For six weeks after his series came out, Webb waited in a kind of honeymoon. His e-mail was exploding, he recalls, "from ordinary people who said, 'This has restored my faith in newspapers.' It was from college students, housewives that heard me on the radio; it was really remarkable to think that journalism could have this kind of effect on people, that people were out marching in the streets because of something that had been hidden from us all these years. The thing that surprised me was that there was no response from the press, from the government. It was total silence."

Finally, in early October, The Washington Post ran a story by Robert Suro and Walter Pincus headlined, THE CIA AND CRACK: EVIDENCE IS LACKING OF ALLEGED PLOT. The story focused in part on the fact that Webb had given a defense attorney questions to ask Oscar Danilo Blandon about his CIA connections. It also quoted experts who denied that the crack epidemic originated in Los Angeles, disputed that Freeway Rick Ross and Blandon were significant national players in the cocaine trade of the eighties (pegging Blandon's coke business at five tons over the decade, whereas Webb had evidence that it was more like two to five tons per year). And, the article continued, there was no evidence that the black community had been deliberately targeted (the "plot" referred to in the headline and a claim never made by Webb), that the CIA knew about Blandon's drug deals (also a claim never made by Webb, who in the series merely connected Blandon to CIA agents), or that Blandon had ever kicked in more than $60,000 to the contra cause (the Post based this number on unnamed law-enforcement officials;

Webb based his estimate of millions of dollars to the contras from dope sales on grand-jury testimony and court documents). Perhaps the best summary of the Post's retort to Webb came from the paper's own ombudsman, Geneva Overholser, some weeks later: "The Post...showed more passion for sniffing out the flaws in San Jose's answer than for sniffing out a better answer themselves. They were stronger on how much less money was contributed to the contras by the Mercury News's villains that their series claimed, how much less cocaine was introduced into L.A., than on how significant it is that any of these assertions are true."

In late October, the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times weighed in on consecutive days. The Los Angeles Times had two years before described Freeway Rick Ross vividly: "If there was an eye to the storm, if there was a criminal mastermind behind crack's decade-long reign, if there was one outlaw capitalist most responsible for flooding Los Angeles's streets with mass-marketed cocaine, his name was Freeway Rick....Ross did more than anyone else to democratize it, boosting volume, slashing prices, and spreading disease on a scale never

before conceived....While most other dealers toiled at the bottom rungs of the market, his coast-to-coast conglomerate was selling more than five hundred thousand rocks a day, a staggering turnover that put the drug within reach of anyone with a few dollars." In the 1996 response to Webb's series, the Los Angeles Times described Ross as one of many "interchangeable characters" and stated, "How the crack epidemic reached that extreme, on some level, had nothing to do with Ross." Both stories were written by the same reporter, Jesse Katz, and the 1996 story failed to mention his earlier characterization. The long New York Times piece the following day quoted unnamed government officials, CIA personnel, drug agents, and contras, and noted that "officials said the CIA had no record of Mr. Blandon before he appeared as a central figure in the series in the Mercury News."

A common chord rang through the responses of all three papers: It never really happened, and if it did happen, it was on a small scale, and anyway it was old news, because both the Kerry report and a few wire stories in the eighties had touched on the contra-cocaine connection. What is missing from the press responses, despite their length, is a sense that anyone spent as much energy investigating Webb's case as attempting to refute it. The "Dark Alliance" series was passionate, not clinical. The headlines were tabloid, not restrained. But whatever sins were committed in the presentation of the series, they cannot honestly be used to dismiss its content. It is puzzling that The New York Times felt it could discredit the story by quoting anonymous intelligence officials (a tack hardly followed in publishing the Pentagon Papers). In contrast, what is striking in Webb's series is the copius citation of documents. (In the Mercury News's Web-site version-cgi.sjmercury.com/drugs/postscriptfeatures.htm -- are the hyperlinked facsimiles of documents that tug one into the dark world of drugs and agents.) But when Jerry Ceppos, the executive editor of the Mercury News, wrote a letter in response to the Post's knockdown, the paper refused to print it because a defense of Webb's work would have resulted in spreading more "misinformation."

Despite Ceppos's initial defense of the series, the Mercury News seemed to choke on these attacks, and Webb could sense a sea change, But he kept on working, building a a bigger base of facts, following its implications deeper into the government. When the Mercury News forced him to choose between a $600,000 movie offer and book deals and staying on the story, Webb picked the story. He kept discovering people who had flown suitcases full of money to Miami from dope sales for the contras. He documented Blandon's contra dope sales from '82 through '86. Gary Webb was on a tear; he was going to advance the story. Almost none of this was published by the Mercury News; the paper grudgingly ran (and buried) one last story on New Year's Eve 1996.

The paper had printed the story of the decade, the one with Pulitzer prize written all over it, and now was unmistakably backing off it. Webb entered a kind of Orwellian world where no one said anything, but there was this thing in the air. The Mercury News assigned one of its own reporters to review the series, using the stories of the L.A. Times, The New York Times, and The Washington Post as the benchmark for what was fact.

Webb wouldn't admit it to himself, but he had become a dead man walking.

WHEN HECTOR BERRELLEZ SPENT HIS YEAR GOING TO MOVIES IN Washington, he knew he was finished in the DEA. One day in October 1996, a month after he retired, Hector Berrellez picked up a newspaper and read this big story about a guy named Gary Webb. Hector had lived in shadows, and talking to reporters had not been his style. "As I read, I thought, This shit is true," he says now. He hadn't a doubt about what Webb was saying. He saw the reporter as doomed. Webb hit a sensitive area, and for it he would be attacked and disbelieved.

Hector knew all about the Big Dog and the Big Boy rules.

Hector's body aches from the weight of secrets. When we meet, he is in a white sport shirt, slacks, a blue blazer with brass buttons, and a shoulder-holstered 9mm with fifteen rounds in the clip and two more clips strapped under his right arm. He may be a little over-armed for his Los Angeles private-investigation agency (the Mayo Group, which handles the woes of figures in the entertainment industry -- that pesky stalker, that missing money -- for a fat fee up front and two hundred dollars an hour), but not for his history. For the rest of his life, Hector Berrellez will be sitting in nice hotels like this one with a cup of coffee in his hand, a 9mm under his jacket, and very quick eyes.

He saw a lot of things and remembers almost all of them. He wrote volumes of reports. In 1997, he was interviewed by Justice Department officials about those unseemly drug ledgers and contra materials he saw during the raid on the fourteen Blandon stash houses back in 1986.  His interviewers wanted particularly to know whether anyone besides Hector had seen them. They then told Hector that they couldn't find the seized material anymore.

Before he retired, Hector was summoned to Washington to brief Attorney General Janet Reno on Mexican corruption. He talked to her at length about how the very officials she was dealing with in Mexico had direct links to drug cartels. He remembers that she asked very few questions. Now he sits in the nice lounge of the nice hotel, and he believes the CIA is in the dope business; he believes the agency ran camps in Mexico for the contras, with big planes flying in and out full of dope. He now knows in his bones what the hell he really saw on October 27, 1986, when he hit the door of that house in the Los Angeles area and was greeted with politeness and fresh coffee.

But he doesn't carry a smoking gun around. The photos, the ledgers, all the stuff the cops found that morning as they hit fourteen stash houses where all the occupants seemed to be expecting company, all that material went to Washington and seems to have vanished. All those reports he wrote for years while in Mexico and then later running the Camarena case, those detailed reports of how he kept stumbling into dope deals done by CIA assets, never produced any results or even a substantive response.

Hector Berrellez is a kind of freak. He is decorated; he is an official hero with a smiling Ed Meese standing next to him in an official White House photograph. He pulled twenty-four years and retired with honors. He is, at least for the moment, neither discredited nor smeared. Probably because until this moment, he's kept silent.

And Hector Berrellez thinks that if the blacks and the browns and the poor whites who are zombies on dope ever get a drift of what he found out, well, there is going to be blood in the streets, he figures -- there is going to be hell to pay.  He tells me a story that kind of sums up the place he finally landed in, the place that Gary Webb finally landed in. The place where you wonder if you are kind of nuts, since no one else seems to think anything is wrong. An agent he knows was deep in therapy, kind of cracking up from the undercover life. And the agent's shrink decided the guy was delusional, was living in some nutcase world of weird fantasies. So the doctor talked to Hector about his patient, about whether all the bullshit this guy was claiming was true, about dead men and women and children, strange crap like that. And he made a list of his patient's delusions, and he ticked them off to Hector. And Hector listened to them one by one and said, "Oh, that one, that's true. This one, yeah, that happened also." It went on like that. And finally, Hector could tell the shrink wondered just who was nuts -- Hector, his patient, or himself.

ON SUNDAY, MAY 11, 1997, GARY WEBB WAS hanging wallpaper in his kitchen when the San Jose Mercury News published a column by executive editor Jerry Ceppos that was widely read as a repudiation of Webb's series. It was an odd composition that retracted nothing but apologized for everything. Ceppos wrote, "Although the members of the drug ring met with contra leaders paid by the CIA and Webb believes the relationship was a tight one, I feel we did not have proof that top CIA officials knew of the relationship." Fair enough, except that Webb never wrote that top CIA officials knew of the contra-cocaine connection. The national press wrote front-page stories saying that the San Jose Mercury News was backing off its notorious series about crack. The world had been restored to its proper order. Webb fell silent. He had to deal with his own nature. He is not good at being polite. "I'm just fucking stubborn," he says, "and that's all there was to it, because I knew this was a good story, and I knew it wasn't over yet, and I really had no idea of what else to do. What else was I going to do?"

What he did was have the Newspaper Guild represent him in arbitration with the Mercury News over the decision to ship him to the wasteland of Cupertino. "I'm going to go through arbitration, and I'm going to win the arbitration, and I'm going to go to work," he says. "I was just going to fight it out. This was what I did, this was me, I was a reporter. This was a calling; it was not something you do eight to five. People were not exactly

beating down my door, saying, Well, okay, come work for us. I was...unreliable." So he went to Cupertino, and he wrote stories about constipated horses and refused to let his byline be printed. And then he went to his

apartment and missed his wife and family and watched Caddyshack endlessly. He was a creature living a ghostly life. The only thing he didn't figure on was himself. Webb slid into depression. Every week, the 150-mile drive between his family in Sacramento and his job in Cupertino became harder. Every day, it was harder to get out of bed and go to work.

And he was very angry most of the time. He says, "I was going to live in my own house and see my own kids. At some point, I figured something was going to give." Finally, he couldn't make it to work and took vacation time. When that was used up in early August, he started calling in sick. After that, he went on medical leave. A doctor examined him and said, "You are under a great deal of stress," and diagnosed him as having severe depression. He couldn't sleep. He couldn't do much of anything. He decided to write a book about "Dark Alliance," but this time no one wanted it. His agent was turned down by twenty-five publishers before finding a small press, Seven Stories, that operates as a kind of New York court of last resort.

A job offer came from the California state legislature to conduct investigations for the government-oversight committee at about the same money he made for the Mercury News. His wife said, Take the job. Why hang around in this limbo? Webb thought about her words and told himself, What do I win even if I do win in arbitration? I get to go back to my office and get bullshitted the rest of my life. He watered his lawn, worked on the house, read more and more contra stuff. Drifted in a sea of depression. "I didn't know what to do if I couldn't be a reporter," he says. "So all of a sudden, I was standing there on the edge of the cliff, and I don't have what I was doing for the last twenty years -- I don't have that to do anymore. I felt it was like I was neutered. I called up the Guild and said, 'Let's see if they want to settle this case.' They sent me a letter of resignation that I had to sign."

