Deutch continued with his pledge: “Most importantly, when this investigation is complete I intend to make the results public so that any person can judge the adequacy of the investigation. Anyone in the public who has a wish to look at the report will be able to do so. I want to stress that I am not the only person in the CIA who wants any American to believe that the CIA was responsible for this kind of disgusting charge. Finally, I want to say to you that as of today, we have no evidence of conspiracy by the CIA to engage in encouraging drug traffickers in Nicaragua or elsewhere in Latin America during this or any other period.”
Deutch now endured a grilling of the sort an MIT prof might have had to submit to in the Vietnam War era during a student sit-in. One of the first questions came from a graduate of Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. She wanted to know why anyone should trust the US government on the crack issue after it had covered up for forty years the medical experiments on black men with syphilis. “I’d like to know how this incident differs from what happened at my school where, for forty years, the government denied inflicting syphilis on African-American men.”
Clearly taken aback, Deutch said that he too thought what had happened at Tuskegee was terrible, and then snatched at the silver lining: “Let me say something else. There was no one who came forward forty years ago and said they were going to investigate.”
From the audience now came some harrowing personal accounts of the ravages of crack in their neighborhoods. A woman said, “In Baldwin Village where I live there are no jobs for the children and our kids are just seen as commodities. They are being cycled through the prisons. They come back to the street and are marked and scarred for the rest of their life. You, the President and everybody else should be highly upset. You should be saying, how did this cancer get here?”
Deutch had no response. Then a man stood up and said, “And now we are supposed to trust the CIA to investigate itself?” Deutch responded with an assertion of the Inspector General’s independence, and the crowd grew angrier. “Why don’t you turn it over to an independent counsel, someone who has the power to issues subpoenas. It would have more credibility.” The best Deutch could do with this one was to say that the reason there was no independent counsel was because no criminal complaint had been filed.
Now came one of the most interesting exchanges of the evening. A former Los Angeles police narcotics officer, Michael Ruppert, rose to confront Deutch. “I will tell you, director Deutch, as a former LAPD narcotics detective, that your Agency has dealt drugs throughout this country for a long time.” Roars of applause. Deutch: “If you have information about the CIA [and] illegal activity and drugs you should immediately bring that information to wherever you want. But let me suggest three places: the Los Angeles Police Department …” Cries of “No, no.” Then a question: “If in the course of the Inspector General’s investigation you came across evidence of severely criminal activity and it is classified, will you use that classification to hide the criminal activity, or will you tell the American people the truth?”
Amid continued hostility from the crowd Deutch promised that if such information turned up wrong-doing, “We’ll bring the people to justice.”
Another confrontation, from an obviously middle-class black man: “My question to you is, If you know all this stuff that the Agency has done historically, then why should we believe you today, when you say certainly this could never happen in Los Angeles, when the CIA’s done this stuff all over the world?”
“I didn’t come here thinking everyone was going to believe me,” Deutch replied. “I came here for a much simpler task. I came here to stand up on my legs and tell you I was going to investigate these horrible allegations. All you can do is listen to what I have to say and wait to see the results.”
“But how can we know how many viable documents have been shredded and how can we be certain that more documents won’t be shredded?” asked another black member of the audience. “I don’t know that anybody has found any lost documents in the operational files,” Deutch answered oddly. “I know of nobody who has found any gaps in sequences, any missing files, any missing papers for any period of that time. That may come up …” Deutch was interrupted here by a man who said, “Hey, do you know Walter Pincus?” Deutch said yes, he had heard of Walter Pincus. Why? “Is he an asset of the CIA?” Deutch put his head in his hands and shook it.
Now the crowd was smelling blood and beginning to get testy with Rep. Millender-McDonald for inviting the CIA boss to South Central. “I don’t know why this lady is saluting Deutch’s courage for coming here today,” someone in the crowd cried, “when everybody knows this building has got hundreds of pigs in it. There’s pigs behind those curtains. There’s pigs on the roof. We’re not going to get no ghetto justice today.”
Millender-McDonald shouted the man down, but his sentiments seemed to resonate with the crowd. The next black person to stand up pointed at Deutch and said, “To see you coming in this community today in this way is nothing more than a public relations move for the white people of this country. So you are going to come into this community today and insult us, and tell us you’re going to investigate yourself. You’ve got to be crazy.”
This was the last straw for John Deutch. The questioning was called off and the CIA man spoke a few words to the crowd before leaving: “You know, I’ve learned how important it is for our government and our Agency to get on top of this problem and stop it. I came today to try and describe the approach and have left with a better appreciation of what is on your mind.”
