Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies, and the CIA in Central America, Updated edition

Cocaine

Politics

Cocaine

Politics

Drugs, Armies, und the CIA in Central America,

Updated Edition with a New Preface

PETER DALE SCOTT AND JONATHAN MARSHALL

University of California Press

BERKELEY LOS ANGELES LONDON

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

London, England

First paperback printing 1992

Updated paperback edition 1998

© 1991 by

The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Scott, Peter Dale.

Cocaine politics: drugs, armies, and the CIA in Central America / Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-520-21449-1 (pbk.: alk. paper)

1. Narcotics, Control of—Central America. 2. Narcotics, Control of—Political aspects—Central America. 3. Cocaine industry—Central America. 4. Corruption (in politics)— Central America.

I. Marshall, Jonathan. II. Title.

HV5840.C45S36 1991

363A’ 5 ‘09728—dc20 90-48813

CIP

Printed in the United States of America

12 11 10

12 11 10 9

Contents

Contents

Preface to the 1998 Edition

Preface to the 1992 Paperback Edition

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1 The Kerry Report The Truth but Not the Whole Truth

2 The CIA and Right-Wing Narcoterrorism in Latin America

3 Bananas, Cocaine, and Military Plots in Honduras

4 Noriega and the Contras Guns, Drugs, und the Hururi Network

5 The International Cali Connection and the United States

6 The Contra Drug Connections in Costa Rica

7 Jack Terrell Reveals the Contra-Drug Connection

8 North Moves to Silence Terrell

9 How the Justice Department Tried to Block the Drug Inquiry

10 Covert Operations and the Perversion of Drug Enforcement

11 The Media and the Contra Drug Issue

12 Conclusion

Notes

Names and Organizations

Index

Preface to the 1998 Edition

In the six years since Cocaine Politics was first published, the picture it depicts of intelligence-protected drug-trafficking has emerged more and more clearly, and on a more and more alarming scale. In the last year alone, two leading CIA assets have been indicted for cocaine-smuggling. One is Venezuelan General Ramón Guillen Davila, charged by a Miami grand jury in 1996 with smuggling as much as twenty-two tons of cocaine into the United States in 1990. According to the Wall Street Journal, the CIA authorized the import of at least one ton into the United States, overruling the objections of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). (Guillen claimed the agency approved all his shipments.) Many of the drugs were actually stored, prior to shipment, at a Venezuelan anti-narcotics center funded by the CIA.¹

The other CIA asset indicted recently is former Haitian police chief Michel-Joseph Francois, charged with smuggling thirty-three tons of cocaine and heroin.² Like a similarly named unit in Peru (see below), his National Intelligence Service, or SIN, functioned as what the New York Times called an instrument of political terror. Before the CIA stopped directly supporting the unit in 1991, it gave the organization as much as $1 million a year in equipment and training. One U.S. official said of the SIN, It was a military organization that distributed drugs in Haiti. It never produced drug intelligence. The agency [CIA] gave them money under counternarcotics and they used their money to do other things in the political arena.³ Haiti’s corrupt officials protected about 50 tons of cocaine a year that transited the island for the United States in the early 1990s.⁴

As we show in Cocaine Politics, such cases are not so much anomalous as paradigmatic. In country after country, from Mexico and Honduras to Panama and Peru, the CIA helped set up or consolidate intelligence agencies that became forces of repression, and whose intelligence connections to other countries greased the way for illicit drug shipments.