Webb carried the letter with him from November 19 to December 10 of last year. Every day, he got up to sign the letter and mail it. Every night, he went to bed with the letter unsigned. His wife would ask, Have you signed it? Somebody from the Mercury kept calling the Guild and asking, Has he signed it yet?  "I mean," he says softly, "writing my name on that thing meant the end of my career. I saw it as a sort of surrender. It was like signing," and here he hesitates for several seconds, "my death certificate."

But finally he signed, and now he is functionally banned from the business. He's the guy nobody wants, the one who fucked up, the one who said bad things. Officially, he is dead, the guy who wrote the discredited series, the one who questioned the moral authority of the United States government.

If Gary Webb could have talked to a Hector Berrellez in the fall of 1996, when his stories were being erased by the media, Hector would have been like a savior to him. "Because he would have shown what I was reporting was not an aberration," Webb says now, "that this was part of a pattern of CIA involvement with drugs. And he would have been believed." But Webb was not that lucky, and the Hectors of the world were not that ready to talk then. So Webb was left out there alone, one guy with a bunch of interviews and documents. One guy who answered a question no one wanted asked.

I CAN HEAR HECTOR BERRELLEZ TELLING ME that I will never find a smoking gun. I can hear the critics of Gary Webb explaining that all he has is circumstantial evidence. Like anyone who dips into the world of the CIA, I find myself questioning the plain facts I read and asking myself, Does this really mean what I think it means?

-- In 1982, the head of the CIA got a special exemption from the federal requirement to report dealings with drug traffickers. Why did the CIA need such an exemption?

-- Courthouse documents attest to the fact that the Blandon drug organization moved tons of dope for years with impunity, shipped millions to be laundered in Florida, and then bought arms for the contras. Why are Gary Webb's detractors not looking at these documents and others instead of bashing Webb over the head?

-- The internal CIA report of contra cocaine activity has never been released. The Justice Department investigation of Webb's charges has never been released. The CIA has released a censored report on only one volume of Webb's charges. The contra war is over, yet this material is kept secret. Why aren't the major newspapers filing Freedom of Information [Act] requests for these studies?

-- The fifty-year history of CIA involvement with heroin traffickers and other drug connections is restricted to academic studies and fringe publications. Those journalists who find themselves covering the war on drugs should read Alfred McCoy's massive study, The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade, or Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall's Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies, and the CIA in Central America.

-- Following the release of "Dark Alliance," Senator John Kerry told The Washington Post, "There is no question in my mind that people affiliated with, on the payroll of, and carrying the credentials of, the CIA were involved in drug trafficking while involved in support of the contras." Why has the massive Kerry report been ignored to this day?

-- On March 16, 1998, the CIA inspector general, Frederick P. Hitz, testified before the House Intelligence Committee. "Let me be frank," he said. "There are instances where CIA did not, in an expeditious or consistent fashion, cut off relationships with individuals supporting the contra program who were alleged to have engaged in drug-trafficking activity, or take action to resolve the allegations."

Representative Norman Dicks of Washington then asked, "Did any of these allegations involve trafficking in the United States?"

"Yes," Hitz answered.

The question is why a mountain of evidence about the CIA and drugs is ignored and why the legitimate field of inquiry opened by Webb remains unpursued and has become journalistic taboo.

Maybe the CIA is great for America. But if it is, surely it can roll up its sleeves and show us its veins.

WEBB AND HIS WIFE, SUE, ARE STANDING IN the driveway with me after a Thai dinner in Sacramento. The night is fresh; spring is in the air. A frog croaks from the backyard on the quiet and safe suburban street. Sue has just finished rattling off details from one facet of the contra war, the CIA drug-airline operation run out of Ilopango airfield in El Salvador. She seems to have absorbed a library of material over the last three years of her husband's obsession. Before, he always worked like hell, she knows, but on this one he brought it home. He could not keep it separated from his wife and family and his weekly hockey games. So Sue, with her winning smile and cheerful ways, has become an authority on America's dark pages. And we stand there in the fine evening air, the rush of spring surging through the trees and grass and shrubs, talking about the endless details of this buried episode in the secret history.

And I wonder how Webb deals with it, with all the hard work done, with all the facts and documents devoured, and with all this diligent toil resulting in his personal ruin, depriving him of the only kind of work he has ever wanted in his life.

And I remember what he said earlier that day while he sat in his study, leaning toward me, his right hand gripping his left wrist: "The trail is littered with bodies. You go down the last ten years, and there is a skeleton here and a skeleton there of somebody that found out about it and wrote about it. I thought that this is the truth, and what can they do to you if you tell the truth? What can they do to you if you write the truth?"

 (c)1998 by Hearst Communications, Inc. Printed in the USA.

*Judge Overrules Bid to Link CIA, Drug Lords in Camarena Trial - June 08, 1990  by Henry Weinstein, Times Staff Writer

U.S. District Judge Edward Rafeedie barrs attorney Mary Kelly from questioning Laurence Victor Harrison about possible CIA links during the Camarena murder trial.  Harrison was a government-paid witness who had extensive dealings with both Mexican law enforcement and drug traffickers.  Harrison stated that he worked for Miguel Nazar Haro who was DFS director from 1977 to 1982.  Harrison called Nazar his "overboss" and said Nazar was involved in drug trafficking. U.S. officials in Mexico attempted to block DOJ prosecution stating that Nazar was "an essential repeat essential contact for CIA station Mexico City."   At one point, Harrison testified that he had told drug kingpin Ernesto Fonseca Carrillo, for whom he had installed a sophisticated radio system, that law enforcement might go after him (Fonseca). "He told me I was crazy," Harrison recalled. "He told me there was no danger."

Then the witness was asked, "Did Fonseca say it (his feeling of safety) was a political thing?" Harrison replied, "Yes."

On Thursday, Kelly asked Harrison if Nazar was connected to the CIA. Prosecutor Manuel Medrano objected on the grounds that the question was irrelevant to the case. U.S. District Judge Edward Rafeedie sustained the objection.

Later, however, outside the presence of the jury, Kelly told the judge why she thought questions about the CIA were relevant to the Camarena case.

"Fonseca thought his actions were condoned by the Mexican government, as well as sanctioned by the CIA," she said. "This goes to the issue of whether this was an illegal enterprise" and could help her client in her defense.

http://articles.latimes.com/1990-06-08/local/me-647_1_drug-lords

** After presiding over the hearings on the Contra Drug Controversy, Porter Goss, the Chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) was later appointed to the position of Director of Central Intelligence by George W. Bush. He served as CIA Director from September 22, 2004 to May 25, 2006.  Goss had prior service in the intelligence community from 1960 until 1971 — working for the Directorate of Operations, the clandestine services of the CIA. After holding its hearings behind closed doors, the final report on the Contra Drug allegations titled "CIA and Drugs in Los Angeles” was classified in 2000 and never released to the public.

 “In the end the objective of unseating the Sandinistas appears to have taken precedence over dealing properly with potentially serious allegations against those with whom the agency was working,” CIA Inspector General Britt Snider said in classified testimony on May 25, 1999. He conceded that the CIA did not treat the drug allegations in “a consistent, reasoned or justifiable manner.”

Retired CIA Officer Robert D. Steele appeared with Celerino Castillo III in Kevin Booth’s 2007 film American Drug War: The Last White Hope along with several other notable law enforcement agents and political figures.  Steele went on to review Dark Alliance and validated the Contra drug allegations.  His comments go even further as he alleges that intelligence agencies employed a “eugenics” policy towards low income blacks, considering them “expendable”.    “It is safe to say that all US Senators know the truth and have chosen to betray their Oaths of Office and their responsibility under Article 1 of the Constitution….We the People are considered expendable by those who do this.”

American Drug War: The Last White Hope can be viewed for free on Youtube.  http://www.americandrugwar.com/

The full Two hour film is here:  

Strategic Investment Newsletter - Sept. 1995: "The Latin American drug cartels have stretched their tentacles much deeper into our lives than most people believe. It's possible they are calling the shots at all levels of government."

Dennis Dayle, former head of DEA's Centac, was asked the following question: "Enormously powerful criminal organizations are controlling many countries, and to a certain degree controlling the world, and controlling our lives. Your own U.S. government to some extent supports them, and is concealing this fact from you."

Dennis Dayle's answer: "I know that to be true. That is not conjecture. Experience, over the better part of my adult life, tells me that that is so. And there is a great deal of persuasive evidence.

"I have put thousands of Americans away for tens of thousands of years for less evidence for conspiracy with less evidence than is available against Ollie North and CIA people...I personally was involved in a deep-cover case that went to the top of the drug world in three countries. The CIA killed it." - Former DEA Agent Michael Levine - CNBC-TV, Oct. 8, 1996

"The connections piled up quickly. Contra planes flew north to the U.S., loaded with cocaine, then returned laden with cash. All under the protective umbrella of the United States Government. My informants were perfectly placed: one worked with the Contra pilots at their base, while another moved easily among the Salvadoran military officials who protected the resupply operation. They fed me the names of Contra pilots. Again and again, those names showed up in the DEA database as documented drug traffickers. When I pursued the case, my superiors quietly and firmly advised me to move on to other investigations." - Former DEA Agent Celerino Castillo - Powder Burns, 1992

"I really take great exception to the fact that 1,000 kilos came in, funded by U.S. taxpayer money." - DEA official Anabelle Grimm - CBS-TV "60 minutes"

Former Arkansas Supreme Court Justice Jim Johnson Statement: "He (Former Congressman Bill Alexander - D. Ark.) made me privy to the depositions he took from three of the most credible witnesses in that project, which left absolutely no doubt in my mind that the government of the United States was an active participant in one of the largest dope operations in the world.."

From LOYAL OPPOSITION: In Plain Sight: The CIA Keeps Getting Away With It

By David Corn

June 5, 2000

http://www.alternet.org

A few weeks ago, the House intelligence committee released a 44-page report that declared the CIA had nothing to do with the rise of crack in Los Angeles in the 1980s. Why did the Agency need to be exonerated of such malfeasance? Because a controversial 1996 San Jose Mercury News series by reporter Gary Webb exposed a group of California-based Nicaraguan drug-dealers who in the 1980s had supported the Nicaraguan contra rebels battling the leftist Sandinista regime. The contras, of course, had been a pet project of President Ronald Reagan and the covert cowboys he put in charge at the CIA. The headlines on the Mercury News pieces suggested that this particular band of contra backers shared responsibility for triggering the crack wave that wreaked havoc on inner-city communities across the nation. "America's crack plague has roots in Nicaragua war," read the day-one headline. "Shadowy origins of 'crack' epidemic," read the next day's. "Role of CIA-linked agents a well-protected secret until now." Thousands rushed to read the stories on the newspaper's website. The phonelines at black radio talk shows lit up. Members of Congress, particularly those in the Congressional Black Caucus, demanded answers from the CIA. (Even today, the CIA says that its recruitment of African-Americans suffers because of these stories.) The CIA director at the time, John Deutch, felt obligated to attend a town meeting in Watts to deny the charges.

