 (UTC)

PDS 1972 article from Earth

I'm impressed you found this. I got Weisberg's files from archive.org, but now I see that these are not complete; in the future I will go straight to the Hood archives. I was somewhat surprised to see that this article is in fact identical to chapter 8 of Scott's 1972 book, The War Conspiracy. I've read this before, so I sort of know where I am in the development of things now. Thanks for the hand. Also, I carelessly missed the fact that in the acknowledgements to the 1st ed. of McCoy 1972, PDS is listed as one of those who "shared their information and informants with us and gave us many leads", while Ginsberg is mentioned as helping and advising. Rgr09 (talk) 08:34, 28 November 2015 (UTC)

Gad, this issue of Earth was the original publication of the CIA dope calypso, how could I not know this! Rgr09 (talk) 15:43, 28 November 2015 (UTC)

I assume you are talking about the March 1972 article in Earth. Here are the three versions we've compiled thus far: 1, 2, and 3. Sometimes I have luck searching the Hood archives, other times I just google "jfk.hood.edu" with whatever search term. As with this one, there are often multiple copies of the same document to be found in different locations. I stumbled upon the scribd.com link just by luck. There are other articles by Scott copied into scribd.com. I thought I saw someone there with the username "Peter Dale Scott" within the past few months, but I can't seem to find it now. Regarding "development of things", are you stating that McCoy's work on this did precede Scott's by a short period of time? - Location (talk) 16:06, 28 November 2015 (UTC)

This is all educational for me. It appears you have expertise in Gingberg's writings whereas, as you can surmise, I have no knowledge of them. I've added Ginsberg's "CIA Dope Calypso" to the draft; perhaps you can nail down the timeline for me. I'm not sure what you mean by "Earth was the original publication of the CIA dope calypso?" - Location (talk) 16:18, 28 November 2015 (UTC)

I found discussion of the Earth article and Ginsberg's poem in an academic source here starting on page 79! It seems as though Jeremy Kuzmarov has already done much of this work. - Location (talk) 16:25, 28 November 2015 (UTC)

Ginsberg is on the case as early as March 1971.[18][19] - Location (talk) 17:19, 28 November 2015 (UTC)

Having trouble keeping up with the conversation. Kuzmarov looks very interesting; the Jack Anderson article is also great. I'll come back tomorrow and see what else is new Rgr09 (talk) 17:42, 28 November 2015 (UTC)

I reordered this section so I could see what was covered and what was not. Interesting way of getting a conversation going! It looks like most of the loose ends from yesterday are tied up. Let's see if I can sum this up. A lot of material on the early history of CIA-drugs claims in Vietnam has come up. I think it's safe to say the idea originated in the late 1960's and was based on events in Vietnam. How soundly based is a question I don't think the article should try to answer; that would be original research. The main proponents of these ideas, in terms of people writing, long-term, on this subject, are Scott and McCoy.

Peter Dale Scott is a former Canadian diplomat (1957-61) who was hired by the UC Berkeley Speech Department in the early 1960s. I gather that this was later merged into the English department. In the 1950s he published mostly his own poetry, not politics. In the early 60s he became very active in the anti-Vietnam war movement at Berkeley. Scott was an important figure in developing the CIA-drugs idea. He came up with broad, conspiratorial claims that are developed at length in his 1972 book The War Conspiracy. Scott now prefers terms like Deep Politics to avoid being labeled as a conspiracy theorist. Scott both influenced and was influenced by McCoy

Alfred W. McCoy was a student at Yale in the late 1960s, where he studied with Harry Benda, who played a leading role in developing Yale's program in Southeast Asian studies (McCoy 1972 is dedicated to Benda, who died in 1971). McCoy was very active in the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars, a group of strongly left-wing scholars, mostly students, who split off from the American Association for Asian Studies in the late 1960s. His focus was on Laos, and based on the reviews I have read, the Nov. 1970 book he helped put together gives a clear picture of his views at the time. This book led directly into McCoy 1972. McCoy 1972 was strongly promoted by his publisher Harper & Row, including a lengthy excerpt in Harper's, then as now a leading literary magazine, and by various congressional members who found McCoy's views convincing or at least compatible with their own. These members gave McCoy a chance to testify before Congress, and this plus the ensuing controversy and newspaper coverage made McCoy's book the best known of the CIA-drug writings.

Allen Ginsberg's work is much more in the background. Apparently Ginsberg, like Scott, was a newspaper clipper, but he didn't leave any writings based on these that I have yet seen. Ginsberg was talking to both Scott and McCoy in 1970-72. To say more about this, who influenced who, would require going into archival material. Kuzmarov, whose book you cited above, has apparently not done this yet. He is following the same trail we are, newspapers and articles.

Kuzmarov is primarily looking at the claims of numerous "heroin addict soldiers" in the Vietnam war, claims which he now views as generally inaccurate. This was an important part of McCoy's book, and was one reason he was able to get extensive coverage and attention in Congress. Kuzmarov is not the only person to question this, but his work seems to be the most solid, and published by U Mass Press, a very reputable publisher. Kuzmarov's attempts to rebut this should go in the article on McCoy's book. Much of Kuzmarov's rebuttal comes from Congressional inquiries, which found little to support the claims of McCoy and other anti-war writers.

To get an idea of differences between McCoy and Scott's views, you can read Scott's review of McCoy in the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars. Much of what Scott says here is straightforward conspiracy stuff in my opinion, no different from stuff like The Secrets of The Federal Reserve. I don't think the article should go into comparisons of Scott and McCoy though. That would be original research, and a major job.

The early reports section is looking very strong now, the strongest I have seen anywhere, but putting it together will require caution to avoid synthesis. Can't really help with this difficult task, I am just too busy. Really appreciate your impressive work though. Rgr09 (talk) 01:25, 29 November 2015 (UTC)

Miscellaneous

Re the Corn/Morley story on Bo Gritz; Sorry, no links for this story. I got it off Ebscohost (ASP). Nation doesn't seem to leave articles prior to 2000 on-line. Here is a citation for the paper version (sans EBSCOhost url): Corn, David; Morley, Jefferson (1988-05-07). "Beltway Bandits". Nation. 246 (18): 634–634. ISSN 0027-8378. {{cite journal}}: |access-date= requires |url= (help)

Looking at the early reports section, I got quite curious about the Nguyen Cao Ky story. This is also in the May 1971 Ramparts article "New Opium War". Found a blog mentioning a Sam Mustard who adopted a Vietnamese girl. Very possible that this was the same guy who supposedly wrote to Gruening. There is nothing to confirm or deny he was CIA (the blog said he was suspected to be). Operation Haylift was real, and Nguyen Cao Ky flew as a part of it. There is a reference for both of these facts in Ken Conboy and Dale Andrade, Spies and Commandos: How America Lost the Secret War in North Vietnam, with an amazon preview available. This is a very colorful reference; on one of the last test runs, Bill Colby was a passenger in the plane Ky was flying and Ky took him skimming wave top height over the Gulf of Tonkin, inspiring Colby to remark the next time they did it he would bring his fishing rod. There is a detailed account of this series of attempts to infiltrate NV in another of Thomas Ahern's Vietnam histories, The way we do things. It seems quite clear from these sources that Ky's 'opium smuggling' from Laos during the flights is a fiction; the planes didn't start from Laos, didn't land in Laos, apparently didn't even fly over Laos. They crossed over the North/South border through the DMZ and after the dropoff refueled at Da Nang air force base, about 85 m. south of the DMZ, before returning to Saigon. How to handle this sort of ancient falsehood that no one ever bothered to check out before is a puzzle to me. Am I doing original research? If so, should I conceal what I found out and in the article simply repeat claims that 40 plus years later turn out to be false? Perhaps just mention the publication and dates of articles such as "New Opium War", omitting the false or specious claims. Don't know; what do you think? Rgr09 Rgr09 (talk) 12:08, 29 November 2015 (UTC)

Under early reports, article from Sydney Sunday Herald (March 22, 1970: "The C.I.A. had enlisted the help ...) is out of sequence and indirect. The article was written after Sihanouk was deposed, assumes the CIA was behind it, and recites some old history. The reference to Phao Sriyanod (sic, should be Sriyanond) is specifically sourced to a 1966 NYT series on CIA activities in SE Asia, and the events discussed go back to the 1950s. Phao is in ch 4. of McCoy 1972.

It seems that Kuzmarov sometimes has rather careless errors. On page 77 (Google books preview), he says "correspondent Don Strock stated that after slipping into an unauthorized military zone, he had witnessed the loading of opium onto T-28 bombers by U.S. forces working in conjunction with Laotian and Thai special forces." This is a reference to a 30 Jan 1971 article by Carl Strock in the Far Eastern Economic Review, which is quoted in Rampart's "New Opium War" article: "Over the years eight journalists, including myself, have slipped into Long Cheng and have seen American crews loading T-28 bombers while armed CIA agents chatted with uniformed Thai soldiers and piles of raw opium stood for sale in the market (a kilo for $52)." Kuzmarov has gotten Carl Strock's name wrong and scrambled the meaning of the quote. (What is the purpose of loading opium on a T-28 bomber?) When in doubt, always check. When not in doubt, still check.

Can probably skip the college newspaper reprints of the Ramparts articles. These are often incomplete or even mangled, and with all issues of Ramparts available at UNZ.org, one can simply go straight to the source. Rgr09 (talk) 16:08, 29 November 2015 (UTC)

Regarding the early reports and the college papers, I do not think we should use all of this material. Some of it is irrelevant, some of it is redundant, and some of it could only be used via synth. Most of this is new to me, so I put it down on the "scratch pad" and try to figure out as we go along as it fits or doesn't fit into the other material or at least the material that is considered to be reliably sourced. You seem to have a good handle on this. Enjoyed your analysis the of Nguyen Cao Ky story. I have not read all of the relevant material in Kuzmarov, but I find the chronology to be helpful. I must say I am a bit skeptical when journalists or authors take the assertions of previously unknown speakers at anti-war rallies at face value, particularly those who claim to have worked for or have some association with the CIA. As far as I know, "Lee Mond", "Paul Withers", and "SM Mustard" may have been pseudonyms for student anti-war activists pushing an agenda. It's difficult to know when these people seem to fade very quickly into obscurity. I have seen the material that refers to "Sam Mustard"; same name appears in Whiteout. I wish I could find the primary source documents from Gruening's subcommittee. - Location (talk) 16:40, 29 November 2015 (UTC)

Nguyen Cao Ky story

The New York Times report seemed to figured prominently in the Nguyen Cao Ky story as discussed by Jeremy Kuzmarov, Alfred McCoy, and even Jack Anderson, so I asked Gamaliel if he could track down the article for me. I don't have Kuzmarov's or McCoy's books, but my guess is Kuzmarov may be citing McCoy and — if the link above is to be trusted — McCoy appears to be citing "S. M. Mustard, letter to Senator Ernest Greuning [sic] (March 9, 1968); The New York Times, April 19, 1968, p. 11." The title of the article on page 11 in the NYT is "C.I.A. ONCE OUSTED KY, REPORT SHOWS; Senate Unit Studies Charge He Flew Opium on Mission"; there is a small sub-article below it that stats "U.S. Embassy Issues Denial". The article has a few quoted excerpts that are a bit longer, but the material isn't really any different than what appears in a few variations of the Associated Press report from the same day (i.e.[20][21] [22]). It contains a few items of information that the AP report does not have, but also omits some material that the AP report does have. For example, one version of the AP report that states that the report is in the form of a letter to Gruening, whereas the NYT doesn't mention a letter and states only that the report was made available by Gruening's subcommittee. I guess my point is that contrary to Kuzmarov's statement that "the New York Times obtained leaked information from a Senate subcommittee" regarding the allegations, The New York Times did not have any information that the AP did not have... nor was the material "leaked". (Incidentally, I have found only one source, a paper by an undergrad, who cited the NYT article properly but even he seems to distort what was actually reported by taking the allegations in the report as gospel.) Anyway, I'm spending a lot of time on an allegation that was made, then officially denied. - Location (talk) 18:52, 30 November 2015 (UTC)

Crud! I just noticed that The New York Times article is an AP report! This article is the same as what appears in the NYT until where is states "The missions were flown from Saigon's Tan Son Nhut Air Base, the report said." The NYT article continues with material stating the types of planes used in HAYLIFT, but does not include the bit "The author of the report said he was sent to Vietnam in March 1962..." I know that newspaper editors would trim AP or other news service reports to fit, but this report has been cut up much differently in four different papers. - Location (talk) 19:28, 30 November 2015 (UTC)

Yes, it's a mess. Certainly the letter had real information in it. The company Aviation Investors (mentioned in the Chicago Tribune article you linked to) was a real CIA front (search for Aviation Investors CIA, there's a Washington Post story on it). Operation HAYLIFT was a real name, according to Conboy (Ahern does not mention it). I haven't seen the complete NYT version of the story, so I'm curious about the planes it lists. This would help fit it in with the Conboy and Ahern books (Ahern says the first mission had only one C-47).

The slice and dice approach to the AP story is unfortunate but common. Apparently the complete story was never printed anywhere. I am especially curious whether the AP story or any other paper story mentioned Mustard's name. When the Sub-Committee's staff director Joseph Lippman gave AP a complete copy of the letter, it seems that the writer's name was still on it. He asked them to be nice enough to leave off the author's name; I wonder if they did. Of course, once Jack Anderson got a copy of the letter, and gave copies to Allen Ginsberg and Ramparts, this was all in vain. Do you think McCoy got his copy from Ramparts or Ginsberg? Or maybe Ginsberg to Scott to McCoy or some permutation thereof. In any case, the 1971 Jack Anderson story tells us that Ginsberg was not able to find the original letter in the Sub-Committee files. To get a copy of the letter I think you would have to look in the papers of Allen Ginsberg or Jack Anderson or Alfred McCoy.

The letter seems to be at least partially in error. There were numerous missions into NV, which both Conboy and Ahern detail, Ahern with individual names for each mission. Nguyen Cao Ky was not involved with all of these. There were several failures when pilots crashed into mountains and things like that, and according to Conboy, the Vietnamese crews were dropped after these, and replaced with more experienced Chinese pilots from Taiwan. The letter mentions Chinese ground crews coming in at one point. This confirms that the author was associated with ground services for the mission, but he apparently didn't know even the pilots were switched. Or have I missed something?

Later missions involved flights near heavily protected areas which the Chinese pilots apparently were not very enthusiastic about. According to Conboy, Ky and the Vietnamese were brought back for these (one of these missions was called 'Kamikaze', which says something about the dangers involved). This was in 1965, so that Ky was still in good standing with the CIA after the writer's claimed firing of Ky in 1963. This suggests to me that the writer was no longer involved with any of this stuff by 1965.

