THE EXPERT WITNESS
Media Works Overtime to hide CIA Crimes
VOL. I OF THE CIA'S OWN INVESTIGATION OF ITSELF clears them of all complicity of trafficking in drugs to the nation they have sworn to protect. Now narcotic agents who have put people in jail actually condemn the CIA as guilty of the worst kind of treachery in this country: conspiracy, aiding and abetting large-scale drug trafficking. Yet almost every mainstream media outlet that I'm aware of has taken the CIA's summary of their own report, clearing themselves of all charges, and repeated it as "news," apparently either without reading the actual text, or not understanding what it meant.
Apparently many journalists simply do not understand the laws of conspiracy and aiding and abetting, or they don't want to. Or maybe they really trust the CIA to be doing the honorable thing, the right thing they're supposed to be doing for their enormous budget. Katherine Graham, publisher of the Washington Post, once said to a class of CIA recruits in the late '80s that it was the media's duty in this dangerous world, to hide things from the American public, supposedly to protect us, in some kind of partnership with the CIA, to parse out only what information the American people needed to know for our own good.
Let's look at some of the news items which the media has apparently decided to protect us from by not printing it, or not covering it in depth, and see if the CIA is to be trusted, or if they are a gang costing as much as a hundred billion a year, who cannot do, or is unwilling to do, what we pay them to do.
Recently, a CIA agent in a very key position, a code-breaker, was fired and arrested for extorting Central Intelligence. He actually went to the CIA and told them, either pay me a half million dollars, or I am going to tell the countries whose codes we've broken that we have those codes. A flat-out extortion! That's a Mafia thing. I've been a federal agent for 25 years, investigating corruption as part of my duties, but I've never heard of an agency whose agents thought they could get away with acting like the Mafia. What does that tell you about the atmosphere of lawlessness that must be prevalent inside this agency? Incredible! God only knows how long the media sat on that story or why they did not follow it up.
Or take Aldrich Ames, CIA's chief of Soviet counterintelligence who, for nine long years, got away with coming to work in their "super secret" Langley headquarters drunk, driving different luxury cars, living way beyond his means, while he was secretly working for the KGB.
Or Mr. Nicholson, a former CIA station chief, who was recruited by the KGB only days after Aldrich Ames pled guilty. In Nicholson's own words, he thought that with Ames in jail, "There'd be an opening in the KGB." This was a CIA station chief!
Then there is the news--never covered in the American media, or only barely covered--that John Deutsch, the man lauded and hired by President Clinton, lauded and ratified by the Senate and praised by every media talking and writing head in existence, according to foreign journalists, was really fired for ineptitude, for his massive, almost sophomoric failure in toppling Saddam Hussein, costing close to $300 million and tens of thousands of lives.
If you heard the CIA hearings, you know about the Venezuelan National Guard case that happened in 1991 and was kept out of the media until November 1993. An Associated Press report said the NYTimes had the story since 1991 and when they heard that "60 Minutes" was going to run a piece on it in '93, the NYTimes finally ran it. This case involved the National Guard, CIA assets, and a general by the name of Guillen, all caught smuggling a ton of cocaine. My information right from the git-go (coming from sources inside DEA) was that it was more like 20-21 tons, and that's the truth that's coming out now. These CIA assets were smuggling 20 to 21 tons of cocaine. That's doing much better than the Medellin Cartel ever did, and this case is in court right now in Miami.
But guess what? Maxine Waters testified that she tried to get information from the U.S. Attorney in Miami about the case, but was told that he could tell her nothing. National security! By the way, the head of the DEA, Judge Bonner, looked right at the camera on "60 Minutes" and said the CIA smuggled drugs--there was no other way to describe it. National security? They're telling us that the worst security threat to this nation right now is the drug problem, and yet, because of national security, they can't tell us the source of 21 tons of cocaine and what happened to it? Let me tell you, that much cocaine killed a lot of Americans.
