|
The Akha Heritage Foundation - www.akha.org
Akha Human Rights - Akha University
| ||
 
|
Document
You may copy and save this document for later reading.
Please remember to do a site search for other related documents which may not be shown here. A Sordid History, The CIA and the War on Drugs
From Tom Burghardt <tburghardt@igc.apc.org> ________________________________________________
A - I N F O S N E W S S E R V I C E http://www.ainfos.ca/ ________________________________________________ ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| ||| ||| ||| A N T I F A ||| ||| ||| ||| I N F O - B U L L E T I N ||| ||| _____ ||| ||| ||| ||| * News * Analysis * Research * Action * ||| ||| ||| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| ***** ||/\|/\|/\|/\|/\|/\|/\|/\|/\|/\|/\|/\|/\|/\|/\|/\|/\|/\|/\||/\|| || * -- SPECIAL -- * June 10, 1998 * -- EDITION -- * || ||\/|\/|\/|\/|\/|\/|\/|\/|\/|\/|\/|\/|\/|\/|\/|\/|\/|\/|\/||\/|| * SPECIAL EDITION * * * * _________________________________________________________________ A SORDID HISTORY: THE CIA & THE `WAR AGAINST DRUGS' _________________________________________________________________ CONTENTS ------ 1. (TI/AA) TRANSNATIONAL INSTITUTE/ACCION ANDINA: Colombia's Blowback - Former CIA-Backed Paramilitaries Are Major Drug Traffickers Now, by Frank Smyth 2. (ITT) IN THESE TIMES: US - Don't Ask, Don't Tell, by Martha Honey [1982 `Memorandum of Understanding] 3. (PNS) PINK NOISE STUDIOS: 1982 Correspondence Between US Attorney General William Franch Smith & CIA Director William Casey 4. (IPS) INSTITUTE FOR POLICY STUDIES: A Tangled Web - A History of CIA Complicity in Drug International Trafficking * * * AFIB EDITOR'S NOTE: The article below by investigative journalist Frank Smyth was published last Fall by the Transnational Institute (Amsterdam) and Accion Andina (Cochabomba, Bolivia) as a chapter titled, "La Mano Blanca en Colombia," in the book _Crimen Uniformado [Crime in Uniform]: entre la corrupcion y la impunidad_, 1997. It appears in Antifa Info-Bulletin with the author's permission. _________________________________________________________________ COLOMBIA'S BLOWBACK: FORMER CIA-BACKED PARAMILITARIES ARE MAJOR DRUG TRAFFICKERS NOW _________________________________________________________________ By Frank Smyth The CIA has long backed anti-communist allies who, either during their relationship with the agency or later, ran drugs. This comes as no surprise. As early as 1960, U.S. military manuals encouraged intelligence operatives to ally themselves with "smugglers" and "black market operators to defeat communist insurgents, as reported by Michael McClintock in his seminal book _Instruments of Statecraft_. In fact, the CIA did just that. Take Southeast Asia. Later in the that same decade the agency allied itself with, among others, the Hmong in Laos, who, according to historian Alfred W. McCoy in his book _The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade_, were trafficking opium. Or Afghanistan. There in the 1980s the CIA backed the Mujahedeen against the Soviet Union. In the 1990s, according to Tim Weiner of the New York Times, the same Mujahedeen have controlled up to one third of the opium (used to make heroin) reaching the United States. Colombia is an even better example today. In addition to suffering from rampant common crime, Colombia is a country crippled by two ongoing political campaigns. One is a three-decade war pitching the CIA-backed Colombian military and allied rightist paramilitaries against formerly pro-Moscow and pro-Havana, leftist guerrilla groups. The other campaign is the drug war, where the battle lines are far less clear. Elements of all these sides are involved in Colombia's drug trade, which includes the processing of about 80 percent of the world's cocaine, the base substance of crack. The CIA is no exception. Since 1995, an elite CIA counter- drug team commanded by, progressively enough, a woman, and staffed mainly by young, competent technocrats, has been instrumental in apprehending all top seven leaders of Colombia's Cali cartel. But back in 1991, another CIA team played a different role. More interested in supporting Colombia's dirty counter-insurgency than its counter-drug efforts, this team helped forge and finance a secret anti-communist alliance between the Colombian military and illegal paramilitary groups, many of whom are running drugs today. Why was this alliance made secret? Colombia had outlawed all such paramilitary groups two years before in 1989. Why did Colombia do that? A Colombian government investigation had found that these same paramilitaries had been taken over by the Medellin drug cartel led by the late Pablo Escobar. At the time, Escobar and his associates were fiercely resisting U.S.-backed pressure for Colombia to pass extradition laws intended to make them stand trial in the United States on drug trafficking charges. So they took control of Colombia's strongest paramilitaries, using them to wage a terrorist campaign against the state. These same paramilitaries, based in the Middle Magdalena valley, were behind a wave of violent crimes, including the 1989 bombing of Avianca flight HK-1803, which killed 111 passengers. Investigators concluded that the bomb was detonated by an altimeter, and that the perpetrators had been trained in such techniques by Israeli, British and other mercenaries led by an Israeli Reserved Army Lieutenant Colonel, Yair Klein. The Colombian military had helped protect this training, to the point of even being in radio contact with the paramilitaries' training base, while Escobar had paid the mercenaries' fees. The CIA, however, ignored these facts when it decided two years later to help renew -- in secret -- the alliance between the Colombian military and paramilitary groups. By then, even though the cold war was over and Eastern bloc aid had long since dried up, Colombia's leftist insurgents were still relatively strong. And