I'll stick with my judgment that Ky couldn't have used HAYLIFT to import opium from Laos, because HAYLIFT didn't go into Laos. I would be curious to see Mustard's letter for more details of his claim. A particularly interesting question is why he waited until 1968 to write to Gruening about events in 1962-4. I am also very curious to know what happened to him after his identity was revealed. I believe the Sam Mustard in the story I found on-line really was him, so clearly they didn't fly him out over the Tonkin Gulf and drop him from a helicopter.

The CIA's very carefully worded statement that it had never fired Ky from any operations is noteworthy (and convincing to me). That all of these people ignore it is also noteworthy. I think we're both curious about the facts behind the claims, but digging into these is OR. On the other hand, many of the details in these claims are very shaky. Rather than repeat shaky details in any Wikipedia articles, I think general statements would be better. What books and articles were published? Who wrote them? When were they published? Give a general summary of the claims, done. Who responded? Where? When? Give a general summary of the response, done.

The problem in this particular case is that Gruening's committee really had very little to do with investigating misdeeds and scandals in Vietnam (though from googling Gruening and Lippman, it looks like they tried to). The main reason the letter went to Gruening's sub-committee was probably because Gruening was a prominent critic of the War. I don't believe that the sub-committee published any investigation of the claims, so from the official standpoint there's no tail to this mess. This is common. Such incidents can go in the files, but I don't think they're worth putting into any articles until an RS turns up that gives it a tail. Rgr09 (talk) 03:01, 1 December 2015 (UTC)

I found a few things on Lee Mond and Paul Withers. I think it would be a waste of time to bother with either of them. Rgr09 (talk) 03:01, 1 December 2015 (UTC)

Below is my transcription of the article. Gamaliel sent me a pdf of page 11 which I can forward to you if you would like to see it. My search for any published investigation by Gruening or his subcommittee, including the document, has been fruitless. (It was my impression, too, that Mustard knew Gruening had a sympathetic ear.) It does make sense that a journalist like Anderson was able to get his hands on it, but I have no idea how or when it made its way to Ginsberg, Ramparts, and McCoy (or Scott). I imagine that we could contact McCoy or Scott, but as you've stated it would be "inadmissible" for Wikipedia purposes. It is interesting, though. - Location (talk) 04:17, 1 December 2015 (UTC)

Very interesting. Many thanks for the transcription, which is good enough for my purposes. Seems the AP story had two distinct versions: NYT = St. Petersburg Times, and Chicago Tribune = Spokane Daily Chronicle. Perhaps different versions for different editions? I've seen a few cases like that, but not many.

The plane types in the NYT story (C-54 and C-123) fit the era; both are mentioned by Conboy and Ahern. Have not been able to place the C-54 crash in late 1964. There were a lot of crashes, though. 36 operations altogether, according to Ahern, and the longest any of the teams lasted before capture was 11 days. A regular meat-grinder of an operation. A number of the men died or were shot after capture. The rest were locked up until the 1980s. Conboy's book is built on interviews with the ones who survived; fascinating but grim.

I see nothing to disconfirm what S. M. Mustard seems to say of himself: that that he was one of the ground service personnel, perhaps a short term contractor, who knew the planes were dropping off saboteurs (the ones captured were put on public trial in NV), but with little to no knowledge of where the planes were going or how they got there. No doubt had a detailed knowledge of how many bullet holes they came back with. Why he would make his claims about Ky, which now seem ridiculous to me, is anyone's guess. The newspapers seem to quote him as saying "to make a long story short" in describing how Ky did his smuggling; seems no circumstantial claim here at all, and both the sub-committee's investigators and Jack Anderson's investigator said so. McCoy disagreed perhaps, but based on what? I see by the way that I was wrong to say the CIA rebutted the claims on Ky, that was the embassy.

As for the letter, Jack Anderson says he gave Ginsberg a copy. Anderson also mentions Ramparts asking him for a copy, and I assume he was happy to oblige. I'm sure McCoy had a copy, because he mentions the date of the letter (March 9, 1968). This was not in any of the news stories. Rgr09 (talk) 18:13, 1 December 2015 (UTC)

This certainly doesn't have the air of someone seeking attention or fabricating a story, but how much of it was an accurate portrayal of what really happened is a different issue. Unfortunately, "To make a long story short..." means that the details are lost in the long story that likely only Gruening's investigators may have heard or documented. It doesn't appear that there is anything more on this that I can pursue for the article, so I think I'm going to move on to other allegations related to Air America. - Location (talk) 20:56, 1 December 2015 (UTC)

The New York Times; April 19, 1968; page 11.

Carl Strock, "No News from Laos", Far Eastern Economic Review, January 30, 1971

I'm not sure that there is anything more to be gleaned from what appears in Ramparts, but I am wondering if you have been able to find a link to Strock's article. It does appear that his account is referenced by a few sources,including a couple official US and Canadian reports. (I did note your earlier comment regarding "Don Strock" and the loading of opium into T-28 bombers. To his credit, it does appears as though Kuzmarov cited "Carl Strock" correctly.) - Location (talk) 22:07, 1 December 2015 (UTC)

Writing for the AP in February 1971 1972, Strock refers to allegations of Air America transporting "raw poppy sap" for Vang Pao.[23] - Location (talk) 23:06, 1 December 2015 (UTC)

FEER is on the Proquest database, which I do not have access to. Your link above gives the same quote from Carl Strock which appears in Rampart's "New opium war", so I assume that's right. Kuzmarov says FEER correspondent "Don Strock stated ... he had witnessed the loading of opium onto T-28 bombers by U.S. crews." This is dead wrong. Strock said

Over the years eight journalists, including myself, have slipped into Long Cheng and have seen American crews loading T-28 bombers while armed CIA agents chatted with uniformed Thai soldiers and piles of raw opium stood for sale in the market (a kilo for $52).

This passage is not a model of clarity, but it seems clear enough to me: A) Strock saw T-28 bombers being loaded at Long Tieng, guarded by American and Thai forces, and B) Strock saw raw opium for sale in the market of Long Tieng and was told that the cost was $52 a kilo. He did not say he saw opium being loaded on planes. How could he? "Piles of raw opium stood for sale in the market" means the opium was in the market when he saw it. He even walked over and asked how much it cost. Strock juxtaposes this scene with the airbase; T-28 bombers were being loaded at an air base where there were armed guards. This careless juxtaposition does not allow us to claim the planes were being loaded with opium rather than bombs. Strock says nothing to warrant that idea.

Putting aside Kuzmarov's misinterpretation of Strock's article, loading raw opium onto the North American T-28 Trojan doesn't make sense. The T-28 was a highly maneuverable two engine trainer very handy for dropping things on NV troops, but very unsuitable for carrying people or cargo. There is no cargo door to put things in (see the picture in the article); what will they do, hoist the opium up with a winch and drop it in the trainer's seat behind the pilot?

The second article by Strock you cite is Feb 1972, not 1971. This is over a year after the first article and Strock not only doesn't claim to have been a witness to planes being loaded with opium, he says the assertion of AA transport of opium is made without proof. Rgr09 (talk) 03:07, 2 December 2015 (UTC)

I only meant to state that Kuzmarov referenced Strock correctly via his footnote; I did not mean to state that Kuzmarov paraphrased Strock corrected. I agree with you completely. I'm sorry for the confusion. I'm interested in seeing Strock's article not to verify whether or not he was accurately paraphrased by Kuzmarov (he was not) but rather to see what else he had to say on the subject. Same for the February 1972 article. - Location (talk) 05:40, 2 December 2015 (UTC)

I see; Kuzmarov identifies Strock as Carl in the footnotes, but calls him Don in the text. Okay, I'll take 4 points off instead of 5. I guess I'm just puzzled (and annoyed) by such misinterpretations. Rgr09 (talk) 06:46, 2 December 2015 (UTC)

1973 Report on the U.S. Heroin Problem and South-East Asia

Yet another report I did not know of. Great find! I wonder if there are still more official reports that deal with the topic. My first take after skimming it for a half hour is that it is not the massive endeavour some other reports were, but is still an interesting look back at some of the McCoy 1972 material soon after it came out, with people he interviewed denying the statements he attributed to them. Note that it came out in January 1973, and the revised version of McCoy 1972 came out in September 1973. This is similar to Webb's Dark Alliance and presents challenges when covering the book's content in an article. Rgr09 (talk) 12:06, 2 December 2015 (UTC)

I found this article in The Age while searching GNews for "Air America" and "opium". That article supplied the name of the report, so I was able to track it down from there. Unfortunately, I have not yet been able to find any discussion of the report in US papers or other sources. [Update: I found an earlier report by Morton Kondracke in the Chicago Sun-Times. [24]] Also, "The findings contained in the report are those of the [two person] staff survey team, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the members of the Committee on Foreign Affairs."

Do you have more information on who denied statements that McCoy attributed to them? - Location (talk) 16:50, 2 December 2015 (UTC) edited 16:40, 6 December 2015 (UTC)

Page 30 of the report mentions three. To see who these people were and what McCoy said they told him, you would have to look at the book; the spellings are somewhat variant. Ouane Rattikone (Ouan Rathikoun) is the most prominent. He is mentioned in the Appendix on Air America and opium in Ahern's Undercover armies; in fact, the incident involving Ouane that Ahern mentions probably refers to this very investigation (search for Brady). In the CIA FOIA there is also a translation from a Laotian newspaper where Ouane denies he told McCoy he ran a heroin factory, and says that rather than talk to him for three hours, he talked to him for a half hour in a hotel lobby. Rgr09 (talk) 18:27, 2 December 2015 (UTC)

Got it. So this statement on page 30 — "There have been several allegations that Air America has been involved in transporting opium in Laos. The charges are based partly on statements alleged to have been made by Gen. Ouan Rathikoun, Gen. Thao Ma, and a Meo village leader named Ger Su Yang." — is a reference to McCoy's allegations. That's helpful. Thanks! Were you stating that McCoy revised material in his book attributed to those three? - Location (talk) 21:37, 2 December 2015 (UTC)

Don't know what material McCoy changed, added, or dropped. This is what I meant when I said new editions present challenges in describing their content. You would have to go through both books page by page to see what changed. There were big changes between the two editions of Webb's Dark Alliance; I believe there were significant changes between the 1st ed. of McCoy (1972) and the rev. ed. published in September 1973, but I haven't done the work for either Webb or McCoy so I can't be specific. Rgr09 (talk) 00:15, 3 December 2015 (UTC)

Tying up a loose end on this. The report doesn't specifically state that it was McCoy who made those allegations, but it is clear that it is referring to those in McCoy's letter to the editor in the July 20, 1972 issue of The Washington Star where he plainly states that "the basis for [his] findings" is the information he received from those three men. I'm not yet clear on what other evidence McCoy has on Air America, however, it surprises me that so many people would accept this particular conclusion when it rests on hearsay and those claimed to have made the statements have denied making them. On second thought, I've observed enough things like this that it doesn't surprise me but rather I just don't understand it. - Location (talk) 14:16, 3 December 2015 (UTC)

Comments on sources

Very impressive digging over the last week. I had looked earlier without success for McCoy's 1972 testimony, very happy to see you found it; any future article should have a link to it. There should also be links to the material from Joseph Leeker and William Leary, and the CATAAM Archive.

It now looks like there is almost enough to have separate sections on Burma and Laos (I'm happy to offer suggestions about work other people might do). Burma is where the KMT troops were located, and it is perhaps even more important in terms of opium production than Laos. Bertil Lintner has written a lot on both Burma specifically and opium/heroin smuggling in general and might be worth a look in this respect; he has a longish paper here that might be useful. I can't say if he is more or less reliable than McCoy, but he may be a little more up to date in some things.

Another possibly useful book is The Secret Army: Chiang Kai-shek and the Drug Warlords of the Golden Triangle by Richard Michael Gibson, with a preview on Amazon. McCoy 1972 is full of old misinformation on the KMT troops in Burma. McCoy 1991 and 2003 may have improved, but judging by the chapter titles, this book probably gives a much more thorough look. Reliability again unknown, but it is one of the most recent of these books (2011).

Another more general work that might be worth looking at is Webs of Smoke by Meyer and Parssinen; unfortunately, the Amazon preview is limited and the Google books one seems to be messed up. Still, with the final chapter called 'The Myth of Conspiracy', I'm curious. Rgr09 (talk) 09:04, 7 December 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for the links/sources. I am really curious to see that final chapter in Webs of Smoke. It appears not to cite McCoy much, so I suspect that the conclusions drawn might be different. - Location (talk) 18:10, 7 December 2015 (UTC)

USDOJ/OIG Special Report

The Introduction of the USDOJ/OIG Special Report states: "We also discuss the rise of crack cocaine in the United States..." Do you know where in the report that discussion can be found? Thanks! - Location (talk) 22:40, 9 December 2015 (UTC)

It is in Chapter 6, section c, called "The Roles of Ross and Blandon in the Spread of Crack." There is also an article in the LA Times (written in response to Dark Alliance) called "Tracking the genesis of the crack trade." Chapter nine of Nick Schou's biography of Webb is an interesting account of the Mercury-News search for support of Webb's claims. Reporter Pete Carey talked to thirty cocaine experts; none of them agreed with the "Dark Alliance" claims. This group included the people Webb quoted in the series. There are specific sources on the subject listed in the DOJ report. Webb's own account is in Chapter 1 of Dark Alliance. There is a link to a preview of this chapter in the NY Times review of the book. Rgr09 (talk) 00:40, 10 December 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for the links. Katz's article is long but very informative. Was Cary with the Mercury News for his investigation? - Location (talk) 01:01, 10 December 2015 (UTC)

Yes. Pete Carey is (still) one of SJMN's most prominent investigative reporters; he contributed stories to both of the series for which SJMN won Pulitzers. Carey wrote one story on the DA controversy in Oct. 1996, and eventually was assigned to go over the whole series under the direction of Jonathan Krim. Krim was the editor who usually oversaw major investigative stories, but for some reason he was not involved in Dark Alliance. Both Carey and Krim worked very hard to shore up the DA claims, but in the end were not able to. Some of this story is in the Gary Webb wikipedia article. Sources include the Paterno article on Webb we discussed a few weeks ago, and Schou's book on Webb. Rgr09 (talk) 04:21, 10 December 2015 (UTC)

Nick Schou

@Rgr09: The article on Shelby Coffey III cites Nick Schou and states: "The L.A. Times' coverage was subsequently criticized for helping to ruin Webb's reputation by trying to discredit his work, which included misdirection and attacking a claim that Webb never made." Schou's article states: "All three major U.S. dailies, The Times included, debunked a claim that Webb actually never made -- that the CIA deliberately unleashed the crack epidemic on black America." Is the key word here "deliberately", because it sure seemed to me that he was stating that the CIA was responsible for it? -Location (talk) 23:09, 24 April 2017 (UTC)

Correct. This particular Schou article, which is not entirely consistent with Schou's book, here echoes Webb himself, who says in Dark Alliance, p. 452: "I never believed, and never wrote, that there was a grand CIA conspiracy behind the crack plague. Indeed, the more I learned about the agency, the more certain of that I became. The CIA couldn't even mine a harbor without getting its trenchcoat stuck in its fly. That the Contras' cocaine ended up being turned into crack was a horrible accident of history, I believed, not someone's evil plan. The Contras just happened to pick the worst possible time ever to begin peddling cheap cocaine in black neighborhoods."