And what passes for investigation in Washington began. The CIA's inspector general examined the allegations of the "Dark Alliance" series. The Justice Department did the same. Not surprisingly, the CIA's own gumshoes -- and those of Justice -- pronounced the CIA not guilty of complicity in the crack explosion. Webb's series had its problems. He had unearthed a good tale of contra drug involvement, but he had not uncovered a definite link between the Agency and these dealers, and his suggestion that this one drug outfit was instrumental to the birth of crack epidemic was far-fetched. Now, the House intelligence committee, nearly four years later, has seconded the verdicts of the CIA and the Justice Department: "The committee found no evidence to support the allegations that CIA agents or assets associated with the contra movement were involved in the supply or sale of drugs in the Los Angeles area."

But the case is not closed -- that is, it should not be closed. The spies' overseers in the House -- the people who keep an eye on the CIA for the rest of us -- also confirmed, in a quiet fashion, the real dirty secret of the CIA: that during the contra war, the Agency worked hand-in-cloak with persons it had reason to believe were smuggling drugs. In a report released in late 1998, the CIA inspector general acknowledged that the Agency, obsessed with its contra mission, had on a number of occasions collaborated with suspected drug-runners. This should have been a scandal in itself. The report provided the details of several examples. It also noted that the "CIA did not inform Congress of all allegations or information it received indicating that Contra-related organizations or individuals were involved in drug trafficking." Put more bluntly: the CIA had covered up the contra-drug connection. A CIA official who served in Central America told the inspector general, "Yes there [was] derogatory stuff [on the contras] ... but we were going to play with these guys." Webb had gotten near this truth. In the middle of the just-say-no Reagan years, a federal agency had indeed struck a "dark alliance" -- not the one Webb had depicted, but one as disturbing. This revelation, though, received scant media attention; most news coverage echoed the CIA's self-exoneration regarding the crack charges.

The House intelligence committee investigation repeats the pattern. The bulk of the report is directed at disputing the crack allegations. But toward the end there is understated recognition that scandalous CIA activity did happen: "As described in Volume II of the CIA IG report, under various circumstances, the CIA made use of or maintained relationships with a number of individuals associated with the Contras or the Contra-supply effort about whom the CIA had knowledge of information or allegations indicating the individuals had been involved in drug trafficking."

Now why does the House intelligence committee have nothing else to say on this front? It preferred flogging Webb one more time to examining the real skulduggery. Moreover, the committee interviewed several senior CIA managers, and these people insisted they could only recall only one single report of contra-related drug-dealing. But with the CIA inspector general having determined there had been many such instances, it's plausible (make that, likely) that these CIA officials did not speak truthfully to the committee. Did the committee's report address this contradiction and the possibility CIA officials had once again withheld information from Congress? Not at all. And the House's report registered barely a blip in the national news media.

When the CIA released the IG report that acknowledged the contra program had been tainted by drugs, Frederick Hitz, then the inspector general, said the study was merely a start: "This is grist for more work, if anyone wants to do it." A year and a half has passed since then, and it is clear that no one in government has the desire to pursue this topic. The House intelligence committee is positioned to do so. But it is more concerned with bolstering the CIA than in providing an independent and thorough look at this ugly piece of recent history. Al Gore could raise the issue -- as a reminder of what happened the last time Republicans controlled the CIA -- but then he would have to explain why his administration has shown no inclination to hold the Agency accountable. George W. Bush is hardly able to complain about lackadaisical oversight of the CIA. When the spies were hobnobbing with suspected drug runners, they were doing so to implement the pro-contra policies of the Reagan-Bush White House. (And the CIA headquarters is now named after George the Elder, who was a CIA director in the 1970s.) It's in no one's interest in Washington to make a stink. The CIA is permitted to slither off. This is not a cover-up; it's a look-away. Reagan and Bush's CIA made common cause with suspected drug thugs and ... no big deal. Nevertheless, it will be worth keeping this nasty episode in mind, for when the ailing Reagan expires, the media hoopla will overflow with praise of the Old Man. Yet nothing that happened in Bill Clinton's Oval Office was as untoward as what went on in Reagan's CIA.

http://articles.latimes.com/1988-05-09/news/mn-1751_1_noriega

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,157496,00.html#ixzz2BxNbjyKy

Iran-Contra: The Cover-Up Begins to Crack

Until last week the Iran-contra scandal seemed ready to fade from the courts, the news and the mind. After costing more than four years and $25.5 million, the investigation headed by special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh was limping to a close. A federal appeals court had overturned Lieut. Colonel Oliver North's felony conviction, and a retrial seemed unlikely. The same outcome seemed possible for former National Security Adviser John Poindexter's conviction.

Then the scandal roared back to life with a series of stunning developments. They suggested that:

-- Top intelligence officials had engaged in covering up the Reagan Administration's attempts to evade a congressional ban on aid to the Nicaraguan rebels by siphoning off profits from secret arms shipments to Iran.

-- The Iran-contra affair may be only part of a broader and previously undisclosed pattern of illegal activities by intelligence agencies during the tenure of Ronald Reagan and his CIA chief William Casey. Sources close to the unfolding investigation of the Bank of Credit & Commerce International told TIME that U.S. intelligence agencies, including the CIA, maintained secret accounts with the globe-girdling financial empire, which has been accused of laundering billions of dollars in drug money, financing illegal arms deals and engaging in other crimes.

The discovery of the CIA's dealings with B.C.C.I. raises a deeply disturbing question: Did the agency hijack the foreign policy of the U.S. and in the process involve itself in one of the most audacious criminal enterprises in history? Items:

-- Alan Fiers, head of the CIA's Central America task force from 1984 to 1986, pleaded guilty on Tuesday to two counts of lying to Congress about when high- ranking intelligence officials first learned of the illegal diversion of funds to the contras. Fiers said he became aware of the diversions and informed Clair George, then the CIA's deputy director for operations, in the summer of 1986. But, Fiers said, George ordered him to deny any knowledge of the transfers when he testified before the House intelligence committee that October. In exchange for being allowed to plead guilty to two misdemeanors instead of more serious felonies, Fiers is now assisting Walsh's investigation. With his help, Walsh will probably seek a perjury indictment of George and perhaps other present and former government officials.

-- Three days after Fiers entered his plea, the New York Times disclosed that Walsh possesses tapes and transcripts of hundreds of telephone conversations between CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., and agents in Central America. The talks occurred during the period when North, former Air Force General Richard Secord and his business partner Albert Hakim were operating their secret arms pipeline. The tapes -- which have been in Walsh's hands for three years -- were recorded on a system that George installed at the agency's operations center in the early to mid-1980s.

In recent months Walsh has used the tapes to prod the memory of North and other reluctant witnesses before the grand jury that is still gamely looking into the scandal. The tapes are expected to furnish evidence that could lead to further indictments. Some transcripts of the recordings have been examined by staff investigators for the congressional Iran-contra committees. But curiously, until last Friday, no member of the Senate intelligence committee was aware of the recordings.

-- Investigators probing B.C.C.I. have told TIME that the Iran-contra affair is linked to the burgeoning bank scandal. Former government officials and other sources confirm that the CIA stashed money in a number of B.C.C.I. accounts that were used to finance covert operations; some of these funds went to the contras. Investigators also say an intelligence unit of the U.S. defense establishment has used the bank to maintain a secret slush fund, possibly for financing unauthorized covert operations. More startling yet, even before North set up his network for making illegal payments to the contras, the National Security Council was using B.C.C.I. to channel money to them. The funds were first sent to Saudi Arabia to disguise their White House origins; then they were deposited into a B.C.C.I. account maintained by contra leader Adolfo Calero.

The Iran-contra affair has been characterized by U.S. officials as a rogue operation managed by overzealous members of the National Security Council. But if Fiers is correct, top-ranking CIA officials not only knew about the operation and did nothing to stop it; they also participated in an illegal cover-up.

One of the first casualties of the disclosures could be the nomination of Deputy National Security Adviser Robert Gates to head the CIA. Though Fiers did not implicate Gates in the deception, some Senators find it hard to believe Gates' claim that he knew next to nothing about the Iran-contra scheme when he served as Casey's principal deputy. Four years ago, that suspicion forced Gates to withdraw after Reagan picked him to succeed Casey, who was dying from brain cancer.

Those misgivings appeared to have faded when George Bush chose Gates to replace William Webster. But the mounting questions about the scandal could put his nomination on hold. The Senate intelligence committee, which had expected to begin its hearings on Gates this week, decided to hold off. Members may want to question Fiers, George and perhaps others about what Gates may have known. If the committee's uncertainty drags on, it could run into the August congressional recess, which would delay hearings until September.

Sensing the threat to Gates' confirmation, Bush rushed to defend his nominee. He implored the Senate not to leave Gates "twisting in the wind" through the summer. "Get the men up there who are making these allegations," Bush demanded. "Isn't that the American system of justice -- innocent until proven guilty?"

But Gates is just one more figure twisting in a resurgent storm. Suddenly a number of unanswered questions assume a new urgency. Just what did Ronald Reagan -- and George Bush -- know? And when did they know it?

Beyond that, the discovery of the secret intelligence-agency accounts in the renegade B.C.C.I. raises a whole new set of unsettling possibilities. The most serious is that U.S. spymasters may have been undertaking unauthorized covert operations and all the while furthering the ends of B.C.C.I. By providing clandestine services for intelligence agencies in numerous countries, B.C.C.I. was able to cloak its activities in an aura of national security and thereby stave off investigations from banking officials in the U.S. and abroad.

In 1988 Gates is reported to have told a colleague that B.C.C.I. was "the bank of crooks and criminals." Yet when customs agents investigated the bank in 1988, they found "numerous CIA accounts in B.C.C.I.," says former U.S. Commissioner of Customs William von Raab. Those, he says, were being used to pay agents and "apparently to support covert activities."

Senate investigators, who have known of the agency's links to the bank, have demanded an explanation from the CIA -- so far, without getting a satisfactory response. One question they might ask is whether the CIA link to B.C.C.I. explains the Justice Department's slowness in pursuing its case against the bank. Last year the Justice Department tried unsuccessfully to persuade the Florida state comptroller not to lift B.C.C.I.'s license to operate in that state.

Armed with Fiers' testimony and the treasure trove of CIA phone tapes, Walsh is likely to seek more indictments. In addition to George and perhaps other CIA officials, there are two potential targets outside the agency: former Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams and Donald Gregg, now U.S. ambassador to South Korea. In his plea Fiers says he lied to Congress at a Senate intelligence committee hearing on Nov. 25, 1986. On the same day, Abrams testified that no one at the State Department knew of the diversion of funds. A few days later, when Abrams made a second appearance before the lawmakers, Democratic Senator Thomas Eagleton of Missouri angrily accused him of having lied earlier. "You've heard my testimony," Abrams said during their exchange. "I've heard it," Eagleton replied, "and I want to puke."

Fiers may also implicate Gregg, a onetime CIA officer who served as a foreign policy adviser to then Vice President Bush. Gregg was a close friend of Felix Rodriguez, another former agent, who became a crucial link in the North pipeline to the contras. But Gregg has repeatedly denied before Congress that the office of the Vice President recruited Rodriguez. One tantalizing entry in North's diary indicates that on Jan. 9, 1986, North and Fiers had a phone conversation about Rodriguez. It reads, "Felix talking too much about V.P. connection." Was the reference to Gregg or to Bush?