Although each of these cases is now public and has received scattered coverage in mainstream media, journalists (and politicians) remain reluctant to squarely address the recurring CIA-drug problem. One exception is Gary Webb, whose stories on the CIA, Contras, and cocaine (which focused on the Contra supporter Norwin Meneses: see p. 107 of this book) appeared in the San Jose Mercury Newsxn August 1996. After they received national attention through talk radio and the World Wide Web, his stories were soon attacked, at extraordinary length, in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Washington Post. Attacks on his stories soon became attacks on his personal integrity. As we go to press, Webb has been demoted from his position in the state capital of Sacramento to the small town of Cupertino.⁵ Webb’s stories, which sketched a provocative link between the drug trafficking of Contra supporters and the crack problems of south-central Los Angeles, were admittedly controversial. Critics questioned his estimate of the amount of drugs involved, his claim that millions of dollars in profits had reached the Contras, and his case that the national crack cocaine epidemic had been created by Meneses’s drug connection. But even Webb’s harshest critics had to concede —as the San Francisco Examiner had first documented ten years earlier— that Meneses and his colleagues did bring large drug shipments into the country, that they did meet with top CIA Contra protèges, that they gave at least tens of thousands of dollars to the Contra cause, and that they were given extraordinary special treatment by U.S. federal prosecutors. Whatever the problems with Webb’s pieces, they managed, as Peter Kornbluh wrote in the Columbia Journalism Review, to revisit a significant story that had been inexplicably abandoned by the mainstream press, report a new dimension to it, and thus put it back on the national agenda where it belongs.⁶

Ironically, lost in all the squabbling over the details of Webb’s stories were the abundant facts already pulled together in Cocaine Politics, which documented wider CIA (and overall Reagan Administration) protection of Central American drug traffickers. Since our book appeared, the world has also received additional information revealing just how important, and coherent, was the pattern of support for the Contras in this period from virtually all of the biggest drug cartels in the region.

For example, CIA aid for the Contras in Costa Rica was channeled chiefly through the tightly controlled Ilopango Air Base in El Salvador, a base where the real power was exercised by a U.S. colonel responsible for Contra support. The local DEA agent at the time, Celerino Castillo, has since charged that two hangars there, which were under CIA and Oliver North’s control, doubled as depots for major cocaine shipments. Castillo claims that his documented reports on Ilopango to DEA in Washington were never acted on.⁷ A number of notorious drug traffickers are known to have regularly flown in and out of Ilopango; a drug plane given over to the Contras and CIA was stationed there; and Ilopango allegedly served as a base for American drug networks, such as the notorious Company, which distributed drugs through the entire United States.⁸

Castillo was kept under wraps by the DEA during his service in Central America and was not called to testify before the Kerry Committee, which investigated links between the Contras, drugs, and the U.S. government in the 1980s. His firsthand account was published in Canada, but it has been almost entirely ignored by the U.S. media.

The Miami drug trial of former Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega in 1991, after this book went to press, also supplied intriguing new details about the Central American connection. Noriega was at one time also a Contra supporter, and his initial drug indictment in 1988 was for shipments with pilots who were at the same time flying aid for Contra camps in Costa Rica. (This potentially embarrassing charge was ultimately dropped.)⁹

Some of the government’s witnesses against Noriega provided more information than the show trial was scripted for. To quote from a 1991 Washington Post editorial, What is one to make of the riveting assertion, made by a convicted Colombian drug kingpin at Manuel Noriega’s Florida drug trial, that the Medellín cartel gave $10 million to the Nicaraguan Contras? Carlos Lehder is a key prosecution witness; the U.S. government cannot lightly assail his credibility.¹⁰

This was not the only embarrassment for the U.S. government caused by Noriega’s trial. In 1995 it was reported that one of the government’s chief witnesses against Noriega, former co-defendant Ricardo Bilonick, had been paid $1.2 million for his testimony by leaders of the Cali cartel.¹¹ This confirmed our speculations that Noriega’s downfall followed his having sided with the Medellín cartel against their more established competitors in Cali (see pp. 73, 82).