many trade union, student and peasant groups, among others, provided them with political and sometimes even logistical forms of support. CIA officers knew that paramilitaries -- civilians usually led by retired military officers -- could provide the Colombian military with plausible deniability for assassinations of suspected leftists and similar crimes. "A vast network of armed civilians began to replace, at least in part, soldiers and policemen who could be easily identified," writes Javier Giraldo, a Jesuit priest and founder of Colombia's Inter-Congregational Commission for Justice and Peace. "They also started to employ methods that had been carefully designed to ensure secrecy and generate confusion." But neither the CIA nor any other U.S. agency admitted that it was still backing Colombia's counter-insurgency campaign. Instead U.S. officials claim that all U.S. support to Colombia, since 1989, has been designed to further the drug war. "There was a very big debate going on [about how to best allocate] money for counter-narcotics operations in Colombia," said retired U.S. Army Colonel James S. Roach, Jr., who was then the top U.S. military attache in Bogota as well as the Pentagon's ranking Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) liaison there. "The U.S. was looking for a way to try to help. But if you're not going to be combatants [yourselves], you have to find something to do." Do, they did. First an inter-agency team including representatives of the U.S. embassy's Military Advisory Group in Bogota, the U.S. Southern Command in Panama, the DIA in Washington and the CIA in Langley made recommendations to completely overhaul Colombia's military intelligence networks. Then The CIA independently provided funds to incorporate paramilitary forces into them. It didn't matter that these paramilitary forces were illegal in Colombia at the time. Nor did it matter that they had been outlawed explicitly over the growing influence of the late Pablo Escobar and his Medellin drug cartel in directing them. In addition to drug trafficking, Colombia's nefarious paramilitaries had already been implicated in widespread human rights abuses. This led the Defense Department, for one, to discourage the Colombian military from incorporating them into these new intelligence networks. "The intent was not to be associated with paramilitaries," said Colonel Roach, who was also in regular contact with CIA officers in Bogota. He says they had another approach. "The CIA set up clandestine nets of their own. They had a lot of money. It was kind of like Santa Claus had arrived." CIA spokesman Mike Mansfield declined to comment. News of these clandestine intelligence networks was first brought to light by Human Rights Watch, in November 1996 released U.S. and Colombian military documents, as well as oral testimony, to show that both the Defense Department and the CIA, in late 1990, encouraged Colombia to reorganize its entire military intelligence system. In may 1991, Colombia formed 41 new intelligence networks nationwide "based on the recommendations made by the commission of U.S. military advisors," according to the original Colombian order which established them. Later, four former Colombian operatives from one of network in central Colombia's Magdalena valley testified that it incorporated illegal paramilitary groups, paying them to both gather intelligence and assassinate suspected leftists. Though U.S. officials still maintain that they supported this intelligence reorganization as part of their drug war efforts, the same Colombian order quoted above instructs these new intelligence networks to fight only "the armed subversion" or leftist guerrillas. Indeed most of Colombia's leftist guerrillas, especially among the formerly pro-Moscow FARC, are also involved with drugs. But a U.S. interagency study recently ordered by the Clinton administration's former ambassador in Bogota, Myles Frechette, found the guerrillas' role to be limited to mostly protecting drug crops, and, to a lesser degree, processing operations. Meanwhile, rightist paramilitaries allied with the military protect far more drug laboratories and internal transit routes, according to both U.S. intelligence and Colombian law enforcement authorities. In fact, according to one Colombian law enforcement report, drug trafficking today is -- again -- the paramilitaries' "central axis" of funding. Similarly, according to another report from a different law enforcement entity, this one about the Magdalena valley in 1995 by top detectives from Colombia's Judicial and Investigative Police, the military and paramilitaries there are allied "not only for the anti-subversive struggle, but also to profit and open the way for drug traffickers." One paramilitary suspect it names is "the well-known narco-trafficker Victor Carranza." A contemporary of Medellin's Escobar, Carranza first established himself by rising to the top of Colombia's lucrative emerald trade among the Bo-yaca mountains, and by wiping out a large guerrilla front there at the same time. Soon Carranza also became a major landowner, buying large swaths of it in the eastern plains of Meta, a province choked with drug crops as well as laboratories. Today Colombian police identify Carranza as both a multi-ton level drug trafficker, and one of the key leaders of Colombia's many illegal paramilitary groups like, in Meta, the infamous "Black Snake." Human rights groups have accused Carranza of engineering assassinations as well as massacres. There is no evidence that Carranza has ever been either a CIA asset or informant. But his anti-communist credentials are unquestionable. And he runs frequently in military crowds. Military eyewitnesses say that military officers in Villavicencio, Meta have even met him inside the Los Llanos hotel there which he owns. U.S. officials too know a lot about him. "Carranza comes up constantly in intelligence reporting," one such