How The People Seldom Catch Intelligence- pub. in You Are STILL Being Lied To,ed. Russ Kick for the Disinformation Company, 2009

How the People Seldom

Catch Intelligence

(Or, How to Be a Successful Drug Dealer)

by Preston Peet for You Are Still Being Lied To
edited by Russ Kick for the Disinformation Company
published Jan. 2009
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1934708070/disinformation

 For me, one could write about lies from morning till night, but this is the one most worth writing about, because the domestic consequences are so horrible; it’s contributed to police brutality, police corruption, militarizations of police forces, and now, as we speak, it contributes to the pretext for another Vietnam War.

—Peter Dale Scott, July 24, 2000

 This is a sordid history of lies and outright criminality by sec­tions of the US government, mainly by its military and intelli­gence forces (ignoring the more common and mundane corrup­tion amongst domestic law enforcement and their anti-narcotics operations), which is continuing right through today. Blatant business procedure for decades at the very least, the practice of working with drug traffickers, enabling their profitable busi­ness dealings to continue, is only picking up speed as the for­eign invasions, entanglements, and covert operations by the US increase year by year since the September 11th terrorist attacks. While linking the War on Terror with the seemingly end­less War on Some Drugs, the hypocrisy of our government propping up the cartels and narcotics warlords who support US foreign policies—as the US justice system simultaneously con­tinues arresting, trying, and incarcerating Joe Citizenry for buy­ing, selling, and using the very same drugs our “allies” and so-called protectors traffic into the country—is stark.

 “I See Nothing!” Said the Man

 On May 11, 2000, the US House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence made public their “Report on the Central Intelligence Agency’s Alleged Involvement in Crack Cocaine Trafficking in the Los Angeles Area.”1 The investigation by the HPSCI focused solely on the “implications” of facts reported in investigative reporter Gary Webb’s three-part exposé in the San Jose Mercury News titled “Dark Alliance.” Published on August 18, 19, and 20, 1996, the series alleged that a core group of Nicaraguan Contra supporters formed an alliance with black dealers in South Central Los Angeles to sell cocaine to the Bloods and Crips street gangs, who turned it into crack. The drug profits were then funneled back to Contra coffers by the Contra supporters.

 

DEA agent Celerino Castillo in front of his major Operation Condor tool, a chopper.

Approved for release in February 2000, the HPSCI report states the Committee “found no evidence” to support allegations that CIA agents or assets asso­ciated in any way with the Nicaraguan Contra movement were involved in the supply or sale of drugs in the Los Angeles area. Utilizing a not-so-subtle strategy of semantics and misdirection, the HPSCI report seeks to shore up the justifiably crumbling trust in gov­ernment in the US and elsewhere. But the report is still a lie.

One would have to intentionally ignore the copious amounts of evidence of drug trafficking sanctioned, protected, or simply ignored by the CIA, even in LA, that exists in the public record. The HPSCI spent its entire “investigation” disregarding sworn testimony and government reports, even ignoring what agents on the ground at the scene have to say.

 An Eyewitness Strongly Disagrees, Says: “It Is a Flat-Out Lie”

 A Vietnam veteran, the DEA’s lead agent in El Salvador and Guatemala from 1985 to 1990 was Celerino Castillo, who docu­mented massive CIA-sanctioned and -protected drug traffick­ing, and illegal Contra-supply operations at Illapango Airbase in El Salvador. Asked what he thought of the HPSCI report, Castillo said, “It is a flat-out lie. It is a massive cover-up. They completely lied, and I’m going to prove that they are lying with the case file numbers. I was there during the whole thing.”2

After participating in a historic CIA-Drugs Symposium held in Eugene, Oregon, June 11, 2000,3 Castillo decided to go back through his notes, journals, and his DEA-6’s—the biweekly reports he’d filled out at the time—to see just how many times his records didn’t match the “not guilty” verdict of the HPSCI report. “I’ve got them [CIA] personally involved in 18 counts of drugs trafficking. I’ve got them on three counts of murders of which they personally were aware, that were occurring, and to make a long story short, I [also] came out with money launder­ing, three or four counts.”4

Among the cases Castillo describes in his scathing written response to the HPSCI report—full of DEA case file numbers and Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs Information System (NADDIS) numbers—is that of drug trafficker Francisco Rodrigo Guirola Beeche, who has two DEA NADDIS jackets, and is documented in DEA, CIA, and US Customs files. On February 6, 1985, Guirola flew out of Orange County, California, “in a private air­plane with three Cuban-Americans. It made a stop in South Texas where US Customs seized $5.9 million in cash. It was alleged that it was drug money, but because of his ties to the Salvadoran death squads and the CIA he was released, and the airplane given back.”5 In other words, the government kept the money, and known drug trafficker Guirola got off with his airplane.

(As we shall later show, these incidents of CIA-connected, drug-laden planes getting busted as their occupants get off scot-free, are not lim­ited to the Iran-Contra era. These sorts of happenings continued throughout the 1990s, right through to today, with connections to some of the major events of the past nearly eight years since this article was first published in 2001, including some extremely disturbing ties to the September 11th attacks.)

In May of 1984, Guirola had gone with Major Roberto D’Abuisson, head of the death squads in El Salvador at that time, to a highly secret, sensitive, and as it turns out, success­ful meeting with former Deputy Director of Central Intelligence Vernon Walters. “Walters was sent to stop the assassination of [then] US Ambassador to El Salvador, Thomas Pickering.”6 The CIA knew Guirola, and knew him well. The HPSCI report notes that John McCavitt, a senior CIA official in Guatemala and El Salvador at the time, “rejects forcefully” the idea that there was CIA involvement in trafficking in either country, and that he told the Committee that Illopango Airport in El Salvador hadn’t been used as a narcotics trans-shipment point by Contra leaders.7 But Castillo documented Guirola less than a year after the arrest in South Texas, flying drugs, cash, and

 “I’ve got them [CIA] personally involved in 18 counts of drugs trafficking. I’ve got them on three counts of murders of which they personally were aware, that were occurring, and to make a long story short, I [also] came out with money laun­dering, three or four counts.”

 

 
Celerino Castillo, DEA agent and anti-drug police, with
General G.C. Walter Andrade of Peruvian anti-drug police, in 1984.

weapons in and out of Illopango Airfield, out of hangers Four and Five, run respectively by Oliver North/Gen. Richard Secord’s National Security Council (NSC) Contra-supply operation, and the CIA.8 There’s no sign of Guirola within the entire 44-page HPSCI report.

 The CIA Practice of Recruiting Drug-Financed Armies

 Prof. Peter Dale Scott also wrote a response to the HPSCI report, in which he says that “this latest deception cannot be written off as an academic or historical matter. The CIA’s prac­tice of recruiting drug-financed armies is an on-going matter.”9 He wasn’t exaggerating then, and still isn’t today, as we will later cover when discussing current operations in Afghanistan.

A Professor Emeritus at the University of California-Berkeley, a prolific author, and a Canadian diplomat from 1957 to 1961, Scott has spent years studying and reporting on drug-traffick­ing connections and activi­ties on the part of the CIA and other US government agencies. Knowing that the HPSCI report is full of lies and misrepresentations, Scott is at a loss as to how this report could have been authorized for release by the Committee, voicing serious concerns about the staff of the HPSCI.

“Well, they were headed by this guy who just committed suicide [Chief of Staff John Millis], who not only was ex-CIA, he’d actually been working with Gulbuddin Hekmatyer in Afghanistan [as part of CIA covert operations assisting in the fight against the Soviets in the late 1970s and early 1980s, while Hekmatyar moved tons of opium and smack]. He may not have known about the Contra-drug connections, but he certainly knew about some CIA-drugs ties. I don’t think it was an accident that they picked someone from that area to sit over the staff either. I mean, this was one of the most sensitive politi­cal threats that the CIA had ever faced.”10 John Millis, a 19-year veteran of the CIA, was found dead of “suicide” in a dingy hotel room in Vienna, Virginia, just outside of Washington, DC, June 3, 2000—less than a month after the release of the HPSCI report.

The CIA released its own report, the Hitz Report, in two parts—Volume 1 in January 1998 and Volume 2 in October 199811 (within hours of the vote by Congress to hold impeach­ment hearings over Clinton’s lying about a blowjob). It exam­ined the allegations of the CIA protecting, facilitating, and directly participating in drug trafficking. There were numerous examples contained therein, particularly in Vol. 2, of just how much the CIA really knew about the drug trafficking of its “assets” during the Contra support operations, and admitted to knowing. But by the time the report was released to the public, the major news outlets—“the regular villains,” as Scott calls them—had already denigrated the story for two years, attacking and vilifying Gary Webb, instead of investigating the facts themselves.