The DOJ Report (Chapter 1, section D), however, takes a more jaundiced view: "While the series does not allege that there was a deliberate plan to target black communities by the CIA or other agencies of the United States government mentioned in the article (e.g., DEA, U.S. Attorney's Offices, and the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), the articles strongly imply such a plot." In addition, outside the paper, as the Report observes, Webb was also much less careful in his language and allegations.

Regardless of whether Webb believed there was a government conspiracy to destroy black communities in America by spreading crack cocaine, he certainly believed that Blandon and Meneses were in fact responsible for the "crack epidemic." Webb's insistence on this idea, which no one else but him found credible, is one of the main reasons for his problems at SJMN, which specifically disavowed the claim. Webb, on the other hand, emphatically reaffirms the idea in both editions of the Dark alliance book. Rgr09 (talk) 00:39, 25 April 2017 (UTC)

Thanks for pointing out that section of the DoJ report, which I re-read. I wonder what is the best way to address that in Shelby Coffey III. My preference is to simply remove the statement cited to Schou as it is obviously misleading. The other is to make some note about what you pointed out, but I dislike countering WP:REDFLAG statements with primary sources unless there is no other way to do it. -Location (talk) 00:39, 29 April 2017 (UTC)

The description of the controversy in the Coffey article is strongly POV and should be revised. Some mention of criticism of the LAT coverage is in order, but I am not sure of the exact role Coffey played in the series, except to tell the metro staff to do something on the Dark Alliance claims, and to sign off on the series as it appeared. Leo Wolinsky was LAT metro editor at the time and probably had more to do with the series than Coffey. I'll see what I can get and either edit Coffey directly or leave a note here. Rgr09 (talk) 00:57, 5 May 2017 (UTC)

Schou briefly quotes Wolinsky here. In the same article, Schou writes "History will tell if Webb receives the credit he's due for prodding the CIA to acknowledge its shameful collaboration with drug dealers." For future reference: AJR's The Web That Gary Spun. Also, Kornbluh in CJR: "Both McManus and Wolinsky deny that the Times response was ever intended, as Wolinsky put it, 'as a knockdown of the Mercury News series.'" -Location (talk) 03:06, 5 May 2017 (UTC)

Webb wrote: "“Thousands of young black men are serving long prison sentences for selling cocaine — a drug that was virtually unobtainable in black neighborhoods before members of the CIA’s army started bringing it into South-Central in the 1980s at bargain-basement prices.”[25][26] It does seem that Shou is nitpicking and cherry-picking to cast Webb in a favorable light. -Location (talk) 15:35, 5 May 2017 (UTC)

Robert Parry

@Rgr09: Do you know why Robert Parry stopped working for the AP and Newsweek? I have seen what he claims, but I haven't read anything else on it. -Location (talk) 16:34, 4 May 2017 (UTC)

The main thing I have read on this outside of Parry himself is Mark Hertsgaard, On Bended Knee (1988, 314-316) . Hertsgaard cites a story on Parry-Barger reporting by Jefferson Morley and Tina Rosenberg, 'The Real Heroes of Contragate' (Rolling Stone, September 10, 1987), and also interviewed both Parry and AP Washington bureau chief Charles Lewis. Summarizing Hertsgaard, Parry's story is that Lewis told him 'New York doesn't want to hear any more on this [the drug story], and later also told him 'Nicaragua isn't a story anymore.' Lewis denied to Hertsgaard that he said these things and says he 'had no doubt that Parry and Barger are pissed off that they didn't get to go everywhere they wanted to go, as often as they wanted, when they wanted." Apparently responding to the RS story, Lewis told Hertsgaard there was "no basis for the idea that we were afraid of offending the administration" and reminds him that AP carried several Parry-Barger stories on these subjects. Hertsgaard repeats Parry's complaint that 'it was never easy' to get the stories published, and Lewis replies 'when you're dealing with stories of this magnitude, that rely on information gleaned from Third World gangsters of known unreliability or unknown reliability, it was never easy and it should never be easy ... I don't know what got into Parry. I'm sorry he left us and I'm sorry he's apparently not as proud of his work as we are.' I haven't read Morley/Rosenberg. Hertsgaard says that Parry moved to Newsweek in 1986 after talking to the NYT and WP, who were also not interested in these stories. The source for their lack of interest was surely Parry, but that Parry went from AP to Newsweek in this year is no doubt a fact.

Hertsgaard only goes up to Parry's move to Newsweek. For His departure from Newsweek, I have only Parry's book Lost History. This was self-published, like most of Parry's books. No doubt there is more on his career in places like Columbia Journalism Review, American Journalism Review, and Editor & Publisher. Rgr09 (talk) 22:55, 4 May 2017 (UTC)

Although it is not directly related to the drug trafficking allegations, I saw that Parry's article in The Nation is heavily cited in House October Surprise Task Force#Published report. My inclination is to scrap almost everything in Wikipedia cited to Parry, however, I could see how that particular article could be challenged by someone claiming that The Nation (or AP or Newsweek) has "editorial oversight". -Location (talk) 02:53, 5 May 2017 (UTC)

Article in The Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics

@Rgr09: Have you seen this article by William M. LeoGrande in the Fall 1997 issue of The Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics?

LeoGrande, William M. (Fall 1997). "Did the Presitige Press Miss the Nicaragua Drug Story?" (PDF). The Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics. 2 (4): 10–31. Retrieved May 8, 2017. {{cite journal}}: Cite has empty unknown parameters: |laydate=, |laysource=, |layurl=, |dead-url=, and |nopp= (help)

Without delving into the various sources who have run with the conspiracy angle, it is an amazing summary that could be used as one of the main sources in CIA involvement in Contra cocaine trafficking. It makes me conscious of how formidable my task would be to construct an article as an ordinary non-academic Joe with nothing but a simple interest in the story. -Location (talk) 18:50, 8 May 2017 (UTC)

Yes, I read LeoGrande a couple of years ago when I was wading through the Gary Webb article. The article is primarily on press coverage of the Contra drug smuggling issue. I wound up not citing it in the Gary Webb article, since most of his points on news coverage of Contra smuggling were raised earlier by others, and LeoGrande is not a journalism expert or practising reporter with experience in Central America.

LeoGrande does not discuss CIA involvement in smuggling, so I don't think he offers much help on that score. The only mention of the CIA in LeoGrande's article is a reference to Alan Fiers's testimony before the Kerry Committee, during which Fiers said the CIA broke with Eden Pastora because they had reason to believe Pastora was involved with drug smuggling. This of course flatly contradicts conspiracy claims, and Webb's book is at pains to dis-associate Pastora with smuggling charges.

LeoGrande is not a good source for specific details of the smuggling claims, omitting most of these, and, in my opinion, doing a poor job where he does deal with them. For instance, he blandly presents the story of Ramon Milian Rodriguez, a Medellin cartel accountant, that the cartel gave $10 million to the Contras, then says that Contra leader Adolfo Calero denied it, but Carlos Lehder confirmed it at Noriega's trial. In fact, the Kerry Committee polygraphed Milian, and his answers to key questions were judged untruthful (Kerry Report p. 61-62). LeoGrande is very familiar with the Kerry Report, yet he fails to mention this. For Lehder's testimony at the Noriega trial, Steve Albert's "Case Against the General" (1993, 322-334) gives a detailed account of the testimony, which in several ways is not consistent with Milian's story, but LeoGrande does not mention this either. This is all Gary Webb territory, and is discused in Webb's book (Dark Alliance rev. ed, p. 239), but even Webb points out some of the problems that LeoGrande ignores. Rgr09 (talk) 02:07, 9 May 2017 (UTC)

Understood. I liked how the article summarized highlights of the story from beginning to end. For example, I don't think I was really aware of how those on the right leveled similar accusations against the Sandinistas. I also thought the article gave me more insight to how the "Prestige Press" addressed Webb's claims than what Shou has stated. -Location (talk) 05:00, 10 May 2017 (UTC)

Timeline and Kerry Committee Report

More interesting material on your main allegations page. I have a suggestion, however, on structuring the article. Currently you have two separate sections for Central America and the Contras, one subtitled Christic and one subtitled Webb. The node from which these two branches split off is the Kerry Committee Report. This is where the contra drug claims became mainstream, and it is the source for most of the claims of CIA drug involvement in South-Central America that don't come from Webb. Material such as the Scott-Marshall book also starts from the Kerry Committee Report, spreading it into general allegations of CIA-drug involvement throughout Central America. This could be a third branch. If you just want chronological, I suggest Kerry Committee, Christic suit, Scott-Marshall, Webb.

Chronologically, I think that both Kerry's investigation and the Christic suit originated from Avirgan-Honey's investigation, but that is just my opinion (wait for my book, published by Trine Day of course). Regardless of who picked up on A-H first, however, the Christics unquestionably piggy-backed off the Kerry Committee's work in most of their claims, so discussing them after the more serious work of the Kerry Committee is not unreasonable.

Then, after the Christic suit, there is Scott-Marshall's Cocaine Politics. This book has been less prominent than Webb's or McCoy's but it is a pervasive influence. Scott has many Wikipedia editors among his readers and I spent a lot of time looking at drug-related articles that source him. Cocaine Politics was published by UC Press and is by far the most mainstream of his books. As a result, it is much more restrained in its implications of CIA involvement, but hey, you can't have everything. In any case, because of its mainstream origin I think it is worth at least a couple of paragraphs.

Webb's series is also clearly derived in part from the Kerry Report; some material in the sidebars, such as the Frogman arrests, is straight from Kerry, hence the complaints of some reporters that he inflated the series by simply dragging up old material. In his book, he talks about going through material from Iran-Contra, a vast ocean, but after taking a hard look at his references, I think he closely followed material the Committee report references. This shouldn't be taken to denigrate his diligence, in some areas he did more research than the committee. The book puts out a number of new theories, but much of it is also conspiracy-oriented, and not worth following into the labyrinth. Rgr09 (talk) 01:06, 17 May 2017 (UTC)

Page 5 of the Kerry Committee Report states that Kerry began his investigation of the allegations in early 1986. I assumed that this was in response to the allegations put forth by the Christic Institute, so I placed it (i.e. the Kerry Committee Report) at the bottom of that section. I guess that may have also been in response to those of Avirgan and Honey -Location (talk) 03:11, 17 May 2017 (UTC)

According to Sheehan's bio (p. 446-48) he was introduced to Avirgan and Honey through Brian Barger, and they hired him in connection with their suit in the fall 1985. His contributions to their case were apparently not significant, though both Sheehan and Honey (p. 42) are not clear on dates. David Corn's biography of Ted Shackley, Blond Ghost, has a good short account of the Christic suit (p. 382-401). According to Corn, Sheehan began to develop his Secret Team theories under the influence of Gene Wheaton, whom Sheehan met in Feb. 1986, and Edwin P. Wilson (Sheehan visited him in prison), and filed the suit in May 1986. It was tossed out in September (badly written), but the judge allowed Sheehan to amend it and he refiled in October, filing his numbered source affidavit in December. Things didn't really get going until the end of January 1987, when the judge refused to dismiss the suit and Sheehan was given power of discovery.

Kerry's account of how he got onto Contra Drugs does not mention names, but he claims he went with information to CFR chair Lugar in April, asking for an investigation. I don't think the Christic story was really developed at this time, and I'm also unclear how Kerry would have met Sheehan at such an early point. Rgr09 (talk) 04:08, 17 May 2017 (UTC)

That makes sense. I see that Avirgan and Honey are mentioned in the Kerry Committee report, but I don't see that Christic is. -Location (talk) 04:23, 17 May 2017 (UTC)

@Rgr09: In 1996, Honey was stating the CIA was likely involved[27], then Shou wrote in Kill the Messenger that Avirgan, Honey, and other journalists reinvestigated the bombing and concluded that the CIA was not involved.[28] Do you have any primary or other secondary sources discussing her reinvestigation or change of mind? -Location (talk) 03:37, 23 May 2017 (UTC)

Here are some links:

• Tamayo, Juan (1993-08-01). "'84 Bomb Mystery Unravels; Sandinistas Tied to Jungle Deaths". Miami Herald (Final ed.). pp. 1–. (main source, not on line)
• Avirgan, Tony (1993-09-06). "Unmasking the La Penca Bomber". Nation. 257 (7): 239–240. ISSN 0027-8378. {{cite journal}}: |access-date= requires |url= (help)
• "Costa Rica Reopens Inquiry in 1984 Bombing". New York Times. 1993-08-08. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2015-11-17.
• Lanchin, Mike (2012-07-25). "Peter Torbiornsson: My guilt over La Penca bombing". BBC News. Retrieved 2017-05-23.
• La Penca: Thirty years later (Tico Times article on the 30th anniversary of the bombing)

There are other articles, but these are all available online (except for the first two). The most interesting one is the Tico Times 30th anniversary website, with articles by Honey and Juan Tamayo. Tamayo was the reporter who put together the story of the identity of the real bomber, an Argentine leftist named Vital Gaguine. Prior to 1993, Avirgan and Honey had always maintained that the bomber was a CIA assassin. After 1993, Avirgan and Honey accepted that Gaguine was the bomber. You have to read the Progressive article you cited carefully. After incorrectly stating that "Honey and Avirgan identified the bomber as a leftist Argentinian", rather than Juan Tamayo, the article quotes Honey: "We believe there's some intertwining of forces. We still have this body of evidence that points to the ClA and the North network. And the CIA was certainly involved in the cover-up." This is similar to what Avirgan says in the New Republic article. Their position seems to be that yes we were wrong about the bomber's identity but we were right about everything else we said, including the CIA covering up the bombing, though now they are covering up for the Sandinistas rather than themselves. Her 1994 book Hostile Acts is a 640 page attempt to defend this position. It is, I think, unsuccessful. David Corn says "The simplest conclusion is that the Sandinistas tried to knock off Pastora" (Blond Ghost, p. 383 fn). I take this as dry humor. Rgr09 (talk) 08:53, 23 May 2017 (UTC)

Thanks for the feedback and the various sources. The pearl from all of this seems to be that Honey has modified her position, but still believe the CIA acted nefariously in some way.

