Official: CIA does mean Cocaine Importing Agency after all On October 8 1998 the CIA’s Inspector General published a report on the recent CIA-cocaine controversy which – apparently – more or less copped the lot, acknowledging that the CIA had ignored drug smuggling by its Contra allies. (See for example The Independent 7 November 1998, … Read more
[…] transmission into the brain’, January 1974: personal unpublished papers submitted to the US State Department. Schapitz suggested the following experiment. ‘Brain waves that have been produced by drugs of known psychic effect are going to be registered on magnetic tape. The recorded rhythms will then be modulated onto a microwave (or several beams if […]
Spectre In the last Lobster 35 I reported on the new anti-EU magazine Spectre and wondered about its political orientation. In response, the editor, Steve McGiffen, sent an exemplary piece of candour from which here are some extracts. ‘….. Our original statement, sent out very widely, made it clear that we are minimalist to a … Read more
Transnationalised Repression; Parafascism and the U.S. In general, the fall of Nixon and the eventual election of Carter cut off the CIA subsidies to the Right, which does much to explain the recent financing of both West European fascists and Chile’s Cuban proteges by criminal activities, including narcotics. In late 1974 Italian Interior Minister Andreotti … Read more
Transnationalised Repression; Parafascism and the U.S. All this has a very direct bearing on the career of Orlando Bosch, who boasts of having collaborated with the AAA in the murder of two Cuban diplomats as late as August 1976. (66) It is quite possible that this collaboration was facilitated through the international narcotics traffic, since … Read more
[…] gun-running and – the holy grail – nuclear material smuggling. A ‘senior police officer’ was quoted in the Observer, 6 November 1994: ‘It’s very easy to present drugs and organised crime as a threat to national security particularly because of Eastern Europe. There the threat of armoured divisions has been replaced by the threat […]
[…] Police “to help the police hunt down narcotics traffickers”.(143) Even if the Thai BPP are no longer, as in the past, profiting themselves from the movement of drugs out of the ‘golden triangle’, their activities will certainly be political. The new Deputy Prime Minister in charge of the Thai anti-narcotics campaign, Amporn Chanvijit, is […]
Barry and the boys The CIA, the Mob and America’s Secret History Daniel Hopsicker Venice (Florida): The Madcow Press, 2006, $19.95, p/b Barry is Barry Seal and ‘the boys’ are the CIA. There is a decent Wiki entry for Seal which conveys the outlines of his extraordinary life as a pilot, large-scale drug smuggler and, … Read more
[…] the presence of U.S. Ambassador Robert Hill): We hope to wipe out the drug traffic in Argentina. We have caught guerillas after attacks who were high on drugs. Guerillas are the main users of drugs in Argentina. Therefore, the anti-drug campaign will automatically be an anti-guerilla campaign as well. Soon afterwards, a visiting DEA […]
Transnationalised Repression; Parafascism and the U.S. Seven years after the event, to its credit, the New York Times finally revealed a little of the story about the wind-up of the CIA’s Operation 40 because of its narcotics activities.(25) It did so an part of a series of stories exposing operations for which the CIA’s counter-intelligence … Read more