Walsh's biggest worry may be that the Senate intelligence committee will call Fiers and George as witnesses at Gates' confirmation hearing. Last July a federal appeals court set aside North's 1989 conviction on the ground that some witnesses who testified against him may have been influenced by his congressional testimony about Iran-contra. That testimony could not be used against North in court because Congress had granted him immunity. Concerned that future Senate testimony by Fiers or George might also be put beyond his reach by a grant of immunity, Walsh last week issued a pointed warning to the committee not to imperil his case. "Our investigation has reached a point of significant breakthrough," Walsh said. "To jeopardize this progress in a vain hope of getting quick facts as to an individual nomination would be regrettable."

In one respect, at least, Walsh is right: an individual nomination is no longer the central issue. The main questions now focus on whether the intelligence community covered up illegal acts and how high the conspiracy reached.

March 16, 1999

COLD PURSUIT: A SPECIAL REPORT

ASHINGTON -- Early last year, as undercover U.S. Customs agents neared the end of the biggest investigation ever conducted into the illegal movement of drug money, bankers working with Mexico's most powerful cocaine cartel approached them with a stunning offer.

here is a article about some of the banks and methods used to facilitate the trade.

http://www.wakeupmag.co.uk/articles/ciadrugslaunder.htm

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Drugs, Money, Murder, and Family

Lionel Bruno Jordan was murdered on January 20, 1995, in an El Paso parking lot, but he keeps coming back as the key to a multibillion-dollar drug industry, two corrupt governments — one called the United States and the other Mexico — and a self-styled War on Drugs that is a fraud. Beneath all the policy statements and bluster of politicians is a real world of lies, pain, and big money.

Down by the River is the true narrative of how a murder led one American family into this world and how it all but destroyed them. It is the story of how one Mexican drug leader outfought and outthought the U.S. government, of how major financial institutions were fattened on the drug industry, and how the governments of the U.S. and Mexico buried everything that happened. All this happens down by the river, where the public fictions finally end and the facts read like fiction. This is a remarkable American story about drugs, money, murder, and family.

Tonight, Mike and Mark speak with author Charles Bowden about this tragic, neverending story.

About the guest:

Charles Bowden is an American non-fiction author, journalist, and essayist based in Tucson, Arizona. He is a former writer for the Tucson Citizen and often writes about the American Southwest. He is a contributing editor of GQ and Mother Jones magazine, and writes for other periodicals including Harper’s Magazine, New York Times Book Review, Esquire, and Aperture. He is the winner of the 1996 Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction.

Down bY The River

i also wanted to mention that in Charles Bowden's recent book "Down By The River" Bowden interviews the head of the El Paso Intelligence Center (EPIC) Phil Jordan. the book details the rise of the cartels, links to the intelligence community and political corruption from the president on down.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0684853434/002-6668459-0280845?v=glance
Jordan details capturing a man at a texas airport based on profiling. the man is found to be carrying $28.8 million in cash and is found to be working for BCCI, a notorious money laundering bank.

Jordan then receives a telephone call "from a high level DOJ employee" who orders that the man be allowed to continue on his was AND he was to be given his money back!

Jordan did as he was ordered and didnt ask why. (makes me wonder why)

the book was published in November, 2002. i highly recommend it.

Editorial Reviews

The Real Deal!, March 7, 2003
Reviewer: A reader
You want the true story about the "War On Drugs"? Then don't wait and buy this book NOW. Bowden takes you right inside what's going on with this so called war, and the people who get hurt by it. Once you pick up this book you won't be able to put it down. Charles Bowden is one of this country's great reporters/writers.

Jay Marvin
WLS Radio
Chicago, IL

Shocking slice of reality, February 7, 2003

Reviewer:

Don H. Ford Jr. "author of Contrabando" (Seguin, Texas United States) - See all my reviews

As a former participant in the drug war (on the wrong end), I will assure you this is an accurate portrayal. Participants on both sides of the issue are decimated, and people prefer to bury their heads and hide from this reality, a reality that may be the most critical problem facing our nation.

This book is extremely well written. My hat is off to Mr. Bowden.

Charles Bowden, a Fly on the Wall Watching the Drug War that's 'Down by the River'

A BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW

This isn’t some ugly conspiracy by corrupt American presidents. This is what’s called realpolitik. Tolerating the existence of a narco-state in Mexico is preferable to having an economic collapse in Mexico. Successive presidents have looked at the facts and made the same decision. ... It’s simply confronting reality. ... The effort of the border patrol to stop illegal immigration is also simply for show, because if we really bottled up Mexico and a half million people a year couldn’t come north, the economy would collapse.

* * *

"The war on drugs." It's the kind of label that just stops us, allowing preconceived notions to take over. Most of us don't think that much about it, or ever wonder who who has been killed in that "war." Investigative reporter Charles Bowden did wonder. He got into his truck and drove to the front lines and embedded himself in that war to get some answers.  His investigation, focusing on a lone victim and his grieving family, unfolds in Down by the River, an absolutely haunting book.

* * *

BuzzFlash: Why did you make the murder case of Lionel Bruno Jordan the centerpiece of your book?

Charles Bowden: I thought if I could understand and explain one murder, I could explain what was happening on the border. I take the murder of Bruno Jordan because his brother was the head of DEA intelligence in El Paso. I had seen a small mention about the killing in a Mexican newspaper called La Jornada. They had arrested a 13-year-old boy for the killing. I just dialed information, got the phone number for the El Paso intelligence center, and talked to Phil Jordan, Bruno’s brother, who ran the center. He said, “If you come here, I’ll talk to you. I won’t talk on the phones.” I got in my truck and drove 321 miles and walked into his office. Seven-and-a-half years later, the book came out. That’s how it started.

BuzzFlash: Why did it take seven-and-a-half years?

Charles Bowden: Because in the drug wars, whether you’re dealing with law enforcement or dealers, you have to spend months to get what would amount to one paragraph in the book.I became obsessed.

BuzzFlash: That comes through in the book.

Charles Bowden: The structure of the book is simple - we’ll look into one murder. But to explain that murder, you have to retell the history of the United States and Mexico, going back forty or fifty years. The narrative arc is the killing, and trying to solve it, but to understand that you have to understand all this history. I wound up writing the history, with hundreds of footnotes. That took time.

BuzzFlash: Your style is like the Southwestern landscape itself – very beautiful and very engaging and lyrical. You manage to be both compassionate toward the Jordan family,   yet very cynical about the context of his death, meaning the drug world lurking in the background.

Charles Bowden: His murder could never be solved, in a simple sense, because it would implicate the governments of both nations in the solution. Once you get into the drug wars in Mexico, it goes all the way to the top of the government.That’s just a fact. And Phil Jordan received zero cooperation from the DEA, his agency, or from the FBI, in solving his brother’s murder.

BuzzFlash: "Cynicism" becomes the operative word, in that this is a show drug war. Phil Jordan, despite being head of a DEA center engaged in the drug war on the frontier, was given the cold shoulder and not helped to solve his brother’s murder.

Charles Bowden: Like I say in the book, he is briefing Janet Reno, the Attorney General of the United States, about the high Mexican officials he’s going to meet in a week in Mexico, and he's giving the drug connections of every one of them. She stares at him with total disbelief. I don’t know how you want to characterize that, because Phil Jordan is your basic American true believer. But they basically destroyed him for trying to find justice for his brother.

BuzzFlash: The Jordans are a close-knit, Mexican-American family. The book was called Down by the River because that's where they lived.

Charles Bowden: Their house is five blocks from the river in a very old barrio in El Paso, Texas. His parents have lived in the same home for over fifty years, just adding rooms as more children came. They won’t leave, because if they leave, they will lose their connection with their dead son.He’s buried four blocks away.

BuzzFlash: You burrow into this family and almost became a fly on the wall in their lives.

Charles Bowden: We’re still friends. I sit alone in silence and grief every January 20th, which was the day Bruno was killed.At 7 p.m. on January 20, 1995, he got out of the pick-up truck at the K-Mart in El Paso, Texas, and was instantly gunned down.

BuzzFlash: In your effort to ascertain who killed Lionel Bruno Jordan, you really do find that the "war on drugs," as the politicians call it, is a show war for domestic consumption. All the obstacles you ran up against, and his brother ran up against, and the great risk you took to enter the drug underworld to try to get some answers, just led you to conclude that it doesn’t really exist. There’s a peaceful coexistence between the U.S. and Mexico in terms of drugs coming into the United States, except for occasional busts.

Charles Bowden: The United States wants a stable Mexico. Mexico is economically dependent on narco dollars to survive. If you could actually shut down the border and stop the importation of drugs into this country, Mexico would collapse. So it’s a show war.

BuzzFlash: What about the argument that they now have increased economic power in petro-dollars?

Charles Bowden: The Mexican oil fields are in severe decline. They’re nationalized and run by one of the most corrupt mechanisms in Mexico – Petroleos Mexicanos, also known as Pemex. Mexico makes more money from drugs than they do from oil, tourism, and the remittances sent back by illegal Mexicans working here. They earn at least $50 billion a year now from selling drugs. They simply can’t live without it. You have to understand the Mexican economy is 4% the size of the United States' economy. Fifty billion dollars is big money in an economy of that size.

BuzzFlash: If we go back over the last five decades of Mexican-American relations, in terms of the drug situation, this has been a de facto show war on drugs.

Charles Bowden: Smoke and Mirrors, by Dan Baum, was an excellent book on that subject which was also heavily footnoted. He proved conclusively that every reaction or thought in the drug war for forty years by the U.S. government was simply to get domestic political support. It had nothing to do with the drug problem. Until the early 1990s, more Americans died every year by falling down staircases than died from overdoses. We’ve created a sort of fictional monster in drugs.

BuzzFlash: Does the solution lie in the legalization of drugs?

Charles Bowden: Well, if you continue the current policies, your prison population will continue to grow - and 40 to 50% of all inmates now are jailed on drug charges. Drugs will become more common, they will be of higher quality and at lower prices, because that is what’s happened over the course of forty years. Our drug consumption increases, and it becomes cheaper simply because of competition. So this is a failed policy. But there isn’t a politician in the United States who will question the drug wars. It’s considered political death.

BuzzFlash: I want to commend you just for your courage. Clearly you are an investigative journalist who took a lot of risk.

Charles Bowden: You don’t really see it that way when you’re doing it.

BuzzFlash: Why is that?

Charles Bowden: All the roadblocks are just little obstacles, because you’re obsessed with finding out the facts. When you get into this kind of work, you just want to get it down right. What other people see as danger, you see as a nuisance. If I wasn’t writing that book, I never would have gone into the saloons and hellholes that are in that book. I don’t court danger.

BuzzFlash: From our perspective, you took tremendous risks. You contacted drug dealers.

Charles Bowden: I was tired of reading about drug dealers as sort of “them,” and so I went and met them. They’re just people making a living in a murderous business.

BuzzFlash: Is Juarez the city where so many women have disappeared and been found dead and mutilated?

Charles Bowden: Yes. In the same period, 2900 men have vanished. Juarez is a death machine. I did a whole book on it called Juarez, the Laboratory of Our Future. It’s part of the barbarism which they call free trade.

BuzzFlash: In what way?

Charles Bowden: Juarez is full of maquiladoras - factories - where people are paid a wage so low you can’t survive on it.

BuzzFlash: That’s as a result of NAFTA, in large part.

Charles Bowden: Yes, it’s all connected.And illegal immigration explodes in the United States once NAFTA passes. There’s an absolute linear progression. If you’re a Mexican, your real earning power has been declining since the early 1990s.