It has also become more clear just how cynical were the government’s claims that the apprehension of Noriega would help constrain the hemispheric drug traffic. Within a year of Noriega’s ouster, U.S. drug agents admitted that the Cali cartel had turned Panama into a financial and logistics base for flooding North America and Europe with cocaine.¹² And U.Ś. Ambassador Deane Hinton complained in 1993 that Panamanian authorities had not arrested a single person for the crime of money laundering in the three and a half years after Noriega’s capture in a bloody U.S. invasion.¹³

These problems are of more than historical interest, given that the problem of a U.S.-protected drug traffic endures. Today the United States, in the name of fighting drugs, has entered into alliances with the police, armed forces, and intelligence agencies of Colombia and Peru, forces conspicuous by their own alliances with drug traffickers in counterinsurgency operations.

One of the most glaring and dangerous examples is in Peru. Behind Peru’s president, Alberto Fujimori, is his chief adviser Vladimiro Montesinos, the effective head of the National Intelligence Service, or SIN, an agency created and trained by the CIA in the 1960s.¹⁴ Through the SIN, Montesinos played a central role in Fujimori’s auto-coup, or suspension of the constitution, in April 1992, an event which (according to Knight-Ridder correspondent Sam Dillon) raised ’the specter of drug cartels exercising powerful influence at the top of Peru’s government.¹⁵ Recently Montesinos has been accused of arranging for an opposition television station to be bombed, and in August 1996 an accused drug trafficker claimed that Montesinos had accepted tens of thousands of dollars in payoffs.¹⁶

According to an opinion column in the New York Times by Gustavo Gorriti, a leader among the Peruvian intellectuals forced into exile, Mr. Montesinos built a power base and fortune mainly as a legal strategist for drug traffickers. He has had a close relationship with the CIA, and controls the intelligence services, and, through them, the military.¹⁷

In the New York Review of Books, Mr. Gorriti spelled out this CIA- drug collaboration more fully:

In late 1990, Montesinos also began close cooperation with the CIA, and in 1991 the National Intelligence Service began to organize a secret anti-drug outfit with funding, training, and equipment provided by the CIA. This, by the way, made the DEA … furious. Montesinos apparently suspected that the DEA had been investigating his connection to the most important Peruvian drug cartel in the 1980s, the Rodriguez-Lopez organization, and also links to some Colombian traffickers. Perhaps not coincidentally, Fujimori made a point of denouncing the DEA as corrupt at least twice, once in Peru in 1991, and the second time at the Presidential summit in San Antonio, Texas, in February [1992]. As far as I know, the secret intelligence outfit never carried out anti-drug operations. It was used for other things, such as my arrest.¹⁸

The San Francisco Chronicle also reported from Mexican officials that Vladimiro Montesinos … and Santiago Fujimori, the president’s brother, were responsible for covering up connections between the Mexican and Peruvian drug mafias.¹⁹

Others have pointed to the drug corruption of Peru’s military establishment, which also receives U.S. anti-drug funding.²⁰ Charges that the Peruvian army and security forces were continuing to take payoffs, to protect the cocaine traffickers that they were supposed to be fighting, have led at times to a withholding of U.S. aid.²¹ Such charges against Fujimori, Montesinos, and the Peruvian military are completely in line with what we have written in this book about Peru over the last two decades (see pp. 84, 191).

The ongoing situation in Peru shows that Washington’s proclivity to tolerate, protect, and reinforce the influence of Third World drug traffickers didn’t die with the end of the Reagan-Bush years. Indeed, the Clinton Administration, guided by White House drug czar General Barry McCaffrey, has consistently asked for large increases in counternarcotics aid to compromised Latin American police and military forces. As a critical New York Times editorial observed, Until taking the drug czar job, General McCaffrey was head of the United States army Southern Command, which worked with Latin militaries and police to fight cocaine. He knows that the overseas programs have succeeded largely in pushing cocaine from country to country.²²

Such funding priorities must be repudiated. The misnamed War on Drugs, a pernicious and misleading military metaphor, should be replaced by a medically and scientifically oriented campaign geared toward healing this country’s drug sickness. The billions that have been wasted in military anti-drug campaigns, efforts which have ranged from the futile to the counterproductive, should be rechanneled into a public health paradigm, emphasizing prevention, maintenance, and rehabilitation programs. The experiments in controlled decriminalization that have been initiated in Europe should be closely studied and emulated here.²³

