Special Agent Roy Ibble reporting . . .

[Andrew Dinn]

Foax,

The scene: Hector has sprung for tickets for Flash and Frenesi to
fly to Vineland the Good, `having left them at the Regional Office
with Roy Ibble, one of Flash's old handlers' (VL 352.17). Exactly
which `Agency' Ibble works for and Flash used to work for is not
clarified here but I assume, since Hector is involved, that it is
DEA (this also fits in with my background reading of which more
later). Ibble bemoans the effects of Reagan's budget squeeze on his
agency's lot, not to mention the interference of other federal
agencies on his patch:

    "We're nobody's protege this administration, State Department
  hates our ass, NSC thinks we're scum, if Customs don't steal it
  out from under us, Justice and FBI try to either run it or fuck
  it up and frankly," lowering his voice, "notice how cheap coke
  has been since '81? However in the world do you account for
  that?"
    "Roy! Is you're sayin' the President himself is duked into some
  deal? Quit foolin'! Next you'll be tellin' me George Bush."
    Roy kept a prop Bible on his desk, useful when he needed to get
  along with born-agains in the Agency. He opened it and pretended
  to read. "Harken unto me, read thou my lips, for verily I say that
  wheresoever the CIA putteth in its meathooks upon the world, there
  also are to be found those substances which God may have created
  but the U.S. Code hath decided to control. Get me? Now old Bush
  used to be head of the CIA, so you figure it out?" (VL 355.28)

Well, figuring it out is what I have been doing for the last few
months, courtesy of our very own Steelhead's book on the CIA's
involvement with drugs followed up by a fairly large sample of the
referenced works on which it is based. And Pynchon was right on the
money, and what is more he wrote this before 1990 which predates
many of the sources I have read. But what emerges is more than a
few links between Pynchon's work, the CIA and the drug business.
I would recommend anyone with an interest in Pynchon to read Jeff's
book and then to go back to his sources as I have done for the
Pynchon interest alone. But more than that I think that anyone who
sympathises with Pynchon's politics will find these books riveting
(if you don't think Pynchon is political -- in his books I mean,
whatever the man may say think or do in his personal life -- then you
really ought to read this stuff, preferably removing your head out
of that orifice so as to obtain better lighting conditions).

The most notable source and the one most pertinent to the above quote
is, of course, Gary Webb's Dark Alliance which I just finished this
evening and which prompted me to write this note. Webb documents, in
painstaking detail, how the CIA were not only aware of but positively
facilitated, supported and encouraged the smuggling of cocaine into
the US, most notably into South Central LA. The CIA denied that their
agents were involved directly in wrongdoing, claiming that those
fingered were not employed by the agency, but of course they would say
that. As well as reporting the incriminating testimony of many of the
drug dealers who were supporting the Nicaraguan Contras and of a variety
of DEA, FBI and LAPD agents/officers who ran up against institutional blocks
to their investigation of cocaine and crack supply into the US, Webb
details voluminous circumstantial evidence and various `unfortunate' pieces
of official documentation which belie the CIA's claims to innocence. Most
damning of all is the fact that the government carefully and explicitly
changed
the law in 1981 so that they would not be obliged to report any
information they obtained regarding drug trafficking to the Justice
Department. Webb finds it hard to believe that this was not done with
the deliberate intention of aiding their use of drug sales to fund covert
and in many cases illegal operations (i.e. explicitly banned by Congress)
in Afghanistan and Nicarigua and I find it hard to disagree having read all
his evidence.

Steely's book (White Out : The CIA, Drugs and the Press, Alexander Cockbburn
and Jeffrey St Clair, Verso 1998) is perhaps a better place to start reading.
The book is essentially a primer on the CIA's links with the drug trade.
Webb's story is one of its main concerns, particularly the way his story
was rubbished by the mainstream press (particular thanks are due to a host
of mainly Washington journalists who have acted as apologists for the CIA
many times) and his paper was squeezed into backing down on the story and
dumping the blame on Webb. Webb resigned in protest at his treatment and
went on to publish the full story as a book.

Such press whitewash has a long history as I found out when I checked another
one of Steely's sources, Dirty Work, Philip Agee and Louis Wolf's collection
of essays and journalism pieces on the CIA from the mid 70s. In fact the CIA
even trained journalists and sent them out to do their dirty work in the
mainstream press. And not just in the US but here in Europe too. I have not
yet
obtained a copy of Agee's `Inside the Company : CIA Diary', in which Agee
spills
the beans on the agency for which he worked until its immoral behaviour
convinced him it was beyond reform, but it is is highly recommended as an
intro
to their modus operandi. Agee took much flak from the CIA's press buddies for
publishing guides to spotting and exposing agents and was blamed, quite
unjustly,
for the assassination of the Greek station chief in 1976 as documented in
Dirty Work.