BuzzFlash: Your look at the war on drugs involved a tremendous investigative job. Out of the story of one person, one family, one murder, grew all these tentacles that illuminated the failed war on drugs and the real acceptance of the drug trade by both the United States and Mexico.

Lionel’s murder is officially unresolved, but reading your book, certainly one would be left with the understanding that this was drug-related and sending a signal to his brother that he better not be an Eagle Scout and take the war on drugs seriously. You had the head of Mexico and his brother, the Salinas brothers, seemingly intimately involved in the drug trade. Carlos Salinas, the president, was a close friend of George Bush Senior.

Charles Bowden: They were making money off it, and banking with Citibank in New York and in Switzerland. They were using the same banker in New York that the head of the Juarez cartel was using to funnel money to a secure place. It’s not an accident. Everybody in DEA knows it, although they wouldn’t officially say it. It would destabilize our relationship.

BuzzFlash: Do you think the President of the United States gets briefing papers that are top secret from DEA, from CIA, and NSA and so forth? Do you think President Bush the first knew this?

Charles Bowden: Of course. Everybody knows it. As it happens Phil Jordan was the guy preparing those briefing papers. I know exactly what they were told because I know the guy who told them.

BuzzFlash: What's the trade-off for a President of the United States?

Charles Bowden: All I can say is, if they really cracked down on drugs in Mexico, the economy and the Mexican government would collapse. Millions of people would stream north to survive.Given that choice, successive American presidents have put on a kind of theatrical war on drugs, but let the business continue because the consequences of ending the business are worse than letting the business continue. Mexico needs the money.

BuzzFlash: What was the torture murder of DEA agent Enrique Camereno in Mexico all about?

Charles Bowden: He was kidnapped by members of the Guadalajara cartel and tortured for two days. They taped the torture, and they were asking him questions. Those tapes have never been made public - the DEA and the CIA have the tapes. What they were trying to find out is how much he knew about the connections between the cartel leaders and the heads of the Mexican government. That’s it. I happen to know the guy who led the investigation of the murder of Camereno. Almost every human being that was in the house in Guadalajara where they tortured Camereno had been trained by the CIA and was an asset. They had trained them to be an anti-drug force in Mexico, but they went over to the other side. That’s why the case was "buried."

BuzzFlash: Are these people still free and moving about Mexico?

Charles Bowden: That’s right. They busted a couple guys, who are technically in prison, but they show up at parties all over Mexico.

BuzzFlash: You have one very vivid description of going down further south into Mexico, and meeting with a drug kingpin in a vast ranch, and the partying that’s going on.

Charles Bowden: The party went on for five days and five nights.

BuzzFlash: It's like the old Al Capone days in Chicago.

Charles Bowden: They are the government. They are interchangeable in Mexico. I was once drinking with a major drug dealer, and I said, “Who do you work for?” And of course, what I was asking was which cartel. And he said, “I work for the President of Mexico.” And he meant it. He was angry over the hypocrisy that he’s allegedly a criminal, when in fact, the people he sees on TV are taking money from him. He was a killer. I know of four people that man had murdered in my own city, because he told me that.

BuzzFlash: Why didn’t you pose a threat to these people? 

Charles Bowden: One, anybody in the drug business knows they’re going to be murdered and forgotten. Secondly, if I had sneaked around trying to find things out, I would have been killed. But I was public about it. I’d sit in front of these people while they were sitting there with machine guns, and make notes. That’s how it happened. I just acted like it was normal. Slowly, I built relationships with trust. At the same time I’m doing this, I have deep connections in DEA. One thing I never did was betray a DEA operation to a drug dealer, and I never betrayed a drug dealer to DEA.

BuzzFlash: You kept the confidentiality of your sources.

Charles Bowden: I’m down there at one point with a drug dealer from the United States. He’s buying cocaine for a shipment north while I’m there. We go down to get a bunch of drugs and he’s going to bring them up through U.S. Customs. If that shipment had been seized, I would have been murdered, because they would have thought: ah, he was the reason it was seized. That’s the risk. I knew when I was sitting there, and they were arranging this business deal, that if anything went wrong, they’d blame me.

BuzzFlash: You’ve written other books and articles on the drug trade. How did this come to interest you?

Charles Bowden: I was a reporter for a newspaper in the early eighties in Arizona. I’ve always had a deep interest in biology, ecology, the environment. Scientists I knew who had been going into the Sierra Madres in certain areas, collecting plants, started coming back with reports that they couldn’t get into villages because suddenly there were men there with machine guns. Everybody was growing drugs.  I thought, well, this was a story. I became increasingly obsessed with why this huge industry was growing right at my doorstep, and it was not being reported. That was the beginning.

Then the scale of the business got huge. Full-bodied jets were landing, full of cocaine, and none of this was being reported. At one point, I took photos and gave them to Jack Anderson, the columnist, trying to get him to print it. They simply didn’t believe what I gave them.

BuzzFlash: We have an argument about immigration going on in the U.S., now, and there are the Minutemen. A couple of weeks ago, there were allegedly encounters between American immigration officials on the border and people who looked like they were in the Mexican Army.

Charles Bowden: They were in the Mexican Army. No drug dealer would try and look like the Army, they would try and blend in.  The Mexican Army is in the drug business. The movie "Traffic" was not a complete fiction.

BuzzFlash: Let's get back again to the personal story of the Jordan family.

Charles Bowden: It’s absolutely certain that Lionel Bruno Jordan, who was murdered at the age of 27, had no connections to drugs.He was getting ready to get married, he sold suits at Men’s Warehouse, and he was preparing to enter law school. He had lived a totally blameless life. He had nothing to do with his brother’s career in DEA. He was slaughtered for no reason.

BuzzFlash: The family is the fine, upstanding, model American family. They happen to be of Mexican descent. One brother is a heroic DEA agent – your honest, straight-arrow DEA agent, incorruptible. His younger brother was shot and killed in a parking lot. No one will cooperate to find the real murderer. They pin it on a young kid. The Mexican Consul in El Paso won’t answer any questions directly.

Charles Bowden: The Mexican Consul is funneling drug money to the criminal attorneys that are defending the kid who did the killing.We know that because of DEA wiretaps.

BuzzFlash: And the American government didn’t want him to pursue it. They didn’t want to anger the Mexican government by pursuing this.

Charles Bowden: The effort of the border patrol to stop illegal immigration is also simply for show, because if we really bottled up Mexico and a half million people a year couldn’t come north, the economy would collapse.

BuzzFlash: You also have in your book that, even on shipments coming through in trucks at border check points, crooked Americans are just allowing these trucks in.

Charles Bowden: Yes. When I spoke earlier of the drug dealer arranging the shipment of a load of cocaine to the United States, that person I’m dealing with "owned" the border crossing. He owned U.S. agents. That’s how he was going to move it through. I knew the exact town it would go through, and he had paid people in U.S. customs to wave it through.

BuzzFlash: Has there been any official government response to your book?

Charles Bowden: No. Nobody wants to deal with it. This war is a fraud, unless you get murdered in this war. 

BuzzFlash: Suppose that we in the United States were really serious about taking on the drug industry in Mexico, and let’s just say theoretically we could wipe it out. You’re saying the economy in Mexico would collapse. People would do whatever they could to cross over into America to make whatever money they could make

Charles Bowden: That’s right.

BuzzFlash: Therefore we leave the status quo, which is drugs coming in.

Charles Bowden: This isn’t some ugly conspiracy by corrupt American presidents. This is what’s called realpolitik. Tolerating the existence of a narco-state in Mexico is preferable to having an economic collapse in Mexico. Successive presidents have looked at the facts and made the same decision. So this is not the result of some evil leadership in our country. It’s simply confronting reality.

BuzzFlash: The Mexicans might say, you’re using this stuff, that is your responsibility. You clean up the consumer side. It’s not our problem.

Charles Bowden: That’s correct. That’s what they all say, and they have a point. Also, drugs don’t have very much value until they get to the United States. Then they explode in value. The real profits are made here.

BuzzFlash: And you couldn’t have the extent of drug trafficking unless you had some officials paid off in the police department.

Charles Bowden: In almost any city in the United States, it’s easier to find cocaine than it is to find veal. The stuff is everywhere, and everybody knows it.

BuzzFlash: Someone’s got to be letting it get through.

Charles Bowden: Everybody that gets into the drug industry becomes corrupted. It doesn’t matter if you’re a cop or a robber. There’s just too much money. All you have to do is blink and you can get paid. You’re standing there waving cars through at the border. You’re a U.S. official. You wave cars through all day. All you have to do is wave one more through and you can make $50-100,000 in the blink of an eye.

I’ll give you an example. They busted a drug ring in 1989. This ring had moved 900 consecutive loads of cocaine into the United States through one crossing in El Paso – one bridge – without ever being detected. That's mathematically impossible unless you buy people.

BuzzFlash: Did anything happen?

Charles Bowden: Well, the ring got busted. But it terrified DEA and I’ll tell you why. They took down 21 tons of cocaine in a warehouse in California in 1989, and after they did that, the price of cocaine did not go up. It had no effect on the market, so much was coming in. That was the first time that DEA really understood the magnitude of the drug use in this country, because it’s very hard to track. People don’t report how much coke they use every week.

BuzzFlash: Has anything changed under Vincente Fox?

Charles Bowden: I’m not going to criticize Mr. Fox, but he’s not really in control of Mexico. The drugs continue to be moved. The cartels continue to flourish. The army continues to be corrupt. Any Mexican president that effectively waged war against the drug industry would be murdered.

BuzzFlash: As one candidate was.

Charles Bowden: Yes, Colosio.

BuzzFlash: It’s heart-wrenching to read about the Jordan family and their loss.

Charles Bowden: It devastated that family. That family believes in America, and America betrayed that family. They have gotten no justice for the murder of their son and brother.

BuzzFlash: The only justice done - because the Mexican and American governments both put up obstacles to finding out who really was responsible - the only justice for Lionel Jordan is your book, Down by the River.

Charles Bowden: That’s right, and it’s even worse than that for me. Lionel Bruno Jordan was one of thousands of people murdered on the border in these drug wars, but he’s the only one that got a book. The others don’t even get that. It’s like it never happened.  I find that morally repellent. I think human life matters, and I think ignoring death on this level is a sin.

BuzzFlash: Thank you very much.

Charles Bowden: Adios.

A BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW

Interview Conducted by BuzzFlash Editor Mark Karlin.

* * *

RESOURCES:

Down by the River: Drugs, Money, Murder, and Family (Paperback) by Charles Bowden, a BuzzFlash premium

Down by the River: Drugs, Money, Murder, and Family (Paperback) by Charles Bowden , a BuzzFlash review

Charles Bowden: No more fear: Vote as if it matters - because it does (9/04, Arizona Daily Star)

http://www.buzzflash.com/interviews/06/03/int06008.html

Former contra wins review of U.S. drug ties.

By Bob Egelko

OF THE EXAMINER STAFF July 27, 2000

Fights deportation to Nicaragua, says CIA knew of cocaine deals The former Northern California spokesman for the Nicaraguan contras, facing deportation for cocaine trafficking in the 1980s, will apparently get the chance to convince a federal judge that he was assured the drug deals had U.S. government approval.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Wednesday that a judge should hear and evaluate Renato Pena's claim that a federal prosecutor in San Francisco had told him after his arrest in 1984 that he was at no risk of deportation for having carried cocaine and cash to Los Angeles about a dozen times.