“The Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times all insisted that the Contra-cocaine was minor, and could not be blamed for the crack epidemic. As the gov­ernment investigations [Hitz/CIA and DoJ] unfolded, however, it became clear that nearly every major cocaine-smuggling network used the Contras in some way, and that the Contras were connected—directly or indirectly—with possibly the bulk of cocaine that flooded the United States in the 1980s,” wrote Robert Parry, one journalist who has covered this story exten­sively from the very start.12

“This has been the case since the beginning,” says Scott.13 “The strategy of how to refute Webb is to claim that he said some­thing that in fact he didn’t say. The Committee didn’t invent this kind of deflection away from the truth; they just followed in the footsteps of the New York Times and the Washington Post, and they in turn may have been following in the footsteps of the CIA to begin with, but I don’t know. The Committee was originally created to exert Congressional checks and restraints on the

Professor Peter Dale Scott
Photo by Preston Peet

There were numerous examples contained therein, particularly in Vol. 2, of just how much the CIA really knew about the drug trafficking of its “assets” during the Contra support operations, and admitted to knowing.

intelligence community, in accordance with the spirit of the Constitution. For some time it has operated instead as a rubber-stamp, deflecting public concern rather than representing it.”14

Allegedly as a result of the mainstream press’ vilification of him, and the subsequent utter destruction of his career as an award-winning journalist, Webb committed “suicide” on December 11, 2004, by shooting himself in the face, twice. In the days leading up to Webb’s suicide, as reported by Alex Jones and Paul Joseph Watson, “Credible sources who were close to Gary Webb have stated that he was receiving death threats, being regularly followed, and that he was concerned about strange individuals who were seen on multiple occa­sions breaking into and leaving his house before his apparent ‘suicide’ on Friday morning.” “Freeway” Rick Ross, Webb’s primary source for the “Dark Alliance” series, told Kevin Booth during a phone interview that during conversations just prior to his so-called suicide, that Webb told him “that he had seen men scaling down the pipes outside his home and that they were obviously not burglars but ‘government people.’” Ross also told Booth that Webb said he’d been receiving death threats and was regularly being followed. Ross said Webb was working on a new story about the CIA and drug trafficking. Webb told Ross the men he saw around his home were “pro­fessionals,” who “jumped from his balcony and ran away when Gary confronted them.”15

 CIA/DoJ Memorandum of Understanding

 On Saturday, October 10, 1998, anyone watching CNN in the morning might have caught a brief mention of the release of the Hitz Report, Vol. 2. CNN report­ed that the CIA acknowl­edged it knew of at least 58 companies and individuals involved in bringing cocaine into the US and selling cocaine to US citizens to help fund the Contra war in Nicaragua, while they were working for the CIA in some capacity.

March 16, 1998. Fred Hitz, then–Inspector General of the CIA, had already testified to US Representatives at the sole Congressional hearing on the first half of this report, Hitz Vol. 1, that the CIA had worked with companies and different individuals that it knew were involved in the drug trade.16 I.G. Hitz went on to say that the CIA knew that drugs were coming into the US along the same supply routes used by and for the Contras, and that the Agency did not attempt to report these traffickers in an expeditious man­ner, nor did the CIA sever its relationship with those Contra supporters who were also alleged traffickers.

One of the most important things Hitz testified to was that William Casey, Director of the CIA under President Ronald Reagan, and William F. Smith, US Attorney General at that time, in March 1982 signed a “Memorandum of Understanding” in which it was made clear that the CIA had no obligation to report the allegations of trafficking involving “non-employees.” Casey sent a private message to A.G. Smith on March 2, 1982, in which he stated that he had signed the “procedures,” saying that he believed the new regulations struck a “…proper balance between enforcement of the law and protection of intelligence sources and methods….”17 This was in response to a letter from Smith to Casey on February 11, 1982, regard­ing President Reagan’s new Executive Order that had recently been implemented (E.O. 12333, issued in 1981), which required the reporting of drug crimes by US employees.18

With the MOU in place, the CIA, in cooperation with the Department of Justice, changed the CIA’s regulations in 1982, redefining the term “employee” to mean only full-time career

Fred Hitz, then–Inspector General of the CIA, had already testified to US Representatives at the sole Congressional hearing on the first half of this report, Hitz Vol. 1, that the CIA had worked with companies and different individuals that it knew were involved in the drug trade.

CIA officials. The result of this was that suddenly there were thousands of people, contract agents, until then “employees” of the CIA, who were no longer called employees. Now they were “employed by, assigned to, or acting for an agency within the intelligence community.”19 Non-employees, if you will.

According to a February 8, 1985, memo sent to Mark M. Richard, the Deputy Assistant Attorney General/Criminal Division of the US, on the subject of CIA reporting of drug offenses, this meant, as per the 1982 MOU, that the CIA really was under no obligation to report alleged drug violations by these “non-employees.”20

Matta’s SETCO airline was one of four companies that, although known by the US government to be engaged in drug trafficking, in 1986 were still awarded contracts by the US State Department with the Nicaraguan Humanitarian Assistance Organization (NHAO).

Juan Matta Ballesteros and SETCO  

It is pure disinformation for the HPSCI to print, “CIA reporting to DoJ of information on Contra involvement in narcotics traffick­ing was inconsistent but in compliance with then-current poli­cies and regulations. There is no evidence however that CIA officers in the field or at headquarters ever concealed narcotics trafficking information or allegations involving the Contras.”21

“On April 29, 1989, the DoJ requested that the Agency pro­vide information regarding Juan Matta Ballesteros and six codefendants for use in prosecution. DoJ also requested information regarding SETCO, described as ‘a Honduran corporation set up by Juan Matta Ballesteros.’ The May 2 CIA memo to DoJ containing the results of Agency traces on Matta, his codefendants, and SETCO stated that following an ‘extensive search of the files and indices of the directorate of Operations…. There are no records of a SETCO Air.’”22 Matta—whom Newsweek magazine described as being responsible for up to a third of all cocaine entering the US23—was wanted by the DEA in connection with the brutal 30-hour torture and murder of one of their agents, Enrique Camarena, in Mexico in February 1985. Obviously, Matta was a very well-known trafficker. It is ludicrous to suggest that the CIA hasn’t covered up evidence of drug trafficking, and even murder of US anti-drug agents, by assets, even from their own investigators.

“I mean, this is different than the MOU, which said the CIA was under no obligation to volunteer information to the DoJ,” said Scott. “It never said the CIA was allowed to withhold informa­tion from the DoJ. In the case of SETCO, they were asked for the information, and the CIA replied falsely that there was none. The Hitz people tried to find out how this could have happened, and one person said I just didn’t know about SETCO, but that is impossible. If people like me knew about SETCO, how could they not? Because the SETCO thing was a big thing.”24

Matta’s SETCO airline was one of four companies that, although known by the US government to be engaged in drug trafficking, in 1986 were still awarded contracts by the US State Department with the Nicaraguan Humanitarian Assistance Organization (NHAO). These companies were flying weapons and supplies in to the Contras, then drugs back to the US on the same aircraft, with the knowledge of CIA officials. Matta was protected from prosecution until his usefulness to the Contra efforts came to an end. Then he was arrested, tried and convicted in 1989, the same year Manuel Noriega was indicted in US court, was removed from office in Panama by a bloody invasion by US troops, then arrested and imprisoned within the US for trafficking, where he still rots to this day.

The CIA Admits to Shipping a Ton of Cocaine to US Streets

The Contra-CIA drug trafficking was no anomaly, but rather normal operating procedure for US Intelligence, particularly the CIA and military, and for the US government, while they simultaneously and actively perpetuate their profitable War on Some Drugs.

Noting a New York Times article dated November 20, 1993, she stated that “the CIA anti-drug program in Venezuela shipped a ton of nearly pure cocaine into the USA in 1990. The CIA acknowledged that the drugs were sold on the streets of the USA.”

Juan Ramón Matta Ballesteros.

Rep. Maxine Waters, (D-CA), in a speech in the House of Representatives on March 18, 1997, outlined various reports of CIA drug-trafficking complicity. Noting a New York Times article dated November 20, 1993, she stated that “the CIA anti-drug pro­gram in Venezuela shipped a ton of nearly pure cocaine into the USA in 1990. The CIA acknowl­edged that the drugs were sold on the streets of the USA…. Not one CIA official has ever been indicted or prosecuted for this abuse of authority.”

Rep. Waters continued, calling it a “cockamamie scheme.” She described how the CIA had approached the DEA, who has the authority over operations of this nature, and asked for their permission to go through with the operation, but the DEA said, “No.” The CIA did it anyway, explaining later to investigators that this was the only way to get in good with the traffickers, so as to set them up for a bigger bust the next time.25

Keith Boone’s excellent 2007 documentary, American Drug War—the Last White Hope, features a brief clip of former DEA head Richard Bonner admitting on film that indeed the CIA allowed this ton of cocaine to hit US streets with no oversight or follow-up whatsoever.

In late 1990, CIA Agent Mark McFarlin and General Ramon Guillen Davila of the Venezuelan National Guard, sent an 800-pound shipment of cocaine to Florida, where it was intercepted by US Customs at Miami International Airport, which lead to the eventual indictment of Guillen in 1996 in Miami for his involvement in trafficking up to 22 tons of cocaine into the city.26 Gen. Guillen was the former chief Venezuelan anti-drug cop.