Another case barely covered by the media is a CIA division chief fired in 1996 because he tried to intervene on behalf of a Dominican drug dealer who was, he alleged, a boyhood friend. You're not supposed to get fired for what is known as "aiding and abetting." You're supposed to go to jail for aiding and abetting! There are tens of thousands of Americans in jail for this. Some I've put there.
There's even more bizarre stuff--beyond belief--that the media either refused to touch or barely touched. On July 10, 1996, it was revealed that 100 government credit cards intended for use by the CIA's overseas spies were stolen by three CIA clerks who used them for nine months, spending almost $200,000 for stuff similar to that which Oliver North bought with government funds--designer clothing, hotel lodging, meal tickets to basketball games, tires, auto accessories, motorcycle helmets, CD players, and the like. What's really incredible is these clerks weren't the first. They stole the cards and used them right after two other CIA clerks--Steven Jackson and Thomas Bernard Lee--pled guilty to the same thing. Holy National Security?
The CIA weapons smugglers are another story virtually untouched by mainstream media for five years. Mind you, this is the agency that's telling us they would never smuggle drugs. In the fall of 1991, two CIA contract employees tried to smuggle into the United States a small arsenal of weapons described as exotic and powerful, which included automatic AK-47s, grenade launchers, British submachine guns, Iraqi pistols (illegal in the U.S.)--all of which were stolen from Desert Storm. And who caught them? ATF caught these guys. One of them pled guilty. The other faced only a judge, who said it was close, but he found him innocent.
If you read the facts, no jury would have found this guy innocent, but federal judges--you just don't know any more. The smugglers were Ret. Army Brigadier General Charles Getz, a CIA contractor, and Wayne Ostenkosky, a top CIA ordinance expert, whom the prosecutor called a "barrel-sucker." Barrel-suckers are people who just love guns. By the way, Ret. Gen. Getz, in this time of children killing children with guns, said he wanted to give them away as gifts. Ostenkosky said, "We didn't do anything that hadn't been done a million times before."
How do our elected protectors allow this to happen? Not even Hollywood would buy these absurd gang-that-can't-spy-straight scenarios. It happens because CIA agents feel that they are above the law and media scrutiny, and consider congressional oversight a joke, referring to it as "the oversight." Either we change the law to say, "Hey, you are above the law--you can do anything you want," or they should pay the penalty, just like us, just like the average guy, just like the thousands that I've put in jail.
This is a country where Will Foster is now beginning his second year of a 99-year sentence in Texas for possessing marijuana plants that he was using for arthritis. This is a man with a clean record, a family, a computer business, and evidence indicating that he had severe arthritis. This is a nation where the president admits to smoking grass--but not inhaling it. As a narcotic agent, I want to tell you if the President was caught not inhaling that joint in Texas, he'd have an 11-digit serial number after his name instead of Commander-in-Chief.
I've been asked if I'm anti-government. I am anti-crook; I am anti-corruption; I am anti-anyone in government who thinks himself above the same law that sends your children to jail. And just calling someone "anti-government " who has worked as a federal agent for 25 years and won almost every award given for doing that job is absurd. The point is, I took an oath to protect the Constitution and the people. And that's the oath I'm going to live up to. Am I a CIA-basher? You are not going to find anything I have ever said about that Agency that is not solidly grounded in fact.
I am definitely against those in the CIA who, believing themselves above the law, have done irreparable damage to the society that pays them. This year their budget is $27 billion that we know of, and at the same time people in that agency exact from us the worst price in the lives of our children and our economy that they can. And some experts say they actually overrun their budget by as much as 400%.
For a country looking to save its social security system by taxing its already heavily taxed populace, for a country who has promising young minds unable to afford an education, for a country whose working people cannot afford health insurance, this is an enormous burden. As Al D'Amato said, during the Iran Contra hearings, "We tax Americans to fight drugs, but we're in bed with the biggest drug-dealers in the world." We can't have such lingering doubts; we've got to know all the facts.
--Michael Levine is Host of THE EXPERT WITNESS radio show (WBAI, NY 99.5 FM, Tuesdays 7-8pm) and author, with Laura Kavanau, of Deep Cover, The Big White Lie, and Triangle of Death.