"The big side-story of this is that the Gary Webb story was broken in August '96.
We were promised all these investigations. Then...
Maxine Waters received a "smoking gun" letter from Reagan Attorney-General William French Smith to Bill Casey, where it said the CIA no longer has to report drug trafficking by its agents!
It's in writing!" - Mike Ruppert
US to monitor a 'hot line' on city strife this summer
By With Analysis from Monitor Correspondents Around the World Edited by Randy Shipp
MAY 29, 1981
WASHINGTON — Attorney General William French Smith said the Justice Department has an "early-warning system" to identify the potential for civil disturbances in cities this summer. The department's Community Relations Service has been alerted to "keep a finger on the pulse" of the nation, particularly in light of administration budget slashes.
The service was created by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to help to communities resolve racial and ethnic disputes. [TEXT OMITTED FROM SOURCE]
Mr. Smith [TEXT OMITTED FROM SOURCE] gone off everywhere [TEXT OMITTED FROM SOURCE] the situation in TTEXT OMITTED FROM SOURCE] is particularly inflammatory as are situations in other areas including Buffalo, where [TEXT OMITTED FROM SOURCE] an Army private has been indicted for the fatal shooting of three black men.
January 11, 1981
BEST FOOT FORWARD
BEST FOOT FORWARD; CONFIRMATION ISN'T THE ONLY AIM OF THE PROCESS
By ADAM CLYMER
WASHINGTON - ONLY eight Cabinet nominees have ever been turned down by the Senate (unless you count, as two, the fellow President Coolidge had rejected twice). And, as confirmation hearings for Ronald Reagan's nominees began last week, there seemed to be almost no chance that Alexander M. Haig, Jr., Mr. Reagan's choice for Secretary of State, would be the ninth.
There are some Senators who don't like Mr. Haig, a few who think he acted dishonorably at the Nixon White House, and a number who just feel uneasy about him, as, for a matter of fact, do a number of Reagan aides. But that doesn't add up to the resources needed for the sort of all-out battle it takes to defeat a prospective Cabinet officer.
This has less to do with Mr. Haig's virtues than with the uncertainty of Democrats who can't remember when they were last in the minority and what to do about it. But even that, while important, is less of a factor than is the basic awkwardness of the role the Senate plays when it is asked to confirm Cabinet nominees.
The Constitution may be full of brilliant compromises. But the balance between executive and legislative appointment to high offices devised by the framers, in which the President makes appointments ''with the advice and consent'' of the Senate, has never been hailed as one of them. A Risk of Obloquy
John Adams, the first Vice President, wrote in July 1789 of the Senate's power to reject nominees: ''This negative on appointments is in danger of involving the Senate in reproach, censure, obloquy and suspicion without doing any good.'' He predicted that if the Senate did not reject nominees it would be ridiculed as ''servile'' to the President. But if the power was used, he foresaw, ''It will expose the Senators to the resentment of not only the disappointed candidate and all his friends, but of the President and all his friends.''
Mr. Haig's curt manner toward questions he considers dumb is not likely to win him many friends on the committee. But President-elect Reagan won in a landslide, and it is plainly difficult, though not necessarily impossible, for the country to be without a Secretary of State even for a few days, so there seems to be little fire in the Democrats' bellies for this particular conflict.
But there are more uses to the confirmation process than simply defeating a nominee. The reassurances that Senators have been extracting from James G. Watt, the prospective Secretary of the Interior, represent perhaps the most typical use of the process. Confirmation hearings are an opportunity to scare the nominee a bit, to make him realize that there are powerful interests in the city (at least theoretically representing real interests out in the country) that demand to be taken seriously.
Even Mr. Haig's Friday testimony had a few bars of that welcome kind of music in his promises to consult seriously with the Foreign Relations Committee, in his promises to abide by the War Powers and Intelligence Oversight Acts, or, for that matter, in his promise to Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina not let Henry A. Kissinger run what he called ''my State Department.''
The confirmation requirement can even force a prospective nominee to do something immediately, not just promise to be good in the future, whether the subject is Charles E. Wilson selling his General Motors stock in order to become Secretary of Defense in 1953, or Griffin Bell quitting all-white clubs to get to be Attorney General in 1977.
The clubs issue is likely to come up again this week in hearings on William French Smith, Mr. Reagan's pick as Attorney General. The betting is that he won't quit his clubs; the votes of feminists and blacks don't mean as much to Republicans as they do to Democrats.
A well-organized fight against a nomination can also be a way of sending a signal to an administration, especially a new one, whatever the eventual Senate vote. This has seemed to matter more in the case of non-Cabinet nominees. For example, the 40 votes cast in 1977 against Paul C. Warnke to be President Carter's arms control negotiator were a significant early warning, if an unheeded one, against a soft-sounding arms limitation treaty. Withdrawal Symptoms
Then there is the withdrawal of a nomination, something that happens not infrequently to judges. Withdrawal frequently occurs when a Senate committee simply refuses to send a nomination it dislikes to the floor for action, though in the Carter Administration the name of Theodore C. Sorenson was withdrawn from consideration for Director of Central Intelligence before it was clear the opposition was that determined. The battle just did not seem worth it.
Scaring Mr. Reagan off Mr. Haig was probably never in the cards, especially when the nomination, back in early December, seemed to shaping up as a test of strength. Senator Robert C. Byrd, the new minority leader, challenged the nomination at a news conference, but there has been little effective follow-up. Instead, Democrats on the committee issued a series of unrealistically voluminous requests for evidence, an exercise that Friday reached the level of pleading with Mr. Haig that he beg former President Nixon to turn some Watergate tapes loose.
For all the high-sounding talk about meeting their ''constitutional duty,'' the tradition behind confirmation of Cabinet appointments has been to give the President pretty much what he asks for. There are reformist spasms after such matters as Bert Lance's banking practices go unquestioned during hearings and blow up months later. Mr. Byrd cited those situations when explaining the need for an in-depth Haig inquiry. Indeed, the risk is there if the Nixon tapes ever emerge and can be taken to contradict Mr. Haig's assurances of virtue.
But the Republicans want to get the nomination through. They have a plausible partisan interest in not raking over their disgrace in the Nixon era just to measure Mr. Haig's portion of accountability. Meanwhile, the Democrats have not been cheered on in their skepticism by the press or any other massive public reaction, so even their punches seem pulled. If the Republicans, and Mr. Haig, continue to rub the Democrats' noses in their new feebleness, the erstwhile majority may fight back, but if their mood at Friday's and Saturday's hearings was any index, probably only to the degree of stalling the nomination a day or two past Jan. 20, Inauguration Day.