Researcher Dan Russell relates, “Speaking from his safe haven in Caracas, Guillen insisted that this was a joint CIA-Venezuelan opera­tion aimed at the Cali cartel. Given that Guillen was a long-time CIA employee, and that the drugs were stored in a Venezuelan warehouse owned by the CIA, the joint part of Guillen’s statement is almost certainly true, although the ‘aimed at’ part is almost certainly false.”27

“That is the case that has gone closest to the heart of the CIA, because the CIA actually admitted to the introduction of a ton [of cocaine onto US streets]. The man was indicted for 22 tons, and [some people said] that his defense was that the CIA approved all of it,” Scott said, recalling the audacity of the case. For the very same Times article mentioned in Rep. Waters’ speech, “the spin the CIA gave the Times was that it was trying to sting Haiti’s National Intelligence Service (SIN)—which the CIA itself had created.”28

 Death Threats Against the Head of the DEA in Haiti

 Which brings us to the case of Colonel Michel Francois, one of the Haitian coup leaders who overthrew democratically elected Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 1991, helping rule Haiti until 1994. In her impassioned speech, Rep. Waters men­tioned a Los Angeles Times article (dated March 8, 1997) that reported, “Lt. Col. Michel Francois, one of the CIA’s reported Haitian agents, a former Army officer and a key leader in the military regime that ran Haiti between 1991 and 1994, was indicted in Miami with smuggling 33 tons of cocaine into the USA.”29

“When the DEA’s Tony Greco tried to stop a massive cocaine shipment in May, 1991, four months before the coup, his fam­ily received death threats on their private number from ‘the boss of the man arrested.’ The only people in Haiti who had that number were the coup leaders, army commander Raoul Cedras and his partner, Port-au-Prince police chief Michel Francois, ‘the boss of the man arrested.’ A 1993 U.S. GAO [Government Accounting Office] report insisted that Cedras and Francois were running one of the largest cocaine export rings in the world.”30

 
Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA).

 “We have uncovered more than sufficient evidence that conclusively shows that the US State Department was overtly—there wasn’t anything secret about it—overtly supporting the PRD, and that the PRD had as part of its structure a gang that was dedicated to selling drugs in the United States,” said former US Congressman Don Bailey.

In January 2000, US Customs found five cocaine hauls welded deep within the steel hulls of “Haitian” freighters on the Miami River in Florida. (There have since been many more such ship­ments intercepted.) The mainstream press reported that the drugs had “passed through” Haiti from Colombia. What the mainstream press did not focus on was that the five freighters were registered in Honduras, where, coincidentally, Haitian expatriate Michel Francois lives. Francois, a graduate of the infamous US Army’s School of the Americas, has an extradition request out for him from the DEA. During the subsequent DEA investigation of this freighter smuggling, two Haitians were arrested in Miami, suspected of masterminding the operation. One, Emmanuelle Thibaud, had been allowed to emigrate to Miami in 1996, two years after Aristide returned to power. When US police searched his Florida home in January 2000, “they found documents linking him to Michel Francois.”31 The Los Angeles Times quoted an FBI investigator, Hardrick Crawford, saying “it is not a big leap to assume that Francois is still direct­ing the trafficking from Honduras.”32 Although the US requested extradition of Francois in 1997, the Honduran Supreme Court ruled against it. So the CIA-molded and nurtured Francois continues to surface in these inter­national drug investiga­tions.

Explaining why they feel the US government recertified Haiti again that year (2002) as a cooperative partner in the War on Some Drugs, even with the abundance of evidence pointing to Haitian officials’ continued involvement in the drug trade, Haiti Progres, the leftist Haitian weekly based in New York, wrote: “Because they need the ‘drug war’ to cam­ouflage their real war, which is a war against any people which rejects US hegemony, neoliberal doctrine, and impe­rialism…. Like Frankenstein with his monster, the US often has to chase after the very criminals it creates. Just as in the case of Cuba and Nicaragua, the thugs trained and equipped by the Pentagon and CIA go on to form vicious mafias, involved in drug trafficking, assassinations, and money laundering.33

 Most-Favored Traffickers Receive Overt Support

 A case involving the CIA stepping in and crushing an investiga­tion into drug trafficking by CIA assets and favored clients took place in Philadelphia from 1995 to 1996, and continues in the official harassment of the investigating officer in charge. John “Sparky” McLaughlin is a narcotics officer in the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Bureau of Narcotics Investigations and Drug Control, Office of the Attorney General (OAG/BNI). On October 20, 1995, McLaughlin and two other officers approached Daniel Croussett, who was acting suspiciously. While ques­tioning Croussett, the officers found documents in his car marked “Trifuno ‘96,” which Croussett told McLaughlin’s team belonged “to a political party back in the DR [Dominican Republic], and they are running Jose Francisco Pena-Gomez for President in May.”34 This political party was the Dominican Revolutionary Party (PRD).

McLaughlin, in a supplemental report filed January 29, 1996, wrote that “Trifuno ’96” was basically a set of instructions on how to “organize the estimated 1.2 million Dominicans who currently reside outside the Dominican Republic to overthrow the present regime in the elections May, 1996.”35 Soon it was obvious that McLaughlin’s team had uncovered an enormous drug-traffick­ing operation, run by a group associat­ed with the PRD, the Dominican Federation, who were supporters of the man most favored to win the Dominican Presidency in 1996, and more ominously, most favored by the US government and the Clinton Administration. An informant for McLaughlin had told him that if Pena was elected, he was going to make sure that the price of heroin for Dominican supporters fell dramatically.

On October 26, 1995, former CIA operations officer and State Department field observer Wilson Prichett, hired as a security analyst by the BNI, wrote a memo to McLaughlin’s boss, BNI supervisor John Sunderhauf, stating he felt it time to bring in the CIA as they may already have had a covert interest in the PRD. By December 7, 1995, the CIA was called in to give assistance and to advise the local officers in this case that had potential international ramifications. On January 27, 1996, Sunderhauf received a memo from Larry Leightley, the CIA Chief of Station in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic.

In one memorable raid, officers found $136,000 “wrapped and ready” to be shipped to Sea Crest Trading, a suspected CIA front company.

“‘It is important to note that Pena-Gomez and the PRD in 1995 are considered mainstream in the political spectrum,’ Leightley wrote. ‘Pena-Gomez currently leads in the polls and has a bet­ter than even chance of being elected the next President of the Dominican Republic in May, 1996 elections. He and his PRD ideology pose no specific problems for U.S. foreign policy and, in fact, Pena-Gomez was widely seen as the ‘U.S. Embassy’s candidate’ in the 1994 elections given the embassy’s strong role in pressuring for free and fair elections and Pena’s role as opposition challenger.’ Leightley went on to say that on Dec. 11, 1995, Undersecretary of State Alex Watson had a lengthy meeting with Pena-Gomez, whom Leightley stated ‘is a well-respected political leader in the Caribbean.’”36

By this time, McLaughlin’s team had hooked up with DEA investigators in Worcester, Massachusetts, who informed them that the PRD headquarters in Worcester was the main hub of the Dominican narcotics trafficking for all of New England. McLaughlin was able to get an informant wearing a wire inside some meetings of the PRD. He taped instructions being given by PRD officials on how to raise money for the Pena-Gomez candidacy by narcotics trafficking. Then the CIA turned ugly and want­ed the name of McLaughlin’s infor­mant, and all memos they had written to the BNI on the matter.

McLaughlin and his team refused to turn the name over, fearing for the informant’s life. On March 27, 1996, CIA Agent Dave Lawrence arrived for a meeting with McLaughlin and Sunderhauf at BNI headquarters. According to court documents filed in McLaughlin’s civil suit against the CIA, the Pennsylvania Attorney General, the United States Attorney in Philadelphia, and the State Department, “CIA Agent Lawrence stated that he wanted the memo that he gave this agency on Jan. 31, 1996, and that BNI shouldn’t have received it in the first place. CIA agent Lawrence went on to state that he wanted the identification of the C/I and what province he came from in the Dominican Republic, CIA agent Lawrence was adamant about getting this information and he was agitated when BNI personnel refused his request.”37 Because this was potentially a very dam­aging case for the US government, which seemed to be protect­ing a known group of traffickers, if the informant disappeared there’d be no more potential problem for the government.

Within two weeks of refusing to turn over the name of his infor­mant to the CIA, all of McLaughlin’s pending cases were dis­missed as unprosecutable by the Philadelphia District Attorney, stories were leaked to the press alleging investigations into McLaughlin’s team for corruption, and superiors ordered McLaughlin’s team not to comment on charges publicly to the press, putting McLaughlin under a gag order.38 McLaughlin’s team broke up, and McLaughlin lost his initial civil suit against his employers and the CIA, although as reported by the National Whistleblowers Coalition, he did win a “retaliatory lawsuit,” though he still remained off the streets through at least 2006, barred from working anti-narcotics investigations.