Last night I stumbled upon a different article in the Tico Times written in 2012 by Honey: [War and Peace: Remembrances of a reporter covering Costa Rica in the tumultuous 1980s http://www.ticotimes.net/2012/09/13/war-and-peace-remembrances-of-a-reporter-covering-costa-rica-in-the-tumultuous-1980s]. (I wasn't familiar with the Tico Times until just a few days ago when I stumbled across a different article referenced in Marita Lorenz that reiterates as fact a lot of Lorenz's dubious claims.)

I haven't read David Corn's book on Theodore Shackley nor am I familiar with his writing style. Why "dry humor"?

As an off-topic aside, I noted in the BBC article that Peter Torbiörnsson questioned "Hansen" (Gaguine) after the bombing and he replied: "Do you really think I could do something like this?" I found this interesting because two days ago I was watching a YouTube video featuring a former CIA "deception expert" in which she referred to conveying vs. convincing statements. Someone who is deceptive will say things in an attempt to convince people of certain things rather than convey factual information. She provided an example of a convincing statement that I believe was almost identical to "Do you really think I could..." -Location (talk) 15:31, 23 May 2017 (UTC)

By the way, were Avirgan and Honey allegations regarding the bombing discussed in any official US reports? I don't see anything about that in the Kerry Committee report. -Location (talk) 16:16, 23 May 2017 (UTC)

The DOJ-OIG report mentions them in chapter 1 section e, but no extended discussion. The CIA-OIG report part 2 discusses them in Appendix E, but the discussion is on drug allegations rather than La Penca bombing. The Kerry report mentions Avirgan-Honey in 2 sections, but no extended discussions of their claims. They are not mentioned in the HPSCI 2000 report on "Dark Alliance," or the 1996 Senate hearings on "Dark Alliance."

On Corn's comment; it just seemed such an understated reaction to the collapse of A-H's florid theories that I wondered if he was being sarcastic. Rgr09 (talk) 02:11, 24 May 2017 (UTC)

@Rgr09: FYI: I have a link for the Kerry Committee report, however, I would be interested in reviewing hearings, testimony, etc. if you happen to locate a link for them. The discussion of Betzner has me wanting to look up what he told Kerry. Sometimes I wonder if Kerry was skeptical about anything he was told. -Location (talk) 00:03, 19 September 2017 (UTC)

Richard J. Brenneke

By the way, Richard J. Brenneke is another article to put on your watchlist. The article was created by an editor who had a history of creating articles built upon dubious sources. -Location (talk) 15:14, 17 May 2017 (UTC)

Hopefully I'll get around to looking at Brenneke's drug claims eventually. A man so unreliable that Gary Webb didn't mention his name once. FYI, quite a bit of source material at archive.org under Danny Casolaro that deals with Brenneke, including copies of the forged letters Brenneke used to claim CIA employment. Rgr09 (talk) 16:42, 17 May 2017 (UTC)

I believe he used that letter in his 1990 trial. I know this might be a little off topic, but do you have any of the details regarding how it was determined to be forged? -Location (talk) 17:07, 17 May 2017 (UTC)

The CIA response can be found in the CIA FOIA reading room here. The letter was dated December 1979, but the person who purportedly signed it had retired from CIA years earlier. Rgr09 (talk) 23:38, 17 May 2017 (UTC)

Thanks for the link. I was looking for that article in the NYT as well. Incidentally, I found a blog post here in which omeone appears to be arguing that the letter could be authentic, however, another individual in the comment section, "wrt", shot holes in those claims. Sorry for the off-topic discussion. The October Surprise conspiracy theory is another story that interests me and I was aware that Brenneke interjected himself into that one, too. -Location (talk) 15:38, 18 May 2017 (UTC)

IPS on CIA drugs

I see you found the IPS timeline that Conyers inserted in the CR in 98. A better html version is at FAS I would never link to pinknoiz. I seem to remember that this timeline was put together by Honey, who was employed at IPS for a while; if I find a source for that I'll put it here. IPS has supported much of the work people have done on CIA-drug ties, going all the way back to Ginsberg. It doesn't hurt to take a look at what they have. Another left-wing policy center that played a role in the Avirgan-Honey suit was the International Center for Development Policy. Rgr09 (talk) 16:31, 17 May 2017 (UTC)

I probably linked to pinknoiz simply to access the material (I find some formats easier to search), but I would never cite it. I think I saw that cited in one of the articles I mentioned to you last week or so. I didn't know the timeline was put together for IPS by Honey, so that would be a good find if you have it. Ironically (or unsurprisingly), the article for International Center for Development Policy was created by the editor I referred to in the last section. He must have had a similar interested in this, albeit from a different perspective. -Location (talk) 17:18, 17 May 2017 (UTC)

Overview

I think I am going to start compiling an overview to place in Central Intelligence Agency#Drug trafficking. Without going into very much detail, I'll probably touch on the major allegations that have been made and the various committees and reports that address them. Let me know if you have any suggestions. Thanks! -Location (talk) 01:17, 23 May 2017 (UTC)

Allen Ginsberg

@Rgr09: You may want to double check my edit here in Allen Ginsberg. I didn't really want to introduce that material since it is probably more applicable to Alfred McCoy, but the assertions there were unchecked. There are a few sentences there that are not currently cited, but I assume the intent was to attribute them to Morgan. (Per previous discussions here, it appears as though you are familiar with that source.) -Location (talk) 01:53, 26 May 2017 (UTC)

Good edit. Looks like you have the major sources, but it does seem long for the short passage. Perhaps using a footnote might be better. The Ginsberg article is a bloated, poorly structured page that I would love to see shrunk down by a least a third, but life is short. I'm trying to write up some of this on my own (for my Trine Day epic), so I may come back to it in the near future. Rgr09 (talk) 16:01, 26 May 2017 (UTC)

Richard Armitage

@Rgr09: I'd like to briefly return to our previous discussion regarding the allegations in Richard Armitage (politician). William Safire wrote on October 5, 1985: "The vindictive Perot put his head together with the radical leftist Christic Institute, which had sued Armitage for being a drug-and-gun-running C.I.A. operative in some vast conspiracy. The suit was thrown out of court and the complainant fined. Perot later took some of those phony allegations to the F.B.I.; its inquiry cleared Armitage."[29] Do you have any more information on what was this FBI inquiry? Also, the AP reported on January 12, 1987: "The Defense Department, in a statement released Sunday, said, 'That's an old allegation that was looked into years ago and found to be groundless.'"[30] Do you have any more information on this "investigation" by the DoD? Thanks! -Location (talk) 03:32, 2 June 2017 (UTC)

I found this response from the Department of State to a question submitted in writing by the Task Force on International Narcotics Control: "Accusations such as this are typical of the types of disinformation tactics employed by major drug traffickers to distract the world from the real issues. The charges have been looked into, and found to be completely groundless. The Secretary of Defense retains full confidence in Mr. Armitage."p. 223 -Location (talk) 04:09, 2 June 2017 (UTC)

Found this, but haven't been able to track down the text of the 'prepared statement.' I suspect this story and some of the stuff you found come from another one of those chopped up AP stories, with different bits appearing here and there. LA Times has a collection of articles about Armitage here. Rgr09 (talk) 11:00, 2 June 2017 (UTC)

The aforementioned AP report by Rita Beamish says: "Bush's office was responding to a Sunday article in the Boston Globe. The newspaper quoted sources it did not name as saying Perot had asked Bush to investigate allegations Armitage was involved in drug and weapons trafficking dating to the early 1970s when he was in Vietnam, and when working as a Defense Department consultant in Bangkok, Thailand, in the mid-1970s." I think I tracked down an abstract of the original Globe article by Ben Bradlee Jr. here. There also appears to be a follow-up in the Globe (by Beamish) here; it appears as though Beamish is writing for the Globe rather than the AP in that one, but I'm not sure. -Location (talk) 15:19, 2 June 2017 (UTC)

Ben Bradlee Jr.'s article (abstract) refers to "the lawsuit" (which contains various allegations), but doesn't state what lawsuit to which he is referring. Do you think this is referring to the Christic lawsuit, and the truncated abstract just fails to give us the full picture? -Location (talk) 16:27, 2 June 2017 (UTC)

The claims cited in Bradlee's article are from the 1987 Christic affidavit, pp. 36-39. Most of them were dropped in the March 1988 declaration. Rgr09 (talk) 21:05, 2 June 2017 (UTC)

FYI: I had no idea that a documentary about Bo Gritz was recently released: [31]. -Location (talk) 03:43, 2 June 2017 (UTC)

Not the first one, actually. There was also a video tape called "A Nation Betrayed," probably put out in conjunction with Gritz's first book (same title, published 1988) that is cited in a vast range of miscellaneous listserv postings. This youtube segment may be a fragment of this. Gritz is the chatterbox, and the one wearing a hat at the beginning is indeed Khun Sa, but he never speaks. Armitage's name is mentioned by the interpreter, or whoever he is. What I want is the complete, unedited footage of ALL Gritz's meetings and/or interviews with Khun Sa, and the complete text of the letter he supposedly wrote, in both the original language and English. Don't hold your breath for either of these. Rgr09 (talk) 05:04, 2 June 2017 (UTC)

Regarding the timeline, do you know when the Christic allegations against Armitage (noted here) first became public? I have that Avirgan v Hull was filed by DS on December 12, 1986 (I also have a note stating May 29, 1986) with revisions on January 31, 1987[32] and April 1, 1987[33]. I'm trying to figure out if Armitage was added before or after Perot became involved/interested. -Location (talk) 01:11, 3 June 2017 (UTC)

The lawsuit, Avirgan v. Hull et al., was filed May 29, 1986. It was dismissed without prejudice in September, and refiled October 3. December 12 is the date Sheehan filed his affidavit, so that 70+ page thingie is not the suit itself, it is a court document purporting to support his claims. I have not yet seen the actual suit. Very frustrating. However, Armitage was not a defendant in the suit, which suggests to me that when DS filed, he didn't know doodle about Armitage. In contrast, Jensen-Stevenson was focused on Armitage at least a year before this (1985), when she tried to do a story suggesting American deserter/collaborator Robert R. Garwood was a real POW. It is possible that Sheehan incorporated Armitage in his affidavit based on information derived from these conversations, which took place mid-November. If we could only find the statement where Sheehan identifies the numbered witnesses in the affidavit (except for the 20 whose names he didn't know). Rgr09 (talk) 03:11, 3 June 2017 (UTC)

Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair

FYI: There are a couple citations in Manuel Noriega suggesting US complicity with drug trafficking, including one to Cockburn and St. Clair. That's WP:REDFLAG territory, so I'm looking for a secondary source for their charges. -Location (talk)

Yes, I noticed a zillion people editing the Noriega article after his death, and sure enough a fair amount was on the CIA charges. I have Whiteout, I'll look up their chapter sources; some I believe is from the Kerry report, though filtered through the Cockburn prism. Rgr09 (talk) 05:04, 2 June 2017 (UTC)

No way of telling what the source is in Whiteout; there are six pages of "sources" for that chapter, but Cockburn/St. Clair don't believe in footnotes. Or page numbers. Rgr09 (talk) 08:03, 2 June 2017 (UTC)

@Rgr09: I saw that the article on Manuel Noriega has been nominated as a good article. I am not interested in his biography enough to want to review it, but I thought I would bring it to your attention (in the event you want to comment on the sourcing for the drug trafficking allegation). -Location (talk) 20:43, 8 June 2017 (UTC)

I saw your post there. Thanks again! -Location (talk) 01:28, 9 June 2017 (UTC)

@Rgr09: In case you are interested, the article has just opened for GA review so now is a good time to voice objections if you have them. Cockburn and St. Clair appear to be one of the four main references to the article. Webb is cited once. I don't know the material well enough to comment. -Location (talk) 14:58, 19 September 2017 (UTC)

Ross Perot

I don't think that Perot made any of the drug trafficking allegations until he hooked up with the Christic Institute to fuel his beef with Armitage. Do you have a rough idea of when Perot first started working with Christic or caught wind of their story? -Location (talk) 23:02, 2 June 2017 (UTC)

Daniel Sheehan writes quite a bit about Perot in his autobiography. His first encounter with Perot is on p. 510-512. DS appeared before the House Subcommittee on Latin Affairs 15 Oct. 1986, and described the Christic suit (apparently violating Judge King's gag order). Perot called the next day and introduced himself and his interest in the SE Asian MIA issue ("He said that a staff person of his had called yesterday and told him to turn on C-Span 'because that Sheehan fella is on testifying about the guys that you are interested in.'" DS met Perot in November and introduced him to William Stevenson and Monika Jensen (the 60 Minutes producer who wrote Kiss the Boys Goodbye). These two had told RP that Shackley was smuggling heroin with Vang Pao and RP wanted to know what Sheehan knew about Shackley. Sheehan told him the story he claims he got from Gene Wheaton and Carl Jensen. RP was distressed and volunteered he should tell George Bush about it. DS warned him that Bush was probably involved and suggested FBI director Webster. RP agreed that this was a good choice and asked DS to write up a summary and diagram of the plot.

There's a lot more in this vein. I disbelieve much of the dialogue, which DS puts in as if he had tape-recorded all his conversations, but I expect that the basic facts of how DS met RP are correct. Rgr09 (talk) 00:16, 3 June 2017 (UTC)

Thanks for the feedback. I have a follow-up question related to the timeline that I'm going to post under the Richard Armitage thread. -Location (talk) 01:04, 3 June 2017 (UTC)

Carl Jenkins (not Jensen). Is that right? -Location (talk) 03:47, 3 June 2017 (UTC)

Yes, Jenkins, my bad. I'm still doing Inslaw. Rgr09 (talk) 04:53, 3 June 2017 (UTC)

Article in American Spectator

You've likely already seen this article by David Brock in the May 1988 issue of The American Spectator:

Brock, David (May 1988). Tyrrell, R. Emmett (ed.). "Christic Mystics and Their Drug-Running Theories" (pdf). The American Spectator. Vol. 21, no. 5. pp. 22–26. Retrieved June 3, 2017.

Brock has his own political leanings, so I wonder how the reliability of the article would be for sourcing in Wikipedia; however, I don't see anything in it doesn't jibe with the little I know about the Christic Institute, DS, and their allegations. -Location (talk) 15:16, 3 June 2017 (UTC)

It's a notable article on the subject, so whatever its biases, it's a reasonable source. Another article, also well-known (or at least cited in David Corn's book on Shackley), is:

Traub, James (1988-02-01). "The Law and the Prophet". Mother Jones.