Wall Street, CIA and the Global Drug Trade
Former Los Angeles policeman Mike Ruppert blows the whistle on Wall Street's role in laundering drug money for CIA enterprises, and warns that Colombia could be the centre of the next regional conflict.
Extracted from Nexus Magazine, Volume 8, Number 6 (October-November 2001)
PO Box 30, Mapleton Qld 4560 Australia. editor@nexusmagazine.com
Telephone: +61 (0)7 5442 9280; Fax: +61 (0)7 5442 9381
From our web page at: www.nexusmagazine.com
An interview with Michael C. Ruppert
by Guerrilla News Network © 2000
Please introduce yourself.
I'm Mike Ruppert, and I'm the publisher of From The Wilderness newsletter and an ex-LAPD narc and general troublemaker fighting corrupting and evil influence around the world.
When you created the newsletter, what were you responding to and what were your intentions?
Well, in March of '98, it was about four months after I confronted CIA Director John Deutch at Locke High School on world television--he had come to Los Angeles to talk about allegations about CIA dealing drugs. I stood up on CNN and ABC Nightline and I said: "I am a former LAPD narcotics detective. I worked South Central and I can tell you, Director Deutch, that the Agency has dealt drugs in this country for a long time." And the room exploded, and what I saw at that time was there was a crying lack of knowledge in the body politic about how much evidence there really was about the criminal activities of the Central Intelligence Agency, specifically about dealing drugs. I said: "Wait a minute; I can pull out a little newsletter and say, 'If you look at this document, here's the proof for that.'" Because a lot of people were running around with the vague notion that maybe the CIA were bad guys and had done some things wrong, and they didn't know how much actual proof there was. So that's been the mission: to present the real proof that's irrefutable about what goes on.
Let's talk about your experience on the beat and what you confronted as a citizen trying to do right in the streets--must be pretty wild as it is.
I haven't been a policeman now for a long time. I graduated from the LA Police Academy class of 11/73, hit the streets in January of '74 in South Central Los Angeles. It was a vastly different world then; there was no cocaine and we had six-shooters and straight batons and nobody had a radio that you carried around with you. But the world has changed enormously. I specialised in narcotics quickly, and heroin was the predominant drug on the street in my area; it was Mexican brown heroin in those days.
And what happened to me was that I met and fell in love with a woman who was a contract CIA agent, a career agent. Now, I come from a CIA family and they had tried to recruit me, so this was not unexpected to me, but I began to see that she was protecting drug shipments and that the Agency was actively involved in dealing drugs. This happened with her in Hawaii, Mexico, Texas and New Orleans, and I kept saying I'm a narc, that I'm not going to overlook drug shipments. That's what basically set me on the irreversible course of events that determined the rest of my life. That was 1977.
You imagine someone in the CIA as thinking about protecting the country, or at least imagine the intelligence community as something that's ordered around national security. What do you think it is that triggers them to want to reconcile drug shipments in the country in line with that pursuit?
Well, they don't even have to reconcile it. That's what took so long to figure out, but what we teach now with From The Wilderness is that it wasn't just CIA dealing some drugs to fund covert operations. It is that drug money is an inherent part of the American economy. It has always been so, as it was with the British in the 1600s when they introduced opium into China to fund the triangular trade with the British East India Company.
The point about the drug trade is not that the CIA dealt a few drugs during the Contra years to fund the covert operation that Congress didn't want it to engage in. The CIA has dealt drugs for all 50 years of its existence--50 plus years, even before it was the CIA. And the point is that with 250 billion dollars a year in illegal drug money moved, laundered through the American economy, that money benefits Wall Street. That's the point of having the prohibitive drug trade, which the CIA effectively manages for the benefit of Wall Street.
Just before the Contra war, the annual cocaine consumption in this country was about 50 metric tons a year; let's say back in 1979. By 1985, it was 600 metric tons a year. We are still consuming 550 metric tons of cocaine a year in this country, and the money that's generated from that is used...let's say some drug dealer in Colombia calls General Motors and buys a thousand Suburbans--GM doesn't ask where it came from. Philip Morris is now being sued by 28 departments (the same thing as states) in Colombia for smuggling two billion dollars worth of Marlboro cigarettes into Colombia and getting paid for it with cocaine money! That money boosts Philip Morris's stock value on Wall Street; General Electric the same way...it's documented in the US Department of Justice.
So the purpose of the Agency being involved in the drug trade has been to generate illegal cash, fluid liquid capital, which gives those who can get their hands on it an unfair advantage in the marketplace.
So when you hear the term "War on Drugs"...
Well, it's not a War on Drugs. It's a War on People. Consider this: Joseph McNamara, a former chief of San Jose from the Hoover Institute at Stanford University, published some really telling figures. In 1972, when Richard Nixon started the War on Drugs, the annual federal budget allocation was 110 million dollars a year for enforcement. In fiscal year 2000, 28 years later, the budget allocation was 17 billion dollars a year, and yet, in the year 2000, there are more drugs in this country, they are cheaper, and they are more potent than they were in 1972. That has to tell you that there's some other agenda going on here.
Going back to the idea of China and the Opium War, it is described also as a war on the people of China, to bring them to a state of passivity where they couldn't actually be a force. Do you see in some way the drugs that come in satisfying a racist goal--with the crack laws especially in black inner city populations?
There are a number of ways to look at that. For the British, the introduction of opium into China was a means to an end. China was a homogeneous culture. When the British arrived there, they were these Caucasian heathens. The Chinese didn't want anything to do with them; they didn't want to give up their tea, they didn't want to give up their silk, and the British said "We can't have this". They went to India and grew the opium poppy in east India, in the foothills of the Himalayas, and smuggled it to China. And what they did over the course of a hundred years was they converted China from a homogeneous culture that was unified, into a society of warlords fighting for turf to see who had which drug-dealing regions.
If you look at what happened in South Central LA in the 1980s, the model is exactly the same; it didn't change. When I talk about narcotics, I come from several different angles. It's not just that I am a former narcotics investigator with the LAPD; I am also a recovering alcoholic who has sponsored men in recovery for 17 years. I've served on the board of directors of the National Council on Alcoholism. Alcohol is a drug. I have written more than 35 articles in the US Journal of Drug and Alcohol Dependence on treatment of addiction, recovery from addiction. The issue with drugs is this: people are going to get addicted no matter what you do, and a certain percentage of any population will always get addicted.