“We have uncovered more than sufficient evidence that con­clusively shows that the US State Department was overtly—there wasn’t anything secret about it—overtly supporting the PRD, and that the PRD had as part of its structure a gang that was dedicated to selling drugs in the United States,” said for­mer US Congressman Don Bailey, who represented McLaughlin in his original suit.39 Bailey said that he suspects the govern­ment got the name of the informant anyway, as he cannot find the informant now.

A source close to the case confirms that photographs were taken of Al Gore attending a fundraising event at Coogan’s Pub in Washington Heights in September 1996. The fundraiser was held by Dominicans associated with the PRD, some of whom—such as PRD officers Simon A. Diaz and Pablo Espinal—even having DEA NADDIS jackets, and several had “convictions for sales of pounds of cocaine, weapons viola­tions and the laundering of millions of dollars in drug money.”40 Why was the Secret Service allowing Vice President Gore to meet with known traffickers and accept campaign contributions from them?

 Sea Crest Trading and More Dominican Connections

 Joe Occhipinti, a senior Immigration and Naturalization Service agent in New York City with 22 years service—one of the most decorated federal officers in history, with 78 commendations

The CIA and the US government do not want anyone bringing Hitz Vol. 2 into a court room and giving it the public hearing that former CIA Director John Deutch promised. 

and awards to his credit—began investigating Dominican drug connections in 1989. Occhipinti developed evidence, while solving the murder of a NYC cop by Dominican drug lords, that one of the Dominican drug lords was “buying up Spanish gro­cery stores, called bodegas in Washington Heights to facilitate his drug trafficking and money laundering activities.”41 Occhipinti launched what began to turn into the very successful, multi-agency task-force Operation Bodega, netting 40 arrests and the seizure of more than $1 million cash from drug proceeds.

In one memorable raid, officers found $136,000 “wrapped and ready” to be shipped to Sea Crest Trading, a suspected CIA front company.42 Then Occhipinti found himself set up, arrest­ed, tried, and convicted for violating the rights of some mem­bers of the Dominican Federation he’d busted during the operation. Sentenced to 36 months in prison in 1991, Occhipinti was pardoned by the out-going President Bush in 1993.

Another investigator who tied Sea Crest Trading to the CIA was former NYPD detective Benjamin Jackobson, who began investigating the company for food-coupon fraud in 1994. “According to Justice Department documents obtained by Congressman James Trafficant (D-OH), the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) believes that Sea Crest is behind much of the money laundering in New York’s Washington Heights area of Manhattan, but that attempts to prosecute the compa­ny ‘have been hampered and legislatively fought by certain interest groups and not a single case has been initiated.’ Jacobson’s inquiry led him to conclude that one of those ‘inter­est groups’ was the CIA, which, the investigator believes, was using Sea Crest as a front for covert operations, including weapons shipments to mujahideen groups in Afghanistan.”43

“All I can say is,” said Occhipinti, “I find it very unusual that doz­ens of viable federal and state investigations into the Dominican Federation and the activities of Sea Crest Trading company were prematurely terminated…. I am not optimistic that this stuff is ever going to really break. They will just simply attempt to discredit the people bringing forward the evidence, and to try to selectively prosecute some to intimidate the rest.”44

In sworn testimony entered into the Congressional Record by Representative James Trafficant, NYPD Internal Affairs officer William Acosta said, “My investigation confirmed that Sea Crest, as well as the Dominican Federation, are being politi­cally protected by high ranking public officials who have received illegal political contributions which were drug pro­ceeds. In addition, the operatives in Sea Crest were former CIA-Cuban operatives who were involved in the ‘Bay of Pigs.’ This is one of the rea­sons why the intelligence community has consistently protected and insu­lated Sea Crest and the Dominican Federation from criminal prosecution. I have evidence which can corrobo­rate the drug cartel conspiracy against Mr. Occhipinti.”45

It should also cause no undue con­cern among American citizens that the winner of the Dominican presidential race on May 18, 2000, was Hipolito Mejia, who was the vice-presidential running mate of the infamous Pena-Gomez in 1990 and who was the vice-president of his party, the PRD, for years before winning the race.46 The inauguration took place August 16, 2000. Not to mention that Clinton Administration insider and former Chairman of the Democratic National Party, Charles Manatt, accepted the US Ambassadorship to the poverty-stricken Dominican Republic, presenting his credentials on December 9, 1999, to the Dominican government.47

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals Has Its Doubts About US Government Drug-Ties Denials

Bringing one of the minor players in Gary Webb’s story back into the limelight, on July 26, 2000, the US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals (the second-highest court in the US) ruled that asylum-seeking Nicaraguan Renato Pena Cabrera—a former cocaine dealer and Fuerza Democratica Nicaraguense (FDN)

 “If you ask: In the process of fighting a war against the Sandinistas, did people connected with the US government open channels which allowed drug traffickers to move drugs into the United States, did they know the drug traffickers were doing it, and did they protect them from law enforcement? The answer to all those questions is ‘YES.’” —Jack Blum, former Chief Counsel to the Kerry Committee

Contra faction spokesman in Northern California during the early 1980s—should have a judge hear his story in court. Pena is fighting extradition from the US stemming from a 1985 con­viction for cocaine trafficking. Pena alleges the drug dealing he was involved in had the express permission of the US govern­ment, and that he was told by the prosecutor soon after his 1984 arrest that he would not face deportation, due to his assisting the Contra efforts.

“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. Pena states that he was told that leading Contra military commanders, with ties to the CIA, knew about the drug dealing,” the three-judge panel wrote in its decision.48 Efforts to find out the results of his asy­lum bid in 2008 have proven fruitless.

Pena’s story seemed plausible to the judges, who decided that the charges were of such serious import they deserved to be heard and evaluated in court. It also means that they probably do not believe the HPSCI report. Perhaps they were remem­bering the entries in Oliver North’s notebooks, dated July 9, 1984, concerning a conversation with CIA agent Duane “Dewey” Clarridge: “Wanted aircraft to go to Bolivia to pick up paste,” and, “Want aircraft to pick up 1,500 kilos.”49

The CIA-created FDN was the best-trained, best-equipped Contra faction, based in Honduras, and lead by former Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Samoza’s National Guardsman, Enrique Bermudez. Pena was selling drugs in San Francisco for Norwin Meneses, one of the main figures in Webb’s story, another Nicaraguan who was in turn sending much of that money to the Contras. “It was during October, 1982, that FDN leaders met with Meneses in L.A. and San Francisco in an effort to set up local Contra support groups in those cities.”50 Pena was arrested along with Jairo Meneses, Norwin’s nephew. Pena copped a guilty plea to one count of possession with intent to sell, in March 1985, getting a two-year sentence in exchange for informing on Jairo.

Dennis Ainsworth, an American Contra supporter in San Francisco, told the FBI in 1987 that he was told by Pena that “the FDN is involved in drug smuggling with the aid of Norwin Meneses.” Ainsworth also told the FBI that the FDN “had become more involved in selling arms and cocaine for per­sonal gain than in a military effort to overthrow the current Nicaraguan Sandinista government.” He went so far as to tell them that he’d been contacted in 1985 by a US Customs Agent, who told him that “national security interests kept him from making good narcotics cases.” When Jairo Meneses reached court for sentencing in 1985, in exchange for a three-year sentence he testified against his uncle, claiming to be a book keeper for Norwin, but nothing happened. Norwin Meneses continued to operate freely.51

Webb’s attention was initially directed toward Norwin Meneses’ partner, Danilo Blandon Reyes, who turned out to be the sup­plier for “Freeway” Ricky Ross, described by many as being instrumental in the spread of crack throughout South Central Los Angeles and beyond, beginning in late 1981. By 1983, Ross “was buying over 100 kilos of cocaine a week, and sell­ing as much as $3 million worth of crack a day.”52 Pena, during this same time (1982 to1984)—according to information in the CIA’s Hitz Report, Vol. 2—made six to eight trips “for Meneses’ drug-trafficking organization. Each time, he says he carried anywhere from $600,000 to $1,000,000 to Los Angeles and returned to San Fransisco with 6 to 8 kilos of cocaine.” Webb speculates that, “Even with the inflated cocaine prices of the early 1980s, the amount of money Pena was taking to LA was far more than was needed to pay for six to eight kilos of cocaine. It seems like that the excess—$300,000 to $500,000 per trip—was the Contra’s cut of the drug proceeds.”53

Whether Pena’s appeal will eventually reach a court is not yet known. Most likely someone in Washington, DC—perhaps even former CIA officer and current Chairman of the HPSCI, Rep. Porter Goss himself, (R-FL)—is going to pick up the phone and call the Special Assistant US Attorney listed in the court filings, Robert Yeargin, tell him to drop the case, and allow Pena to remain in the US. The CIA and the US govern­ment do not want anyone bringing Hitz Vol. 2 into a court room and giving it the public hearing that former CIA Director John Deutch promised. As noted, attempts in June and July 2008 by this author to find out what happened to Pena’s suit have been unsuccessful.