A root cause of the governmental drug problem in this country (as distinguished from a broader social drug problem) is the National Security Act of 1947, and subsequent orders based on it. These, in effect, have exempted intelligence agencies and their personnel from the rule of law, an exemption that in the course of time has been extended from the agencies themselves to their drug trafficking clients. This must cease. Either the president or Congress must proclaim that national security cannot be invoked to protect drugtraffickers. This must be accompanied by clarifying orders or legislation that discourages the conscious collaboration with, or protection of, criminal drug traffickers by making it clear that such acts will constitute grounds for prosecution.

Clearly a campaign to restore sanity to our prevailing drug policies will remain utopian if it does not contemplate a struggle to realign the power priorities of our political system. Such a struggle will be difficult and painful. For those who believe in an open and decent America, the results will also be rewarding.

Notes

1 Wall Street Journal, November 22, 1996; New York Times, November 23, 1996; see also Associated Press, November 19, 1993; Washington Post, November 20, 1993. This story has a Contra connection as well: One of Guillen’s associates, who was named Venezuela’s ‘anti-drug ambassador’ in 1989 by then-President Carlos Andres Peres, reportedly worked with CIA official Duane Clarridge to funnel money to Contra leader Eden Pastora in the mid-1980s.

² San Francisco Chronicle, March 8, 1997, AIO.

³ New York Times, November 14, 1993.

⁴ Associated Press, October 14, 1993.

⁵ For a critique of the press attack on Webb’s stories, see Peter Dale Scott, The CIA, Drugs, the Ghetto—and the Media Whitewash, Tik- kun, 12, 4 (July/August 1997), 27-32.

⁶ Columbia Journalism Review, January-February 1997, 33ff.

⁷ Celerino Castillo, Powderburns: Cocaine, Contras, and the Drug War (Oakville, Ont.: Mosaic Press, 1994), 126, etc.

⁸ Peter Dale Scott, Honduras, the Contra Support Networks, and Cocaine: How the U.S. Government Has Augmented America’s Drug Crisis, in War on Drugs: Studies in the Failure of U.S. Narcotic Policy, edited by Alfred W. McCoy and Alan A. Block (Boulder: Westview Press, 1992), 151-56. See also Sally Denton, The Bluegrass Conspiracy (New York: Avon, 1990), 332, 336-37, etc. A recently released FBI cable of July 26, 1984, pertaining to an FBI investigation of trafficking narcotics at Mena, Arkansas, corroborates widely circulated stories that convicted trafficker Barry Seal based at Mena the notorious CIA-equipped plane used in his controversial 1984 Managua sting operation (see Cocaine Politics, 98-102). The same plane flew in and out of Ilopango for the CIA-linked firm Southern Air Transport, and was ultimately downed by Nicaraguans in 1986, with testimony by the survivor Eugene Hasenfus then leading to the Iran-Contra Affair. See FBI cable of July 26, 1984, from Little Rock to Assistant FBI Director Revell; reproduced in R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr., Boy Clinton: The Political Biography (Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 1996), 331-33. After the plane was downed, Revell then suspended an ongoing investigation of Southern Air Transport (Leslie Cockburn, Out of Control [New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1987], 231; cf Iran Contra Report, 287). In November 1996 a CIA report acknowledged that the CIA did run a joint training operation with another federal agency at Mena Intermountain Airport, which it also used for routine aviation-related services (Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, November 9, 1996).

⁹ New York Times, January 17, 1993, 25; Cocaine Politics, 110-11, 116.

10 Washington Post, November 27, 1991, Al6.

¹¹ Washington Post, November 4, 1995 and March 5, 1996; New York Times, November 5, 1995 and March 5, 1996.