What the Agency has done (and I have written specifically on this; it's on my website), through institutions like the Rand Corporation and UCLA's Neuropsychiatric Institute and a number of academic projects which the CIA has funded, is they have deliberately engaged in pharmacological research to find out which drugs are most addictive. For example, in 1978-79, long before the cocaine epidemic hit here in the United States, research scientists from UCLA's Neuropsychiatric Institute, some of whom, like Louis Jolly West, who were very closely tied to the MK-ULTRA program, were doing research in South America where South American natives were smoking basuco, which has the same effect as crack cocaine. And the addiction was so strong that they were performing lobotomies and the people were still smoking the basuco or the paste in Colombia; and they knew that because NI and the Rand Corporation brought that data back.
So the CIA knew in 1980 exactly what the effects of crack were going to be when it hit the streets.
Who benefits most from an addicted inner-city population?
It's not just who benefits most; it's how many people can benefit on how many different ends of the spectrum.
We published a story in my newsletter From The Wilderness in May of 1998 that was written by Catherine Austin Fitts, a former Assistant Secretary of Housing [and Urban Development, HUD]. She produced a map in 1996, August of 1996--that's the same month that the Gary Webb story broke in the San Jose Mercury News. It was a map that showed the pattern of single family foreclosures or single family mortgages--HUD-backed mortgages--in South Central Los Angeles. But when you looked at the map all of these HUD foreclosures, they were right in the heart of the area where the crack cocaine epidemic had occurred. And what was revealed by looking at the HUD data was that, during the 1980s, thousands of middle-class African American wage-earning families with mortgages lost their homes. Why? There were drive-by shootings, the whole neighbourhood deteriorated, crack people moved in next door, your children got shot and went to jail and you had to move out. The house on which you owed $100,000 just got appraised at $40,000 because nobody wanted to buy it and you had to flee; you couldn't sell it, so you walked on it. And what Catherine's research showed was that someone else came along and bought thousands of homes for 10 to 20 cents in the dollar in the years right after the crack cocaine epidemic.
So the economic model is the same one that's always been in play for the ruling elite: use the poor people's money to steal their own land. You get the poor people to buy the drugs, using their money; you take that money to bring in more drugs, which destroys their property value, and then you steal it back. And the same thing has happened not only in Los Angeles; it has happened in Washington Heights in New York. As a matter of fact, it's been documented by a fabulous researcher, Professor John Metzger at the University of Michigan, who is one of my subscribers; he has a doctorate of urban planning. It was discussed in the Kerner Commission Report in 1967 after the Detroit riots, where it became US government policy that no more than a quarter of the population of any major inner city should be minority. "Spatial deconcentration" they call it, which really sounds Nazi to me, but it's in the Kerner Commission Report.
So the plan is literally to kill, loot...let me make it real simple...it's "Kill the Indians, take the land, take the wealth". So it is something of a misnomer or a misconception to believe that all of the cocaine or all of the crack cocaine was only used by African Americans. There was almost as much crack being used by whites as there was by African Americans, certainly in terms of total consumption.
Whites probably consumed more cocaine than African Americans, but they consumed powder. And what we saw was a deliberate effort by the Agency or Agency-related organisations to make sure that the large quantities of the cocaine, and the high-quality cocaine, got into the inner cities like Los Angeles. It was protected. And that's what I saw with the LAPD. I saw the hands-on working relationship, the interface between local police departments and the CIA.
I was first recruited when I was a senior at UCLA. The Agency flew me to Washington and said: "Mike, we want you to become a CIA case officer. You've already interned for LAPD for three years, you interned for the chief, your family was CIA, your mother was NSA. We want you to go back to the LAPD, and being an LAPD cop will just be your cover."
Now the Agency has done that; we've documented it in New Orleans, in New York, in police departments all across the country. And I've seen the interface where the CIA will deal very quietly with local agencies to protect their drug operations. That's one of the reasons they have to do it; it weeds out competition.
Now the people who go on from CIA training and become police officer covers, are they not inherently crooked? Is it for money or do they actually believe there's a benefit here?
Well, we were talking earlier before about Lenny Horowitz and his great book, Emerging Viruses. He has a quote in the front of that book that's one of my favourite quotes of all time; it's from Alexander Solzhenitsyn. And Solzhenitsyn says that men, in order to do evil, must first believe that what they are doing is good, otherwise they can't do it.
Now, not everybody in a local police department who connects with the CIA is a case officer. The Agency will use contractors. They'll approach guys who have military specialties and they'll hire them on the side. There are some like LAPD Chief Daryl Gates, who I believe was a case officer his whole life--and we can go there later if you want to. Others are just contract employees, but they brainwash themselves. And it's easy to believe--it's one of the worst human vices of all--that if you're making all this money and you have power, then you're doing it for a good cause. So there's an aspect of delusion about it, but it is one that becomes extremely vicious when you try to bring it out of denial.
The guy who goes and buys the house at the cheap rate, how is he really connected to the CIA who are bringing in drugs from Nicaragua? Some people would say that's a simplified version of a conspiracy theory. How would you respond to those people?
This is all documentable, this is provable, this is not speculation. We can trace this money very quickly; it's very easy to do. That's one of the reasons we've been so dangerous at From The Wilderness, because this is not speculation. Did the guy who was operating the roundhouse that turned around the train that was rolling to Auschwitz know what was going on in the shower room? I'm not making that argument, but it was all part of the system that produced the same net result. And what you find repeatedly--one of the things that we'll be seeing more of, I think, in From The Wilderness and certainly I've seen excellent research on this--is that one of the biggest investors in HUD multi-family units and HUD mortgages is Harvard University. It is a huge corporation that has a long list of ties to organised crime. Well, you take major firms like Harvard or related investment firms that also turn out to be huge campaign contributors, and they find out that there are 200 houses on the market for 20 cents in the dollar and they don't ask how it got that way; they just follow the money.
I was at the Shadow Convention where I interviewed a number of very famous people--Jesse Jackson, John Conyers, Maxine Waters, Arianna Huffington, Scott Harshbarger of Common Cause, a great many very important American people. I talked to them about the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in July of 2000 confirming that there was evidence that CIA was ordering drug dealing by a Contra leader, Reynato Peña. And it was funny, because I got all these political answers.
But one guy I talked to was a guy named Rex Nutting, who was the bureau chief of CBS Market Watch--he is the head guy for CBS for the stock market. And we're sitting back in the room--I'm waiting for Huffington to get free--and I'm talking to this guy about the fact that Richard Grasso, the Chairman of the New York Stock Exchange, last July went to Colombia and cold-called on the FARC guerrillas and asked them to invest their drug money in Wall Street. And Rex Nutting says: "Well, of course they always go where the money is. It's obvious."
The drug money is always going through Wall Street. Wall Street smells money and doesn't care where the money comes from; they'll go for the drug money.