expert says. An old-fashioned gangster, "Don Victor," as he is respectfully called by his men, still frequents the emerald mines and likes to be the first to pick out the largest stones from the best veins uncovered. Yet, Carranza remains untouchable, even though one of his purported lieutenants, Arnulfo Castillo Agudelo, also known as "Scratch," was arrested in 1995 implicated Carranza in circumstances involving over 40 corpses which had been exhumed -- six years before -- on one of Carranza's Meta ranches. "Scratch" declined to be interviewed in Modelo prison in Bogota. Carranza, who avoids publicity, was also unavailable for comment. In recent years, Carranza has been expanding his operations in central Colombia throughout the Magdalena valley. The above police report notes: "Carranza is planning to acquire Hacienda Bella Cruz [there] to use as a base for his activities, [and] bring in 200 paramilitary operatives from Meta." Witnesses say that it is now teeming with armed men, who have displaced hundreds of local peasants. In total, Carranza and other drug suspects have bought about 45,000 acres of land throughout the Magdalena valley, according to Jamie Prieto Amaya, the Catholic bishop there, quoted in the Bogota news-weekly Cambio 16. Still another suspect is Henry Loaiza, also known as "The Scorpion." Demonstrating the importance of paramilitaries to the overall drug trade, he was one of the top seven Cali cartel suspects arrested with CIA help since 1995. Like Carranza, "The Scorpion" is also implicated in several specific civilian massacres of suspected leftists carried out jointly by military and paramilitary forces, including the 1989 Trujillo massacres (involving chainsaws) near Cali. Other drug suspects identified by the Colombian police include military officers like Major Jorge Alberto Lazaro, a former Army commander also accused of ordering paramilitaries to commit massacres in the Magdalena valley. Today this same central Colombian valley, which runs about 400 miles north toward Caribbean ports, is a major corridor for both processed drugs and precursor chemicals. The CIA helped enable Colombia's military and paramilitaries to collaborate in the dark -- more than a year after the Berlin Wall fell. By doing so, the CIA has facilitated crimes involving both human rights and drug trafficking. Such behavior was reprehensible during the cold war. It is completely indefensible now. Frank Smyth is a freelance journalist who has written about drug trafficking in The Village Voice, The New Republic, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal. He is co-author with Winifred Tate of "Colombia's Gringo Invasion," _Covert Action Quarterly_, Number 60, Spring 1997. The article above was reprinted in _Colombia Bulletin: A Human Rights Quarterly_. For more information on U.S. intervention in Colombia, or to subscribe to _Colombia Bulletin_, please contact: * COLOMBIA SUPPORT NETWORK * P.O. Box 1505 Madison, WI 53701 Tel: (608) 257-8753 Fax: (608) 255-6621 E-Mail: csn@igc.org Web: http://www.igc.apc.org/csn Subscriptions - 1 year $25; low income $12.50 * * * * IN THESE TIMES * E-mail: itt@inthesetimes.com Web: http://www.inthesetimes.com - May 1998 - ----- _________________________________________________________________ US: DON'T ASK, DON'T TELL _________________________________________________________________ By Martha Honey In testimony before the House Select Committee on Intelligence on March 16, the Central Intelligence Agency once again suffered a blow to its reputation. This time the injury was self-inflicted. The CIA's own top watchdog, Inspector General Frederick P. Hitz, admitted that although "dozens of individuals and a number of companies" involved in the agency's covert war against Nicaragua during the '80s were suspected drug traffickers, the CIA had legal authority to ignore their crimes as long as they were helping contra rebels fight the left-wing Sandinista government. Hitz revealed that between 1982 and 1995 the spy agency had an agreement with the Justice Department, allowing it to ignore drug trafficking by its "agents, assets and non-staff employees." The directive, known as a "Memorandum of Understanding" (MOU), did not exempt the agency's full-time, career employees, who are known as CIA "officials." However, the agency did not have to tell the Justice Department about the criminal activities of "agents" or "assets" -- terms used interchangeably to refer to its paid and unpaid spies. Also exempt were CIA contractors, such as pilots, accountants and military trainers, who supplied the agency with specific goods and services rather than intelligence. "There was no official requirement to report on allegations of drug trafficking with respect to non-employees of the agency," Hitz told the committee. Hitz said this agreement, which he termed "a rather odd history," has since been changed. But it was not until 1995 -- five years after the end of the war in Nicaragua and three years into Clinton's first term -- that the agreement was revised to include agents, assets and contractors as "employees" whose suspected criminal activities, such as drug trafficking, must be reported to the Justice Department. Disclosure of this agreement is another black eye for the CIA at a time when the agency is trying to distance itself from persistent allegations of drug trafficking, including the provocative August 1996 "Dark Alliance" series in the San Jose Mercury News. Veteran journalists, investigators, policy analysts and members of Congress interviewed by In These Times all say they were unaware of the directive. "This previously unknown agreement enabled the CIA to keep known drug smugglers out of jail and on the payroll of the American taxpayer," says Peter Kornbluh, a senior analyst with the National Security Archive, who has written extensively on the CIA and the war in Nicaragua. "CIA officials realized collaborating with pro-contra drug