Choppers returning Contra troops to Ilopango from Nicaragua.
PHOTO: Celerino Castillo

Older Reports, Irrefutable Evidence

The evidence of the CIA working with traffickers is irrefutable. Many Congressional inquiries and committees have gathered massive amounts of evidence of CIA drug connections. Senator John Kerry’s (D-Mass) Senate Subcommittee on Narcotics and Terrorism, which released a report in December 1988,54 explored many of the Contra/CIA-drug allegations. As Jack Blum, former Chief Counsel to the Kerry Committee, testified in Senate hearings October 23, 1996 (before the subcommittee of Arlen Specter, the inventor of the infamous “magic-bullet theo­ry” for the Warren Commission’s investigation of the Kennedy assassination): “If you ask: In the process of fighting a war against the Sandinistas, did people connected with the US government open channels which allowed drug traffickers to move drugs into the United States, did they know the drug traf­fickers were doing it, and did they protect them from law enforcement? The answer to all those questions is ‘YES.’”55

The Kerry Report’s main conclusions are directly opposite those of the latest HPSCI report: “It is clear that individuals who pro­vided support for the Contras were involved in drug trafficking. The supply network of the Contras was used by drug trafficking organizations, and elements of the Contras themselves received financial and material assistance from drug traffickers.56

Webb’s article also resulted in a Department of Justice inves­tigation, lead by DoJ Inspector General Michael Bromwich. The Bromwich report found that that the CIA did indeed inter­vene to stop an investigation into Julio Zavala, a suspect in the “Frogman” case in San Francisco, in which swimmers in wetsuits were bringing cocaine to shore from Colombian freighters. When police arrested Zavala, they seized $36,000. The CIA got wind of depositions being planned and stepped in. “It is clear that the CIA believed that it had an interest in preventing the depositions, partly because it was concerned about an allegation that its funds were being diverted into the drug trade. The CIA discussed the matter with the US Attorney’s Office, the depositions were canceled, and the money was returned.”57

Since the release of the HPSCI report, there has been a noticeable silence emanating from the office of Rep. Maxine Waters, who after the release of Hitz Vol. 1, had called for open hearings, and who had still not authorized her staff to make any statements on the subject at the time of this writing (July 2008). Rep. Waters told the HPSCI in 1998 it was a shame that after all the evidence of CIA assets being involved in drug traf­ficking gathered by Senate officials in the 1980s, that the CIA either absolutely knew, or turned its head, “at the same time we are spending millions of dollars talking about a war on drugs? Give me a break, Mr. Chairman, and Members. We can do better than this.”58

There has yet to be a public hearing on Hitz Vol. 2. The HPSCI has released a report that blatantly lied to the American peo­ple, who have watched their rights and liberties chipped away a bit at a time in the name of the War on Some Drugs, while certain unscrupulous individuals within the CIA and other branches of US government, as well as the private sector, continue making themselves rich off the war. The investiga­tions into the CIA-Contra-Cocaine connections serve only to focus attention upon one small part of the whole picture, while the HPSCI report narrows the field even further, by insisting on refuting—poorly, one might add—Webb’s reporting yet again. “These guys have long ago become convinced that they can control what people believe and think entirely through power and that facts are irrelevant,” said Catherine Austin Fitts, for­mer Assistant Secretary of Housing and Federal Housing Commissioner under Bush.59

The HPSCI mentions the most prolific drug smuggler in US history—who used the Contra-supply operations to broaden his own smuggling operation—only in passing, relegating Barry Seal to a mere footnote. Mena, Arkansas—Seal’s base of operations during the same time then-Arkansas Governor Clinton’s good friend Dan Lasatar was linked by the FBI to a massive cocaine trafficking ring—isn’t mentioned once. White House NSC members Oliver North, Admiral John Poindexter, and General Richard Secord were all barred for life from enter­ing Costa Rica by the Costa Rican government in 1989 due to their Contra drug trafficking-connections, but you won’t read that in the HPSCI report.

Then there are the drug-financed armies, such as the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), which in 1996 was being called a terrorist organization by the US State Department, while the European Interpol was compiling a report on their domination of the European heroin trade. US forces handed a country to the KLA/Albanian drug cartels, and just over one year later the US was facing a sharp increase in heroin seizures and addiction figures.

Back in the 1960s and 1970s it was the Hmong guerrilla army fighting a “secret” war completely run by the CIA in Laos.

Senator Frank Church’s Committee hearings on CIA assassi­nations and covert operations in 1975 “accepted the results of the Agency’s own internal investigation, which found, not sur­prisingly, that none of its operatives had ever been in any way involved in the drug trade. Although the CIA’s report had expressed concern about opium dealing by its Southeast Asian allies, Congress did not question the Agency about is allegiances with leading drug lords—the key aspect, in my view, of CIA complicity in narcotics trafficking,” Alfred McCoy, author of the seminal The Politics of Heroin, wrote in 1972.60

Sounds a bit familiar, doesn’t it? Brit Snider, then–Inspector General of the CIA, testified before the HPSCI in a closed-door session, May 5, 1999. “While we found no evidence that any CIA employees involved in the Contra program had partici­pated in drug-related activities or had conspired with others in such activities, we found that the Agency did not deal with Contra-related drug trafficking allegations and information in a consistent, reasoned or justifiable manner. In the end, the objective of unseating the Sandinistas appears to have taken precedence over dealing properly with potentially serious alle­gations against those whom the Agency was working.”61 Yet, somehow the HPSCI felt justified in releasing its utter sham of a report to the American people, assuring us that it “found no evidence to support allegations” that CIA-connected individu­als were selling drugs in the Los Angeles area.

 Are We About to Commit Another Vietnam, or Has It Already Begun?

US politicians continue hollering for stronger law enforcement tactics and tougher sentencing guidelines. They voted in 2000 to give the Colombian military $1.3 billion dollars—so it can turn around and buy 68 Blackhawk helicopters from US arms merchants—to assist Colombia in its War on Some Drugs. The lies have a personal effect on our lives. This is not a harmless little white lie—this is costing thousands of undue, horrible deaths and ruined lives each year around the world, this sham of a war. For US politicians to continue to vote for increased Drug War funding—when the evidence is irrefutable that US intelligence agencies, federal law enforcement agencies, and even some government officials in elected office have actively worked to protect and cover up for the real, major drug lords—the analogies to Vietnam are not so far off the mark.

“When I came to America in 1961, the US was just beginning a program where they were sending advisors [to Vietnam], insisting that they would never be anything more,” said Scott. “And [they had] a defoliation program, an extensive defoliation program, which is what we are doing now in Colombia. Only, I think we now have even more advisors in Colombia, and we’ve graduated to biowarfare in Colombia, which is something we are treaty-bound not to do. Yet we are doing it. The deeper in we get, the harder it will be to get out. So there may be still a chance to get out of this mess, or to change it to a political solution, but it is dangerously like Vietnam.”62

Colombia is a perfect illustration of the hypocrisy of the War on some Drugs, when we consider the case of Colonel James Hiett, former head of the US anti-drug efforts in Colombia. Col. Hiett covered up for his wife, Laurie, who in 1998 came under investi­gation by the US Army for smuggling cocaine and heroin through the US Embassy postal service in Bogata. Laurie gave thou­sands of dollars of drug profits to her husband to launder for her. The US military put her under investigation, but they told Col. Hiett they did so, giving him time to cover his tracks. The Army performed a perfunctory investigation of the colonel, cleared him of any wrongdoing, then recommended he get probation. In May 1999, Laurie was sen­tenced to five years, and in July 2000 Col. Hiett was sentenced to five months of prison.

Colombian paramilitary.

White House NSC members Oliver North, Admiral John Poindexter, and General Richard Secord were all barred for life from entering Costa Rica by the Costa Rican government in 1989 due to their Contra drug trafficking-connections, but you won’t read that in the HPSCI report.

Hernan Aquila, the mule that Laurie hired to pick up the drugs in NYC and deliver them to the dealers, got a longer sentence than the two Hietts put together—five and a half years. He is Colombian; they are white Americans. He was simply a mule, while Col. Hiett was in charge of all US anti-drug efforts in Colombia, and his wife was one of the masterminds of the operation.