And we jokingly laughed that the National Security Act that created the CIA in '47 was written by a guy called Clark Clifford, who was a Wall Street banker and lawyer. He's the guy that brought us BCCI. The job of writing the outline for CIA, the design for the Agency, was given to Clark Clifford by John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles--both law partners in the Wall Street law firm of Sullivan and Cromwell. In '69 after Nixon came in, the Chairman of SEC [Securities and Exchange Commission] was William Casey--the same guy who was Ronald Reagan's Director of Central Intelligence. And the current Vice President in charge of enforcement for the New York Stock Exchange, Dave Dougherty, is a retired CIA General Counsel. The CIA is Wall Street, and vice versa. When you understand that, and that money is the primary objective, everything else just falls into place.
What is the character of our governing body that's taken on this apparatus? What times do we live in?
Well, this is the Roman Empire. This is the Roman Empire before the fall. There is no question. I have written extensively in From The Wildernessand we've been right...we talk about a thing called a map. Have you ever had the experience where you're reading a map--you're trying to go to a party or some place you've never been before--and you follow this map and you read it, and you see that according to the map you're supposed to be at 34th and Main, and you look up at the street sign and it says 34th and Main? You feel good.
But if you look up at the street sign and it says Fifth and Broadway, you get this real sinking feeling inside. Everybody, most of the world, is operating from a bad map. From The Wilderness has a good map because we've been able to predict what's going to happen; we can explain it and make sense out of it.
The map that we're following--and this is where I agree wholeheartedly with Le Monde in Paris, a fabulous publication that's about to give us a pretty decent endorsement in September [2000], this month--is that organised crime is probably the lubricating force for the entire world economy right now. There's a trillion dollars a year in organised crime money. That trillion dollars a year is liquid, and if you think of money--criminal money, drug money--as water, which is thin, it can flow very quickly from point A to point B. And in the world markets, where you apply money is where you control business. You control markets. You control banks. You control interest rates. Drug money flows fastest. Money that is not criminal money has to go through regulations and banking systems. It has to go through taxations. It's tracked. The lawyers follow it. That money moves like molasses.
So those who have access to the cheapest capital always win. That's why if you don't play with drug money in the world economy today, you can't play at all. That's why, as we have documented, drug money was going directly into Al Gore's presidential campaign. Why? Because the Republicans, going as far back as Reagan, were using drug money, and that's how they put Reagan into office--with Bill Casey. If you don't play in that mode, you can't play at all. But the analogy I use is that it's like a snake eating its own tail: it's got to stop sooner or later.
We were faced with a huge economic lapse in 1997 when the Asian economies collapsed and the whole world held its breath, waiting for the other shoe to drop in the American markets. Well, it didn't drop. But you know why it didn't drop? Because we went to war in Kosovo. We blew up several hundred billion dollars worth of bridges, refineries and factories. The KLA controls 77 per cent of the heroin that's entering into Western Europe. We loosened up that money. American companies got all these new contracts to rebuild the refineries, the bridges, and the economy was saved.
Now we're going to war in Colombia--we have already taken combat casualties--but it's not sustainable because Colombia is and will become another Vietnam. And South America is already saying "We're not going there".
So I think we're on the brink of some really serious economic upheavals in the US economy that are essential, because the system cannot last. The way I see it, this is this very much like Rome. And I see some big changes coming very soon.
Obviously you deploy information in the desire that people might become conscious of it and make a change. What do you think when the average American says, "Why is this not in the major media and, if it's true, then it's gotta stop"? What do you say?
As far as the major media go, it's real simple. First of all, if you look at what just happened with AOL and Time Warner who own CNN. We have proven in From The Wilderness that CNN flat lost a lawsuit over the use of sarin gas during Vietnam. The Tailwind suits were settled and the former producer, April Oliver, just bought a six-bedroom house. I mean, CNN cannot afford to tell the truth, because what happened when they tried to tell the truth is that Henry Kissinger and Colin Powell picked up the phone and scared Ted Turner to death by threatening his stock value on Wall Street.
It's very interesting to note that one of the companies I track as far as laundering drug monies go--General Electric--happens to own NBC. Now, everybody knows that GE brings good things to life; they make DVDs, VCRs, television sets, telephones. When drug money in South America says they'd like to buy 100 million dollars worth of TVs and DVDs so that someone laundering drug money in Colombia can open a chain of appliance stores and make that money legal, GE asks absolutely no questions about where that money is coming from. As a matter of fact, there are no requirements for Wall Street to report drug money being invested.
If you and I go to a bank and we take in $10,001 in cash, the bank has to fill out a currency transaction report because you might be laundering money. GE can accept a check for 100 million dollars from the biggest drug lord in the world, and there is no requirement in the world that GE report that to anybody. But with a thing called the "price-to-earnings ratio" on their shares, a hundred million dollars in net profit for GE in South America--which was very easily done last year--equates to, at a price-to-earnings ratio of thirty to one, an increase in GE's stock value of three billion dollars.
So we're living in a hugely inflated bubble, and not one of the major media outlets in this country--all of which are publicly traded corporations afraid of takeover, trying to maximise profits--can afford to tell the truth. That's why we see these great opportunities for little organisations like From The Wilderness, and you guys, and everybody else that's coming up now--because what we're peddling is the truth, and what we find is that the truth sells!
Very well said. So now the second part of the question is this: what do you think the reaction of the American people will be when a critical mass of people actually digests this information in a rational way?
Denial is not a river in Egypt! There's gonna be a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth. There are several ways that I describe this. America is hopelessly addicted to its consumerism and blinded by the fact that the good things that we enjoy in our lives are at the price of slave labour in Indonesia, East Timor and all over the world. But we're blind to that--the same way that a drunk on a barstool is blind to the fact that he's drunk. Alcoholics don't stop because they don't know when to stop, they don't know how. One is too many and ten thousand not enough.
There are two models that I use to describe what happens in the American culture. One of them is we're like a family in which the father is molesting the youngest daughter, and everybody in the family conspires in a conspiracy of silence to scapegoat the youngest daughter because they're afraid of what's going to happen to the family if they speak out or, worse yet, they think "Oh my God, he's going to come after me". America very much works that way.
But the other way that I look at it is that we have to hit a bottom. Something is going to have to break. Something's gonna have to fall out--something's gonna have to destabilise the equilibrium here before people will even begin to look at what's going on. Yes, we've made some enormous progress over the last five years because there's a real hunger for good information, but as far as reaching the vast majority of the American people goes, something's gonna have to knock 'em off their barstool!
Cool. How would you characterise our "democracy", the two-party system? Is there any truth to the fact that we elect our officials?