smugglers was important to the goal of overthrowing the Sandinistas and it sought protection from the Justice Department." In 1982, when the MOU was implemented, the United States was gearing up for a covert war in Central America aimed at toppling the Sandinistas. Over the next eight years, the CIA hired scores of Latin American, Cuban and American spies, as well as dozens of aviation, fishing and real estate companies, to support the contras. Simultaneously, cocaine began flooding into the United States, fueling the crack epidemic that has devastated Los Angeles, Baltimore and other cities. David MacMichael, who was a senior CIA officer in the early '80s, says that while he was not aware of this MOU, he does recall that "in 1981, [CIA Director William] Casey went to attorney general [William French] Smith looking for a blanket exemption from prosecution for CIA officers for crimes committed in the line of duty." Smith demurred, he says. Since the mid-'80s, a spate of media reports, congressional inquiries, and court cases in the United States and Central America have linked contra officials and collaborators with cocaine traffickers, money launderers and various front companies. Many of those implicated also claimed or were alleged to be working for the CIA. In 1996, the accusations erupted anew with the publication of Gary Webb's Mercury News series, which detailed how a Nicaraguan drug ring used black street gangs to sell crack cocaine in Los Angeles. Over the years, the CIA has repeatedly denied allegations that it dealt with drug dealers. Those denials have been championed by Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus, a specialist in national security affairs and a leading critic of the Mercury News series. Pincus, who has yet to report on Hitz's testimony, says he had not been previously aware the directive. "I am still trying to get a clarification of it," he says, adding that it may not be very significant. "All it admits is that what they were doing was legal. On occasion they were dealing with people who may or may not have been dealing in drugs." In December 1985, reporters Robert Parry and Brian Barger wrote the first story tying the CIA's contra operation to cocaine smuggling. The piece for The Associated Press angered Reagan administration officials, who tried unsuccessfully to block its publication. During the contra war, most of the media either ignored or discredited the drug trafficking reports. Parry maintains that his pursuit of this story helped cost him jobs at AP and Newsweek. "Historically we were correct," Parry says. "We pointed to a serious problem in a timely fashion, and we were all punished and ridiculed. The reporters who put this story down have gone on to fame and fortune." Parry calls Hitz's disclosure "extremely significant." "It amounts to a blank check for dealing with drug traffickers," he says. "The agency is admitting that it engaged in covering up drug crimes by the contras and that this was legal." Major media also ignored the 1989 findings of Sen. John Kerry's (D-Mass.) Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics and International Operations. The Kerry committee's two-year investigation turned up substantial evidence of cocaine smuggling and money laundering by persons connected to the contras and the CIA. Among the conclusions of its 1,166-page report: * "Drug traffickers used the contra war and their ties to the contras as a cover for their criminal enterprises in Honduras and Costa Rica. Assistance from the drug lords was crucial to the contras, and the traffickers in turn promoted and protected their operations by associating with the contra movement." * "Drug traffickers provided support to the contras and used the supply network of the contras. Contras knowingly received both financial and material assistance from the drug traffickers." * "Drug traffickers contributed cash, weapons, planes, pilots, air supply services and other materials to the contras." * "In each case, one or another U.S. government agency had information regarding these matters either while they were occurring, or immediately thereafter." The report was all but ignored by the three major networks and buried in the back pages of the major newspapers. Combined, the stories in the Washington Post, New York Times and Los Angeles Times totalled less than 2,000 words. At the March congressional hearing, Hitz explained that the MOU between the agency and the Justice Department was modified slightly in 1986, prohibiting the CIA from paying those suspected of involvement in drug trafficking. The CIA, however, could legally continue to use suspected drug smugglers and not report their activities, as long as they received no money from the agency. But for major drug traffickers, being allowed to operate under the CIA's umbrella was payment enough. The Kerry committee's report, along with most press accounts of the CIA-cocaine connection, alleges that the contras accepted money and supplies from drug smugglers and money launderers -- not the other way around. John Mattes, a young public defender in Miami in the mid-80s, stumbled upon the allegations of drug trafficking by Cuban-Americans working with the contras. Mattes, who represented several cocaine traffickers and soldiers-of-fortune who testified before the Kerry committee, says traffickers were seeking protection, not money, from the CIA. "There was a marriage of convenience between the contras and the coke smugglers," he says. The smugglers had cash, planes and pilots, while the Contras had intelligence, airstrips and, most importantly, unimpeded access to the United States. "And that, to a drug smuggler," he says, "is worth all the tea in China." During the '80s, the CIA conducted several internal inquiries and announced it found no substantial evidence that contra leaders and other persons working for the CIA had connections to cocaine traffickers. Then, the "Dark Alliance" series