He may have had an uncomfortable moment or two, but John Deutch knew what he was doing and after a glance at the coverage of the occasion, he surely must have felt his calculation had been correct. That very evening Ted Koppel used the meeting as a hook for his first mention of the CIA–drug connection on his Nightline show – three months after the story broke. Koppel spent half an hour interviewing members of the South Central audience via satellite from his control booth in Washington, D.C. He sought desperately to find someone who would say that Deutch’s visit had been worthwhile, that it was a useful first step in the process of allaying suspicion. But he was disappointed. The great interrogator was mostly met with sharp-pointed questions himself, such as “You come down here and talk about solutions. We have kids that are dying, we have hospitals for babies born drug addicted. When are you guys going to come down and bring cameras to our neighborhood?” Koppel: “I’m not sure that anybody even thought that was why Director Deutch came there today. He’s coming here because a lot of you are in anguish. A lot of you are angry. A lot of you are frustrated by what you believe to be the CIA’s involvement in bringing drugs to South Central LA. Now, I want to hear from someone who thought it did some good.”
The closest Koppel could get to this objective was Marcine Shaw, the mayor pro tem of Compton: “Well, I am glad Mr. Deutch was here today. I’m glad Congresswoman McDonald had him here because that’s what it took to get your cameras here, Mr. Koppel.” Koppel shook his head and answered, “Yes, but that’s not the question.” He wrapped up his show with the doleful thought that “if any suspicions were put to rest or minds changed, there was no evidence of it in South Central this evening.”
By and large, the commentary in the white press on the Deutch’s visit was positive. He had reached out. He had confronted “black paranoia” head on. The only sour note was from Washington Post columnist James Glassman, who argued that Deutch had demeaned government by going out to South Central and “listening passively as paranoids and lunatics shouted epithets at him. That’s not the way a top government official should behave in the face of vicious insults.”
But aside from Glassman’s diatribe on Capitol Gang, a TV show, Deutch vindicated a proposal he and the Council on Foreign Relations had made some months before, which attracted remarkably little criticism. Deutch had said in congressional testimony that he wanted to change the twenty-year-old policy of the Agency not using journalists accredited to American
news organizations, nor clergy or members of the Peace Corps. He argued that American journalists should feel a civic responsibility to step outside their role as journalists. (The ban may have been official policy, though the CIA has always retained journalistic assets.) To his credit, Koppel testified in Congress against Deutch’s proposal, though he certainly didn’t repeat on the night of Deutch’s town meeting what he said in Congress: “I’m opposed to having the legal option of using journalistic cover. The CIA has broken laws. It will again. When an intelligence official breaks US laws, if their argument is persuasive Congress can be lenient. If the CIA must use journalists, it will do so, but it should have to be breaking the law in doing so.”
Sources
Maxine Waters has been one of the heroes of this story. We are grateful to Waters and her resourceful staff for providing crucial documents and copies of the congresswoman’s numerous speeches on the CIA, urban America, money laundering and the drug trade. James Jones has written the most thorough account of the Tuskegee syphilis experiments, Bad Blood. For information on the Justice Department’s snooping into the life of Martin Luther King and his family we turned to Stephen Tompkins’s amazing investigation in the Memphis Commercial Appeal, Taylor Branch’s Pillar of Fire (the second volume of his biography of King), and David Garrow’s The FBI and Martin Luther King. Ward Churchill and Jay Vander Wall’s books tell the story of the FBI’s COINTELPRO operation against the Black Panthers and the American Indian Movement. For statistics on the racist application of the death penalty we are indebted to defense attorney Stephen Bright and the Death Penalty Information Center. The Sentencing Project provided us with material on the disparity in federal and state sentencing guidelines between powder cocaine and crack. They also gave us statistics on incarceration rates over the past twenty years by offense, race, age and gender. There is no better guide to the recent cultural history of Los Angeles than Mike Davis’s City of Quartz. Dan Baum’s book, Smoke and Mirrors, is a funny and dire account of US drug policy since Nixon. Cracked Coverage by Jimmie Reeves and Richard Campbell is a detailed examination of how crack users came to be demonized, jailed and killed for the sake of politicians and ratings. But Clarence Lusane’s Pipe Dream Blues remains the best critique of the racist nature of the drug war. It’s a book that badly needs to be updated and republished to include the equally vile and racially motivated drug polices of the Clinton era.
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