No. It's a joke. There are two ends of the same party. There are two factions. There's what I like to call a Clinton faction--even though he is leaving office--and a Bush faction. But they are like the Genoveses and the Gambinos. If I am going to be the shopkeeper who is going to be oppressed, it doesn't make any difference to me whether there's a Gambino or a Genovese sticking a gun in my face and taking the money out of my pocket. We rationalise this by saying, "Well, they keep the economy good, etc., etc." That's the blind spot.
But no one in the American political system is allowed to rise to the level where they can seriously compete for the White House unless they are already compromised. Period. I know; I've been there. I was the press spokesman for the Perot presidential campaign in Los Angeles County in 1992. I had known Ross Perot before--we had spoken on issues of the POWs, the CIA and drugs--and what I found out is that I have yet to meet a millionaire who has my best interests at heart. And what I saw done was Ross had no intention of winning; it was all fixed even as far back as '92. I don't think we've had a fair election in this country since John Kennedy, even if that was fair, so...
Can you explain some of the political adventures or misadventures that brought the CIA to the public eye around drug dealing?
Well, if you go back historically, the Agency has been real active in Central America since the Second World War. I mean, the Agency was down there, even before it was CIA, with United Fruit and all the major landowners in Central America. In 1979, Anastasio Samosa, the dictator of Nicaragua, was overthrown by the Sandino movement--the Sandinistas. They were a "Marxist" movement, and Ronald Reagan mobilised the country to stave off this alleged threat of communist imperialism on America's doorstep. It was a whole lot of rubric and Congress didn't really want to get involved in it deeply. Congress passed some amendments to the Military Appropriations Act. They were known as the Boland Amendments, and were passed first I think in 1981 and again in 1984; they were Boland 1 and 2, which limited direct military aid to the Contras, the people fighting the Sandinistas.
And so the CIA and Ronald Reagan and Bill Casey and George Bush (Vice President George Bush) were running the whole operation; we know that now. They circumvented the will of Congress and there was this explosion of drug trafficking all throughout Central America, coordinated by the CIA. And we now have the CIA's own documents, and I can show you one later. It's the CIA's Volume 2 of their own Inspector-General's Report from 1998 where, in its own words, the Agency admits that of the 58 known Contra groups, 58 were involved with drugs. And that the Agency dealt with them; it protected six traffickers, kept them out of jail. One guy moving four tons of cocaine a month was using a bank account opened by White House staffer Oliver North. Other CIA assets were caught moving 200 kilos at a time--200 kilos is not personal use--and he was saying, "Well, I can't tell you what I'm doing because I'm doing it for the National Security Council"--that's the White House organ that oversees the Central Intelligence Agency. So we saw this huge explosion.
The point I make in my lectures is that in the mid- to late '70s, we in America--those of us who are old enough to remember--dealt with cartels but we didn't deal with drug cartels, we dealt with oil cartels. We had an oil crisis and it almost crippled the American economy. We had been subsidised by very cheap oil that we acquired by, in a sense, exploiting other countries. Well, then we had cartels of cocaine and we went from 40 to 50 metric tons a year to 600 metric tons a year. And that money was moved through Wall Street and became, in effect, the capital that replaced oil in the US economy.
How do you characterise the true governance in the world, and is this national or international?
Well, I think some of this is really traceable. Some people talk about something called the Illuminati. I've never met any Illuminati. When people start to talk to me about the Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations and the Bilderbergers--those are all readily identifiable groups of people who are the wealthiest of the wealthy in the world. And we find the Rothschilds and there are groups of wealth in the world that are so powerful that political movements don't ever touch them. And yes, they are in effect a guiding unseen hand. I have yet to see one individual person--I don't think there's a Mr Big somewhere, like in the Wizard of Oz, pulling levers--that's responsible for all the evil. I've never yet found one person who, if they were killed, would take away all the evil.
I want to talk about Clinton for a bit because it's incredible that most people don't even understand Mena. Is he not the ultimate millennial politician, and can you just tell us a little about who he really is?
Bill Clinton... Well, first of all, he was up to his eyeballs in CIA cocaine in Mena, Arkansas. Again, it's provable; the Wall Street Journal covered it. The New York Times covered the aspects of that. Gary Webb in his fabulous book, Dark Alliance, produced documents showing that CIA contracts at the Mena airport were negotiated by the Rose Law Firm--Hillary's law firm. There is no question that Bill came up in that milieu. My democratic drug money piece also covered this, showing that the CIA has been under Clinton control, funnelling money into the Democratic Party.
Bill Clinton is a guy who came up with this driving ambition to become President. He would do anything to be President. And he did do anything to become President. He is a lean, mean, vicious, ruthless streetfighter. Yes, he came from humble beginnings; his mother was a nurse, there was drinking in the background, his father died in a car crash. Some people have speculated that his real father might be Winthrop Rockefeller--who knows? But he is not a guy who came up in the fourth-generation in-bred George W. Bush style, you know, who has never had to fight a fair fight in his life. And my personal belief is that one on one, or politically even, the Clinton faction would kick the Bush faction every time--except the Bush faction just has lots more money!
Clinton played the games he had to play. I firmly believe that Bill Clinton was connected to the CIA as far back as when he was at Oxford. I believe his trip to Moscow was not to protest the war. I believe it was to spy on Americans. He was making his bones. And I've documented this very completely, about how Bill Clinton blackmailed his way out of the impeachment with the proof in the CIA investigations that Reagan and Bush had been dealing cocaine and ordering it, that Bush was involved in it first-hand; and that's where we got it--volume two of the report.
The big side-story of this is that the Gary Webb story was broken in August '96. We were promised all these investigations. [Democrat Congresswoman] Maxine Waters jumped in and was running all around the country screaming about CIA and cocaine. In March of 1998, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, did a walking tour of South Central and Maxine received a 300-million-dollar empowerment grant. Then, in May, Maxine Waters received a "smoking gun" letter from Reagan Attorney-General William French Smith to Bill Casey, where it said the CIA no longer has to report drug trafficking by its agents! It's in writing!
Then, in October of '98, CIA Inspector-General Frederick Hitz released a report...well, actually, he didn't release it; he had finished a report as far back as May or June of '98 and it was classified as Top Secret; and it was left to the CIA Director George Tenet to declassify it for public consumption. Well, George Tenet works for Bill Clinton. Bill Clinton appoints the head of the CIA. Head of the CIA takes Clinton's orders. That report--that CIA report that absolutely destroys George Bush--is a public document; you can access it off my website copvcia.com, and I have these extracts that I sell. It was released to the public on October 8, 1998, one hour after Henry Hyde's committee on the judiciary voted to start the impeachment of Bill Clinton. Bill Clinton picked up the phone and said: "They're gonna impeach me? George Tenet, CIA, release the report that sinks George Bush; we'll see how far they want to go." Click. Maxine Waters stops screaming about CIA and drugs, and she starts supporting Bill Clinton.