One aghast reporter wrote: “In the Colombian drug war, denial goes far beyond the domesticated: Col. Hiett turned a blind eye not only to his wife’s drug profiteering but to the paramili­taries, to the well-documented collusion of Colombian officers in those death squads and to the massive corruption of the whole drug-fighting enterprise. [Col.] Hiett’s sentencing revealed not an overprotective husband, but a military policy in which blindness is the operative strategy—a habit of mind so entrenched that neither Col. Hiett nor the Clinton administra­tion nor the U.S. Congress can renounce it, even as the prison door is swinging shut.”63

Former US Ambassador to Paraguay and El Salvador Robert White said, “Cocaine is now Colombia’s leading export,” laughing at “the idea that an operation of that magnitude can take place without the cooperation of the business, banking, transportation executives, and the government, civil as well as military.”64

 Which Brings Us to the New Millennium, the Post-9/11 Age

 Researcher Daniel Hopsicker has reported: “A two-year inves­tigation in Venice, Fl. into the flight school attended by Atta and his bodyguard Marwan Al-Shehhi and which provided them with their ‘cover’ while in the U.S. unearthed the amazing fact that during the same month the two men began flying lessons at Huffman Aviation, July of 2000, the flight school’s owner’s Lear jet was seized on the runway of Orlando Executive Airport by Federal Agents who found 43 pounds of heroin onboard.” Hopsicker has uncovered FBI cover-ups involving ter­rorist hijacker training at Huffman Aviation, and their connections to what appears to be a US-sanctioned drug-trafficking operation under­way at the very same tiny airport where lead hijacker Mohammad Atta trained.

Atta arrived at the Venice flight school at the same time that 43 pounds of heroin were seized from a plane owned by Walter Hilliard (co-owner, with Dutch national Rudi Dekkers, of Venice airport’s terror flight school Huffman Aviation) by machine gun–wielding DEA agents who apparently were not in on the operation. Although authorities found Hilliard inno­cent of any knowledge of the heroin shipment, they still kept his plane under asset-forfeiture laws. The same plane made between 30 to 40 of the exact same runs before getting busted, yet the pilot was never charged, for “lack of evidence.” The Orlando Sentinel (August 2, 2000) called this Florida’s largest-ever seizure of heroin.

Hopsicker suspects that the entire episode was kept out of the public’s eye to protect the US intelligence operation Able Danger, which had Mohammad Atta under surveillance for at least two years prior to the September 11th attacks, though the official US government 9-11 Report insists that no US intelli­gence service had any foreknowledge of Atta before the attacks. Hopsicker also raises the interesting point that only he and former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds made public other, numerous connections between the attacks and the interna­tional illicit drug trade. “FBI whistle-blower Sibel Edmonds, in the months after the attack, bumped into the arms for drugs deals. Edmonds alleged that the US State Department blocked investigations showing links between criminal drug trafficking networks and the terror attacks on 9/11 ‘Certain investigations were being quashed, let’s say per State Department’s request, because it would have affected certain foreign relations [or] affected certain business relations with foreign organizations,’ she stated.”65

In an interview, Daniel Ellsberg—who famously leaked the Pentagon Papers, proving the entire Vietnam fiasco was predi­cated on lies and greed by the military-industrial complex—summarized two interviews Edmonds gave to Antiwar.com:

Al Qaeda, she’s been saying to Congress, according to these interviews, is financed 95 percent by drug money—drug traffic to which the US government shows a blind eye, has been ignoring, because it very heavily involves allies and assets of ours—such as Turkey, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Pakistan, Afghanistan—all the ‘Stans—in a drug traffic where the opium origi­nates in Afghanistan, is processed in Turkey, and delivered to Europe, where it furnishes 96 percent of Europe’s heroin, by Albanians, either in Albania or Kosovo—Albanian Muslims in Kosovo—basically the KLA, the Kosovo Liberation Army which we backed heavily in that episode at the end of the century.

It was known at the time that the KLA consisted largely of drug dealers, and they still do. They’re dominating the politics, pretty much, of Kosovo right now. Now, all of these people are, for various reasons, allies, or clients, of the US—and the fact that they get a large amount of their income from the heroin trade is something the US just regards as the price of doing business with them. That means that not only is the heroin coming into our markets where it furnishes, according to Sibel based on her FBI experience, some 14 percent of our heroin—up from four percent before the invasion of Afghanistan.

The major effect of that is that terrorist gangs are taking a cut of this, including Al Qaeda, which essentially taxes this traffic as it goes through the various lands where each ‘band’ pays a percentage as they hand it off. In other words, the US is in effect, endorsing—well, ‘endorsing’ is too strong a word—“permitting,” definitely permitting, or “not acting against,” a heroin trade—which not only corrupts our cities and our city politics, and our congress, as Sibel makes very specific—but is financing the terrorist organization that constitutes a genuine threat to us. And this seems to be a fact that is accepted by our top leaders, according to Sibel, for various geopo­litical reasons, and for corrupt reasons as well. Sometimes things are simpler than they might appear—and they involve envelopes of cash. Sibel says that suitcases of cash have been delivered to the Speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert, at his home, near Chicago, from Turkish sources, knowing that a lot of that is drug money.66

“In the Colombian drug war, denial goes far beyond the domesticated: Col. Hiett turned a blind eye not only to his wife’s drug profiteering but to the paramilitaries, to the well-documented collusion of Colombian officers in those death squads and to the massive corruption of the whole drug-fighting enterprise.”

 “If You Don’t Violate Someone’s Human Rights, You’re Probably Not Doing Your Job.” —Anonymous US Official, US Torture Facility, Bagram Airbase, Afghanistan

Any thinking person has to be aware that there are so many more poppies and so much more heroin produced in and exported from Afghanistan, a country which has been under US military occupation since 2003. Each year the US and coali­tion forces have been in-country, Afghanistan has produced ever-larger, record-sized poppy crops. In May 2001, the US awarded the Taliban $43 million in humanitarian aid, due to its having eradicated all poppy crops in areas it controlled. Only the 10 percent of the country controlled by the Northern Alliance was still producing poppies. Yet, it’s the Northern Alliance now on the receiving end of US financial and military aid.

“The occupation forces in Afghanistan are supporting the drug trade, which brings between 120 and 194 billion dollars of revenues to organized crime, intelligence agencies and Western financial institutions,” reports Professor Michael Chossudovsky. “The proceeds of this lucrative multibillion dollar contraband are deposited in Western banks. Almost the totality of revenues accrue to corporate interests and criminal syndicates outside Afghanistan. The Golden Crescent drug trade, launched by the CIA in the early 1980s, continues to be protected by US intel­ligence, in liaison with NATO occupation forces and the British military. In recent developments, British occupation forces have promoted opium cultivation through paid radio advertise­ments…. Afghanistan and Colombia (together with Bolivia and Peru) constitute the largest drug producing economies in the world, which feed a flourishing criminal economy.”67

“These countries are heavily militarized. The drug trade is pro­tected. Amply documented the CIA has played a central role in the development of both the Latin American and Asian drug triangles,” reporter Devlon Buckley wrote in another article.68

The aforementioned radio advertisements, aired in Afghanistan in 2007, put it bluntly: “Respected people of Helmand. The soldiers of ISAF and ANA do not destroy poppy fields. They know that many people of Afghanistan have no choice but to grow poppy. ISAF and the ANA do not want to stop people from earning their livelihoods.”

Declan Walsh of the London Guardian reported from Kabul: “The advertisement, which was drafted by British officers and carried on two local stations, infuriated Afghan officials as high upas President Hamid Karzai, who demanded an explanation.”69

(This ignores the fact that Karzi’s half-brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai was taking a lot of money from the US CIA, while simultaneously being suspected as one of the upper tier operatives in corruption and national illicit drug production. That is until he was assassinated July 12, 2011 by his close friend and head of security.) Some reports state that as of 2008, 14 million Afghanistan people are dependent upon harvesting opium for their liveli­hoods. “For Afghanistan, narcotics and insurgency are inter­twined and inseparable problems,” reported Romesh Bhattacharji for the Indian magazine Frontline.70 “Illicit cultiva­tion of opium was used by the US to finance the insurrection against the Najibullah government. Many members of the Mujahideen, who were the Central Intelligence Agency’s [pawns], are now holding powerful posts in the US-propped Hamid Karzai government. These collaborations have ensured the Karzai government’s failure to contain opium production.

“In December 2005, the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) seized nine tons of opium from the house of the then Governor of Helmand, Sher Muhammad Akhundzada—the DEA is the only US organization that seems sincere about reducing narcotics trafficking. But, American and British mili­tary intelligence forces ensured that he was made a Member of Parliament. Similar is the case of Izzatullah Wasifi, the Director of the General Independent Administration of Anti-Corruption (GIAAC). He was arrested in July 1987 with 600 grams of heroin in Caesar’s Palace Hotel, Las Vegas.

“President Karzai’s step-brother Ahmed Wali Karzai is reported to be the ablest protector of all drug traffickers. With such patron­age given by US forces and some people in the Afghan govern­ment, it is no surprise that opium production does not decrease.

“The latest United Nations Rapid Survey for 2008 has pro­jected that Afghanistan produced 8,200 tons of opium in 2007. During the days of the much-maligned Najibullah government in the 1980s, the average opium production was only around 300 tons annually.”71

I interviewed a Blackwater Security employee, who wants to be identified only by his nickname, Rabbit. “Basically it’s going to happen whether you are a part of it or not, and it’s so much money or military money, or money that can be used by a military or paramilitary, if you don’t get involved in it, you lose control of the distribution, the profits, and you also lose knowl­edge of what’s going on, the ins and outs of the underworld. You lose the knowledge of who knows or has what, so if a $10-million deal happened in Fallujah, you know to keep an eye on Fallujah, rather than the next town over, so you will know where to concentrate your forces. It’s going to happen, so you may as well be a part of it or allow it to happen, because it’s silly to waste that asset.”

