INSIDE THE CIA’S SECRET WAR ON JAMAICA - CASEY GANE-McCALLA

Another short little one to sort of clear the palate after THE ROYAL FAMILY. I’m, as is quite clear from this website, pretty interested in CIA history and, like anyone with ears, I’m interested in Jamaican culture and this seemed like a good way to marry these two interests. This book covers the involvement of the CIA in Jamaica during the 70’s and 80’s, with slight digressions before and after this period, and illustrates the ways in which the CIA deployed a strategy of tension to undermine and eventually oust Micheal Manley, a pretty milquetoast social democrat, but one that was friends with Castro, the CIA’s ultimate enemy. Typically, that term, “Strategy of Tension,” is deployed to explain Italy during this same period, where the CIA and others ratchet up the violence, both political and “regular” to create a sense of chaos and unease that would encourage the population to abandon leftist politics and embrace a US approved strongman, but we see here how that same playbook was deployed in Jamaica to the same ends. If you know anything about Jamaican history of if you’ve listened closely to Jamaican music or read that popular novel “A Brief History of Seven Killings” you know that Jamaican public housing complexes are associated with political parties as well as underworld “Dons” who de facto run these areas, administer a sort of street justice, who are likewise plugged into these political factions. The JLP, the CIA and USA’s preferred Jamaican political party was (is?) associated with Lester Lloyd “Jim Brown” Coke’s famous Shower Posse gang that reigned chaos across the island for over a decade and was heavily, heavily, involved in the cocaine trade during the crack era of the 80’s. At one point, the AP estimated that over 80% of America’s crack trade could be traced back to the Shower Posse. This, obviously, ties right into the more famous Webb discoveries about the crack trade on the West coast running through Freeway Ricky and the CIA supported Contras. So there’s heavy CIA involvement on at least 2 major crack routes, though for whatever reason, this one is much less known. Dozens of Shower Posse members have stated consistently and under oath that they received CIA training as well as drugs and weapons. Jim Brown himself was set to do some telling himself before he got the Epstein treatment; someone burned him alive in his Kingston cell awaiting extradition to the US. Pretty fascinating stuff overall. The book stays away from more speculative stuff (aka the Bob Marley Cancer conspiracy stuff, though the book does go into the Marley shooting in a pretty well sourced way) but it’s pretty short and towards the end it spirals into a few chapters about the various actions of the famous anti-Castro Cuban terrorists whe supported in general, as well as a lot of time spent on the Bush family (HW in particular) and all the shady shit in his life. It’s still interesting, but I’m familiar with a lot of it, this telling is pretty clipped and most of it doesn’t directly tie to Jamaica. But overall, a very interesting rundown on a very underappreciated aspect of CIA fuckery and a really succinct look at a strategy of tension in practice. There’s a much larger book to be written about the 80’s cocaine explosion on both coasts and how this connected into CIA evildoing in Latin America plus how the cocaine violence in Black communities in the US was itself a deliberate strategy of tension to sort of place a death knell in Black Power politics in the states. There’s a lot there and I always feel like I’m glimpsing part of it without fathoming the whole.