touched off a volatile, nationwide controversy over the agency's role in introducing crack to Southern California street gangs. To help quell public and congressional anger, both the CIA and Justice Department launched separate internal investigations. Both reports were scheduled to be released last December, but were withheld at the last minute without explanation. Attorney General Janet Reno subsequently announced that she had blocked the release of the Justice Department report (rumored to be the more substantial and significant of the two) for unspecified "law enforcement reasons." Justice Department sources told in These Times that one of the people named in the report is a government witness in an ongoing criminal case, whose identity must be protected. However, Jack Blum, a Washington attorney and investigator for the Kerry committee, doubts that the Justice Department will ever release its report. Blum says law enforcement officials often claim disclosures will jeopardize ongoing cases, and he wonders why the report was not simply edited to protect the informant's identity. In late January, the CIA released a declassified version of volume one of its two-part report. Entitled "The California Story," this 149-page report focuses on the cocaine network described in the "Dark Alliance" series, which detailed the activities of two Nicaraguan drug smugglers, Danilo Blandon and Juan Norwin Meneses. In the early '80s, Meneses and Blandon supplied large quantities of powder cocaine to Ricky Ross, an African-American drug dealer, who then turned it into crack for sale to two Los Angeles gangs. Webb alleges that the Nicaraguans gave some of their drug profits to top contra officials who were working with the CIA. Hitz called the CIA's 18-month investigation "the most comprehensive and exhaustive ever conducted" by the agency. He told the congressional committee: "We found absolutely no evidence to indicate that the CIA as an organization or its employees were involved in any conspiracy to bring drugs into the United States," But, taken in conjunction with what Hitz said about the MOU, "employees" here may pertain only to CIA career officials -- not agents, assets or contractors. Webb, whose reporting touched off the controversy, describes the report as "schizophrenic." "The Executive Summary says there's no CIA involvement," says Webb. "The actual report shows there are CIA fingerprints all over this drug operation." For example, upon the release of volume one, CIA Director George Tenet proclaimed that the Agency "left no stone unturned" in reaching its conclusion that the CIA had "no direct or indirect" ties to Blandon and Meneses. Yet, the report contains a compendium of indirect links between the CIA's contra army and drug traffickers. The most obvious admissions contained in the report include: * An October 22, 1982, cable from the CIA's Directorate of Operations that reports, "There are indications of links between (a U.S. religious organization) and two Nicaraguan counter-revolutionary groups...These links involve an exchange in (the United States) of narcotics for arms." The report goes on to say that there was to be a meeting in Costa Rica of contras, several U.S. citizens and Renato Pena, a convicted drug dealer who was part of Meneses' operation. Astonishingly, a November 3, 1982, cable from CIA headquarters says that the agency decided "not to pursue the matter further" because of "the apparent participation of U.S. persons throughout." * The CIA directly intervened in the 1983 "Frogman Case," in which San Francisco police seized 430 pounds of cocaine and arrested 50 individuals, including a number of Nicaraguans. Because the CIA feared the agency's connections to some of the contras involved had "potential for disaster," an unidentified CIA lawyer convinced the U.S. Attorney in San Francisco and Justice Department officials to cancel plans to take depositions from contra leaders in Costa Rica and to return $36,800 seized in the drug raid to one of the contra factions. "There are sufficient factual details which would cause certain damage to our image and program in Central America," CIA assistant general counsel Lee Strickland wrote in a August 22, 1984, memo quoted in the report. * Blandon and Meneses met on various occasions with the contras' military commander, Enrique Bermudez, who worked for the CIA. At one meeting in Honduras in 1982, Bermudez, arguing that "the ends justify the means," asked the pair for help "in raising funds and obtaining equipment" and arms for the contras. After the meeting, a group of contras escorted Blandon and Meneses to the Tegucigalpa airport, where the pair was arrested by Honduran authorities because they were carrying $100,000 in cash, profits from a Bolivian drug deal. The contras intervened and the money was returned to Blandon and Meneses. The report inexplicably concludes that there is no evidence that Bermudez knew the duo were drug traffickers, even though CIA cables show the agency was aware that Meneses had been a "drug king-pin" since the '70s. At the congressional hearings, lawmakers cited these and other portions of the report, questioning the agency's capacity to investigate itself. Among the most vocal critics were Los Angeles Democratic Reps. Maxine Waters and Juanita Millender- McDonald, whose districts have been the epicenter of the crack epidemic. Waters charged that the report was "fraught with contradictions and illogical conclusions," saying that the CIA's cleverly worded denials of links to drug traffickers in Southern California "defies the evidence." Volume two of the report, which covers the entire Nicaraguan war, was scheduled to be turned over to the House and Senate intelligence committees in late March. But, as of mid-April, CIA officials told In These Times, the report had not been released to Congress. In his congressional testimony, Hitz said that volume two will contain "a detailed