The Cobra

The chiefs of the Sinaloa knew they had stolen nothing from the Don. In others, this might have provoked a sense of bewilderment, but cocaine gangs have only one mood other than satisfaction and that is rage.

Finally, the Cobra, through DEA contacts in northern Mexico, put it about among the Mexican police that it was the Gulf cartel and their allies La Familia who had betrayed the Nogales border crossing to the American authorities; the opposite of the truth—that the Cobra had invented the entire episode. Half the police worked for the gangs and passed on the lie.

It was, for Sinaloa, a declaration of war, and they duly declared it. The Gulf people and their friends in La Familia did not know why, since they had shopped nobody, but had no choice other than to fight back. And for executioners they brought in the Zetas, a mob that hired itself out for the business of the most gruesome murders.

By January, the Sinaloa hoodlums were being slaughtered by the score. The Mexican authorities, Army and police simply stood back and tried to pick up the hundreds of bodies.

“What exactly are you doing?” Cal Dexter asked the Cobra.

“I am demonstrating,” said Paul Devereaux, “the power of deliberate disinformation, which some of us learned the hard way over forty years of the Cold War.”

All intelligence agencies during those years realized that the most devastating weapon against an enemy agency, short of a real mole inside the fabric, was the enemy’s belief that he had one. For years the obsession of the Cobra’s predecessor, James Angleton, that the Soviets had a mole inside the CIA nearly tore that agency apart.

Across the Atlantic, the British spent years fruitlessly trying to identity the “Fifth Man” (after Burgess, Philby, Maclean and Blunt). Careers were broken when suspicion fell on the wrong man.

Devereaux, working his way up from new college boy to CIA mandarin over those years, had watched and learned. And what he had learned over the previous year, and the only reason he had thought the task of destroying the cocaine industry might be feasible where others had quickly given up, was that there were mark

ed similarities between the cartels and gangs on one side and spy agencies on the other.

“They are both closed brotherhoods,” he told Dexter. “They have complex and secret rituals of initiation. Their only diet is suspicion amounting to paranoia. They are loyal to the loyal but ferocious to the traitor. All outsiders are suspect by the simple fact of being outside.

“They may not confide even in their own wives and children, let alone social friends, so they tend to socialize only with one another. As a result, rumors move like wildfire. Good information is vital, accidental misinformation regrettable, but skillful disinformation deadly.”

From his first day of study, the Cobra had realized that the situations of the USA and Europe were different in one vital regard. Europe’s points of entry for the drug were numerous, but ninety percent of the American supply came via Mexico, a country that actually created not one gram of it.

As the three giants of Mexico and the various smaller cartels fell upon one another, competing for the diminished quantities and avenging scores constantly repeated by fresh onslaughts on one another, what had been a product shortage north of the border became a drought. Until that winter, it had been an abiding relief to the American authorities that the insanity south of the border stayed there. That January, the violence crossed the border.

To disinform the gangs of Mexico, all the Cobra had to do was feed the lie to the Mexican police. They would do the rest. North of the border, that was not so easy. But in the USA, there are two other vehicles for spreading disinformation. One is the network of thousands of radio stations; some are so shady they actually serve the underworld, others feature young and fiercely ambitious “shock jocks” desperate to become rich and famous. These have scant regard for accuracy but an insatiable appetite for sensational “exclusives.”

The other vehicle is the Internet and its bizarre offspring, the blog. With the genius-level technology of Jeremy Bishop, the Cobra created a blog whose source could never be traced. The blogger portrayed himself as a veteran of the complex array of gangs that infest the USA. He purported to have contacts in most of them and sources even inside the forces of law and order.

Using the patched-through information lines from the DEA, CIA, FBI and another dozen agencies that the Presidential Order had given him, the blogger was able to reveal genuine tidbits of information that were enough to stun the main gangs of the continent. Some of these gems were about themselves, others about their rivals and enemies. In and among the true material went the lies that provoked the second civil war—among the prison gangs, the street gangs and the biker gangs who, among them, controlled cocaine from the Rio Grande to Canada.

By the end of the month, young shock jocks were perusing the gang blog on a daily basis, elevating the items found to gospel truth and broadcasting them state by state.

In a rare flicker of humor, Paul Devereaux called the blogger “Cobra.” And he started with the biggest and most violent of the street gangs, the Salvadorean MS-13.

This giant gang had started as a residue of El Salvador’s vicious civil war. Young terrorists, immune to pity or remorse, found themselves unemployed, and unemployable, and named their gang “La Mara” after a street in the capital San Salvador. As their crimes became too much for such a small country, they spread to neighboring Honduras, recruiting over thirty thousand members.

When Honduras passed draconian laws and imprisoned thousands, the leaders left for Mexico, and, finding even that country too crowded, moved to Los Angeles, adding the “13” of 13th Street to their name.

The Cobra had studied them intensively—their all-over tattooing; the pale blue-and-white clothing, after the colors of the Salvadorean flag; their taste for hacking up their victims with machetes; and their reputation. This was such that even in the patchwork quilt of American gangs, they had no friends or allies. Everyone feared and hated them, so the Cobra began with MS-13.

He went back to the Nogales confiscation, telling the Salvadoreans that the cargo had been intended for them until it was stopped by the authorities. Then he inserted two pieces of information that were true and one that was not.

The first was that the crew in the truck had been allowed to escape; the second was that the confiscated cocaine had vanished between Nogales and the capital, Flagstaff, where it was due for incineration. The lie was that it had been “liberated” by the Latin Kings, who had thus stolen it from MS-13.

With the MS-13 having branches, known as “cliques,” in a hundred cities in twenty states, it was impossible that they did not hear this, even though it was only broadcast in Arizona. Within a week, MS-13 had declared war on the other giant Latino gang in the USA.

By the beginning of February the biker gangs had ended a long truce: the Hell’s Angels had turned on the Bandidos and their allies, the Outlaws.

A week later, the bloodletting and chaos had enveloped Atlanta, the new cocaine hub of the U.S. Atlanta is Mexican controlled, with the Cubans and Puerto Ricans working alongside but under them.

A network of great interstate highways lead from the U.S.-Mexican border northeast to Atlanta and another grid runs south to Florida, where access from the sea had been virtually ended by the DEA operation out of Key West, and north to Baltimore, Washington, D.C., New York and Detroit.

Fed by disinformation, the Cubans turned on the Mexicans, whom they were convinced were cheating them out of the diminished consignments arriving from the border zone.

The Hell’s Angels, taking terrible casualties from the Outlaws and Bandidos, called for help from their friends, the all-white Aryan Brotherhood, and triggered a rash of slayings in jails across the country where the Aryans hold sway. This brought in the Crips and Bloods.