CIA dirty dealing - they're nothing new

by Tim Wheeler

This article was reprinted from the October 12, 1996 issue of the People's Weekly World. For subscription information see below. All rights reserved - may be used with PWW credits.

Activist Dick Gregory vows to keep on wrapping the CIA with yellow police tape identifying the Langley complex as a "crime scene" and Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), who represents crack-devastated South Central Los Angeles, vows to keep fighting for the truth on the CIA-crack cocaine connection.

No wonder the CIA is heavily into "damage control." The Washington Post weighed in with an article challenging the San Jose Mercury News "conspiracy" explanation of the crack epidemic. Each year, 250 tons of cocaine are sold on U.S. streets and it would have been impossible for the CIA- connected drug merchants, Danilo Blandon and Norwin Meneses, to handle such a volume of drugs, the Post points out. But the Mercury News article did not claim that Blandon and Meneses were the CIA's only drug peddlers. That is the reason Waters is demanding an independent investigation to probe all the unanswered questions.

An unnamed CIA spokesperson called the Mercury News series "ludicrous," hoping the public will reject the notion that the CIA would deliberately poison American cities with a deadly addictive narcotic. But every time the CIA stamps out one brush fire another breaks out. A book by Carl Bernstein of Watergate fame has just been published, "Unholy Alliance," about the 15 meetings CIA Director William Casey, author of the Iran-contra conspiracy, held with Pope John Paul. The purpose of these meetings was not to improve the condition of the human soul. It was to plan the extermination of socialism in Poland, the Soviet Union and the rest of Eastern Europe, with results that are now clear for all to see.

At the end of World War II, U.S. Army Intelligence smuggled Reinhard Gehlen, one of Hitler's most ruthless spymasters, out of Germany and brought him to Washington. Gehlen was chief of the Abwehr (German military intelligence) in Eastern Europe. Through mass murder and torture, he had accumulated enormous files on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. With Gehlen's cooperation and advice, those files served as the basis of the CIA's Cold War covert operations against the Soviet Union.

From the beginning, the CIA established a partnership with the Mafioso in Sicily and with Corsican gangsters in Marseilles, France to smash the labor movement and block a victory for communists and their allies who had been the backbone of the anti-fascist resistance in both Italy and France.

Around the world, the CIA destroyed any government or popular movement that stood in the way of U.S. political domination and maximum profits for U.S. transnational corporations. It included violent coups, destabilization, and "low intensity wars" in Italy, Ukraine, Korea, Indonesia, Guatemala, Iran, Brazil, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Chile, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Afghanistan, Angola and many other nations.

Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba was murdered by the CIA and Zaire was transformed into a base for CIA counterrevolution on the African continent. In Angola alone close to one million have died from a covert CIA war unleashed with the connivance of South Africa's apartheid regime and Zaire's Joseph Mobutu who has been on the CIA payroll for decades.

There was the use of mind altering drugs in the CIA's MKULTRA program and the use of the CIA-infiltrated U.S. media in a far more extensive and insidious effort to brainwash people with anti-communism. The CIA used germ warfare agents to destroy Cuba's swine herds, part of an effort to starve the Cuban people into submission. The CIA also planned the assassination of Cuban president Fidel Castro. This evil history was fully documented, during hearings before a Senate committee chaired by Sen. Frank Church (D-Idaho) and by many other tribunals.

CIA apologists may plead that that "The Company" would never inflict on people here at home the monstrous genocide they inflicted on people around the world. But in the African American communities struggling with the crack cocaine scourge, these disclosures are heard and fully believed. A mood of angry fightback is spreading with mass meetings and promises by Waters of picketlines and other protests. Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.) has provided part of the answer. He has repeatedly introduced legislation to abolish the CIA.