¹² Time, August 26, 1991. As we write, the Panamanian government is attempting to expel Peruvian journalist Gustavo Gorriti, who disclosed contributions of $51,000 from alleged Cali representative Jose Castrillon Henao to the recent campaign of Ernesto Perez Balladares, Panama’s current president. See Wall Street Journal, August 13, 1997.

¹³ La Estrella de Panama, July 13, 1993.

14 Wall Street Journal, January 28, 1997 (Montesinos); James Mills, The Underground Empire (New York: Dell, 1986), 809 (CIA).

¹⁵ San Jose Mercury News, April 19, 1992.

¹⁶ Wall Street Journal, January 28, 1997. The trafficker, detained in prison, later recanted his story.

¹⁷ New York Times, December 27, 1992.

18 New York Review of Books, June 25, 1992, 20. On the Rodriguez- Lopez organization, see Cocaine Politics, 84, 191.

19 San Francisco Chronicle, August 17, 1996. For the analogous but different situation in Colombia, see Peter Dale Scott, Colombia: Amer ica’s Dirtiest War on Drugs, Tikkun (May June 1997), 27-31; Jonathan Marshall, Drug Wars (Forestville, CA: Cohan and Cohen, 1991), 17-21.

²⁰ Washington Post, May 10, 1992, A32 (Montesinos); Jonathan Marshall, Drug Wars, 24-26; Wall Street Journal, November 29, 1991; Washington Post, February 28, 1993 (military).

²¹ New York Times, November 11, 1991, A6; September 28, 1993. (This is a reminder that Washington bureaucracies are sometimes divided over priorities and the proper choice of allies in Third World countries.)

²² New York Times, July 5, 1997.

²³ Eva Bertram, Morris Blachman, Kenneth Sharpe, Peter Andreas, Drug War Politics: The Price of Denial (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996), 204-27. See also Marshall, Drug Wars, 63-67.

Preface to the 1992 Paperback Edition

Since Cocaine Politics appeared in 1991, nothing has emerged to challenge our factual claims. Unfortunately, nothing has emerged, either, to suggest that the dangerous hypocrises underlying the war on drugs will soon be officially repudiated. Predictably, the book’s appearance has evoked no response from the administration and little from the establishment media. Yet, if anything, the revelations of the last few months have added weight to our thesis that governments, very much including Washington, are a key to the worldwide drug problem, and thus to its solution.

The drug traffic should be visualized, not as a horizontal line between producers and consumers, but as a triangle. At its apex sit governments whose civilian and military intelligence agencies recurringly afford de facto protection to drug kingpins beneath them. In the United States as elsewhere, this vertical dimension of protected trafficking has created windows of opportunity for importing narcotics by the ton.

Our conclusion remains that the first target of an effective drug strategy should be Washington itself, and specifically its own connections with corrupt, drug-linked forces in other parts of the world. We argued that Washington’s covert operations overseas had been a major factor in generating changes in the overall pattern of drug flows into the United States, and cited the Vietnam-generated heroin epidemic of the 1960s and the Afghan-generated heroin epidemic of the 1980s as analogues of the central concern of this book: the explosion of cocaine trafficking through Central America in the Reagan years, made possible by the administration’s covert operation to overthrow the Nicaraguan Sandinistas.

Recent indictments, congressional hearings, and news investigations into the shadowy Bank of Credit and Commerce International indicate that the parallel we drew between Afghanistan and Central America is even tighter than wc dared suggest. In both regions, BCCI appears to have gone out of its way to attract drug money, facilitate arms transactions, and cater to the CIA, all the while enjoying an extraordinary, if still unexplained, degree of immunity from prosecution.