But let's get back to those drugs and Pynchon. Steely's book starts with the
CIA's first involvement in drugs, while the agency was only a twinkle in Bill
Donovan's eye. OSS recruited mafia support to help their invasion of southern
Italy, asking New York's mafia boss Lucky Luciano to come to their aid and
springing him from prison in return. The fact that he was thereby allowed to
continue his drug dealing to US citizens was clearly no problem. Besides, most
of the heroin he sold went to blacks, certainly no threat to the Ivy League
boys in the OSS. Richard Harris Smith's history of the OSS documents this
deal,
as well as providing a highly entertaining Who's Who of all those ex OSS men
subsequently slotted into the government-military-industrial complex, the
CIA in particular. My take on GR is that it is set during WWII because that is
when and where the US came to global dominance. Read Harris Smith's book
and you
will see that that dominance came about thanks to US and British intelligence
infiltrating agents or recruiting ex enemy agents across the globe in every
wartime theatre from Western Europe, Eastern Europe, South-East Asia and North
Africa (Central & South America has been a US `back yard' playground for
years, but
post-war CIA involvement in manipulating this region's politics is well
documented
too).

Another source which documents this US rise to global superspy status is
Christopher
Simpson's Blowback, which documents recruitment of ex Nazis as Eastern Block
agents. It also includes details of Nazis who were spirited out of Europe
to help
the cold war effort at home in the US, the most obvious, for a Pynchon reader,
being our old friends Werner von Braun, Walter Dornberger and various other
rocket scientists. But the CIA also recruited Nazis who had performed `medical
experiments' on Jews and appropriated the results of horrific abuses for their
own chemical and biological warfare programmes.

This is where the Pynchon trail picks up again. The CIA chemical warfare
people
were a major player in research into psychoactive drugs, most notably LSD
but also
cannabis. John Marks' `The Search for the Manchurian Candidate' and Martin
Lee/
Bruce Shlain's `Acid Dreams The Complete Social History of LSD, the CIA,
the Sixties
and Beyond' both document the agency's deep involvement in attempts to use
these
drugs for nefarious purposes. Details of individual operations wree carefully
deleted by the agency, but policy documents and documents detailing the
funding
of the research have been supplemented with corroborative detail by various
agents
to prove that the CIA repeatedly tested these drugs (not to mention others
which
are far more scary such as the hallucinogen developed by for military use
which
sends you on a major trip for at least a week) on their own citizens
without the
subjects' consent or, frequently, knowledge of what was being done to them.
Slothrop's
trip down the toilet could be taken straight out of one of their case
reports. Oh and
yes, Ghengis Cohen, who is doling out LSD to housewives in TCOL49, may not
be real
but the idea that such experiments were conducted is no figment of Pynchon's
imagination; such research programmes were bankrolled by the CIA. In fact, you
find any US research into LSD before 1965 and it is almost certain it will
have
been backed by money ultimately derived (via various laundering channels)
from the
CIA. Even Ken Kesey's acid came from the CIA via the military.

What is most intriguing is the fact that most LSD research funding was cut,
almost
overnight, fairly shortly before LSD began to hit the streets in large
quantities.
For years the CIA programme was based on the idea that LSD induced temporary
insanity -- an artifact of the bizarre conditions in which they employed
the drug,
of course. The program appeared to be be dropped as this view came to be
challenged
by data from some of the more independent researchers who were using the
drugs in
very different circumstances and for very different purposes to the more
gung-ho
people the agency relied upon e.g. as an extremely successful treatment for
alcoholism.
It is more than a little suspicious that this research was squashed and
hidden as the
drug moved to the streets and the hints of various CIA-connected people
being involved
in the 60s drug markets suggests that once again the CIA might have found a
better use for
the drug as a tool to control or divert forces within their own country
than for
operations against enemies abroad.