In court papers opposing Pena's challenge to his current deportation order, the U.S. attorney's office said no such assurance was given. Pena's case recalls the controversy over allegations of CIA- backed drug dealing by the contras, the U.S.-supported guerrillas fighting Nicaragua's leftist government in the 1980s. Accused in a San Jose Mercury News series of connections to the early crack cocaine trade in Southern California, the CIA hotly denied having anything to do with Los Angeles drug traffickers who claimed contra connections.

Pena said he had been told by Norwin Meneses, a major drug trafficker with ties to the contras, that CIA-connected contra commanders were aware of the drug operation in which Pena took part. The CIA has denied any relationship with Meneses.

The appeals court stopped well short of finding that the government condoned Pena's activity as a drug courier. But the court said Pena's claims about the government's attitude were relevant to his attempt to overturn his 1985 drug conviction, the basis of the current attempt to deport him.

"Pena and his allies supporting the contras became involved in selling cocaine in order to circumvent the congressional ban on non-humanitarian aid to the contras," the three-judge panel said. "Pena states that he was told that leading contra military commanders, with ties to the CIA, knew about the drug dealing. Pena believed that the sole purpose of these drug transactions was to help the contras, and he believed the United States government would not seek to prosecute.

"The circumstances surrounding Pena's case, including his belief that his activity was supported by the U.S. government and his alleged reliance on the assurances of the assistant U.S. attorney regarding his immigration status, raise important questions about public confidence in the administration of justice."

The court said a federal judge should hear testimony from Pena and others about what assurances he had been given before pleading guilty in 1985, and about whether his court-appointed attorney had acted incompetently by failing to tell him he risked deportation. The judge would then decide whether to set aside the guilty plea. Pena's suit, seeking to overturn the guilty plea, had been dismissed by U.S.

District Judge Fern Smith in 1997. The hearing ordered Wednesday would be held before another judge, because Smith now heads the Federal Judicial Center in Washington, D.C.

"He's a credible person," said Pena's current attorney, Stephen Shaiken. "He was good enough for the U.S. government when he was spokesperson for the opposition and when he was an informant (against others in the drug ring). He was telling the truth then, and he's telling it now."

He said Pena, now a San Francisco city employee, was not speaking to reporters about the case. 

The U.S. attorney's office, which represented immigration officials who want Pena deported, declined comment on the ruling.

Pena was a member of the security force of Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza, who was overthrown by the leftist Sandinistas in 1979. Pena came to the United States in 1980 and became the chief of public relations in Northern California for the FDN, the contras' political arm. He applied for political asylum in August 1984 but was arrested three months later on charges of possessing cocaine with intent to distribute it. Pena said he had been asked by Norwin Meneses' nephew, Jairo Meneses, to travel to Los Angeles with money that would be used to buy cocaine and finance contras, whose U.S. military aid had been cut off by Congress. He was paid about $6,000 for carrying money and drugs to Los Angeles between March and November 1984, the court said.

Pena said he had agreed to cooperate with prosecutors in exchange for a reduced sentence and been told by a federal prosecutor that he would be taken care of and had nothing to fear about his immigration status. He said he never would have pleaded guilty if he had known he could be deported to Nicaragua, then governed by the Sandinistas. He also said his court-appointed attorney had never spoken to him about the possibility of deportation.

After serving a year in a halfway house and testifying against another Meneses relative in the drug case, Pena was granted asylum in 1987, the court said. But the Immigration and Naturalization Service revoked his asylum in 1996 and moved to deport him to Nicaragua because of his drug conviction.

In court papers, Special Assistant U.S. Attorney Robert Yeargin said Pena's asylum had been withdrawn because he had failed to disclose his conviction on his asylum application. Yeargin also said the original prosecutor in the case, Rodolfo Orjales, had discussed drug smuggling to Pena but made no promises to him.

Orjales, now a Justice Department employee in Washington, D.C., was out of his office Wednesday and unavailable for comment.

(c)2000 San Francisco Examiner

The CIA and Cocaine: Truth and Disinformation

Who has the airplanes?

November 15, 1996--John Deutch, Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, went to Watts to speak to hundreds of neighborhood residents. The head of the CIA visiting the ghetto!? Now you know they must be in deep trouble! The CIA and the media tried to suppress the stories of CIA drug-dealing.

For 10 years, the mainstream media refused to report on it--even when the Senate's own Kerry Report brought out damning evidence. They tried to ignore the series by Gary Webb that appeared in the San Jose Mercury that revealed the names of Nicaraguan contra operatives who were distributing cocaine in South Central L.A. and Compton to raise money for the CIA's secret contra war.

In the last month, this country's most prominent newspapers, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the New York Times, all carried stories intended to discredit Webb's report. This campaign has not worked. On Nightline, November 15, Ted Koppel remarked how attempts to dis Webb's report had only made the masses of people more suspicious that crimes were being covered up.

The story is out! Millions know! And now, the CIA is forced to combine more coverup with an unprecedented public attempt at damage control. Deutch was in L.A. to promise that the CIA's Inspector General would "get to the bottom of things." And he had to sit there as the people spoke bitterly of how the system has ruined lives--denying people jobs, packing the youth into prisons, bringing drugs into the community, denouncing the history of CIA drug running.

The first woman at the microphone told how Black men had been allowed to die of syphilis, while government doctors in the infamous "Tuskegee experiment" withheld medicine and studied their deaths. "How is this any different?" she asked Deutch, referring to CIA involvement in bringing drugs into the Black community. One brother said it was an insult to people's intelligence to claim "The CIA doesn't sell drugs," since everyone knows about CIA heroin-running from Asia's Golden Triangle. A former LAPD narcotics cop described how documents about CIA drug operations were suppressed by authorities. Joey Johnson, revolutionary activist against police brutality, exposed how the CIA's contras had murdered thousands of people to destabilize Nicaragua, while their drug traffic destabilized the oppressed communities of L.A. "When are the prison doors going to open?" he demanded, to free those jailed by racist crack laws.

The CIA investigate itself? Nobody is having it!

This scandal cuts to the heart of this government's legitimacy: It lays bare the utter hypocrisy, the racism and the complete hard-heartedness of this system's rulers. They've been jailing thousands of youth--locking them away!--for involvement in the illegal economy. And then it turns out that the government itself, possibly at the highest levels, was deeply involved in the import and sale of that poison!

The Central Intelligence Agency, its head John Deutch, its main investigator CIA Inspector General Frederick P. Hitz, and much of the mainstream media are already claiming that there is no evidence that the CIA itself approved or participated in cocaine trafficking.

These claims are simply not true: There is massive evidence that the CIA was a key force organizing guns-for-drugs operations that secretly financed much of the U.S.'s dirty war against Nicaragua.

In this article, we will explore evidence that came out even before Gary Webb's series: the network of airlines and airstrips used to transport cocaine into the U.S. during the '80s.

Who Has the Planes?

Thirty years ago, Malcolm X made a penetrating observation: Oppressed people don't own airplanes and boats. The media and the government try to blame oppressed people for drugs--but international drug trafficking requires fleets of cargo planes, landing strips in several countries, networks of international contacts, pools of investment money, networks for money laundering and the high-level contacts for getting past U.S. Customs and the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA).

In 1989, pilot Mike Tolliver told CBS that, after years of smuggling drugs, he was recruited into the contra supply operation by a "Mr. Hernandez." Tolliver identified "Hernandez" as Felix Rodríguez, the CIA agent directing contra supply from El Salvador's Ilopango Air Base. Tolliver says he flew a DC-6 loaded with guns and ammunition for "Hernandez" in March 1986, from Butler Aviation at the Miami Airport down to Aguacate, the U.S.-controlled contra air base in Honduras. Tolliver says the guns were unloaded by contras and he was paid about $70,000 by "Hernandez." After a three-day layover, Tolliver said he flew the aircraft, reloaded with over 25,000 pounds of marijuana, as a "nonscheduled military flight" into Homestead Air Force Base near Miami.

"We landed about 1:30, 2 o'clock in the morning," said Tolliver, "and a little blue truck came out and met us. [It] had a little white sign on it that said `Follow Me' with flashing lights. We followed it." "I was a little taken aback," Tolliver told the CBS program West 57th. "I figured it was a DEA bust or a sting or something like that." It wasn't. Tolliver said he just left the plane and the drugs sitting there at the airport to be unloaded, and took a taxi from the base.[1]

West 57th traced this DC-6 back to a company called Vortex. Vortex is one of four airlines hired by the U.S. State Department to supply the contras--using money designated by Congress as being for "humanitarian aid" only.

In April 1987, a Customs service official told the Boston Globe, "We think he did land at Homestead," and acknowledged that there was a system under which contra supply flights were able to fly in and out of U.S. airports free of Customs inspection. But that same Customs official claimed that Tolliver was only a "free-lancer" who "bluffed his way" into Homestead. One researcher writes, "It was not explained how Tolliver bluffed his way into an Air Force base, leaving behind over 25,000 pounds of marijuana which apparently bluffed their way out."[1]

The operation Tolliver described is similar to stories told over and over again in testimony before the Senate Subcommittee headed by Sen. John Kerry. A report was issued in the spring of 1989 by this Foreign Relations Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics and International Operations. That report describes how the U.S. government recruited major drug smugglers, used their airlines to "supply the contras," and how these airplanes flew down to Central America loaded with guns and flew back loaded with drugs.

When the contra war started in 1981, a "retired" U.S. Air Force Colonel, Richard Gadd, was put in charge of creating a secret, private network of cargo airlines to supply the contras. His network worked closely with the CIA-linked Southern Air Transport.

Until 1972, the CIA directly owned Southern Air Transport, an air cargo company based in Miami. In 1972 this airline was "sold" to its president. A 1976 congressional report noted that the sales of other such "proprietary" companies were usually conditioned on "an agreement that the proprietary would continue to provide goods or services to the CIA."[2] The Washington Post reported on January 20, 1987: "According to informed sources, a witness told the Federal Bureau of Investigation last summer of having seen a cargo plane with Southern Air markings being used for a guns-for-drugs transfer at an airfield in Barranquilla, Colombia in 1983." This witness "Wanda Doe," the wife of a major drug trafficker, told the Kerry Subcommittee staff "that she saw airplanes owned by Southern Air Transport land in Barranquilla, Colombia, unload weapons and load cocaine." The flight logs of Wallace B. Sawyer, the Ilopango-based pilot who worked for Southern Air indicate two visits to Barranquilla in October 1985.[3]

After 1984, Congress made it illegal for the White House, the Pentagon, and the CIA to secretly supply arms for the contras. So the operation's organizers stepped up its recruitment of major drug smugglers to do this work for them. Congress allowed the administration to provide the contra army with only "humanitarian aid." According to the Kerry Subcommittee report, the U.S. State Department transferred over $800,000 of this "humanitarian aid" money to four Miami-based firms connected with major drug-smuggling rings:

• $317,425.17 went to Vortex, an air cargo company whose executive vice president was the target of three FBI drug investigations when the State Department handed over the money. According to the Guardian (March 20, 1988), Michael Palmer, owner of Vortex, claimed his operations smuggled $40 million in drugs into the United States between 1977 and 1985.
• $261,930 went to Frigoríficos de Puntereñas, a drug-smuggling and money-laundering operation that used shrimp boats in the Gulf of Mexico as its cover. One part of this operation, a company named Ocean Hunter, reportedly moved about $200,000 a month in cash to the contras.[1]
• $185,924.25 went to SETCO, an air cargo firm owned by multimillionaire Juan Ramón Matta Ballesteros, who ran the largest cocaine operations in Honduras. Newsweek (May 5, 1985) cited official estimates that Matta was responsible for perhaps one-third of the cocaine reaching the United States.
• And $41,120.90 went to DIACSA, which FBI affidavits describe as a center for cocaine trafficking and money laundering. DIACSA was owned by two veterans of the CIA's Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. In 1988 a court case of Panama's General Noriega would reveal that DIACSA carried out drug flights as part of its contra support efforts.[4]

In short, after 1984, the relationship between the U.S. government and the airlines of major drug traffickers becomes part of the public record. This network carried weapons to the CIA's contra army in Central America and returned with drugs to the U.S.