This also has it's political prejudices (Mother Jones is as left-wing as American Spectator is right-wing), but it's an interesting, though critical, look at Sheehan et al. Rgr09 (talk) 15:58, 3 June 2017 (UTC)

In popular culture

FYI: American Made (film) has been getting a bit more activity. -Location (talk) 23:47, 5 June 2017 (UTC)

Also, I just saw a preview for John Singleton's Snowfall that made me wonder. Sure enough, Singleton is doing his part to spread this story to a new generation...

All three actors in attendance discussed the extensive research involved to dive into the world of Snowfall, particularly because of the lack of material about the CIA's actual role in all of it.

"I didn’t know any of it and then when I found out I was terrified. Reading the books and watching documentaries, I'm like we should be talking about this everyday. That the CIA was illegally operating within the United States is shocking and appalling and terrifying," he said. "We don't talk about it, and it's considered almost fringe conspiracy theory at a certain point and it's crazy."

Because the true story of the CIA's involvement is not clearly documented, Singleton and the other producers based the series almost entirely on first-hand accounts. "There are people that lived this stuff, we had to bring people in the room that could speak to this," Singleton said. "We brought in consultants who were deep into each part of it."

Not clearly documented? Ugh. -Location (talk) 04:40, 11 June 2017 (UTC)

I guess this sounds a bit more reasonable...

One of the most controversial aspects about the time period Snowfall covers is how much the United States government was involved with crack finding its way into urban areas and specifically into neighborhoods inhabited primarily by people of color. Andron and Singleton say they are staying away from the conspiracy theories about the government purposefully sending crack into black neighborhoods.

"We are sensitive to the conspiracy theories that over time have been debunked. This exists, I think for all these characters, and what makes an interesting premise is that grey area," Andron said. "I don't think there was any conspiracy to bring crack in to the inner city to destroy the people, but I think they did look away. At the time, cocaine was a rich white man's drug. No one saw what crack was going to do to these people."

Whether it was purposeful or not, the crack epidemic decimated an entire section of the population and the ramifications of its presence are still being felt in the present day. That is something the show is absolutely going to tackle.

"[The government] thought they were doing something where the ends justified the means, but in hindsight, boy, they were so wrong," Andron said.

-Location (talk) 04:54, 11 June 2017 (UTC)

I'm not really concerned about what movies or TV shows get made. The problem is that articles are often compiled based on this stuff, and cleaning them up is tough. A funny example is the Crack epidemic article, which is mostly lists of films, songs, and video games (!) about crack. Replacing this with real content is very difficult. Narcotic abuse is a specialized subject, with all of the uncertainties and controversies of crime statistics. After reading a couple of articles on the correlation between crack and crime rates, I put a rewrite of the article on the back burner; figuring out the statistics was way too time-consuming. Rgr09 (talk) 09:05, 11 June 2017 (UTC)

How much do you want to bet Ricky Ross is one of the consultants? Rgr09 (talk) 11:53, 11 June 2017 (UTC)

I don't know much about him, but if his Wikipedia article is to be believed he has been active in getting out his story. Yes, the part that bugs me is that Wikipedia needs editors who are a little bit more skeptical; however, certain books and films tend to attract people who believe they have been given the full story. I guess reading the DoJ report, etc. can be a bit dry. -Location (talk) 16:30, 11 June 2017 (UTC)

Kerry Report on North's use of drug money

This is an item that is cited is numerous articles. Here is what I've found. The Kerry Report (p. 41) says:

The logic of having drug money pay for the pressing needs of the Contras appealed to a number of people who became involved in the covert war. Indeed, senior U.S. policy makers were not immune to the idea that drug money was a perfect solution to the Contra's funding problems. As DEA officials testified last July before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime, Lt. Col. Oliver North suggested to the DEA in June 1985 that $1.5 million in drug money carried aboard a plane piloted by DEA informant Barry Seal and generated in a sting of the Medellin Cartel and Sandinista officials, be provided to the Contras. While the suggestion was rejected by the DEA, the fact that it was made highlights the potential appeal of drug profits for persons engaged in covert activity.

The report references this to testimony in 1988 before the Subcommittee on Crime. I tracked this down the other day. It is from Enforcement of narcotics, firearms, and money laundering laws: Oversight hearings. The testimony came from Ron Caffrey, head of the DEA cocaine desk in 1984, p. 60. The background to this is on p. 29 (The links might be a page off). The cartel gave Seal 1.5 million to deliver to Nicaragua, which he did, the money supposedly for bribes (to the Sandinistas I guess). DEA photographed the money, Seal delivered it. How exactly this worked is unclear to me. Seal may have come back to the States with his cargo to consult with DEA agents, then gone down to Nicaragua. Caffrey gave an informal briefing (date uncertain) on the case to North, Dewey Clarridge, and another man. At the briefing

Colonel North asked me hypothetically if we were going to return with the aircraft and the money, why we couldn't land the plane somewhere outside of Nicaragua, outside the airport in Managua, and maybe turn the money over to the contras. I told him that was really out of the question because it would jeopardize our informant. It was more a hypothetical question.

Here is how Webb describes the incident

One idea North had in 1984, records show, was to use drug money. At a top-level meeting with DEA in Washington, North shocked the room into silence by suggesting that $1.5 million in cocaine cash the DEA planned to seize from the Medellin cartel should be turned over to the Contras. The DEA says it declined North's suggestion. Subsequently, a White House leak blew the operation, and several DEA officials believed North was responsible, something he denied. (DA, rev ed., p. 206)

The Kerry report's characterization of North's comment seems quite inaccurate. The report also mis-states the date, I believe; the briefing was in 1984, not 1985. Webb is also mistaken on several points. The DEA had no intention of seizing the money, this would have put Seal in great danger, as Caffrey himself says. The "informal briefing" was only four people apparently, describing it as a top-level meeting with the DEA seems exaggerated and misleading. Rgr09 (talk) 00:00, 6 June 2017 (UTC)

Wow. That's a really good find. For Wikipedia purposes, I'm not sure how to (re)write material citing the Kerry report since it's a bit more complex than what the Kerry Report seems to state/distort. Maybe something like: "Ron Caffrey, chief of the DEA's cocaine desk in 1984, testified before the United States House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime in 1988 and stated that North had only asked hypothetically about the possibility of Seal landing the plane outside of Nicaragua and delivering the money to the Contras." I don't doubt that North wanted to fund the Contras, but my interpretation of Caffrey's comments is that North was also concerned to some extent with Seal's well-being. -Location (talk) 02:21, 6 June 2017 (UTC)

For future reference, the claim that "senior U.S. policy makers were not immune to the idea that drug money was a perfect solution to the Contra's funding problems" is cited in Sandinista National Liberation Front#Sandinistas vs. Contras. -Location (talk) 02:47, 5 September 2017 (UTC)

Alfred McCoy

McCoy as a source for info

I found a report in a 2002 issue of the Lodi News-Sentinel that states: "In an effort to contain the spread of Communism in Asia, the U.S. forms alliances with drug lords inhabiting the areas of the Golden Triangle (an expanse covering Laos, Thailand and Burma). To maintain this relationship, the U.S. and France supply the drug lords with weapons and air transport. This results in a significant spike in the illegal flow of heroin into the United States."

I don't know where they got their information, but I am assuming that is McCoy. Does that sound right? -Location (talk) 23:49, 8 June 2017 (UTC)

Yes. The basic source must have been McCoy 1972, chap. 4. The quote is under "the 1950s" in the timeline, but I can't find McCoy saying anything about "a significant spike in the illegal flow of heroin into the United States" in the 1950s. However, it's a 65 page chapter with 236 footnotes, so I might have missed something. Going over this sort of material is extremely time consuming. Rgr09 (talk) 00:36, 9 June 2017 (UTC)

Thanks for the feedback. I don't expect you to do any research for any of my inquiries. Just wondering if you knew off the top of your head. Thanks! -Location (talk) 01:26, 9 June 2017 (UTC)

Whoops, didn't mean that to come across as a complaint. I'm just excusing me to myself for taking so long over McCoy's book. Also, FYI, I have now read most of Webs of Smoke, mentioned earlier on this page. The last chapter is indeed a critique of some of McCoy's claims, but relating to Lucky Luciano and heroin, not Vietnam/Laos. Still, it's also directed at conspiratorial views of government attempts to control/use narcotics trafficking. If I find a short, pithy quote I'll put it up. Rgr09 (talk) 05:05, 9 June 2017 (UTC)

@Rgr09: Do you recall what WoS states about McCoy’s claims, or takes exception to? As always, feel free to ignore my requests for more information if replying would take up too much of your time. (FFR: USDOJ abstract.) -Location (talk) 07:53, 27 April 2023 (UTC)

Meyer/Parssinen's most direct criticism of McCoy's claims of govt involvement w/drugs & traffickers is on p. 281:

Those who see an American government conspiracy point to one specific moment in the postwar world as the origin and prototype of all that followed. In 1946 New York State prison officials released Salvatore "Lucky" Luciano from Dannemora Prison. The prevailing wisdom about Luciano is summarized in Alfred W. McCoy's influential book The politics of heroin in Southeast Asia. "In 1946 American military intelligence made one final gift to the Mafia--they released Luciano from prison and deported him to Italy, thereby freeing the greatest criminal talent of his generation to rebuild the heroin trade." However, McCoy misrepresents a crucial fact: Luciano's sentence was commuted by Governor Thomas Dewey, not by military intelligence. Furthermore, Mccoy's sources for his allegation that Luciano reconstructed the postwar heroin trade are either books or statements by agents of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics who, as we shall see, had a vested interest in portraying Luciano as an all-controlling villain. The reality, however, was rather different. Rgr09 (talk) 12:15, 27 April 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for the leads! In Heroin, Organized Crime, and the Making of Modern Turkey, Ryan Gingeras states: "Kathryn Meyer and Terry Parissinen's study of the opium politics in the twentieth century makes a convincing case for Luciano's irrelevance in the development of postwar heroin trade, arguing instead that Harry Anslinger utilized Luciano's notoriety in order to elevate his own struggle against narcotics. A similar argument can be found in Tim Newark's study, which employs further documentation form British and American archival sources." Now, I don't have any of these books and I cannot read what they have to say in full, but this review of Newark's book states Luciano "was held up as the center of a narcotics-smuggling empire that, the author argues, Luciano did not control—which allowed those federal agencies 'to justify their own bloated law enforcement budgets.'" You will notice in the Corsican syndicates section that I only have a blurb about Luciano. If you have any thoughts of whether this should go before, after, or intertwined with that section, please let me know! -Location (talk) 02:04, 28 April 2023 (UTC)

References

The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia

@Rgr09:Do you have any reviews or good secondary sources about this book? Given that a separate article exists for the book, it appears as though there is excessive discussion about it in the article about McCoy. And the discussion that appears there is mostly cited to the interview with Paul DeRienzo. -Location (talk) 15:38, 21 June 2017 (UTC)

Related to this, Murray Riley#Nugan Hand Bank appears to cite Politics of Heroin in stating: "The Nugan Hand Bank cultivated Sydney criminal networks, corrupt Australian politicians, the CIA and a network of ex-CIA arms dealers. The bank prospered becoming a bridge between large legitimate banks and organised crime syndicates. It laundered illegal money in drug and arms deals that often financed intelligence operations." Citing the 1972 version of McCoy doesn't make sense given that Nugan Hand Bank was started in 1973 and collapsed in 1980. Are you aware of any official CIA denial of this? -Location (talk) 16:23, 21 June 2017 (UTC)

The CIA FOIA reading room had some information on the reception of McCoy 1972. It has been surprisingly under-reviewed for its importance in the CIA-drug controversy. There were some newspaper and magazine reviews when the book came out, but few academic reviews at the time. Here is one of each:

• Markham, James M. (1972-09-03). "Review of The Politics Of Heroin in Southeast Asia by Alfred W. McCoy". New York Times accessdate = 2015-04-29. pp. –1. ISSN 0362-4331. {{cite news}}: Missing pipe in: |work= (help); no-break space character in |title= at position 51 (help) (No URL found)
• Young, Kenneth Ray (1973). "Review of The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia". Pacific Affairs. 46 (2): 343–345. doi:10.2307/2756213. ISSN 0030-851X. JSTOR 2756213.

Both reviews have some praise and some criticism. The later revisions of the book (McCoy 1991, 2003) also have some reviews, but I'm not sure what to do about this. I haven't even made it all the way through 1972 because of the density of the annotation, and the difficulty in finding some of the sources. 1991 and 2003 incorporate most of 1972, but have significant changes in this material (naturally, given the 30 year interval). So should they be put in the same article or not? 1991 and 2003 also have new material, different for each edition. Wikipedia citation of this is very confused. The Murray Riley article should cite 1991; this was the only edition that had material on Nugan Hand. Regarding Nugan Hand, I'll add another section below on this.

Not a review, but I found this internal CIA bulletin on cia.gov. Not sure if I had seen this previously.

Regarding Murray Riley: I forgot that I had the Australian findings to refute the assertion cited to McCoy. I wish more editors would add "According to..." when they add material so I wouldn't feel compelled to "pull weeds". -Location (talk) 03:28, 22 June 2017 (UTC)

Sources for McCoy and his books

The deRienzo interview is a bad source for both McCoy and his work, but I haven't done the digging needed to replace it. deRienzo was the host of a radio show on WBAI in New York, mostly introducing a variety of conspiracy theories and theorists. The interview was in the context of a 1991 tele-conference on "Causes and Cures: A National Campaign on the Narcotics Epidemic," featuring people like McCoy, Peter Dale Scott, and Daniel Sheehan. The source wikipedia uses for the transcript of the interview, bearcave.com, is certainly not the original. Possibly it was originally done by John DiNardo and posted on ListServe (diNardo did this for a large number of WBAI shows). Notability and sourcing are thus big question marks for me.

Another problem is that, like Gary Webb, McCoy says things in interviews that he doesn't write in his books. If he said it, he said it, but he didn't write it, so it can't be attributed to his book. He also makes mistakes in his interview, such as saying that Shackley flew out of Australia with a Nugan Hand official, but as his book correctly states, it was Clines, not Shackley. Interviews have to be treated with due care, this is something Wikipedia editors often do not grok.

So deRienzo should be replaced wherever used. Some of his information can be replaced from other sources, it's just a pain in the butt. And what cannot be replaced from other sources maybe doesn't belong in wikipedia Rgr09 (talk) 01:16, 22 June 2017 (UTC)

I think my inclination was/is similar to yours in that I wanted to remove deRienzo but I didn't have anything from a better to source to put in its place. Most of it could probably be removed under WP:REDFLAG, however, I don't like to battle with people who get alarmed by the removal of large amounts of material.