Pynchon's interests turn up again in Don Baum's `Smoke and Mirrors : The
War on Drugs
and the Politics of Failure' with, of all people, Richard Nixon. Baum's
book looks at the
demonisation of drugs, starting with Nixon's `War on Drugs' in 1969. It
links this
propaganda war with policies intended to reverse the progress on social
justice made
during the 60s, allowing ever greater restrictions on civil liberties to be
snuck
into law in order to deal with a fabulous and obviously fabricated drug
menace and
bypassing all the research which proved that deprivation and the very
criminalisation of
drugs were the major contributors to the problems blamed on the drugs
themselves. This phoney
war eventually grew into a federal boondoggle encouraging excesses such as
CAMP, commando
like raids, asset seizures, spotter planes, helicopters, etc just as
Pynchon describes
them in Vineland.

But hang on a minute, you may ask. If the CIA are so heavily involved in
the drug business
in order to fund their covert ops then what is the federal government doing
providing funds
to support states in clamping down on the drug trade? Well, it does add up,
actually. The
drug trade is very much about turf wars. Since it has such a ready market
there is lots
of competition for the business, illegal or not. The war on drugs served to
allow highly
repressive legislation which required minimal evidence (in many cases no
evidence at all)
in order to sieze assets and imprison suspects. Such sledgehammer laws are
perfect for
ensuring that those who are doing the dealing stay onside with government
agencies
who encourage and profit from their trade, since provision of evidence is
one of things
the CIA (not to mention those who cooperated with them in the FBI, DEA
Justice Dept and
Dept of State) have repeatedly done their best to avoid, as Gary Webb's
book shows.
Besides, such laws have the added advantage that they allow these agencies
to set up anyone
they want, whether or not they are really drug dealers. Baum documents a
variety of cases
where the drug laws were used to imprison people and steal their money and
property without
trial. In many of these cases even when they were acknowledged as innocent
they received no
recompense for their imprisonment and no return of their money/property.
Pynchon did not
make up Zoyd's story from whole cloth.

Steely's book was described by one commentator as `disturbing'. Alex
Cockburn, his co-author,
replied that no, actually, it was not disturbing to find that the CIA was
implicated in
drug dealing on a global scale. On the contrary, it is actually quite
reassuring to find
out that you were not paranoid all along, that it really is true, that
things really are
that corrupt and evil. It is. Reassuring that is. Although, at the same
time, it is also
quite breathtaking. But ask yourself, did you ever believe that it would be
any different?
The US, the champion of the `free' world, has been destabilising
governments, perverting
democracy, assassinating, torturing and abusing free people around the
world for most of
the last 50 years. If the agents of this abuse, the CIA, needed to fund the
abuse by peddling
drugs to `the dregs of their society' do you think they would baulk at that?

I worked for one term in a school in Peckham in inner London during late
1983. Peckham,
Bermondsey and Tower Hamlets, where the kids lived, are the infill housing
schemes in the
old docklands area from all that bomb damage during the war. 1983 was just
around when heroin
wraps started being sold for school kids to smoke at £5 a throw. I know
that several of
the kids in my class were taking drugs, e.g. the kid who had to been in
court three times
with a string of over 80 burglaries to his name (many of them tacked onto
his case just to
clear them up, of course). I now live in Edinburgh where from 1983-6 heroin
distribution led
to the highest per capita incidence of HIV in Europe, exacerbating some of
the worst slums in
Britain with the appalling consequences of that disease. The heroin came
from Afghanistan,
from the Mujaheddin who were trained, funded and aided in the distribution
of the drug by the
CIA.

That's my two best reasons for reading these books and for pushing them all
at you. Yes, the
Pynchon connection is important and interesting but in the end this is not
about a book or
books. It is about people, lives being squashed or destroyed by evil vested
interests.
The same old shit happening to the same old people. Don't ignore it. Read
about it, get
wise and then get angry. Then tell people about it and get them angry too.
I am sure that
was what Pynchon wanted you to do when he wrote that jibe about Bush and
the CIA.

I'll finish by quoting Gary Webb's closing comments from Dark Alliance.

    One of the questions I have been asked many times since this story
broke is this: Now
  that the facts are out there, what can we do? My answer, depressing and
cynical as it
  may be, is always the same. Not much. Not now. And certainly not until
the American
  public and its Congressional representatives regain control of the CIA
and shred the
  curtain of secrecy that keeps us from discovering these crimes of state
until it is
  too late.
    Perhaps when the government officials who presided over these outrages
are safely
  in their crypts, and their apologists and cheerleaders are buried with
them, future
  historians can finally call these men to account for the miseries they
caused. Even if
  that is all that ever happens, it will be fitting and just, because the
favourable
  judgement of history is ultimately what they craved.

Let's see if we can start that ball rolling before the Reagans, Bushes,
Norths, et al
make it to the crypts.


Andrew Dinn
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