When I asked him if he himself felt this way, he replied, “Yeah. It’s an asset that should be used, not wasted.”

But “how would it be wasted by our not working with such criminal elements?” I asked him. “Doesn’t that reflect on us as a society, that we are engaged at home and abroad in a mas­sively expensive, not to mention destructive, War on Some Drugs and Users, yet are working hand in hand with the very same people smuggling the drugs we’re arresting millions of our own citizens for using?”

His reply: “Sometimes to kill a pig you have to crawl into the pig pen.”

What in the world does that mean, I asked him.

“If you want to complete your mission, your may have to engage in activities that may seem to some to be unethical or morally questionable.”

Keeping in mind what was written above about Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai’s brother-in-law being the head pro­tector, I asked Rabbit what he believed his duties were. “To insure that the just-forming government of Hamid Karzai sur­vived, and that the laws of this fledgling nation were being respected and adhered to by the common citizenry as well as the Taliban and other so-called bad guys.”

“Were you at all involved in opium-eradication efforts while in Afghanistan?” I flat-out asked this killer for hire. “What were your observations on the effectiveness of such programs? Did you feel they were sincere or more theater for the public eye instead? In other words, were there actually effective eradica­tion efforts ongoing, or were some in positions of power being selective as to whose fields were being uprooted and destroyed? What are your thoughts as to the fact that opium is the largest cash crop in Afghanistan since US and NATO forces have been in-country there? Do you feel that there are those in positions of power and responsibility making money by allowing the illegal trade to continue?”

“Well, yeah,” he replied matter-of-factly, “someone is making money! Some of the things we did as a unit, such as taking care of a family, and kind of like in exchange for giving the kids something or replacing a windshield in the family truck, while being nice we’d ask questions. Often all we’d get was ‘No, no, no,’ but sometimes we’d get a lead. They’d tell us there’d been a couple of foreigners, Jordanians or Syrians, around, or about a cache of weapons nearby. Proper use of intelligence helped us determine whether they were resisting or fighting for the Taliban. There’s the old rule, “The enemy of my enemy is now my friend,” which came into play with the Taliban resistance. Though morally gray, to obtain the support of the resistance, we helped the resistance get their opium, smuggled people and fuel, ammunition, and whatever other contraband they would be trafficking, through Taliban-controlled checkpoints. The anti-Taliban resistance funded itself primarily through the opium trade.”

So there you have it, right from the word of the mouth of one of those private soldiers paid for with US tax money and accountable to no one. We are enabling the trade without any qualms whatsoever.72

Who Are the Real “Bad Guys?”

Then there’s the State Department’s annual report listing those countries that are working against, or at least being uncoo­perative with the US, in waging the War on Some Drugs. Around 20 countries are on the initial list each year—including Colombia, Mexico, and Afghanistan—but when it comes time for the White House to make the final determination of the bad guys, President Bush always narrowed the list to just two or three countries—countries that the US doesn’t like. Those nations helping the US in its War on Some Terror, like the three listed above, somehow never make the final list, no matter how much they’re flooding the US with illegal drugs.73

Afghanistan—ruled by a US puppet government—produces 95 percent of the world’s heroin. Up to 14 percent of that reaches US shores, but the British lieutenant-general in charge of coali­tion forces in Afghanistan told the London Independent in 2006: “Nato will not be involved in poppy eradication, because we are deeply cautious that if we get it wrong and create the wrong environment, we will tip otherwise perfectly law-abiding and co-operative people into the opposition camp.”74 Nonetheless, this is precisely what has happened, with all sides of the conflict making money on the production, trade, and taxing of the illicit poppy and hashish markets in Afghanistan.

Meanwhile, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has kicked US DEA agents out of his country, accusing them of engaging in efforts to infiltrate and undermine his country and govern­ment. Bush in turn has taken to calling the Venezuelan presi­dent the new Castro, a commie pinko narco-thug. With CIA-connected planes loaded with 5.5 tons of cocaine (some with more, some with less) falling out of the skies in Mexico from late 2007 into summer 2008, a concentrated effort was made by the US government to connect these flights to the Chavez govern­ment, until it was pointed out that some of these same planes had been spotted being used in “extraordinary rendition flights,” where the CIA flies terrorist suspects to a variety of “secret” torture prisons around the world. Two American-owned flights loaded with cocaine actually crashed in Venezuala itself, within 45 days of one another, reports Daniel Hopsicker.75

To Be Continued, and Continued, and Continued…

Will the American people continue to accept the lies and cover-ups? Will the people allow Congress to continue refusing to address the officially sanctioned and CIA-assisted global traf­ficking, insisting that it cannot find any evidence that it exists, meanwhile voting ever-more cash to support the War on Some Drugs? Every American should feel personally insulted that regardless of the facts, their elected representatives again and again choose to foist more lies upon them, but they shouldn’t feel surprised. This entire war is predicated upon the existence of the black market, so to ensure the existence of that black market, agencies such as the CIA and the US military actively promote and protect the power and wealth of the cartels, and themselves, by creating endless enemies, and now by cou­pling the War on Some Terror with their War on Some Drugs.

Perhaps the suitable way to stop their lies and cover-ups would be to sentence these men and women to ten years of addiction in the streets of America under current prohibition policies, to suffer the consequences of their actions, and give them a taste of their own medicine.