Re: "grok". I had to look that one up. Thanks for challenging my vocabulary! -Location (talk) 03:51, 22 June 2017 (UTC)

CIA alliance with Corsican syndicate in Marseille

@Rgr09:The idea that the CIA formed an alliance with the Corsican syndicate in Marseille to shut down communist dock workers has been repeated so many times that it is now "common knowledge" in the available literature. I've tried to find more information on this plausible-sounding story, but it always traces back to McCoy's claims in Politics. There are a number of places in the book where he makes that assertion, but the only place I could find an actual citation is after this passage on page 44:

"Through their contacts with the Socialist party, the CIA had sent agents and a psychological warfare team to Marseille, where they dealt directly with Corsican syndicate leaders through the Guerini brothers. The CIA’s operatives supplied arms and money to Corsican gangs for assaults on Communist picket lines and harassment of the important union officials. During the month-long strike the CIA’s gangsters and the purged CRS police units murdered a number of striking workers and mauled the picket lines. Finally, the CIA psychological warfare team prepared pamphlets, radio broadcasts, and posters aimed at discouraging workers from continuing the strike. 49"

Citation 49 refers to an interview with Lucien Conein in 1971. I have found no information confirming he had anything to do with these alleged actions in Marseille, but this biography in Studies in Intelligence confirms that Conein was in Europe (i.e. Germany) with the OSS/SSU/CIG/CIA from 1946 to 1954 between his stints in Vietnam. One thing very interesting about that biography is this passage:

"'One of the problems with Conein is that he told you these marvelous stories, but they didn’t always pan out,' said Stanley Karnow, a foreign correspondent and historian who abandoned a Conein biography because of the dubious accuracy of his subject’s recollections. 'I had a hell of a time trying to figure out what was true and what was false.'"

Are you aware of any other sources that offer more information about the CIA's supposed involvement in Marseille? By the way, t seems as though this wasn't the only place in the book where McCoy took Conein's statements as gospel without offering any verification or corroboration, so I am surprised that his research is described as "meticulous". - Location (talk) 18:32, 6 February 2023 (UTC)

@Location: Hello! It has been quite a while since I visited wikipedia. If you have specific questions/comments about some of our old conversations, post here! I will check in from time to time.

I looked at McCoy ch 2 to refresh my memory on CIA, Corsicans and Marseille. The sources of this chapter remain obscure to me. Tom Braden's Saturday Evening Post article is cited, this gives some true details of US covert assistance to the non-Communist parties. There are several French language books cited in McCoy's endnotes as well: Castellari, Saccomano, Agulhon and Barrat are three of these.

Parenthetically, McCoy's description of the French resistance as dominated by the powerful, effective communists of FTP and undermined by the incompetent MUR is strongly biased, as is his discussion of the clash between the Socialists and the Communists after the war. Soviet financing and control of the French Communists are of course non-existent in McCoy's narrative.

There is also a tenuous link in chapter 2 to the French Connection, as visualized by McCoy. His sources on this are mostly Congressional hearings and reports. Douglas Valentine also wrote on the French Connection with the usual conspiracist dark suspicions, including a book: The Strength of the Wolf published by Verso in 2004.

Valentine's book has more about Conein, some from McCoy, some from places unknown. Have only seen google books extracts. We can now say Valentine's account of Conein's career is wrong in several places. Valentine has an interesting article on Conein, Ellsberg, problems with McCoy's account of Conein, and Conein's disavowal of what McCoy said Conein said:

https://www.counterpunch.org/2003/03/08/will-the-real-daniel-ellsberg-please-stand-up/

All of this is familiar territory. The Wikipedia article on the French Connection is derived from McCoy, Peter Dale Scott, Valentine, plus the director's commentary track on the French Connection DVD, and newspaper articles dating to the 1960s and 1970s. Jeez! Robin Moore wrote the book the movie came from, together with Sonny Grosso, Popeye's partner. Also found a later book called Hard Target by Ron Chepesiuk, not seen. Chepesiuk writes drug lord biographies. Not bad, actually. Rgr09 (talk) 12:52, 7 February 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for the link and your take on all of this!

I'm not sure what to make of Valentine's article other than he acknowledges their are contradictions in the various stories. On one hand, Conein "adamantly denied [McCoy's] the allegation that he arranged a drug-related 'truce'" with the Corsicans in Vietnam. On the other, McCoy - citing Conein on page 44 - also wrote that the CIA "dealt directly with Corsican syndicate leaders through the Guerini brothers" in 1947 Marseille. I don't want to read too much into the absence of a denial, but it perturbs me that this appears to be the genesis of the CIA-was-complicit-with-drug-traffickers claims and there is nothing else from Conein or anyone else to confirm or refute it. (FWIW: McCoy does not appear to have used Braden or the French sources to cite any specific claims that the CIA was involved in combating the communist strikes in Marseille, so as far as I can tell that leaves Conein as the only source for it.)

Incidentally, I found an interview of McCoy by David Barsamian in which McCoy states "I interviewed a guy named Lt. Col Lucien Conein who, since I published my book now despises me..." There is nothing new on the particular aspect of the subject, but I wonder if that is related to the denial outlined in Valentine's article.

Thanks again! -Location (talk) 19:16, 7 February 2023 (UTC)

@Rgr09: Related to the above, I was wondering if you have read Contrabandista! (possibly also released as The Corsican Contract) by Evert Clark and Nicholas Horrock (1973). It looks like Horrock wrote for a variety of publications[34][35] as did Clark[36]. I do not have their book and I can only see snippets in GBooks, but they might have some of the early information about the French Connection, Vietnam, etc. -Location (talk) 15:09, 25 April 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for the reference to the Clark/Horrock book. You can currently borrow it for an hour at a time at archive.org. C/H were Newsweek reporters at the time of publication. Horrock later moved to NYT and covered a lot of stuff in the 1970s. Book is standard journalistic writing, okay so far as I can tell from a ten minute glance.

The book is primarily about Auguste Ricord, who ran a sort of Latin American adjunct to the "French Connection." He is mentioned 1 time in McCoy 1972, not relevant to the usual SE Asia claims. French Connection was about Turkish opium/heroin, not McCoy's interest. C/H on the other hand have very little to say about Vietnam/Laos, etc. They do not mention McCoy, their book might have been written just before McCoy's claims hit the newspapers.

They do mention the inflated claims of massive GI heroin addiction in Vietnam, this was certainly a factor in McCoy getting so much attention.

A book on "French Connection" at Oxford UP: Heroin, Organized Crime, and the Making of Modern Turkey Heroin, Organized Crime, and the Making of Modern Turkey, by Ryan Gingeras, 2014. The book mentions "deep state" and Gladio, so caveat lector. Not even the OUP imprimateur will render such stuff safe to cite. Rgr09 (talk) 23:51, 26 April 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for the feedback. I found reference to Contrabandista! in Auguste Ricord and was wondering if it might have anything that supports/refutes McCoy's claims about the alleged CIA collusion with drug traffickers in Marseille. I didn't know that about archive.org so I'll check it out.

If it doesn't take up too much time, can you comment on "inflated claims of massive GI heroin addiction in Vietnam"? Are there good sources on that? Cheers! -Location (talk) 00:42, 27 April 2023 (UTC)

There is a book length study: The Myth of the Addicted Army: Vietnam and the Modern War on Drugs. This is by Jeremy Kuzmarov, published by U Mass P, 2009. U Mass P is RS, so can be used. There are errors in the book, I think one is mentioned somewhere around here.

Kuzmarov writes for the revived CovertAction Magazine, thinks PDS is an important and reliable writer on 9/11, etc. Don't use him unless there is publisher review of the book/article. Rgr09 (talk) 01:09, 27 April 2023 (UTC)

Although I’ve not read it, it looks like we’ve already noted Kuzmarov in the “Books” section on our “main page”. The GBooks preview is no longer an option, but I do recall thinking it might be a troubling source due to the credence given to McCoy.

I don’t think it is a subject that I want to write about in Wikipedia, however, this 1974 study is interesting. It seems to note that 43% of servicemen used narcotics in Vietnam with 20% self-reporting as “addicted” while there, but this self-reported number dropped to 1% after returning to the US. (Background per NPR.) -Location (talk) 07:36, 27 April 2023 (UTC)

@Rgr09: Looking for more information about Luciano's connections to the French Connection, I stumbled across this entry by Pierre-Arnaud Chouvy in The Central Intelligence Agency: An Encyclopedia of Covert Ops, Intelligence Gathering, and Spies. Chouvy states: "The CIA soon asked Luciano to use his connections in France to break the strikes led by socialist unions in Marseille's docks, from which arms and supplies were sent to Indochina." There are no footnotes, but Chouvy has only three citations for his entry: himself, McCoy, and Meyer/Parssinen. Is he making this up? (For reference, McCoy wrote: "Through their contacts with the Socialist party, the CIA had sent agents and a psychological warfare team to Marseill, where they dealt directly with Corsican syndicate leaders through the Guerini brothers." He cites an interview with Lucien Conein.) Chouvy writes elsewhere: "Of course, the CIA had full knowledge that the Contras were involved in drug trafficking and that the planes bringing them arms were returning to the United States loaded with cocaine. However, the Boland Amendment of December 8, 1982, effectively cut off funding to the Contras. This led the Reagan administration to undertake arms-for-drugs deals that involved illegal weapon sales to Iran." Full knowledge? Arms-for-drugs? Something doesn't seem very scholarly here. Am I missing something? -Location (talk) 02:40, 28 April 2023 (UTC)

Meyer/Parssinen has no reference whatsoever to CIA/Luciano contacts, or to Luciano's strike breaking activities in Marseilles. The encyclopedia ref either came from McCoy, or is an embellishment added by Chouvy.

Chouvy has a book, Opium: uncovering the politics of the poppy, published by Harvard UP, 2010. Don't know anything about Chouvy, his book, or the encyclopedia reference.

"Guns down, drugs up" was the Christic conspiracy theory. This must have real sourcing for it to even be cited. Chouvy's mere restatement of the claim is utterly worthless.

Re Luciano:

M/P reference a 1977 book by Rodney Campbell, The Luciano Project. They also use primary sources, including what they call "The Luciano File" at NARA. This includes documents from Dewey's correspondence and papers, and later, after Luciano was deported back to Italy, documents from people like Harry Anslinger, longtime head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, Charles Siragusa, FBN liaison in Italy, etc.

There are other sources on Luciano, in addition to M/P and McCoy, e.g. a 2010 bio by Tim Newark, cited in Wiki bio of Luciano. Available for 1-hr at archive.org A 10 minute browse shows it came up with little on the claims of intelligence-jail release quid pro quo.

M/P's discussion of Luciano is longish, about six pages. They review Dewey's pardon and deportation of Luciano and find no real evidence that Naval intelligence played any part in it, or that Luciano provided any particularly valuable intelligence or assistance to NI.

Luciano was sentenced to an outrageously long sentence for his involvement in NYC prostitution, and was later a model prisoner, and could be removed from the U.S. simply by deportation. Frederick Moran, head of the state parole division at the time, said the decision was made on "routine grounds." As McCoy himself notes, numerous other non-intelligence Sicilian gangsters were also deported post war in like manner.

Dewey found the rumors about a deal with Luciano troublesome and eventually another investigation was opened in 1952. The investigation also found nothing improper. All of this contrasts with McCoy's account.

Luciano's sentence was commuted in Jan. 1946 and he was deported to Italy (not France). In Italy, Luciano was the subject of intense scrutiny by Italian police. He soon moved on, and by October 1946 he was in Cuba. This worried Anslinger and he managed to get Luciano deported back to Italy in March 1947.

Luciano was arrested in Italy on his arrival (April 1947). He was soon released, then rearrested again in 1949, then released again.

Luciano was thus the subject of constant surveillance by both the Italians and Anslinger's forces, who never managed to dig up enough evidence to bring him to trial. Despite this, Charles Siragusa, FBN's chief liaison officer in Italian, told the Kefauver Commission in 1951 that Luciano "still ruled the narcotics traffic in the United States, operating from Sicily."

M/P describe the evidence for this as "paper-thin." Why would Anslinger et al have so "grossly misinterpreted" Luciano's role in the narcotics traffic? Anslinger needed a "super-villain" to maintain his agency and position.

But given Luciano's "periodic incarceration and constant surveillance", M/P say, it is "impossible to believe that Luciano could have been the executive of a major international narcotics smuggling operation."

Basically then, M/P reject things like Siragusa's book, which McCoy uses for his 3-4 pages on Luciano's "heroin empire". (McCoy also claims anonymous interviews at BNDD in 1971.) It is certainly true that there were never any major prosecutions in Italy or the U.S. supporting Siragusa's claims.

Pantoleano, another major McCoy source for OSS/CIA involvement with post-war Sicilian mafia, is also problematic, according to Newark. I have seen other sources reject Pantoleano as well. Rgr09 (talk) 20:11, 28 April 2023 (UTC)

I see from another comment elsewhere that you checked out Gingeras on this topic. Anyway, this note is sort of a summary of M/P's views. The Encyclopedia you mentioned should be ignored. Such reference works are simply not good sources. Rgr09 (talk) 20:49, 28 April 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for the summary of M/P. I don't see anything in McCoy's chapter regarding Marseilles that Luciano was involved in strike breaking activities, so I am left to believe that it is an embellishment by Chouvy. I wasn't familiar with the "guns down, drugs up" term, but Chouvy also appears to reiterate the similar idea that the CIA was using Air America to transport opiates while heavily citing McCoy and Martin Booth(!!!). For future reference: HERE is a 1966 review of Michele Pantaleone's The Mafia and Politics that states it "has been the authoritative, if not definitive, history of the Mafia ever since it appeared in Italy in 1962 and it has been used to fault more recent studies, such as Norman Lewis' The Honored Society (1964). It appears now almost simultaneously with Charles Siragusa's The Trail of the Poppy and both men have spent their professional lives in fighting the Mafia." It also states: "Also, where Poppy is specifically about the drug traffic, Pantaleone's book has only a single chapter about heroin and Sicily." I did notice that the Wikipedia editor who created the article on Pantaleone and other Sicilian figures noted that that historians have taken issue with at least one of Pantaleone's accounts about Luciano. -Location (talk) 16:32, 1 May 2023 (UTC)

Webs of smoke

Here is a quote from WOS that might interest you;

Conspiracy takes coordination by a tight group of leaders who enjoy a shared set of strategic goals. In our research we found leadership both in governments and among the traffickers to be less static and focused. As individuals pursued long-term goals, they engaged in factional rivalries to enrich themselves and realize their ambitions. They undercut each other as they jockeyed for position. Politicians who used narcotics for tactical purposes often turned to traffickers for money or information, but their alliance with drug dealers were as fluid as those among the traffickers themselves. Such conditions did not, and do not, foster successful conspiracies. (p. 280)

Overall, WOS seems to buy into some claims I find unlikely or spurious, but I think its fair to say that they generally think that conspiracy is not the right word to describe government-trafficker relations. Rgr09 (talk) 09:58, 9 June 2017 (UTC)

McCoy's 'surges'

Found evidence of McCoy's belief in "periodic surges" in narcotics in his interview with Paul deRienzo

While they were allied with the United States these drug lords were absolutely immune to any kind of investigation. If you're involved in any kind of illicit commodity trade, organized crime activity like drug trafficking, there is only one requisite for success, immunity, and the CIA gave them that. As long as they were allied with the CIA, the local police and then the DEA stayed away from the drug lords.