treatment of what was known to CIA regarding dozens of people and a number of companies connected in some fashion to the contra program or the contra movement, that were the subject of any sort of drug trafficking allegations." Previewing the report, Hitz admitted: "There are instances where the CIA did not, in an expeditious or consistent fashion, cut off relationships with individuals supporting the contra program, who are alleged to have engaged in drug trafficking activity or take action to resolve the allegation." Several congressional sources say that they suspect the report will never be released. While the precise wording of the MOU has not been made public, some say the directive may be considerably broader than implied at the hearing. At one point in his testimony, Hitz said the MOU applied to "intelligence agencies," indicating that it also may include the dozen or so U.S. agencies involved in intelligence work, not just the CIA. Hitz declined requests for an interview. But the CIA may not be able to get away without further disclosures. The National Security Archive and other public interest groups, as well as Reps. John Conyers (D-Mich.) and Waters, are mounting a campaign for the declassification and release of the text of the MOU, the Justice Department report, volume two of the CIA report, tens of thousands of pages of documents and hundreds of interviews compiled by the two agencies in the course of their internal investigations. Attorney Blum warns that CIA officials who testified before the Kerry committee may have perjured themselves in denying they knew of any links between the CIA, the contras and cocaine traffickers. And investigative journalists Parry and Webb, among others, say Hitz's admission may be the smoking gun that conclusively proves that the CIA colluded with and then concealed its involvement with cocaine traffickers. Martha Honey is director of the Peace and Security program at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C. During the '80s, she covered the war in Nicaragua as a journalist in Costa Rica. Article Courtesy of Paul Wolf, paulwolf@icdc.com * * * AFIB EDITOR'S NOTE: The 1982 correspondence below from US Attorney General William French Smith and CIA Director William Casey is a section from a large file posted on the Pink Noise Studios web page: "Intelligence Authorization Act 1999, House of Representatives, May 7, 1998." Portions of those hearings, including the complete 1982 and 1995 CIA/DoJ Memorandum of Understanding, comments by Reps. Millender- McDonald, John Conyers and Maxine Waters and a chronological history of CIA complicity with global narco-trafficking compiled by the Institute for Policy Studies [see below], has been catalogued by Pink Noise Studios Research Director Bob Gonsalves. See: http://www.pinknoiz.com/covert/MOU.html * PINK NOISE STUDIOS * Art - Technology - Politics E-mail: pinknoiz@ncal.verio.com Web: http://www.pinknoiz.com/ - Wednesday, 3 June 1998 - _________________________________________________________________ 1982 CORRESPONDENCE BETWEEN US ATTORNEY GENERAL WILLIAM FRENCH SMITH & CIA DIRECTOR WILLIAM CASEY _________________________________________________________________ Office of the Attorney General, Washington, DC, February 11, 1982. Hon. William J. Casey, Director, Central Intelligence Agency, Washington, DC. Dear Bill: Thank you for your letter regarding the procedures governing the reporting and use of information concerning federal crimes. I have reviewed the draft of the procedures that accompanied your letter and, in particular, the minor changes made in the draft that I had previously sent to you. These proposed changes are acceptable and, therefore, I have signed the procedures. I have been advised that a question arose regarding the need to add narcotics violations to the list of reportable non-employee crimes (Section IV). 21 U.S.C. 874(h) provides that `[w]hen requested by the Attorney General, it shall be the duty of any agency or instrumentality of the Federal Government to furnish assistance to him for carrying out his functions under [the Controlled Substances Act] . . .' Section 1.8(b) of Executive Order 12333 tasks the Central Intelligence Agency to `collect, produce and disseminate intelligence on foreign aspects of narcotics production and trafficking.' Moreover, authorization for the dissemination of information concerning narcotics violations to law enforcement agencies, including the Department of Justice, is provided by sections 2.3(c) and (i) and 2.6(b) of the Order. In light of these provisions, and in view of the fine cooperation the Drug Enforcement Administration has received from CIA, no formal requirement regarding the reporting of narcotics violations has been included in these procedures. We look forward to the CIA's continuing cooperation with the Department of Justice in this area. In view of our agreement regarding the procedure, I have instructed my Counsel for Intelligence Policy to circulate a copy which I have executed to each of the other agencies covered by the procedures in order that they may be signed by the head of each such agency. Sincerely, William French Smith, Attorney General * * * The Director of Central Intelligence, Washington, DC, March 2, 1982. Hon. William French Smith, Attorney General, Department of Justice, Washington, DC. Dear Bill: Thank you for your letter of 11 February regarding the procedures on reporting of crimes to the Department of Justice, which are being adopted under Section 1-7(a) of Executive Order 12333. I have signed the procedures, and am returning the original to you for retention at the Department. I am pleased that these procedures, which I believe strike the proper balance between enforcement of the law and protection of intelligence sources and methods, will now be forwarded to other agencies covered by them for signing by the heads of those agencies. With best regards, Yours, William