How Drug Smugglers Were Recruited

In the early summer of 1984, two contra representatives met with George Morales, a big-time Colombian trafficker who was then under indictment in the U.S. They met at the Miami home of a wealthy Nicaraguan exile. The contra representatives were Octaviano César and Adolfo "Popo" Chamorro.

A San Francisco Chronicle article reports: "Chamorro and César said they asked a CIA official whether they could accept the offer of airplanes and cash from the drug dealer, Morales. `I called our contact at the CIA,' Chamorro said recently. `The truth is, we were still getting some CIA money under the table. They said he (Morales) was fine.' " Journalist Leslie Cockburn subsequently corroborated César's CIA status from no less than eight sources, including high-level administration officials in Washington.[4]

Morales went on to organize numerous guns-for-drugs flights between the United States and Central America.[5] Morales told the Christic Institute that he donated approximately $5 million in drug money to the contras in 1984 and 1985. Morales said that the payment was part of a deal with three contra leaders a few months after his indictment on drug charges: they would `take care' of his legal problem in return for financial and logistical support. Morales later testified before the Kerry Subcommittee that his pilots flew weapons to contra bases and returning to the United States with drug cargoes. At a federal trial in April 1990, Colombian drug pilot Ernesto Carrasco testified that he saw Morales pay more than $1 million in drug profits to contra leader Adolfo "Popo" Chamorro at a Florida restaurant in 1985.[6]

Morales claims that the CIA opened up an airstrip in Costa Rica, on the 1,500-acre ranch of the American John Hull, and that his pilots flew 20 shipments of weapons into Costa Rica in 1984 and 1985, and smuggled thousands of kilos of cocaine on the return flights into the United States. This was confirmed by Gary Betzner, a pilot for Morales, who testified he flew cocaine from Costa Rica to Lakeland, Florida.[7, 1] "I smuggled my share of illegal substance," said Betzner, "but I also smuggled my share of weapons in exchange, with the full knowledge and assistance of both the DEA and the CIA." (Newsweek, January 26, 1986)

The Kerry Subcommittee described John Hull as "a liaison between the contras and the United States government." And subcommittee testimony said that, on at least two occasions, Hull was present while bags of cocaine were transferred to the planes.

In May 1990, Colombian drug kingpin Carlos Lehder told ABC News that Hull was "pumping about 30 tons of cocaine into the United States every year."[6]

In his Kerry Subcommittee testimony, Morales described the protection he enjoyed as long as he worked with the contra supply: Despite a previous indictment and DEA objections, a court order permitted him to enter and leave the country on his drug business. He landed his drug planes at the government-controlled Ilopango Air Force Base in El Salvador. And for two years, arms and drugs were loaded and unloaded from his planes, in broad daylight, at Fort Lauderdale's Executive Airport.

The M.O. for Recruiting Cargo Airplanes, Pilots for the Secret War

The reports of such enlistment of drug smugglers are routinely denied by the CIA. However, there is much evidence that recruiters of the contra supply network would make drug smugglers "an offer you can't refuse." Drug traffickers were offered protection from prosecution and protection for their planes flying in and out of various U.S. airports and military bases. In exchange, the U.S. government got a large "self-financing" network of cargo aircraft and pilots that could not be easily traced to the CIA or Defense Department.

During the 1991 trial of Panama's Manuel Noriega, Carlos Lehder testified that a U.S. official offered to allow him to smuggle cocaine into the United States, if he would allow the contra supply network to use a Bahamian island he owned. Lehder also testified that the Colombian cartel had donated about $10 million to the contras.[8]

According to a Senate narcotics subcommittee, the federal indictment against drug trafficker Michael B. Palmer, owner of Vortex, was dropped because the government decided the case was not "in the interest of the United States." This narcotics subcommittee also reported that in 1985 a federal attorney in Miami stopped investigating drug trafficking on John Hull's ranch because U.S. officials "were taking active measures to protect Hull." The Kerry report says it was the U.S. embassy in Costa Rica that stopped this investigation.[6]

Michael Levine, a DEA agent for 25 years reported from personal experiences in the L.A. Times that "high-level drug investigations had been destroyed" because the CIA would step in--protecting the drug traffickers and forcing DEA prosecutions to be called off in the name of "national security."[9] In 1983, as the contra supply operation was building, the DEA closed its station in Honduras, where the main contra bases and airstrips were located.

Providing Airports and Protection for the Smuggling Operations

Flights like Tolliver's into major U.S. bases were routine. In April 1987 the Boston Globe reported that between 50 and 100 flights "arranged by the CIA took off from or landed at U.S. airports during the past two years without undergoing inspection" by U.S. Customs.[6] Government-protected drug smugglers used many U.S. bases, including Homestead Air Force Base near Miami, U.S. air force bases in Texas, and a number of airstrips around Mena, Arkansas, during the time when Bill Clinton was governor.[3]

Meanwhile, in Latin America, the gun-for-drugs operation used two major U.S.-controlled air bases, in addition to John Hull's ranch, Panamanian government air bases, and the Colombian airstrips in Barranquilla. One was the Salvadoran Air Force base at Ilopango, El Salvador--a base virtually under the control of the U.S. Department of Defense. In 1985, this control was exercised by Col. James Steele, who was then chief of the U.S. Military Advisory Group in El Salvador, and who, in that capacity, oversaw the Contra supply operation at Ilopango at first hand. The other base was the contras' main air base at Aguacate in Honduras. These locations were valuable because their runways could handle large, heavily laden military cargo planes.[4]

Celerino Castillo, who was once Drug Enforcement Agent in charge of Honduras, El Salvador and Costa Rica, says he reported to DEA headquarters that huge drug- and gun-smuggling operations were being run from Ilopango military airport by the "North Network" and the CIA. In his 1994 book, Powder Burns: Cocaine, Contras and the Drug War, Castillo writes, "My reports contained not only the names of traffickers, but their destinations, flight paths, tail numbers, and the date and time of each flight. Hundreds of flights each week delivered cocaine to the buyers and returned money headed for the great isthmus laundering machine in Panama."

Castillo reported that the operations were run out of two hangars at Ilopango: "The CIA owned one hangar and the National Security Council ran the other."[4] Gary Webb documents that cocaine for California's contra ring came through Ilopango, and that its main leader Meneses had close personal ties with Salvadoran generals. "We don't know the extent of the Honduran military's involvement in drugs," said a State Department official. "But our educated guess is that all of the senior officials have knowledge, many are involved...and they are all reaping the profits."[1]

This evidence reveals that U.S. government officials were involved in creating and directing the air networks that supplied the contras with arms and smuggled drugs into the U.S. People are asked to believe that the contras carried these operations out on their own, while low-level CIA agents merely "turned their heads and did nothing."

On one level, the evidence that links these operations to the CIA is fragmentary. These were covert operations--designed by professionals for the specific purpose of giving the U.S. rulers "plausible deniability."

But clearly such operations could not have been conceived by the hired contra mercenaries. Only support within the U.S. government at the highest levels could have protected these networks and assured their safe entry into U.S. air bases. Evidence at every point--in the testimony and documents of DEA agents, in the investigations of the Costa Rican government, in statements by Customs officials and the testimony of contra agents and drug smugglers--points to CIA involvement in these operations--creating them, protecting them, and directing them.

The CIA denies this. But the facts remain: While the government preached "just say no," while it was criminalizing a whole generation of ghetto youth, that same government was deeply involved in transporting cocaine and other drugs into the United States to secretly finance their dirty counterrevolutionary war against Nicaragua.

SOURCES

[1] Washington's War on Nicaragua, Holly Sklar, South End Press, 1988

[2] The Iran Contra Connection--Secret Teams and Covert Operations in the Reagan Era, Jonathan Marshall, Peter Dale Scott and Jane Hunter; South End Press, 1987

[3] "How the U.S. Government Has Augmented America's Drug Crisis," Peter Dale Scott, Ph.D., War on Drugs: Studies in the Failure of U.S. Narcotic Policy, Alfred W. McCoy and Alan A. Block (Eds), Westview Press, Boulder, 1992

[4] "CIA and Drug Trafficking by Contra Supporters," Affidavit by Peter Dale Scott, Ph.D., September 30, 1996

[5] "Account Links Contras, Drug Trafficking," Douglas Farah and Walter Pincus, Washington Post, reprinted by San Francisco Chronicle, October 31, 1996

[6] "The Contra-Cocaine Connection," Amy Lang, Convergence magazine, Christic Institute, Fall 1991

[7] "State Organized Crime," American Society of Criminology Presidential Address, William J. Chamblis, 1988

[8] "A Media Snow Job," In These Times, October 28, 1996

[9] "Is the CIA's New Openness Just Another Con Job on a Naive Public?", Michael Levine, Los Angeles Times, September 12, 1993

DEA'S FINEST DETAILS CORRUPTION
By John Veit

http://mediafilter.org/MFF/DEA.35.html

(Celerino Castillo III, one of the Drug Enforcement Agency's most prolific agents, who netted record busts in New York, Peru, Guatemala, El Salvador and San Francisco, was ordered not to investigate US-sponsored drug trafficking operations supervised by Oliver North. After twelve years of service, Castillo has retired from the agency, "amazed that the US government could get away with drug trafficking for so long." In his book Powderburns: Cocaine, Contras, and the Drug War [Mosaic Press, 1994], Castillo details the US role in drug and weapons smuggling, money laundering, torture, and murder, and includes Oliver North's drug use and dealing, and the training of death squads in El Salvador and Guatemala by the DEA.)

VIETNAM BLUES
Sergeant Castillo was a doper's nightmare during his days in Vietnam. Constantly testing the reflexes and surveillance skills of his platoon, Castillo had no tolerance for soldiers stoned on heroin or OJ's (marijuana soaked with opium). Compassionate with users suffering emotional problems, Castillo took a hard line with those who compromised the safety of the unit, court-martialling anyone who failed to clean themselves up after two warnings.

With addicts dying around him regularly, Castillo vowed to make fighting narcotics his life's work once back in the states. He told the SHADOW: "Every week we would send another overdose victim home in a green bag. If the soldier was well liked, someone would pump a bullet in the soldier's body. The family would be told he died a hero's death. If the consensus was that the dead soldier had been an asshole, he would be sent home with nothing more than the needle pricks in his arm." Dope and undisciplined soldiers were problems Castillo left behind when he volunteered to join a secret sniper unit in neighboring Cambodia in 1971. The Vietcong used Cambodia as a staging ground for raids on South Vietnam since the US Congress had declared it off-limits to American soldiers. Castillo's twelve-man team would pick off commanding officers at VC bases with M-14 sniper rifles. "We never missed," Castillo recalled. "According to the Pentagon, we were never there."

These were the first of many US Government cover-ups Castillo was to be involved with in his twenty-one year career as a public servant.