Finally, if there were any allegations about the involvement of their allies in the drug trade, the CIA would use their good offices to quash those allegations.

This meant that these drug lords, connected with the CIA, and protected by the CIA, were able to release periodic heroin surges, and [in Latin America] periodic cocaine surges. You can trace very precisely during the 40 years of the cold war, the upsurge in narcotics supply in the United States with covert operations.

This is all low grade drivel, especially the idea of spikes in drug production correlating with some sort of political or covert events, and none of this appears in McCoy 1972; I'm surprised to see McCoy expressing himself in these terms. Rgr09 (talk) 10:49, 9 June 2017 (UTC)

Iran–Contra affair

@Rgr09: It seems that various authors attempt to tie the Iran–Contra affair to issues/allegations related to Contra drug trafficking. Wish I had a Mark Lombardi or Venn diagram of these two subjects; it seems like the point of intersection is Eugene Hasenfus. I think Christic attempted to tie the two together. Did Webb? -Location (talk) 00:46, 13 June 2017 (UTC)

There is plenty of room to link Iran-Contra and Contra-drug claims for those who wish to. The official investigations, however, did not find much. The DOJ-OIG report 1.E quotes OIC counsel William Hassler as saying the drug aspect of the Iran-Contra investigation was "minute" and that he did not see any evidence to suggest laundering of drug money by the Contras. The claims of links arise mostly from various statements in the Kerry report; many of these claims that the Kerry report found such and such seem to be grossly misrepresented. Then there is Webb.

Webb is of course very interested in linking Iran-Contra (guns) and Contra drugs. He is also aware that Walsh's report had nothing about drugs. His explanation is that "In an interview [with Webb], Walsh said he tried to stay away from the Contra drug trafficking issue as much as possible because it was outside his jurisdiction and because he knew Senator John Kerry's Senate subcommittee was investigating the topic." (DA rev. ed. p. 266) In fact, Contra finances were at the heart of Walsh's investigation, and he didn't find any cocaine bucks there. Rgr09 (talk) 02:28, 13 June 2017 (UTC)

"(DA rev. ed. p. 266)" = Dark Alliance?

I'm not sure what to think of the Kerry report. You may have seen my recent edit in Barry Seal related to the leak and Washington Times report by Edmond Jacoby that outed Seal. The Kerry report states:

However, the operation was disclosed prematurely by an administration official who leaked to the press evidence supposedly collected by Seal in an effort to influence a pending Congressional vote on Contra aid. Law enforcement officials were furious that their undercover operation was revealed and agents' lives jeopardized because one individual in the U.S. government—Lt. Col. Oliver North—decided to play politics with the issue. p.121

This is a fairly harsh finding attributed only to the "Subcommittee testimony of John C. Lawn, July 12, 1988 pp. 134-135." If Del Hahn is to be believed: 1) Hahn was on an FBI task force going after Seal and 2) Jacoby told him the source of the leak was not North, but Ted Lunger. I know some people view North as the devil, so it makes it difficult to tell if this is scapegoating or what. Sometimes I wonder if the Kerry report is more accurate than Daniel Hopsicker. -Location (talk) 15:07, 13 June 2017 (UTC)

I cannot read the entire thing through the GBooks previews but it looks like Hahn may not have had any luck in tracking down Lawn's testimony either. -Location (talk) 15:10, 13 June 2017 (UTC)

I took a look at the preview of Hahn's book. Very interesting, too bad it's so expensive. So the problem was that the Kerry report cited Lawn's "Subcommittee testimony" to support its claims, but the reference didn't support the Kerry report statements. Hahn asked Lawn if he testified that North interfered with the invetigation and he said I never said such a thing. Hahn asked a National Security Archive staff member (interesting choice, why ask NS Archive?), and she couldn't find it in Lawn's July 12, 1988 testimony to the Kerry Committee either. According to Hahn, however, she did find a mention of Seal's case in Lawn's July 28 testimony before the House Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Crime. This was the same set of hearings where I found Caffrey's testimony, mentioned above. I've read through the July 28th material, and there are two exchanges on Seal, the first between Lawn and subcommittee chairman William J. Hughes (NJ-D) on p. 236, and the other between Lawn and Bill McCollum, the ranking Republican on the Subcommittee on p. 240.

The Hughes exchange is rather tense. Hughes begins: "Do you find that the intelligence community, whether it be the CIA or whether it be the National Security Council, basically interferes with the criminal justice system, to carry out other political objectives?" Lawn replies he doesn't perceive it to be a major problem, mentions his work with intelligence on the National Drug Policy Board, and says that HE recalls an instance where a major case was compromised, not by NSC, but by "another component of the government." (??) Hughes brushes this aside: "But my question deals with national security. How many instances are you aware of where the intelligence community has, for one reason or another, decided to expose a case for other objectives —nonlaw enforcement?" Lawn says "I'm not aware of any, sir." HUGHES then says he thinks the Seal case falls into that category and asks lawn if he agrees. Lawn says it was compromised but "the problem we have is that we don't know who leaked the information." HUGHES then says "I think it is pretty clear, it was CIA or Colonel North or both" and asks "North tried to persuade you (to expose the case), didn't he?" Lawn says "No, sir." and then Hughes ASSERTS "He tried to persuade those in DEA he talked with, including Mr. Westrate, including yourself."

In the McCollum exchange, McCollum emphasizes that the question of who leaked "is not as simplistic as some would like to make it to be." Lawn then mentions a "speech outside the country" that "may have been the catalyst that initiated that leak." This is certainly a reference to the speech by General Gorham.

What do I take away from this? It is possible to claim, based on the July 12 exchange between Lawn and Kerry (Kerry Committe Hearings, Vol 4, pp. 134-135), that Lawn thought that the leak was an instance of foreign policy interfering with law enforcement. Lawn has never, however, blamed North for the leak. Not then, and not, years later, to Hahn. It is possible that the Sub-Committee report screwed up its references. If the intent was to refer to the Hughes-Lawn exchange, the report seems to be attributing Hughes's statements to Lawn. If not, the report has made this claim with no support from testimony by any witness in front of it. Bad Kerry report. Bad!

It is not unique of course for a Congressional report to commit such a faux-pas. In the Inslaw article I found something rather similar; the House report on Inslaw said that Arnold Burns had admitted that if the Inslaw case went to court, the DOJ would lose. Special counsel Bua called this claim "entirely unwarranted" and it certainly seems clear that the House report took Burns' statement dramatically out of context. Handling such problems in an article is an interesting question. The report made the claim, so the claim can go in the article, but if it is contradicted by other evidence, there should at least be a footnote. Rgr09 (talk) 02:44, 18 June 2017 (UTC)

Very interesting, indeed. Thanks for all of the digging around and the relevant links. It appears that you were able to access much more of Hahn that I was able to, or perhaps I wasn't very careful in examining the preview.

LeoGrande at the bottom of page 11 states: "The Washington Times story had been leaked by administration officials who could not resist using the DEA investigation as political ammunition in the contra aid battle with Congress." For that material, his third reference cites an article in the August 6, 1984 issue of the Washington Times by Robert Fontaine, "Conflicting Goals Hamper War on Drug Trafficking". Thus far, this is the earliest reference to the leaker I have seen. I would like to see the article, however, I assume that it doesn't give much more information than that. I also assume that if there was a name to it, it would have been revealed long ago. -Location (talk) 05:23, 19 June 2017 (UTC)

Google book seems to try to count the number of pages you browse, then turn off the preview when you reach a certain number. I've occasionally gotten different chunks of a preview when using different computers to search the same book.

If you are interested, CIA reporting on Nicaraguan government involvement in drug trafficking is covered in CIA-OIG II, appendix 3. It is by no means limited to Seal's photos. Rgr09 (talk) 10:08, 19 June 2017 (UTC)

Regarding CIA-OIG II, I don't see "appendix 3". Are you referring to this?

I apologize if all of this is off course from the topic of the "article". I perceived the assertion that North was the leaker to be a bit of erroneous information, but I'm not sure it has much to do with the allegations that the US government or CIA were drug traffickers.

I have a hard time believing that the Kerry Committee would intentionally report false information, but I wonder how much the blinders of partisan bias might have caused them to highlight findings or material that reflected poorly on the executive branch. -Location (talk) 15:13, 19 June 2017 (UTC)

CIA-OIG II - Yes, Appendix C, sorry. Rgr09 (talk) 00:11, 20 June 2017 (UTC)

Regarding the accuracy of the Kerry report: The Kerry report began as a part of the political struggle over U.S. policy in Nicaragua. It is a strongly partisan document in many aspects. However, I don't think that's relevant to using it in Wikipedia, where it should be treated like any other Congressional report. Sometimes these reports make inaccurate statements, and if there are reliable sources that claim inaccuracy, the article should include this. No need to even consider whether inaccuracies were intentional or not. My personal opinion is that any inaccuracies in the Kerry report were not intentional. However, I also don't think that Gary Webb was intentionally inaccurate. It's just that his judgments of what was accurate were in some cases poor.

Turning a "blind eye" to drug traffickers

I'm sure you have seen various references cherry-pick this passage of the Kerry report referring to "four companies owned and operated by narcotics traffickers" that were selected by the State Department "to supply humanitarian assistance to the Contras":

"At best, these incidents represent negligence on the part of U.S. government officials responsible for providing support to the Contras. At worst, it was a matter of turning a blind eye to the activities of companies who use legitimate activities as a cover for their narcotics trafficking." p.44

On this point, the Hitz report states:

"With the possible exception of Vortex, no information has been found to indicate that this CIA vetting assistance for the NHAO included information regarding the six companies identified in the Kerry Report as having ties to drug trafficking." Section 801

As you know, one of the conclusions of the Hitz report was this:

"CIA Policies and Practices. CIA acted inconsistently in handling allegations or information indicating that Contra-related organizations and individuals were involved in drug trafficking. In some cases, CIA pursued confirmation of allegations or information of drug allegations. In other cases, CIA knowledge of allegations or information indicating that organizations or individuals had been involved in drug trafficking did not deter their use by CIA. In other cases, CIA did not act to verify drug trafficking allegations or information even when it had the opportunity to do so. In still other cases, CIA deemed the allegation or information to be unsubstantiated or not credible." Section 35

Although Frontline erroneously credits the statement in the Kerry report to the Hitz report [37], elsewhere they quote Hitz attributing the above to "bureaucratic inertia" or ineptitude rather than a conspiracy.[38] But outlets like the LA Weekly make the leap that "it was the policy of the U.S. government to turn a blind eye to such connections."[39] Similarly, The Independent wrote that the "CIA turned a deliberate blind eye to Contras' drug smuggling".[40] "Turning a blind eye" certainly appears to be nefarious in these contexts.

Hitz surmises in the Frontline interview that CIA officers in the field wouldn't be taking care of their principal duties if they had to be concerned about reporting drug allegations, but I cannot find anywhere that Hitz said the CIA was "turning a blind eye" to anything. Did I miss something? -Location (talk) 16:56, 19 June 2017 (UTC)

The Kerry report on the four transport companies gets cited regularly because it was one of the few places that CIA involvement with smuggling could be even inferred in the Kerry report. Otherwise, the CIA is virtually unmentioned. Scott/Marshall's Cocaine Politics tries hard to infer big things from the Kerry report, but I give them a low grade on this.

This changed with the CIA-OIG reports, which directly address Agency involvement. The phrase "turn a blind eye" does not appear anywhere in the CIA-OIG reports, nor does Hitz use it anywhere I've seen. (He has a journal article on reporting issues which I've read. It's listed in the Gary Webb article references, but unfortunately it's paywalled.) As you suggest, for some people, the "turn a blind eye" description came from the Kerry report. Those who have read the CIA-OIG report, however, might also infer that this was the case, based on what the report wrote. I think the basis for this inference comes from two places.

First, it comes from the 1982 MOU between DOJ and CIA. This is discussed in CIA-OIG Vol. II. I think I now understand this, but it is so convoluted, and in my opinion unimportant, that I didn't try to put it in the Gary Webb article. It MIGHT be useable in a more general article on CIA involvement with drugs, maybe you can take a look. (I think this may be what the LA Weekly is referring to.)

Second, it comes from the two sentences in the Vol II summary:

In other cases, CIA knowledge of allegations or information indicating that organizations or individuals had been involved in drug trafficking did not deter their use by CIA. In other cases, CIA did not act to verify drug trafficking allegations or information even when it had the opportunity to do so.

As Hitz says, this is NOT a question of policy, but of inconsistent practices; in some cases CIA did act to verify, in some it didn't. A concise explanation of this part of Hitz's findings could go with a short discussion of the 1982 MOU. It's worth emphasizing that the Hitz report is about what the CIA did with the information it received about narcotics smuggling. It is not about who actually smuggled or did not. To decide if someone did "turn a blind eye," one must make this determination, right? You have to determine if Parker really raised a signal for Nelson to retreat before you can judge Nelson. Hitz did not make a determination.

The number of instances of these issues that Hitz found is also worth noting; it is small. This is an aspect of the Contra controversy that bothers me a great deal. The number of people involved and the size of the smuggling is wildly inflated in virtually everything I have read on this. Rgr09 (talk) 02:04, 20 June 2017 (UTC)

The 1982 MOU is noted in Paragraph 25. I had this in mind, too, when I read the LA Weekly piece. I don't buy it, but I'm sure they are not alone in making that argument.

I also wanted to see what it had to say about footnote #5, but I receive a 404 error. The Errata section mentions in Paragraph 2 that the footnotes were initially inadvertently omitted but were " added to the Report's text as links to the corresponding footnote." I dunno. I can't find them. -Location (talk) 03:15, 20 June 2017 (UTC)

Footnotes are here. Rgr09 (talk) 03:51, 20 June 2017 (UTC)

Nugan Hand

I was interested in Nugan Hand and the various drug/arms smuggling claims about it, and read both McCoy 1991 and the book by Kwitny on the subject. There is also a 2015 book by Peter Butt, who did a TV documentary on Nugan Hand. I have Butt's book, but have only gone through the first 50 pages. The problem in doing an article about the subject is that there were multiple inquiries into Nugan Hand which produced multiple reports (over 2000 pages) that I do not have ready access to. There are paid sources for these, but it's by the page, so not a trivial amount. Parts of the reports were withheld at the time of publication. Some of this has recently been released, and I have seen some of it, but I know of nothing which could be cited on it. FBI has files on it as well, still heavily redacted in recent FOIAs (on Archive.org).

