The Big White Lie: The Deep Cover Operation That Expose… (2024)

The Big White Lie: The Deep Cover Operation That Exposed the CIA Sabotage of the Drug War by Michael Levine

I had several problems with this book. First, it could have been much more succinct and more effective accomplishing what the author states he wanted in writing it if he'd simply written what happened instead of recounting every sentence of every conversation, every emotion he felt, every nuance or hunch that he sensed, etc. Second, the reader has to get through hundreds of pages of a walking anxiety attack. Is he being followed and watched? Is the DEA sending him on a high-profile mission while also just hoping to arrest him in the middle of it? Is he being persecuted because he's Jewish? Will his world really come to an end if he leaves after 17 years of service instead of waiting it out a full 25 for a larger pension? It gets exhausting for the reader, and much of it just seemed irrelevant and absolutely distracted from the larger story he wanted to tell. Just flip to the last chapters of the book for the gist of what really mattered-- with actual trial transcripts.

Other problems: I saw an online interview with Levine that mentioned he first dealt with CIA interference while serving as an agent in Thailand at the beginning of his career. Thus, after 15 years it strikes me odd that he'd either be surprised or trying to blow a proverbial whistle about it. He also laments that he didn't get to spend the rest of his career in Buenos Aires. The Foreign Service Act of 1980 makes that impossible-- the longest he could have been posted in any country by the DEA was five years. Nobody appears to have done a FOIA search on Operation Hun, as you can't find any references to it online (unlike other major DEA cases). Levine mentions CIA-backed efforts to prop up right-wing regimes in South America to combat Communism, but never mentions Operation Condor or Operation Charly (Argentina) that were already known by 1993 (Noam Chomsky wrote about it). Argentina put its junta on public trial in 1985, and that information was available at the time of his writing and could have supported his earlier chapters.

This paragraph from his time at Embassy Buenos Aires strikes me as authentic:

"Week after week I attended top-level Country Team meetings with Ambassador (Raul) Castro...during which the number of desparacidos from the previous week would be announced. Ambassador Castro was grieved by what was going on, and we always discussed how we could pressure the Argentine government into changing its ways. The CIA representatives...in stony silence, never offering a single suggestion. The U.S. government was not resolved to end the mass murders, so the prevailing feeling at the embassy was one of helplessness and hopelessness...Some of the Argentine officers and agents upon whom I depended might have been cold-blooded murderers...in some cases there was little doubt."

Spoiler alert: The book is basically about how the DEA was kept from prosecuting major Bolivian drug traffickers like Roberto Suarez, Jose Gasser, Luis Arce-Gomez, who became the Minister of the Interior under the junta of General Luis García Meza, and others because they were CIA assets involved in the "Cocaine Coup" in Bolivia. The later prosecutions of these individuals (and various Colombians after the extradition treaty) came late in the game, and many were not the high-profile traffickers the DEA trumpeted them to be. Levine more or less accuses the Assistant U.S. Attorney who authorized Jose Gasser's release from a Miami jail to return to Bolivia despite overwhelming evidence against him as being corrupt. Another federal judge in Miami -- later impeached by Congress for unrelated reasons-- also granted bail to a Bolivian drug trafficker who went straight back to Bolivia to join the junta. Sonia Atala, the Bolivian "Queen of Cocaine," turned DEA informant along with her husband-- who was also part of the junta-- only after Sonia had already been muscled out of the cocaine business. It was basically a revenge play on her part, and she and her husband used taxpayer money and witness protection to prosecute rivals, reclaim their assets in Bolivia, and continue their drug trafficking from the United States.

"The notion that there were dealers whom I could easily indict and arrest next door in Bolivia getting ready to take over their country and not a single high-ranking DEA bureaucrat or Justice Department attorney seemed interested enough to make a move to stop them just wouldn't sink in." Once in power, now-Interior Minister Arce-Gomez made good on his promise to flood the US with cocaine.

Levine's frantic cables and phone calls to DC, and later offering himself to Newsweek as a source, bring him under internal investigation and removal from Buenos Aires. Despite what he describes as being constantly followed and surveilled by suits in vehicles and monitored by his bosses in DC, he's tapped to do a deep-cover sting operation with Sonia Atala in Tucson, AZ. While the workings of the high-profile deep cover operation might seem interesting, Levine's paranoia about whether each individual member of the DEA team is working with him or against him, and his own desire to flee this life soak up every page and kill the facts. The supposedly high-value cocaine the DEA had supplied is apparently deadly low-value and Levine implies someone at DEA was skimming cocaine from the evidence stashes. At trial, the surveillance tapes in the undercover house have significant portions of missing sound. Ultimately, the damage they do is minimal and the one trafficker that Levine develops sympathy and an outright crush on takes the biggest fall.

By 1983, the one person in the book that Levine seems to admire is able to push forward the indictment of Suarez, Arce-Gomez, and others. In 1989, the now-democratic Bolivian government decided to strip Arce-Gomez of his citizenship in order for the U.S. to extradite him to the United States. "He would be the perfect symbol to show the world that Bolivia was as serious about its war on drugs as Colombia. He would be worth at least $50 million in U.S. aid." He received a 30 year sentence. "He was truly an evil man...but when you consider that (he) would have had no drug customers were it not for Sonia (Atala), and that the coup that gave him power might never have occurred were it not for covert U.S. support, it's difficult to conceive of his extradition and conviction as a victory in the drug war."

I give the book 2 stars out of 5. It is perhaps an important story but told very badly.