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CIA Report
Exposes
Drug Smuggling
Scandal
By GARY WEBBThe sale of missiles to the Ayatollah Khomeini, it seems, wasn't the
real scandal of the Iran-contra affair. It was the sale of cocaine to
American citizens.This we know thanks to a recently declassified CIA inspector
general's report.Though hacked and shredded to about half its original length for
alleged national security reasons, the 361-page CIA report paints a
damning picture of official malfeasance.Had these secret cables surfaced during the firestorm of controversy
then raging over Iran-contra, it is likely neither the CIA nor the
Reagan administration would have survived the conflagration.By 1987, the CIA report shows, the agency was sitting on six years'
worth of reports from field agents, station chiefs, informants,
private citizens and some of the contras themselves, all indicating
that Ronald Reagan's "freedom fighters'' were shipping planeloads of
cocaine and marijuana into the U.S.The justice department's files likewise bulged with evidence of
contra drug-running, including eyewitness testimony from inside
informants. Ditto for the state department. The CIA had briefed
vice-president George Bush personally."Allegations of drug trafficking continue to plague our operations,''
CIA headquarters grumbled in a July 1986 cable to its agents in Costa
Rica.Prime example
A prime example was international drug kingpin Norwin Meneses, a
California-based contra who supplied the South-Central L.A. crack
market with cocaine powder during the 80s and early 90s.A 1988 FBI cable shows that the bureau knew Meneses was working for
the drug enforcement agency (DEA) and believed he "was, and may still
be, an informant for the Central Intelligence Agency.'' At the time,
the FBI was unsuccessfully seeking his indictment on federal
cocaine-trafficking charges.According to the report, the CIA not only failed to act against the
contra traffickers, but also, deliberately or otherwise, misled
others who were investigating them.The agency repeatedly sent false reports to U.S. attorneys, U.S.
customs and other federal agencies assuring them that the CIA had no
record of men and companies who were plainly listed in CIA files as
being involved with drugs.Most important, the declassified cables show that the CIA knew
exactly what it was doing and was fully aware of how the American
public would react if word of its shenanigans ever surfaced."There is a very real risk that news of our relationship with (Alan
Hyde), whose reputation as an alleged drug trafficker is widely known
to various agencies, will hit the public domain -- something that
could bring our program to a full stop,'' CIA headquarters nervously
cabled its agents in Honduras in July 1987.Six years later, the CIA report says, the agency was still protecting
Honduran trafficker Hyde in an effort to keep the CIA's relationship
with drug dealers during the contra war under wraps.A March 11, 1993, cable discouraged counter-narcotics efforts against
Hyde because "his connection to the CIA is well documented and could
prove difficult in the prosecution stage,'' says the report, which
was posted on the CIA's Web site in early October.The CIA knew from the very beginning of the war that the men it had
hired to run its main contra army were narco-terrorists, but it
continued to finance and protect them.Contra army
In September 1981 -- to take just one example -- as the CIA was
becoming formally involved with the contras, the agency learned that
a faction called the Legion of September 15 "had made a decision to
engage in drug smuggling to the United States in order to finance its
anti-Sandinista operations.''A few months after discovering the Legion's involvement with drugs,
the CIA put the group's senior commanders in charge of the agency's
newly formed contra organization, the Nicaraguan Democratic Force
(FDN).According to the testimony of former L.A. drug kingpin Danilo
Blandon, the contra middleman who sold Meneses' cocaine to
South-Central's crack dealers, it was the Legion's commander in
chief, Enrique Bermudez, who recruited him and Meneses in late 1981
to raise money for the contras in California.As part of their fundraising efforts, they began selling cocaine to
the street gangs of South-Central and, in the process, helped touch
off the crack-cocaine explosion there.The inspector general's report should put to rest the long-simmering
historical debate over what the CIA as an institution knew about the
contras' drug trafficking. The answer? It knew everything, despite
its best efforts to remain ignorant.So where was the watchdog press while the Reagan administration,
Congress and the CIA were scrambling to keep a lid on the contra drug
connection? Dishing out the official story as fast as possible.Only now -- nearly 12 years later -- can we fully appreciate what an
astounding lie that was and how eagerly it was swallowed by a
gullible Washington, DC, press corps.While the press was dismissing the issue as the combined fantasies of
dopers and contra-haters, the DEA was sitting on information from
several reliable informants -- eyewitnesses on the U.S. government's
payroll -- who reported that the contras were selling drugs in Los
Angeles and San Francisco with the CIA's connivance.
DEA operative
In one case, Ivan Torres, a contra official who was part of Blandon's
South Central drug ring, told an undercover DEA operative that "CIA
representatives are aware of his drug-related activities and that
they don't mind. He said they have gone so far as to as to encourage
cocaine trafficking by members of the contras because they know it is
a good source of income.''That 1987 DEA report corroborated information the drug agency had
received two years earlier from Renato Pena, another member of the
Blandon/Meneses cocaine ring and the FDN's military representative in
San Francisco.In 1985, Pena told the DEA that "the CIA was allowing the contras to
fly drugs into the United States, sell them and keep the proceeds.''
Pena told CIA inspectors that "Norwin Meneses and Danilo Blandon told
him they were raising money for the contras through drug-dealing and
that Blandon stated that the contras would not have been able to
operate without drug proceeds."Ironically, these recently declassified reports are still secret to
most Americans.
(c)Copyright 1998 Gary Webb