CIA denied publicly having anything to do with Nugan Hand, more than once. I don't have that material on hand now, Kwitny has it I think. There is much heavily conspiratorial speculation on this, even claims that Nugan Hand somehow helped the CIA engineer the dismissal of Gough Whitlam. The final, two volume Royal Commission of Inquiry concluded Nugan Hand bank was a bunch of crooks, but there was nothing to the claims of CIA involvement.

Butt's book differs, and when it came out, one Wikipedia editor immediately filled the Nugan Hand article with bits of Butt. I believe the book is essentially self-published. I haven't seen reviews, but that doesn't mean there were none. Sources are very spotty. In some cases Butt did real digging. In other cases, he interviewed mysterious people who said amazing things, overlooked (or suppressed) in the official reports; in yet other cases, he relies on the dregs of the internet, and conceals this by omitting annotation. Without reading the official reports, I decided I shouldn't mess with the article. Rgr09 (talk) 01:16, 22 June 2017 (UTC)

There appears to be a "review" here. Most of it appears to be reviewing the story and not Butt's investigation or writing. -Location (talk) 02:08, 20 July 2017 (UTC)

I have some concerns about using Butt as a source. I'll post more on Talk:Nugan Hand Bank. -Location (talk) 19:05, 24 July 2017 (UTC)

@Rgr09: I have added more secondary coverage of Nugan Hand, including quite a few sources that reviewed or commented upon Kwitny's book. There is likely enough information to create The Crimes of Patriots: A True Story of Dope, Dirty Money, and the CIA; however, my preference is to put information about mildly notable books within the author's article. I sense that you may disagree with this, but I am very reluctant to use Butt, Kwitny, and McCoy as direct sourcing for these articles because they generally continue(d) to push POVs rejected by the mainstream findings. I think finding secondary coverage of their claims helps to get their POVs into the articles without violating WP:REDFLAG. -Location (talk) 15:55, 26 September 2017 (UTC)

I am off Nugan Hand until I have read the massive reports done on it (thousands of pages again). I would actually argue against an article devoted to Kwitny's book: it is not as seriously deficient as Webb's book, but it's bad enough to make an article on it a questionable addition to Wikipedia. It doesn't have the notoriety of Webb's book, so that's also an argument against an article. And adding it to the Kwitny article wouldn't make a mess, the way Dark Alliance made the Webb article so hard to write.

You've come up with an impressive amount of material to use in any discussions of COP. I had read the Bamford and Prados reviews; Blum is superficial but appeared in NYT, Bushkoff looks good and CSM is/was a major book reviewer. The rest is not what I would put in any discussions of COP. The AIM article is not really a review, more like a laundry list of complaints about Kwitny's writing. Harvard Crimson is not where I go to get my reviews, and Wired does not have reviewers competent to write about books such as this, nor does the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. Rgr09 (talk) 18:29, 26 September 2017 (UTC)

Khun sa allegations

Excellent digging again on the Khun Sa claims! I have only just this weekend looked at the 1987 Committee on Foreign Affairs hearings which you dug up. The committee hearing gives the text of Khun Sa's letter to the DOJ, and it is clearly related to derived from the 1986 Christic affidavit. Shackley's letter to the committee says as much, and he has a solid basis for saying so. I've redone the Khun Sa allegations in Theodore Shackley and Richard Armitage to give a more accurate picture of the whole sordid mess. Rgr09 (talk) 01:56, 25 June 2017 (UTC)

I had never bothered to read Khun Sa's letter. Poor Santo Trafficante Jr.... he got accused of everything! By the way, where did you see Shackley's letter? Also by the way, on page 257, a former CIA chief of station in Lao and Bangkok refers that committee back to the Church committee's report. -Location (talk) 20:55, 19 July 2017 (UTC)

Jack McKay, who wrote the letter on pp 250-254, was Shackley's lawyer, so I take that as Shackley's views. The anachronisms McKay points out in that letter were repeated in Khun Sa's letter. Similar anachronisms occur in Sheehan's December 1986 affidavit, for both Shackley and Armitage. Rgr09 (talk) 15:56, 20 July 2017 (UTC)

Thanks for pointing McKay's letter. There are so many allegations flying around that I'm not really familiar with all of them to draw the parallels. I noticed McKay, too, referred that committee back to the Church committee's report to rebut some of Khun Sa's allegations. (One other thing I also noticed that is not really related to the subject matter of this "article" is that McKay emphasized that the Phoenix program - or rather American policy - "did not condone assassination" which seems to contradict what the Wikipedia article states.) -Location (talk) 16:50, 20 July 2017 (UTC)

Mena, Arkansas

@Rgr09: This AP report dated November 9, 1996 states: "The agency released a six-page, unclassified summary of his [i.e. Frederick Hitz] findings on Friday." Have you seen that summary?

Also, the plot summary for American Made (film) states the following without citation: "American Made tells the story of Barry Seal (Tom Cruise), a TWA pilot who is recruited by the CIA to help counter the emerging communist threat in Central America. Seal's role in this major CIA covert operation led in turn to his involvement with the Medellin cartel, which ultimately embarrassed the Reagan White House after the Iran-Contra scandal became public." Now a fictional movie can tell whatever story it wants to and the official website calls it an "...international escapade based on the outrageous (and real) exploits of a hustler and pilot unexpectedly recruited by the CIA to run one of the biggest covert operations in U.S. history." My impression was that a) Seal was not recruited by anyone, rather he approached the DEA; b) the operation was a DEA operation, not a CIA operation; and c) the CIA's involvement in the operation was only to install the cameras in the plane he used. Am I wrong? -Location (talk) 15:24, 22 July 2017 (UTC)

Re Hitz report summary: I have not been able to track this down, but Del Hahn's book Smuggler's End (p. 212) gives the following quote from the report: "Adler Berriman 'Barry' Seal was never employed by the CIA in any capacity. The only limited contact any CIA personnel had with Seal was during a two-day period in 1984 when Seal was involved in a Drug Enforcement Administration sting operation." The quote concludes, "No evidence has been found to indicate that CIA personnel had any other contact with Seal either before or after this 1984 operation." Hahn notes he had asked the CIA this question in 1983 during the FBI investigation into Seal, and got the same response. In fact, during a 1985 trial where Seal was a government witness, Seal himself denied under oath ever having worked for the CIA (Hahn, p. 212).

Hahn's book also goes into interesting detail on the evolution of various conspiratorial claims about Seal and the CIA. It turns out these are not limited to the Nicaraguan flights, but go back to Seal's first arrest in 1972. This was a U.S. Customs sting operation involving weapons smuggling. Hahn shows this had nothing to do with the CIA (p. 36), but observes that the incident has been used by various conspiracy proponents to make Seal into a 'longtime CIA operative.' I think its safe to say the Cruise movie blurbs are simply advertising hype. Rgr09 (talk) 13:09, 23 July 2017 (UTC)

FYI: I was updating the lede to American Made (film) and found this article in The Independent which linked to this article in Vice that contains a good interview with Hahn. None of it is likely to new to you, especially if you have read Hahn's book. -Location (talk) 15:17, 27 August 2017 (UTC)

Yes, the info in the interview is all in the book. Aside from the interview, the article has a couple of errors; it claims that "Adler Berriman "Barry" Seal was a drug smuggler who, in the early 1980s, orchestrated the importation of thousands of pounds of cocaine and marijuana into the United States via a remote airstrip in rural west Arkansas." But Hahn says, "Mena served as an air base for the planes Seal used to smuggle cocaine and not as a transshipment point for cocaine. His pilot William Bottoms continued to airdrop cocaine at various rural locations in the vicinity of Baton Rouge." (Hahn p. 13) The story also states that when Seal was 'outed' as an informant, "Now that he was no longer useful as a snitch, the DEA cut Seal loose, and not long after, he was arrested by the FBI in Louisiana, where the Baton Rouge US attorney's office had prepared drug kingpin charges." The DEA by no means cut Seal loose, as evidenced by the fact that Seal got probation on the charges. Hahn has a detailed discussion of Seal's continued work and testimony for DEA after the outing; clearly the reporter did not bother reading Hahn's book. I'll try and add a little to the Seal article in the near future.

I see the article American Made now has a description of the plot, which apparently bears very little resemblance to reality. There are on-line resources that attempt to document where movies go historically astray, perhaps something can be found there to correct the movie's distortions. Or perhaps not. Rgr09 (talk) 14:09, 28 August 2017 (UTC)

I brought that up in Talk:American Made (film). The person who wrote the plot acknowledged the point, stating that he did not know how congruous the film was to reality.

In the interview, Hahn stated the following:

My book doesn't deal with allegations that the CIA was involved in the drug business, except to report what the Kerry Committee findings were—four pilots who worked for the CIA hauling some arms and humanitarian supplies were also known to be involved in drug smuggling. I fault the CIA for not vetting these pilots. If they had, they would have easily learned of their drug smuggling connections. They could then have not used them and avoided a lot of accusations and conspiracy theories. I believe the CIA was desperate for pilots and didn't care what they might do when they weren't flying on a CIA project.

Page 42 of the Kerry Committee report refers to three pilots, but I didn't gather than they worked for or were in a position to be vetted by the CIA. Do you know the route(s) by which US weapons and aid were to have made their way to the Contras? Panama by air to Costa Rica then ground to Nicaragua? I'm wondering where these deliveries were staged in the US. Hahn also states the following in the very last line of the article:

We learned later on from Seal's pilot that he planned to jump his probation and flee to Costa Rica—and continue his cocaine-smuggling business—the very next day.

Is that (i.e. "Seal's pilot" a reference to William Bottoms? -Location (talk) 17:24, 28 August 2017 (UTC)

Yes, Bottoms (Seal's ex-brother-in-law) was the pilot with whom Seal discussed fleeing the country (Hahn p. 154-55). Bottoms was Seal's main pilot. According to Hahn (p. 68), from 1980 to 1984, Seal flew 5-10 flights himself, while Bottoms flew 25 (all planned by Seal). If the film shows Seal doing most of his own flying, it is yet another falsehood.

I believe that the "four pilots" was a slip for the four companies which the Kerry report claimed were owned or linked to people who were possibly drug smugglers (Hahn p. 188; Kerry Report 42-48). Who was responsible for 'vetting' these companies was in dispute; see discussion in the CIA-OIG report (vol. II).

The resupply operation was complex because the Contras were divided into South and North, with some on the Atlantic coast as well. Much was done from Ilopango Airport in El Salvador, where Castillo raised such a ruckus. I don't recall reading a comprehensive account of the whole operation, but there is some information in the CIA-OIG report (vol II). Rgr09 (talk) 19:19, 28 August 2017 (UTC)

@Rgr09: Not sure if you are still around, but I was wondering if you had any information regarding the House of Representatives looking at the Mena allegations?[41] - Location (talk) 20:47, 2 February 2023 (UTC)

Russell Welch comments on Del Hahn's book here. -Location (talk) 03:42, 7 February 2023 (UTC)

Boxer letter to Deutch

The text of Sen. Barbara Boxer's letter to CIA DCI Deutch is in the Dark Alliance archive on the Wayback Machine.— Preceding unsigned comment added by Rgr09 (talk • contribs) 22:14, 17 September 2017 (UTC)

Some comments

The page is now a very strong resource, great work! A few miscellaneous comments. The Narconews version of the "Dark Alliance" series is from a copy of the website that the SJMN put out in September 1996. The main difference between this and the Wayback Machine copy of the website is that Narconews still has the original artwork with the crack smoker and the CIA logo. Oh yes, it also omits all the follow-up stories, including Pete Carey's re-examination of the series and Ceppos's column stating that the series "did not meet our standards." Not an acceptable substitute for the Wayback archive.

Another book on the Contra cocaine claims is Out of Control by Leslie Cockburn (1987). Her book was partly based on her reporting for West 57th (TV series); she later did a Frontline program on "Guns, Drugs, and the CIA", which is generally relevant to the page, and available on Youtube. Both the book and the West 57th (TV series) reporting were heavily based on the Christic material, and are cited in Webb's Dark Alliance among other conspiracy oriented work.

A much more useful book is Bribes, bullets, and intimidation: drug trafficking and the law in Central America (2014) by Julie Bunck. This is a massive, very well documented work on just what the title says. I now see it as having some problems, for example credulously citing Scott and Marshall's Cocaine Politics and Honey's Acts of War, but it also has detailed references to legal cases, and heavily uses Spanish language reporting from the countries involved, something almost no other book does.

I see you mention Jack Terrell on the page. I urge you to avoid attaching any weight to him if possible. It is hard to explain how unreliable this guy is, you really have to read his book. Yet he was an important source for Avirgan and Honey, for Sheehan, and especially for Peter Dale Scott. Both Scott and Terrell were 'investigators' at the International Center for Development Policy, and, perhaps as a result, Terrell is a key figure in Scott and Marshall. By the way, according to S & M (p. 135-136), in March 1986 ICDP "agreed to finance and help conduct a full-scale investigation for Kerry of the allegations coming out of Miami." Jack Blum, who served as lead counsel for the Kerry report, was previously the Center's chief counsel. I was unaware that ICDP was involved to this extent. Note also that the CIA-OIG report vol 2 section on Terrell is so heavily redacted that it is almost incomprehensible in parts. Also, Terrell's testimony before the Kerry Committee was in closed session and is not available, even now.

Hathitrust has full-text versions of all the Kerry Committee Hearing volumes here. Be careful though; you are now getting into some serious reading, several thousand pages. Rgr09 (talk) 01:33, 19 September 2017 (UTC)

Forgot, Betzner is here. Rgr09 (talk) 01:44, 19 September 2017 (UTC)

Thanks for the feedback. You must be reading my mind. I re-read your earlier notes regarding ICDP a few hours ago when I was trying to ascertain where you got the information that Honey wrote A Tangled Web: A History of CIA Complicity in Drug International Trafficking. I also had pulled up some information on West 57th and jotted down a note to add them later.

I assume that International Center for Development Policy is different than Center for International Policy where Blum is today.[42] I wasn't planning on using Narconews for anything but a reference to locate other information. If primary sources are used, I agree that it's best to use the versions closest to the original source. Interesting find with Bribes, Bullets, and Intimidation; there are enough secondary sources that it is likely notable under WP:NBOOK. I agree that Terrell shouldn't be used as a reliable source of information. So many names; so many claims. Thanks for the links to the hearings. -Location (talk) 03:41, 19 September 2017 (UTC)

Just watched/listed to Guns, Drugs, and the CIA while looking for sources. The Cockburns threw the kitchen sink into that one. -Location (talk) 16:17, 19 September 2017 (UTC)