OFFICER CASTILLO, TEXAS DEA 101
Things were tamer back in Edinburgh, Texas, where Castillo served as a police officer while earning a criminal justice degree from Pan American University in 1975. "I drank in every detail of the lectures, paying particular attention to any mention of drug laws. They would be my weapons in the streets." Serving first as a dispatcher at the Edinburgh Police Department, he moved to the field, using his Vietnam surveillance and combat skills well, often surprising thieves and other miscreants during the commission of crimes.

Being fluent in Spanish enabled Castillo to intimately interact with people on his beat and he became a model community police officer. His network of informants grew quickly. Unlike the felons in later assignments with the DEA, most of Castillo's informants were locals, people with families fed up with the drug trade in their neighborhood. It was when working with federal agents that Castillo saw basic classroom policing get "thrown out the window."

Two senior DEA agents, Jesse Torrez and Chema Cavazos, took Castillo on as an apprentice of sorts, taking him along when he fed them busts too big for Edinburgh's small force to handle. When Castillo got wind of any smuggling over the border, his DEA mentors summoned the federales, the Mexican national police renowned for their violence.

Mexican interrogations involved hanging the suspected trafficker by a beam and pouring seltzer up his nose. Often a cattle prod, the chicara, named after the cicada, was used to extract names of customs officials and traffickers working both sides of the border. The Americans would stand by at a distance, listening for valuable intelligence.

During other co-ventures between the Edinburgh PD and the DEA, Castillo witnessed the DEA's disregard for the safety of informants. DEA agents would often barge in minutes after a transaction was made, giving the informant's identity away instantly. Castillo had always waited long enough to create an avenue of doubt in the mind of the suspect, a necessary courtesy insuring the relationship's continuity. Like all the DEA offices Castillo later worked in, the one in McAllen, Texas was cooperatively dysfunctional, with two sets of agents pitted against each other, divided primarily along racial lines. Animosity and suspicion among agents were constants in an organization where precision and coordination is a prerequisite to mutual survival.

        NEW YORK CITY: NO RULES
After six years in Edinburgh, Castillo joined the DEA. His first assignment was New York City in 1980, a far cry from Vietnam's jungles and the relatively placid living of the Rio Grande Valley. Cocaine was making a healthy return to streetcorners and the city's surviving discos. Crack pipes were making their first gasps in the city as Ronald Reagan ushered in a new era of borrowed prosperity and conspicuous decadence.

Placed in the New York office's wiliest squad, the "Raiders," Castillo watched as dealers' doors were kicked in without warrants, illegal wiretaps were performed, and Miranda rights were forgotten. During a stint at Kennedy Airport, he saw agents rip off traffickers, regularly pocketing cash, jewelry and drugs. Not being one to snitch, the young agent held his tongue. "I had always done things by the book. Here they ripped out the pages and stomped on them," Castillo told the SHADOW. "Internal Affairs was always watching, but we were protected by the cluster of New Yorkers in DEA's Washington office known as the New York Mafia." These administrative agents insured that the New York office, the country's largest, was immune from "messy internal investigations." Contacted by the SHADOW, DEA spokesman John Hughes denied that such an organization existed, stating that such a thing would, "stick out like a sore thumb."

DEA BRASS: BIGOTS WITH BADGES
The DEA has never been a pioneer of affirmative action. Most agents do not speak Spanish, despite the Agency's constant interaction with Hispanics. On several occasions, Castillo's safety was jeopardized when Spanish-challenged agents failed to recognize the bust's signal word among the rolling Spanish chatter, leaving him to improvise with armed dealers anxious for their drugs or cash.

Spanish-speaking agents follow cases from the mouth of the informant to the prison cell, their superiors often performing only administrative tasks. Despite the paucity of their investigative work, DEA administrators would rush in with the swarm of blue windbreakers the day of the bust, eager to take credit for everything. Castillo told the SHADOW, "Every Hispanic agent I knew fell into the same trap and was assigned wiretap monitoring, translations, and surveillance. We worked long hours building cases against Dominicans and Puerto Ricans and would have to stand back while paper pushers took the credit."

Being a workaholic brought quick results in the Big Apple for Castillo. In his four years working the city, Castillo orchestrated some of the biggest busts the nation had ever seen. On November 4th, 1982, twenty pounds of heroin worth $20 million were hauled in, one of the largest busts in New York City history.

With every day spent on the streets, Castillo's hatred for drugs grew with increasing vehemence. Castillo witnessed addicts of every ilk, sometimes as young as fourteen, constantly throwing their lives into the toilet so drug dealers could get rich. It would be a hard slap of reality to later discover that the United States government was instrumental in saturating American streets with life destroying drugs.

        PERU: DRUG WAR FUTILITY
By 1984, the US appetite for cocaine was peaking as fields in South America were converted to accommodate the coca leaf. Castillo, the only Spanish-speaking field agent in Peru, continued his efficient work, making numerous busts in his two years there.

Working the jungles, although frustrating for Castillo, was a welcome change from Manhattan's steel maze and reminiscent of Vietnam. Stymied by the DEA's advisory status in foreign countries, however, Castillo was unable to probe too deeply into Peru's narco underworld. The Peruvian military thought their American advisor would be satisfied torching small labs and shooting down traffickers' planes. Castillo demanded to bust the big labs, the factories run by the cartels. Peru's military however, conveniently kept the larger fields and refineries off-limits to American investigation. The military claimed that the Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso, the Maoist guerrillas whose reign of terror included cocaine smuggling and numerous murders of government officials and civilians) controlled the areas of major cocaine production.

The last thing Peru's government wanted was to have an American agent killed by Sendero, which would jeopardize future military aid. Castillo later learned their caution was merely a smokescreen used to protect Columbian cartel-controlled airstrips and refineries from American intervention. The military, like most Peruvian governmental agencies, was largely dominated by Colombia's cartels who were adept at greasing palms and instilling fear in the hearts of potential drug enforcement heroes.

The US took a more prominent role in the Peruvian military during Castillo's four years there, with programs like Operation Condor, which used the collective services of the DEA, CIA and the armies of Colombia and Peru to fight drug trafficking. With their help, Castillo was able to coordinate more and larger busts, including South America's biggest ever: four tons of raw coca paste, three airplanes, and a gargantuan cocaine refinery able to perform every phase of the leaf's metamorphosis into nose candy. As a result, US military aid to Peru was increased.

Despite his successes, Castillo remained mired in the DEA's bigoted bureaucracy. Castillo's station chief, Peter Rieff, a non-Spanish speaker, felt threatened by Castillo and transferred him to Guatemala without the promotion originally promised after one year's service. Rieff's reasoning was, "you just haven't paid your dues, Cele."

DEA NEGLECT: AN AGENT IS MURDERED
It was during Castillo's Peru junket that DEA agent Enrique "Kiki" Camerena was killed by CIA informants on March 6th, 1985 in Vista Hermosa, Mexico near Guadalajara. Left alone to work Mexico with some of the country's most notoriously dangerous traffickers, Camerena often complained about not receiving enough support in the field while working undercover. "Camerena warned the DEA brass things were getting dangerous in Guadalajara. The Agency ignored him," Castillo recalled to the SHADOW after listening to audio tapes of Camarena's torture and murder. "Both of the killers worked for the CIA and were double-dipping," (snitching for the CIA while using their protected status to deal dope on the side.) Only one of Camarena's killers were caught.

Castillo empathized with Camerena's plight. He could just as easily have been the one who dug too deeply for the cartel's convenience. Kidnapping and murdering family members of police and informants is common practice in the drug-dominated nations of Latin America. With his wife and two children following him on his long-term assignments, Castillo constantly worried that they would suffer a fate similar to El Salvador's President José Napoleon Duarte, who had to walk unarmed into a guerrilla compound in 1986 and beg for the release of his daughter in exchange for immunity for their imprisoned comrades.

During a later assignment, an informant provided Castillo with wiretapped conversations of a drug dealing Guatemalan colonel outlining an intricate plan to assassinate him. "Instead of talking about the bust the informant was setting up, Colonel Moran kept going on about how he was going to blame the rebels for my assassination. A hit squad was going to wait in the bushes and ambush me when I drove past on Highway 8 in El Salvador," Castillo told the SHADOW from his home state of Texas, where he is currently president of his local Parent Teachers Association.

Castillo had reported to his superiors that Moran was heavily involved in narcotics trafficking, frequently orchestrating cash drops to the Panama City branch of the scandal-ridden Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI). After hearing the tapes outlining the assassination, DEA superiors ordered Castillo to drive down Highway 8 to El Salvador to investigate a mission of dubious importance. "I felt as if someone had painted a bullseye on the back of my head," Castillo recalled. "Tree branches were sniper rifles, I drove about ninety miles an hour most of the way."

DEA files outlining Colonel Moran's sporadic career as a DEA and CIA informant were provided to Castillo by agents sympathetic to his plight as an agency pariah. During later DEA attempts to silence Castillo, the Colonel was summoned to testify before the DEA's Office of Professional Responsibility. Moran detailed allegations to enthralled inspectors that Castillo had shot several drug dealers in the back of the head during a bust in Puerto Barrios, Guatemala in 1986. The charges were false and Moran's plot to assassinate Castillo was never mentioned during the proceedings.

DEA informants include some of the world's most disreputable rouges who often use their informant status as carte blanche to deal dope on the side. Although DEA spokesman Hughes denied to the SHADOW that such "double dipping" is tolerated, he added: "You don't use the Pope to catch drug dealers."

Hughes also denied that the agency is reckless with their overseas agents, saying they "always have a recourse for back-up, usually with local police." Local police certainly didn't help Camerena, and Castillo laughed when the SHADOW told him Hughes' remarks.

CENTRAL AMERICA: CHAOS, COCAINE, DEATH SQUADS
The Guatemala City DEA office in the US Embassy compound covers four countries: El Salvador, Guatemala, Be-lize, and Honduras. In 1985, Castillo's beat, El Salvador and Guatemala, was one of the most volatile on the globe, racked by years of internal warfare, death squad violence, and narcotrafficking.

Like Peru, both governments were subservient to three related entities: the US Government, the cartels, and their militaries. The militaries operated on their own, violently rooting out sus-pected communists from their borders while trafficking drugs and weapons to support themselves. Both nations' mili-taries harbored death squads who rou-tinely kidnapped and tortured suspected subversives. It was with these elements that Castillo was forced to cooperate in forming anti-narcoterrorism units.

In training his elite drug squads, Castillo utilized the services of re-nowned death squad leaders. Dr. Hec-tor Antonio Regalado was hired as a firearms trainer for Castillo's El Salva-dor unit at the recommendation of Colonel James Steele, commander of the United States Military Group which oversaw American armed forces in Cen-tral America.

Trained at the US' School of the Americas in Ft. Benning, Georgia, Regalado often bragged of his trigger-man role in the assassination of Arch-bishop Oscar Romero, a globally be-loved human rights activist, in March 1980. Regalado was also a torture ex-pert, frequently using his skills as a dentist to extract information from nota-ble "subversives." Much to Castillo's dis-gust, the death squads' most notorious human butchers and drug dealers be-came his students and colleagues. While Castillo's classes dealt primarily with surveillance, raid tactics and firearms training, others detailed explicit torture methods. Deemed "interview tech-niques," students were instructed how to use cattle prods and hoses and to sub-merge suspects' faces in buckets of water until nearly causing drowning.