Endnotes

1. US Congress (106th, 2nd session), House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. (2000). Report on the Central Intelligence Agency’s alleged involve­ment in trafficking crack cocaine in the Los Angeles area. Washington, DC: GPO. 2. Interview with Celerino Castillo by Preston Peet, 23 Jul 2000. 3. The “CIA-Drugs Symposium” was held in Eugene, Oregon, 11 Jun 2000. An all-day event, there were nine speakers and presenters with evidence of CIA and official US-sanctioned drug trafficking, including Catherine Austin Fitts, Mike Ruppert, Didon Kamathi, Kris Milligan, Rodney Stich, Cele Castillo, Dan Hopsicker, and Peter Dale Scott, plus a presentation by Bernadette Armand, an attorney working for teams of attorneys in the ongoing lawsuits against the CIA and others for their failure to offer equal protection under the law to everyone in South Central Los Angeles, Oakland, and elsewhere in California. Anita Belle, a Florida attorney, is handling various class-action suits filed in eight other states around the US along the same grounds as the California suits. None of these suits had accomplished anything as of 2008. 4. Op cit., Castillo interview. 5. “Written Statement of Celerino Castillo 3rd, (former DEA Special Agent), July 2000, for the House Select Committee on Intelligence,” p 16. 6. Ibid, p 17. Also see: Webb, Gary. (1998). Dark alliance: The CIA, the contras, and the crack cocaine explosion. New York: Seven Stories Press, p 249. 7. Op cit., HPSCI report, p 18. 8. Op cit., “Written Statement of Castillo,” p 17; op cit., Webb, pp 249–50. 9. Scott, Peter Dale, Ph.D. (2000). Drug, Contras, and the CIA: Government policies and the cocaine economy. An analysis of media and government response to the Gary Webb stories in the “San Jose Mercury News,” (1996–2000). From The Wilderness Publications, p 47. 10. Interview with Peter Dale Scott by Preston Peet, 24 Jul 2000. 11. Office of the Inspector General, Central Intelligence Agency. (1998). Allegations of connections between CIA and the Contras in cocaine trafficking to the United States, (96-0143-IG), Volume 1: The California story. 29 Jan. (Classified and unclassified versions); Office of the Inspector General, Central Intelligence Agency. (1998). Allegations of connections between CIA and the Contras in cocaine trafficking to the United States, (96-0143-IG), Volume II: The Contra story. 8 Oct. (Classified and unclassified ver­sions.) 12. Parry, Robert. (1999). Congress puts Contra-coke secrets behind closed doors. IF magazine, Jul/Aug, p 19. Parry was instrumental in breaking the Contra-cocaine connections in the early 1980s. He won the George Polk Award for Journalism in 1984 for reporting on the CIA assassination/torture manual given to the Contras, and wrote, along with Brian Barger, the very first published article on Oliver North’s connection to the secret Contra-supply operations on June 10, 1985, and the first story linking the Contras to drug running on Dec. 20, 1986, while working for the Associated Press. 13. Op cit., Scott interview. 14. Op cit., Scott (2000). (Emphasis added.) 15. Jones, Alex, and Paul Joseph Watson. (2004). Evidence begins to mount that Gary Webb was murdered; Webb spoke of death threats, ‘government’ people around his home. Prison Planet website, 15 Dec. 16. Testimony of CIA Inspector General Fredrick P. Hitz, before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, on the CIA OIG Report of Investigation, (Hitz) “Vol 1: The California Story,” 16 Mar 1998. 17. Memo to William French Smith, Attorney General, US Department of Justice, from William J. Casey, Director of Central Intelligence, dated 2 Mar 1982. Obtained at <www.copvcia.com>. 18. Memo from William F. Smith, Attorney General, US Department of Justice, to William Casey, Director of Central Intelligence, dated 11 Feb 1982. Obtained at <www.copvcia.com>. 19. As noted in the lawsuit Lyons vs. CIA (Class-Action Lawsuit on Behalf of Victims of the Crack Cocaine Epidemic), filed 15 Mar 1999, in Oakland and simultaneously in Los Angeles. 20. Memo to Mark M. Richard, the US Deputy Assistant Attorney General, from A.R. Cinquegrana, Deputy Counsel for Intelligence Policy, dated 8 Feb 1985, subject: CIA Reporting of Drug Offenses. 21. Op cit., HPSCI report, p 42. 22. Ruppert, Michael C. (1998). Selected excerpts with commentary from “The Central Intelligence Agency Inspector General report of investigation, alle­gations of connections between CIA and the Contras in cocaine trafficking to the United States. Vol. 2: The Contra story” (declassified version). From the Wilderness Publications. 23. Op cit., Scott (2000), p 7. 24. Op cit., Scott inter­view. SETCO was the airline owned by known drug trafficker Juan Mattas Ballestaros, whom Newsweek, on May 15, 1985, estimated was responsible for up to one third of all cocaine reaching the US at that time. SETCO was just one of the 58 companies and individuals mentioned in the Hitz report. 25. Speech of Representative Maxine Waters in the US House of Representatives, 18 Mar 1997. Televised on C-Span. Also see: Adams, David. (1997). Anti-drug mission turns sour. St. Petersburg Times, 26 Jan, p A1. 26. Cockburn, Alexander. (1998). Whiteout: The CIA, drugs, and the press. Verso, p 96. 27. Russell, Dan. (1999). Drug war. Covert money, power, and policy. Kalyx.com, p 450. 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid, p 451. 29. Op cit., speech of Rep. Maxine Waters; Also see: Scott, Peter Dale, and Jonathan Marshall. (1991, 1998). Cocaine politics, drugs, armies, and the CIA in Central America. University of California Press, p vii. 30. Op cit., Russell, pp 451–2. 31. Haiti Progres, 16–22 Feb 2000. 32. Fineman, Mark. (2000). Haiti takes on major role in cocaine trade. Los Angeles Times, 29 Mar. 33. Op cit., Haiti Progres. 34. Altman, Howard, and Jim Barry. (2000). The Dominican con­nection, part 1. City Paper (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania), 27 Jul-3 Aug, front page; Altman, Howard, and Jim Barry. (2000). The Dominican connection, part 2: Shafted. City Paper, 3–10 Aug, front page; see also: Ruppert, Michael C. (1999). Sparky: A case study in heroism and perseverance. From the Wilderness, 30 Aug, pp 7–11. 35. Op cit., Altman and Barry. 36. Ibid. 37. Op cit., Ruppert (1999). 38. Interview with Michael C. Ruppert by Preston Peet, 1 Aug 2000; ibid, p 9. 39. Interview with Don Bailey by Preston Peet, 31 Jul 2000. 40. Op cit., Ruppert (1999), p 9. 41. House Judiciary Committee, Subcommittee on Commercial and Administrative Law, Sworn Testimony by Joseph Occhipinti, 27 July 2000, testifying in support of H.R. 4105. “The Fair Justice Act of 2000,” which would form an agency to investigate alleged misconduct within the Justice Department. 42. Grigg, William Norman. (1997). Smuggler’s dues. New American 13.9, 28 Apr. 43. Unsigned. (1997). US grocery coupon fraud funds Middle Eastern terrorism. New American 13.5, 3 Mar. 44. Interview with Joseph Occhipinti by Preston Peet, 31 Jul 2000. 45. Sworn Affidavit of William Acosta, entered into the Congressional Record in the ongoing investigation of Joe Occhipinti, by Hon. James A Trafficant Jr, 26 Sep 1996, pp E1733–4; also see sworn affidavit of Manuel DeDios, former editor of El Diario Le Prensa newspa­per, and the first US journalist killed by the Dominican Federation drug cartel, same pages of Congressional Record. 46. Unsigned. (2000). Mejia wins in Dominican presidential race. Associated Press, 20 May. 47. Ruppert, Michael. (2000). The Democratic National Party’s presidential drug money pipeline. From the wilderness, 30 Apr, p 8. 48. Egelco, Bob. (2000). Former Contra wins review of drug ties, fights deportation to Nicaragua, says CIA knew of drug trafficking . San Francisco examiner and chronicle, 27 Jul, p A4. 49. Op cit., Cockburn, p 35. 50. Op cit., Webb, p 166. 51. Ibid., pp 168–9. 52. Op cit., Cockburn, p 7. 53. Op cit., Webb, pp 166–7. 54. US Senate, Subcommittee on Narcotic, Terrorism, and International Operations. (1998). Drugs, law enforcement, and foreign policy, Committee Staff Report, Dec. 55. Testimony and prepared state­ment of Jack Blum, Chief Counsel for Senator John Kerry’s Subcommittee on Narcotics, Terrorism, and International Relations, which released its own report in 1986, testifying before Sen. Arlen Specter’s Subcommittee Hearings in 1996; see also: op cit., Cockburn, p 304; op cit., Scott (2000), p 6. 56. Op cit., Cockburn, p 303. 57. US Department of Justice, Office of Inspector General (1997). The CIA-Contra-crack cocaine controversy: A review of the Justice Department’s investigations and prosecutions. Dec, Executive Summary, Section VIII. 58. Testimony of Rep. Maxine Waters Before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, On the CIA OIG Report of Investigation, “Vol 1: The California Story,” 16 Mar 1998. 59. Email correspondence of Catherine Austin Fitts with Preston Peet, 2 Aug 2000. 60. McCoy, Alfred. (1972). The poli­tics of heroin in Southeast Asia. Harper & Row. Reprinted in 1991 as The politics of heroin: CIA complicity in the global drug trade. Lawrence Hill Books, p xviii. 61. Op cit., HPSCI report, p 34. 62. Op cit., Scott interview; also see: Stevenson, Sharon, and Jeremy Bigwood (2000). Drug control or biowarfare. Mother Jones website, 3 May, updated 6 Jul, discussing the planned forcing of Colombia by US drug warriors to spray Fursarium Oxysporum, a hideous, mutating, killer fungi­cide on their coca fields, and hence their land and themselves, in exchange for the $1.3 billion in “anti-drug” aid. Florida has banned the spraying of Fusarmrium Oxysporum within its borders, yet the drug warriors will export it to Colombia. 63. Shapiro, Bruce. (2000). Nobody questions the colonel. Salon.com, 15 Jul. 64. Stein, Jeff. (2000). The unquiet death of Jennifer Odom. Salon.com, 5 Jul. 65. Hopsicker, Daniel. (2005). Able Danger intel exposed protected heroin traf­ficking. <www.MadCowProd.com>, 17 Apr. 66. Daniel Ellsberg interviewed by Kris Welch. Living room radio program. KPFA 94.1 (Berkeley, CA), 26 Aug 2005. Transcription by Kill the Messenger blog <sibeledmonds.blogspot.com>, 21 Oct 2006. 67. Chossudovsky, Professor Michael. (2007). Heroin is ‘good for your health’: Occupation forces support Afghan narcotics trade: Multibillion dollar earnings for organized crime and Western financial institutions. Center for Research on Globalization <GlobalResearch.ca>, 29 Apr. 68. Buckley, Devlin. Drug mafia, CIA blamed for sacking of Afghan governor. Center for Research on Globalization <GlobalResearch.ca>, 6 Jan. 69. Walsh, Declan. (2007). Afghan fury over UK troops telling farmers they can grow poppies. Guardian (London), 28 Apr. 70. Bhattacharji, Romesh. (2008). A losing war. Frontline: India’s nation­al magazine 25.14, 5–18 Jul. 71. Ibid. 72. Interview by Preston Peet with former Blackwater Security employee on the ground in both Iraq and Afghaistan, con­ducted 8 Jul 2008. 73. Brinkley, Joel. (2008). Bush fails to flay world’s obvious offenders. San Francisco chronicle, 15 Jun; Johnson, David T., Assistant Secretary of State for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, US State Dept. (2008). Remarks on release of the annual report on the major illicit drug producing countries for fiscal year 2008. Washington, DC, 16 Sept. Aailable on <www.state.gov>. 74. Coghlan, Tom. (2007). Afghanistan: Opium wars. Independent (London), 30 Apr. 75. Hopsicker, Daniel. (2008). CIA ghost planes hidden in Cayman Isle trusts. <www.madcowprod.com>, 12 Jun.

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