Now the interesting thing that my investigations have revealed is that one of the people who helped negotiate the smoking-gun memorandum was a guy on the Attorney-General's staff named Ken Starr. That's the guy who was prosecuting Clinton! Clinton was blackmailing the Republicans. Both sides played the same game, and Clinton basically says: "You wanna take me down? I'll bring the whole government down!"
I had six hits on my website on February 11, 1999, when the Senate was doing the trial of Bill Clinton. They were reading my stories on the impeachment, and that's when the whole story caved in.
What would you say to young people now? Do we have to be guerrillas? Once we get what you're saying, what should we do?
Follow the money. Understand how money works. If you have a sense in some part of your body, some part of your soul, that something's not right, you're probably right. Something isn't right. I grew up in the '50s and '60s and, you know, one of the things was to question authority. Question authority. Do not accept the mind control that's being fed to you; just don't do it!
With Colombia, explain how that war is being constructed and how it is being played out in the press?
Let's work on the structure of the war in Colombia first. I think that's far more important to understand why Colombia is like Vietnam. There are so many similarities between Colombia and Vietnam. First of all, Colombia will be a regional conflict like Vietnam was. The Vietnam War was not just Vietnam; it was North Vietnam, South Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Guam, China, the whole surrounding region. And the Colombian conflict will be Colombia, Venezuela, Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, Panama, maybe even Mexico, Puerto Rico certainly. We've admitted that we are going to stage for invasion or for intervention in Puerto Rico when we go in. Marines are now training and they've been landing on Colombian beaches. You haven't been hearing that.
One of the reasons why Colombia is like Vietnam is because we already have about 300 Special Forces Green Beret advisers on the ground, training Colombian troops, but we have maybe 500 to 1,000 former--and I use that term real loosely--CIA Special Forces personnel who have supposedly retired from the military and are now working for two corporations: Dyncorp and MPRI. And they're in Colombia as "civilian advisers" but they're going out on combat missions. They're flying airplanes, they're shooting, they're being shot. We've had Army personnel shot down already. About a year ago we had an Army plane shot down by a SAM [surface-to-air missile].
We have major investment corporations like Nicholas Brady's Darby Investments. Nicholas Brady was George Bush's Secretary of the Treasury. He has just opened a billion-dollar investment partnership with a group called Corfinsura, based in Medellín, Colombia, to build roads and dams. And it's like what we saw in Vietnam with major companies like Brown & Root going in to build Cam Ranh Bay, making billions of dollars in profit.
So we're going in to suck out. You see, for twenty or thirty years now, the drug money has been building up in Colombia. There's trillions of dollars in equity that's accumulated and it's become a threat to Wall Street's control, so we have to go down and blow the country up to take the money back to make sure it doesn't become powerful. Venezuela is not going along with this, like Cambodia would not go along with the Vietnam War and Laos wouldn't either. President Hugo Chavez is denying overflight to American planes, so we're gonna sabotage the Venezuelan economy! This is going to suck us into a hemispheric conflict just like Vietnam.
This is the difference. With Vietnam, we were told we were going in to fight the evil Communists. Well, we don't have any more Communist bogeymen. I mean, China is there but it's not really a military threat unless you're on the far right and totally needing lithium. But what we see is that we're being told that we're going to fight the evil drug lords. Well, the American Press even now is having trouble selling that to the American people. And even now, in the first or second week in September of 2000, we're starting to have body counts turn up in the news. It's just like Vietnam, but the Press is having a real hard time dealing with it. This is the sign of the end of the road for this system. It's starting to crumble right now.
But they are reporting this like Vietnam. And I will never forget the coverage from Vietnam exactly the way it played out, because these were my high school classmates that were dying. And it's sounding very similar right now.
Last question. What is the power of money? At the end of the day, drugs means money. Talk a bit about that and what it does to policemen, or to law and order?
Well, I think it's the whole system. Most rank-and-file policemen on the street are not what I would call innovative free-thinkers. They aren't the kind of guys who would see an opportunity to go illegal and just kind of do that on their own initiative. They have to see or sense that it's going on in a climate that allows them to get away with it. So we see the corruption working throughout society. When drug money is going directly into Wall Street--well, why not, you know, if you're a cop...
In March, 1998, the CIA Inspector General testified that there had existed a secret agreement between CIA and the Justice Department, wherein "during the years 1982 to 1995, CIA did not have to report the drug trafficking by its assets to the Justice Department."
As Michael Levine commented, "..[to] a trained DEA agent this literally means that the CIA had been granted a license to obstruct justice in our so-called war on drugs; a license that lasted, so the CIA claims, from 1982 to 1995."
Firstly, the actual request from Central Intelligence Agency Director William Casey to then-Attorney General William French Smith still isn't in the public domain. But two letters, one from Smith thanking Casey for his request, and a follow-up by Casey, are both available. They were released as part of a internal CIA report that explored allegations of CIA involvement in drug trafficking. In the first document, Smith thanks Casey for his letter (the one that isn't public) and says:
"I am pleased that these procedures, which I believe strike the proper balance between enforcement of the law and protection of intelligence sources and methods, will now be forwarded to other agencies..." --William J. Casey, Director, Central Intelligence Agency
The two men then codified their agreement in a Memorandum of Understanding. According to the agreement, intelligence agencies would not have to report if any of their agents were involved in drug running. (By agents, the agreement meant CIA sources and informants. Full-time employees still couldn't deal drugs.) That understanding remained in effect until August of 1995, when current Attorney General Janet Reno rescinded the agreement.
It's reasonable that the CIA be allowed to keep its mouth shut if it knows that some of its agents are involved in minor illegal affairs. Presumably some of the value of informants comes from the fact that they keep company with shady characters who engage in unlawful activities.
But why would the CIA ask to be exempt specifically from drug enforcement laws? According to Congresswoman Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), who is calling for full disclosure of the facts, "The CIA knew that the Contras were dealing drugs. They made this deal with the Attorney General to protect themselves from having to report it."
Subj: US: Don't Ask, Don't Tell
Source: In These Times
Contact: itt@inthesetimes.com
Website: http://www.inthesetimes.com/
Pubdate: May 1998
Author: Martha Honey
DON'T ASK, DON'T TELL
In testimony before the House Select Committee on Intelligence on March
16, the Central Intelligence Agency once again suffered a blow to its
reputation. This time the injury was self-inflicted. The CIA's own top
watchdog, Inspector General Frederick P. Hitz, admitted that although
"dozens of individuals and a number of companies" involved in the agency's
covert war against Nicaragua during the '80s were suspected drug
traffickers, the CIA had legal authority to ignore their crimes as long as
they were helping contra rebels fight the left-wing Sandinista government.