Thus the head of BCCI’s Panama branch, which as noted in Chapter 4 was a conduit of CIA funds to General Manuel Noriega, was the son of a former director of intelligence in Pakistan. Numerous sources confirm that the CIA (and Arab states) used BCCI to move funds into the Afghan pipeline, and that the bank was used in turn by corrupt Pakistani officials to launder drug profits from the burgeoning heroin trade.¹

To be sure, denials have come from many quarters. Acting CIA Director Richard Kerr, admitting that his agency knew by the early 1980s that the bank was involved in illegal activities such as money-laundering, narcotics and terrorism, insisted that the CIA used BCCI merely as a transfer point for the routine movement of funds.² And Pakistan’s finance minister, Sarti Asis, told the Financial Times of London that although the bank did launder CIA contributions to the Afghan rebels, it was not even handling 1 percent of total drug money.³

In Latin America, however, evidence is indisputable that the bank moved aggressively to boost its share of that region’s total drug money. BCCI officers met with and opened accounts for such major Colombian cartel leaders as Pablo Escobar, Jorge Luis Ochoa and Jose Gonzalo Rodriguez Gacha. The bank established branches in such notorious drug centers as Medellín, Cali and even Pablo Escobar’s home town, Envigado.⁴ In Peru, it opened an office in the Huallaga Valley, the center of that country’s coca production.⁵ In Florida, it handled accounts for some 200 drug traffickers and tax evaders.⁶ In all, according to estimates by some U.S. sources, the bank laundered nearly $1 billion in Colombian drug profits.⁷

At BCCI’s Panama City branch, Noriega deposited at least $33 million. Some of that money, as noted in Chapter 4, came from the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies. As part of the discovery process preceding the Noriega trial, the CIA and U.S. Army admitted paying him $322,226 in cash and gifts between 1955 (when, at the age of 19, he joined the Socialist Party and began informing on its operations) and 1986.⁸ Much more money apparently flowed through Noriega’s hands and into BCCI on behalf of the Panamanian Defense Forces.⁹

Such connections may go far to explain the otherwise baffling failure of law enforcement authorities to crack down on the bank, despite indications as early as 1984 that it was laundering drug money. Informant tapes were mysteriously lost, leads were buried in the files, and when an indictment finally came down in 1988, prosecutors accepted a plea bargain that struck many critics as far too easy on the bank. As Congressman Charles Schumer of New York put it, in releasing a report on this record by the staff of the Crime and Criminal Justice Subcommittee, It wasn’t just that BCCI was rumored to be bad. It was that professional investigators in the agencies had hard evidence that they were bad, and bad in a big way, and nobody did anything about it.¹⁰

Expressions of outrage at this failure—and at outright stonewalling from such government departments as Justice and Treasury—have come from as ideologically diverse sources as President Reagan’s Customs Commissioner, William Von Raab, and Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau.¹¹ Former Customs agent Robert Mazur, whose undercover work led to the bank’s indictment for money-laundering crimes in 1988, quit Customs in disgust at its investigatory lapses and decried the Justice Department’s failure to follow up witnesses and records from that case.¹² And Senator John Kerry, whose subcommittee on narcotics and terrorism is investigating BCCI as we write, has complained of Justice Department obstruction in the provision of witnesses, conduct he is only too familiar with from his earlier investigation of U.S. complicity in the Central American drug trade of the 1980s.¹³

Bureaucratic jealousy, bungling, and incompetence and political interference from the bank’s influential allies no doubt explain some of this record of official misbehavior. But it is hard to write off the claim of one U.S. intelligence officer, quoted in Time magazine, that if BCCI is such an embarrassment to the U.S. that forthright investigations are not being pursued, it has a lot to do with the blind eye the U.S. turned to heroin trafficking in Pakistan.¹⁴ It is similarly hard to write off the assertion of one senior bank executive, Abdur Sakhia, that some kind of deal—perhaps related to the Iran-Contra affair—was struck with the bank’s founder, Aga Hassan Abedi, in 1985 to allow him entry to the United States after being blacklisted.¹⁵ And, finally, it is hard to write off the suspicion that the sea change in Washington’s approach to BCCI, so closely parallel to its change in relations with Noriega, was less a product of new information than of shifting regional priorities, in particular the abandonment in 1987 of the commitment to a military victory by the Contras.