J. Casey. * * * _________________________________________________________________ A TANGLED WEB: A HISTORY OF CIA COMPLICITY IN DRUG INTERNATIONAL TRAFFICKING _________________________________________________________________ Prepared by the Institute for Policy Studies, Washington, D.C. * * * WORLD WAR II The Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI), the CIA's parent and sister organizations, cultivate relations with the leaders of the Italian Mafia, recruiting heavily from the New York and Chicago underworlds, whose members, including Charles `Lucky' Luciano, Meyer Lansky, Joe Adonis, and Frank Costello, help the agencies keep in touch with Sicilian Mafia leaders exiled by Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. Domestically, the aim is to prevent sabotage on East Coast ports, while in Italy the goal is to gain intelligence on Sicily prior to the allied invasions and to suppress the burgeoning Italian Communist Party. Imprisoned in New York, Luciano earns a pardon for his wartime service and is deported to Italy, where he proceeds to build his heroin empire, first by diverting supplies from the legal market, before developing connections in Lebanon and Turkey that supply morphine base to labs in Sicily. The OSS and ONI also work closely with Chinese gangsters who control vast supplies of opium, morphine and heroin, helping to establish the third pillar of the post-world War II heroin trade in the Golden Triangle, the border region of Thailand, Burma, Laos and China's Yunnan Province. 1947 In its first year of existence, the CIA continues U.S. intelligence community's anti-communist drive. Agency operatives help the Mafia seize total power in Sicily and it sends money to heroin-smuggling Corsican mobsters in Marseille to assist in their battle with Communist unions for control of the city's docks. By 1951, Luciano and the Corsicans have pooled their resources, giving rise to the notorious `French Connection' which would dominate the world heroin trade until the early 1970s. The CIA also recruits members of organized crime gangs in Japan to help ensure that the country stays in the non-communist world. Several years later, the Japanese Yakuza emerges as a major source of methamphetamine in Hawaii. 1949 Chinese Communist revolution causes collapse of drug empire allied with U.S. intelligence community, but a new one quickly emerges under the command of Nationalist (KMT) General Li Mi, who flees Yunnan into eastern Burma. Seeking to rekindle anticommunist resistance in China, the CIA provides arms, ammunition and other supplies to the KMT. After being repelled from China with heavy losses, the KMT settles down with local population and organizes and expands the opium trade from Burma and Northern Thailand. By 1972, the KMT controls 80 percent of the Golden Triangle's opium trade. 1950 The CIA launches Project Bluebird to determine whether certain drugs might improve its interrogation methods. This eventually leads CIA head Allen Dulles, in April 1953, to institute a program for `covert use of biological and chemical materials' as part of the agency's continuing efforts to control behavior. With benign names such as Project Artichoke and Project Chatter, these projects continue through the 1960s, with hundreds of unwitting test subjects given various drugs, including LSD. 1960 In support of the U.S. war in Vietnam, the CIA renews old and cultivates new relations with Laotian, Burmese and Thai drug merchants, as well as corrupt military and political leaders in Southeast Asia. Despite the dramatic rise of heroin production, the agency's relations with these figures attracts little attention until the early 1970s. 1967 Manuel Antonio Noriega goes on the CIA payroll. First recruited by the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency in 1959, Noriega becomes an invaluable asset for the CIA when he takes charge of Panama's intelligence service after the 1968 military coup, providing services for U.S. covert operations and facilitating the use of Panama as the center of U.S. intelligence gathering in Latin America. In 1976, CIA Director George Bush pays Noriega $110,000 for his services, even though as early as 1971 U.S. officials agents had evidence that he was deeply involved in drug trafficking. Although the Carter administration suspends payments to Noriega, he returns to the U.S. payroll when President Reagan takes office in 1981. The general is rewarded handsomely for his services in support of Contras forces in Nicaragua during the 1980s, collecting $200,000 from the CIA in 1986 alone. MAY 1970 A Christian Science Monitor correspondent reports that the CIA `is cognizant of, if not party to, the extensive movement of opium out of Laos,' quoting one charter pilot who claims that `opium shipments get special CIA clearance and monitoring on their flights southward out of the country.' At the time, some 30,000 U.S. service men in Vietnam are addicted to heroin. 1972 The full story of how Cold War politics and U.S. covert operations fueled a heroin boom in the Golden Triangle breaks when Yale University doctoral student Alfred McCoy publishes his ground-breaking study, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia. The CIA attempts to quash the book. 1973 Thai national Puttapron Khramkhruan is arrested in connection with the seizure of 59 pounds of opium in Chicago. A CIA informant on narcotics trafficking in northern Thailand, he claims that agency had full knowledge of his actions. According to the U.S. Justice Department, the CIA quashed the case because it may `prove embarrassing because of Mr. Khramkhruans's involvement with CIA activities in Thailand, Burma, and elsewhere.' JUNE 1975 Mexican police, assisted by U.S. drug agents, arrest Alberto Sicilia Falcon, whose Tijuana-based operation was reportedly generating $3.6 million a week from the sale of cocaine and marijuana in the United States. The Cuban exile claims he was a CIA