Hitz revealed that between 1982 and 1995 the spy agency had an agreement
with the Justice Department, allowing it to ignore drug trafficking by its
"agents, assets and non-staff employees." The directive, known as a
"Memorandum of Understanding" (MOU), did not exempt the agency's full-time,
career employees, who are known as CIA "officials." However, the agency did
not have to tell the Justice Department about the criminal activities of
"agents" or "assets" -- terms used interchangeably to refer to its paid and
unpaid spies. Also exempt were CIA contractors, such as pilots, accountants
and military trainers, who supplied the agency with specific goods and
services rather than intelligence. "There was no official requirement to
report on allegations of drug trafficking with respect to non-employees of
the agency," Hitz told the committee.
Hitz said this agreement, which he termed "a rather odd history," has since
been changed. But it was not until 1995 -- five years after the end of the
war in Nicaragua and three years into Clinton's first term -- that the
agreement was revised to include agents, assets and contractors as
"employees" whose suspected criminal activities, such as drug trafficking,
must be reported to the Justice Department.
Disclosure of this agreement is another black eye for the CIA at a time
when the agency is trying to distance itself from persistent allegations of
drug trafficking, including the provocative August 1996 "Dark Alliance"
series in the San Jose Mercury News. Veteran journalists, investigators,
policy analysts and members of Congress interviewed by In These Times all
say they were unaware of the directive. "This previously unknown agreement
enabled the CIA to keep known drug smugglers out of jail and on the payroll
of the American taxpayer," says Peter Kornbluh, a senior analyst with the
National Security Archive, who has written extensively on the CIA and the
war in Nicaragua. "CIA officials realized collaborating with pro-contra
drug smugglers was important to the goal of overthrowing the Sandinistas
and it sought protection from the Justice Department."
In 1982, when the MOU was implemented, the United States was gearing up for
a covert war in Central America aimed at toppling the Sandinistas. Over the
next eight years, the CIA hired scores of Latin American, Cuban and
American spies, as well as dozens of aviation, fishing and real estate
companies, to support the contras. Simultaneously, cocaine began flooding
into the United States, fueling the crack epidemic that has devastated Los
Angeles, Baltimore and other cities.
David MacMichael, who was a senior CIA officer in the early '80s, says that
while he was not aware of this MOU, he does recall that "in 1981, [CIA
Director William] Casey went to attorney general [William French] Smith
looking for a blanket exemption from prosecution for CIA officers for
crimes committed in the line of duty." Smith demurred, he says.
Since the mid-'80s, a spate of media reports, congressional inquiries, and
court cases in the United States and Central America have linked contra
officials and collaborators with cocaine traffickers, money launderers and
various front companies. Many of those implicated also claimed or were
alleged to be working for the CIA. In 1996, the accusations erupted anew
with the publication of Gary Webb's Mercury News series, which detailed how
a Nicaraguan drug ring used black street gangs to sell crack cocaine in Los
Angeles. Over the years, the CIA has repeatedly denied allegations that it
dealt with drug dealers.
Those denials have been championed by Washington Post reporter Walter
Pincus, a specialist in national security affairs and a leading critic of
the Mercury News series. Pincus, who has yet to report on Hitz's testimony,
says he had not been previously aware the directive. "I am still trying to
get a clarification of it," he says, adding that it may not be very
significant. "All it admits is that what they were doing was legal. On
occasion they were dealing with people who may or may not have been dealing
in drugs."
In December 1985, reporters Robert Parry and Brian Barger wrote the first
story tying the CIA's contra operation to cocaine smuggling. The piece for
The Associated Press angered Reagan administration officials, who tried
unsuccessfully to block its publication. During the contra war, most of the
media either ignored or discredited the drug trafficking reports. Parry
maintains that his pursuit of this story helped cost him jobs at AP and
Newsweek. "Historically we were correct," Parry says. "We pointed to a
serious problem in a timely fashion, and we were all punished and
ridiculed. The reporters who put this story down have gone on to fame and
fortune."
Parry calls Hitz's disclosure "extremely significant." "It amounts to a
blank check for dealing with drug traffickers," he says. "The agency is
admitting that it engaged in covering up drug crimes by the contras and
that this was legal."
Major media also ignored the 1989 findings of Sen. John Kerry's (D-Mass.)
Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics and International Operations. The
Kerry committee's two-year investigation turned up substantial evidence of
cocaine smuggling and money laundering by persons connected to the contras
and the CIA. Among the conclusions of its 1,166-page report:
*"Drug traffickers used the contra war and their ties to the contras as a
cover for their criminal enterprises in Honduras and Costa Rica. Assistance
from the drug lords was crucial to the contras, and the traffickers in turn
promoted and protected their operations by associating with the contra
movement."
*"Drug traffickers provided support to the contras and used the supply
network of the contras. Contras knowingly received both financial and
material assistance from the drug traffickers."
*"Drug traffickers contributed cash, weapons, planes, pilots, air supply
services and other materials to the contras."
*"In each case, one or another U.S. government agency had information
regarding these matters either while they were occurring, or immediately
thereafter."
The report was all but ignored by the three major networks and buried in
the back pages of the major newspapers. Combined, the stories in the
Washington Post, New York Times and Los Angeles Times totalled less than
2,000 words.
At the March congressional hearing, Hitz explained that the MOU between the
agency and the Justice Department was modified slightly in 1986,
prohibiting the CIA from paying those suspected of involvement in drug
trafficking. The CIA, however, could legally continue to use suspected drug
smugglers and not report their activities, as long as they received no
money from the agency.
But for major drug traffickers, being allowed to operate under the CIA's
umbrella was payment enough. The Kerry committee's report, along with most
press accounts of the CIA-cocaine connection, alleges that the contras
accepted money and supplies from drug smugglers and money launderers -- not
the other way around.
John Mattes, a young public defender in Miami in the mid-80s, stumbled upon
the allegations of drug trafficking by Cuban-Americans working with the
contras. Mattes, who represented several cocaine traffickers and
soldiers-of-fortune who testified before the Kerry committee, says
traffickers were seeking protection, not money, from the CIA. "There was a
marriage of convenience between the contras and the coke smugglers," he
says. The smugglers had cash, planes and pilots, while the Contras had
intelligence, airstrips and, most importantly, unimpeded access to the
United States. "And that, to a drug smuggler," he says, "is worth all the
tea in China."