The political inspiration of Washington’s zigs and zags on matters of law enforcement is evident, as we write, from the ongoing trial of Noriega in Miami for drug offenses, many of which he is no doubt guilty of. Far from demonstrating the renewed commitment of U.S. officials to waging a nonpartisan war on drugs, however, the trial demonstrates the total subordination of that war to politics. In order to justify the demonization of Noriega and the 1989 invasion of Panama, the authorities have slashed prison terms and restored millions of dollars of drug profits to witnesses willing to take the stand against the man deprecated by former cartel kingpin Carlos Lehder as just another criminally corrupt police officer¹⁶

The trial, eagerly awaited by some government critics as a source of revelations about Reagan administration complicity with Noriega, has been narrowly contained by prosecutorial objections and judicial rulings barring most questions about the Contras, George Bush, and related matters. Even so, one key government witness, Floyd Carlton, testified that his associate in the cocaine trade, Alfredo Caballero, organized arms shipments to the Contras in 1983 and 1984 (see Chapters 1,4, and 6).¹⁷ And Lehder, who also testified to the complicity of Cuban and Nicaraguan leaders in the drug trade, admitted (over the intense objection of prosecutors) that the Medellín Cartel contributed some $10 million to the Contra cause.¹⁸

Meanwhile, evidence is mounting that even with Noriega removed from Panama, cocaine continues to pour through that country. One Drug Enforcement Administration agent told the General Accounting Office that the volume of cocaine transiting Panama may have doubled since Operation Just Cause.¹⁹ The price of cocaine reached record lows there in mid- 1991.²⁰ Panamanian reporters have had a field day exposing the links of President Guillermo Endara (whose 1989 election campaign was financed in part by the CIA) to notorious money-laundering banks. Costa Rican authorities say that two-thirds of the cocaine transshipped through their own country goes through Panama’s Chiriqui Province and is often protected by former Nicaraguan Contras.²²

Now that the Nicaraguan civil war is over, more will surely emerge in years to come of the Contra-drug connection. In November 1991, for instance, the chief of Nicaragua’s National Police Criminal Division announced the arrest of that country’s leading narcotics trafficker, Norwin Meneses, known as El Rey (The King). Police seized 738 kilos of cocaine from the ring, which intended to smuggle it to the United States through El Salvador. The Meneses group reportedly had plans to export 4,000 kilos to the North American market.²³ As discussed in Chapter 6, Meneses was at the center of one of the most sensitive U.S. drug busts of the 1980s, the so-called Frogman seizure, which (through a press leak) exposed his role in financing elements of the Contras.

Whether new revelations will make any more difference than the old ones to Congress, public opinion or administration policy remains to be seen. Many law enforcement professionals need no persuading to accept our thesis; Dennis Dayle, former chief of an elite DEA enforcement unit, has said for the record that in my 30-year history in the Drug Enforcement Administration and related agencies, the major targets of my investigations almost invariably turned out to be working for the CIA.²⁴ Yet the notion that Washington is a big part of the problem continues to meet with strong resistance in the major media, where evidence of government complicity with international narcotics traffickers is variously dismissed as unthinkable or as a mere sideshow to more important factors in the drug market.²⁵

Signs of any new thinking about drug issues in Congress are hard to find. The U.S. Senate confirmed the nomination of Robert Gates as CIA director by a vote of 64 to 31 on November 5, 1991, despite voluminous testimony suggesting that he lied as to his ignorance of key matters in the Iran-Contra affair and that he distorted the production of intelligence estimates to serve the political ends of his boss, former Reagan campaign director William Casey. In this respect, one critic testified that Gates pushed the administration line on narcoterrorism, which blamed drug trafficking on leftwing states and insurgent movements (see Chapter 2). Accusing Gates of shopping for analysts to make that case, Mel Goodman testified that a senior analyst was called in by Bob Gates and told that Bill Casey wanted a memo that would link drug dealers to international terrorists. This senior analyst looked at the evidence and couldn’t make those conclusions. The evidence wasn’t there. He was told to go back and look again. He did that. Said the evidence wasn’t there. Gates took the project away from him and gave it to another analyst. I believe there is an ethical issue here. Gates admitted asking analysts to look into accusations of a linkage between traffickers and terrorists but said in his defense that three separate agency analyses concluded any such linkage was weak.²⁶