protege, trained as part of the agency's anti-Castro efforts, and in exchange for his help in moving weapons to certain groups in Central America, the CIA facilitated his movement of drugs. In 1974, Sicilia's top aide, Jose Egozi, a CIA-trained intelligence officer and Bay of Pigs veteran, reportedly lined up agency support for a right-wing plot to overthrow the Portuguese government. Among the top Mexican politicians, law enforcement and intelligence officials from whom Sicilia enjoyed support was Miguel Nazar Haro, head of the Direccion Federal de Seguridad (DFS), who the CIA admits was its `most important source in Mexico and Central America.' When Nazar was linked to a multi- million-dollar stolen car ring several years later, the CIA intervenes to prevent his indictment in the United States. APRIL 1978 Soviet-backed coup in Afghanistan sets stage for explosive growth in Southwest Asian heroin trade. New Marxist regime undertakes vigorous anti-narcotics campaign aimed at suppressing poppy production, triggering a revolt by semi-autonomous tribal groups that traditionally raised opium for export. The CIA- supported rebel Mujahedeen begins expanding production to finance their insurgency. Between 1982 and 1989, during which time the CIA ships billions of dollars in weapons and other aid to guerrilla forces, annual opium production in Afghanistan increases to about 800 tons from 250 tons. By 1986, the State Department admits that Afghanistan is `probably the world's largest producer of opium for export' and `the poppy source for a majority of the Southwest Asian heroin found in the United States.' U.S. officials, however, fail to take action to curb production. Their silence not only serves to maintain public support for the Mujahedeen, it also smooths relations with Pakistan, whose leaders, deeply implicated in the heroin trade, help channel CIA support to the Afghan rebels. JUNE 1980 Despite advance knowledge, the CIA fails to halt members of the Bolivian militaries, aide by the Argentine counterparts, from staging the so-called `Cocaine Coup,' according to former DEA agent Michael Levine. In fact, the 25-year DEA veteran maintains the agency actively abetted cocaine trafficking in Bolivia, where government official who sought to combat traffickers faced `torture and death at the hands of CIA-sponsored paramilitary terrorists under the command of fugitive Nazi war criminal (also protected by the CIA) Klaus Barbie. FEBRUARY 1985 DEA agent Enrique `Kiki' Camerena is kidnapped and murder in Mexico. DEA, FBI and U.S. Customs Service investigators accuse the CIA of stonewalling during their investigation. U.S. authorities claim the CIA is more interested in protecting its assets, including top drug trafficker and kidnapping principal Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo. (In 1982, the DEA learned that Felix Gallardo was moving $20 million a month through a single Bank of America account, but it could not get the CIA to cooperate with its investigation.) Felix Gallardo's main partner is Honduran drug lord Juan Ramon Matta Ballesteros, who began amassing his $2-billion fortune as a cocaine supplier to Alberto Sicilia Falcon. (see June 1985) Matta's air transport firm, SETCO, receives $186,000 from the U.S. State Department to fly `humanitarian supplies' to the Nicaraguan Contras from 1983 to 1985. Accusations that the CIA protected some of Mexico's leading drug traffickers in exchange for their financial support of the Contras are leveled by government witnesses at the trials of Camarena's accused killers. JANUARY 1988 Deciding that he has outlived his usefulness to the Contra cause, the Reagan Administration approves an indictment of Noriega on drug charges. By this time, U.S. Senate investigators had found that `the United States had received substantial information about criminal involvement of top Panamanian officials for nearly twenty years and done little to respond.' APRIL 1989 The Senate Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics and International Communications, headed by Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, issues its 1,166-page report on drug corruption in Central America and the Caribbean. The subcommittee found that `there was substantial evidence of drug smuggling through the war zone on the part of individuals Contras, Contra suppliers, Contra pilots, mercenaries who worked with the Contras supporters throughout the region.' U.S. officials, the subcommittee said, `failed to address the drug issue for fear of jeopardizing the war efforts against Nicaragua.' The investigation also reveals that some `senior policy makers' believed that the use of drug money was `a perfect solution to the Contras' funding problems.' JANUARY 1993 Honduran businessman Eugenio Molina Osorio is arrested in Lubbock Texas for supplying $90,000 worth of cocaine to DEA agents. Molina told judge he is working for CIA to whom he provides political intelligence. Shortly after, a letter from CIA headquarters is sent to the judge, and the case is dismissed. `I guess we're all aware that they [the CIA] do business in a different way than everybody else,' the judge notes. Molina later admits his drug involvement was not a CIA operation, explaining that the agency protected him because of his value as a source for political intelligence in Honduras. NOVEMBER 1996 Former head of the Venezuelan National Guard and CIA operative Gen. Ramon Gullien Davila is indicted in Miami on charges of smuggling as much as 22 tons of cocaine into the United States. More than a ton of cocaine was shipped into the country with the CIA's approval as part of an undercover program aimed at catching drug smugglers, an operation kept secret from other U.S. agencies. * * * ANTIFA INFO-BULLETIN (AFIB) 750 La Playa # 730 San Francisco, California 94121 E-Mail: tburghardt@igc.org * On PeaceNet visit ANTIFA INFO-BULLETIN on pol.ri Copyright 1991 The Akha Heritage Foundation | |