Congress also shows few signs of challenging the war on drugs, in particular, President Bush’s Andean Initiative to send millions of dollars in aid to the militaries of Bolivia, Colombia, and Peru. Assistance to these drug-corrupted forces often goes to fight not traffickers but leftist guerrillas and their civilian sympathizers. The program has been seriously challenged only in the case of Peru, which the human rights group Americas Watch accused of having one of the worst records in the world for disappearances. (The organization admits that the human rights record of the guerrilla group Shining Path, which finances its struggle in part from cocaine taxes, is at least as grisly as that of government forces.) Congress showed enough concern over official abuses in late 1991 to hold up $10 million in military aid earmarked for two army battalions combating the Shining Path.²⁷

This limited dissent is not enough. The administration’s disastrous drug policies must be challenged, both for traditional considerations of nat ional security and basic considerations of humanity. The United States cannot afford to become enmeshed in counterinsurgency campaigns abroad, in Third World jungles, nor at home in the streets of our cities. The social cost of trying to reproduce for illicit drugs the conditions of Prohibition is too high.

This book offers evidence to support changing the focus of our drug strategies away from penalizing individuals and toward curbing our own government. Ending our government’s complicity in the narcotics trade and its destructive war on drugs will not solve the drug problem; the world drug traffic, and the demand that drives it, have causes and a dynamic that extend far beyond any particular covert operation or government decision. But the American people cannot begin to cope with the deeper social problems of drug abuse so long as their political representatives remain such a powerful obstacle to reform. We renew our appeal to citizens to involve themselves in this matter, at a time when both Congress and the media have largely failed to rise to the challenge. At stake is nothing less than the survival of decency in America.

NOTES

1 New York Times, July 13,1991; Congressional Quarterly, August 3,1991 (quoting Jack Blum).

² Wall Street Journal, October 24,1991.

³ Financial Times, July 25, 1991, quoted in Guardian (New York), September 18,1991.

⁴ Washington Post, August 19,1991.

⁵ Miami Herald, August 4,1991.

⁶ New York Times, October 27,1991.

⁷ Washington Post, August 8,1991.

8 New York Times, January 19,1991.

⁹ Thus most accounts of Noriega’s career agree that the CIA paid him more than $100,000 a year during the first half of the 1980s.

¹⁰ Washington Post, September 6, 1991.

¹¹ Wall Street Journal, August 2,1991; Time, July 29,1991; Village Voice, August 6,1991.

¹² Wall StreetJournal, November 22,1991.

¹³ New York Times, October 2,1991.

14 Time, July 29,1991.

¹⁵ Wall Street Journal, October 23,1991.

¹⁶ Associated Press, November 19,1991.

¹⁷ San Francisco Chronicle, October 2,1991.

18 New York Times, October 26, 1991. Lehder also claimed that U.S. officials approached him in 1982, saying they would let him run drugs into the United States in exchange for his help in facilitating the flow of arms to the Contras; fearing a possible sting operation, he turned the deal down. He was blocked from answering questions about this episode (New York Times, October 22, 1991; Newsday, November 26, 1991). Nothing Lehder says should necessarily be taken at face value; he has been accused by Robert Merkel, former U.S. attorney who prosecuted him, of being a liar from beginning to end. (Nation, December 2,1991).

¹⁹ GAO/NSI AD-91-233, The War on Drugs: Narcotics Control Efforts in Panama, (Washington: US Government Printing Office, 1991).

²⁰ San Francisco Chronicle, July 16,1991.

²¹ Peeved by