During the '80s, the CIA conducted several internal inquiries and announced
it found no substantial evidence that contra leaders and other persons
working for the CIA had connections to cocaine traffickers. Then, the "Dark
Alliance" series touched off a volatile, nationwide controversy over the
agency's role in introducing crack to Southern California street gangs. To
help quell public and congressional anger, both the CIA and Justice
Department launched separate internal investigations. Both reports were
scheduled to be released last December, but were withheld at the last
minute without explanation.
Attorney General Janet Reno subsequently announced that she had blocked the
release of the Justice Department report (rumored to be the more
substantial and significant of the two) for unspecified "law enforcement
reasons." Justice Department sources told in These Times that one of the
people named in the report is a government witness in an ongoing criminal
case, whose identity must be protected. However, Jack Blum, a Washington
attorney and investigator for the Kerry committee, doubts that the Justice
Department will ever release its report. Blum says law enforcement
officials often claim disclosures will jeopardize ongoing cases, and he
wonders why the report was not simply edited to protect the informant's
identity.
In late January, the CIA released a declassified version of volume one of
its two-part report. Entitled "The California Story," this 149-page report
focuses on the cocaine network described in the "Dark Alliance" series,
which detailed the activities of two Nicaraguan drug smugglers, Danilo
Blandon and Juan Norwin Meneses. In the early '80s, Meneses and Blandon
supplied large quantities of powder cocaine to Ricky Ross, an
African-American drug dealer, who then turned it into crack for sale to two
Los Angeles gangs. Webb alleges that the Nicaraguans gave some of their
drug profits to top contra officials who were working with the CIA.
Hitz called the CIA's 18-month investigation "the most comprehensive and
exhaustive ever conducted" by the agency. He told the congressional
committee: "We found absolutely no evidence to indicate that the CIA as an
organization or its employees were involved in any conspiracy to bring
drugs into the United States," But, taken in conjunction with what Hitz
said about the MOU, "employees" here may pertain only to CIA career
officials -- not agents, assets or contractors.
Webb, whose reporting touched off the controversy, describes the report as
"schizophrenic." "The Executive Summary says there's no CIA involvement,"
says Webb. "The actual report shows there are CIA fingerprints all over
this drug operation."
For example, upon the release of volume one, CIA Director George Tenet
proclaimed that the Agency "left no stone unturned" in reaching its
conclusion that the CIA had "no direct or indirect" ties to Blandon and
Meneses. Yet, the report contains a compendium of indirect links between
the CIA's contra army and drug traffickers. The most obvious admissions
contained in the report include:
- --An October 22, 1982, cable from the CIA's Directorate of Operations that
reports, "There are indications of links between (a U.S. religious
organization) and two Nicaraguan counter-revolutionary groups...These links
involve an exchange in (the United States) of narcotics for arms." The
report goes on to say that there was to be a meeting in Costa Rica of
contras, several U.S. citizens and Renato Pena, a convicted drug dealer who
was part of Meneses' operation. Astonishingly, a November 3, 1982, cable
from CIA headquarters says that the agency decided "not to pursue the
matter further" because of "the apparent participation of U.S. persons
throughout."
- --The CIA directly intervened in the 1983 "Frogman Case," in which San
Francisco police seized 430 pounds of cocaine and arrested 50 individuals,
including a number of Nicaraguans. Because the CIA feared the agency's
connections to some of the contras involved had "potential for disaster,"
an unidentified CIA lawyer convinced the U.S. Attorney in San Francisco and
Justice Department officials to cancel plans to take depositions from
contra leaders in Costa Rica and to return $36,800 seized in the drug raid
to one of the contra factions. "There are sufficient factual details which
would cause certain damage to our image and program in Central America,"
CIA assistant general counsel Lee Strickland wrote in a August 22, 1984,
memo quoted in the report.
- --Blandon and Meneses met on various occasions with the contras' military
commander, Enrique Bermudez, who worked for the CIA. At one meeting in
Honduras in 1982, Bermudez, arguing that "the ends justify the means,"
asked the pair for help "in raising funds and obtaining equipment" and arms
for the contras. After the meeting, a group of contras escorted Blandon and
Meneses to the Tegucigalpa airport, where the pair was arrested by Honduran
authorities because they were carrying $100,000 in cash, profits from a
Bolivian drug deal. The contras intervened and the money was returned to
Blandon and Meneses. The report inexplicably concludes that there is no
evidence that Bermudez knew the duo were drug traffickers, even though CIA
cables show the agency was aware that Meneses had been a "drug king-pin"
since the '70s.
At the congressional hearings, lawmakers cited these and other portions of
the report, questioning the agency's capacity to investigate itself. Among
the most vocal critics were Los Angeles Democratic Reps. Maxine Waters and
Juanita Millender-McDonald, whose districts have been the epicenter of the
crack epidemic. Waters charged that the report was "fraught with
contradictions and illogical conclusions," saying that the CIA's cleverly
worded denials of links to drug traffickers in Southern California "defies
the evidence."
Volume two of the report, which covers the entire Nicaraguan war, was
scheduled to be turned over to the House and Senate intelligence committees
in late March. But, as of mid-April, CIA officials told In These Times, the
report had not been released to Congress. In his congressional testimony,
Hitz said that volume two will contain "a detailed treatment of what was
known to CIA regarding dozens of people and a number of companies connected
in some fashion to the contra program or the contra movement, that were the
subject of any sort of drug trafficking allegations."
Previewing the report, Hitz admitted: "There are instances where the CIA
did not, in an expeditious or consistent fashion, cut off relationships
with individuals supporting the contra program, who are alleged to have
engaged in drug trafficking activity or take action to resolve the
allegation." Several congressional sources say that they suspect the report
will never be released.While the precise wording of the MOU has not been
made public, some say the directive may be considerably broader than
implied at the hearing. At one point in his testimony, Hitz said the MOU
applied to "intelligence agencies," indicating that it also may include the
dozen or so U.S. agencies involved in intelligence work, not just the CIA.
Hitz declined requests for an interview.
But the CIA may not be able to get away without further disclosures. The
National Security Archive and other public interest groups, as well as
Reps. John Conyers (D-Mich.) and Waters, are mounting a campaign for the
declassification and release of the text of the MOU, the Justice Department
report, volume two of the CIA report, tens of thousands of pages of
documents and hundreds of interviews compiled by the two agencies in the
course of their internal investigations. Attorney Blum warns that CIA
officials who testified before the Kerry committee may have perjured
themselves in denying they knew of any links between the CIA, the contras
and cocaine traffickers. And investigative journalists Parry and Webb,
among others, say Hitz's admission may be the smoking gun that conclusively
proves that the CIA colluded with and then concealed its involvement with
cocaine traffickers.
There are two models that I use to describe what happens in the American culture. One of them is we're like a family in which the father is molesting the youngest daughter, and everybody in the family conspires in a conspiracy of silence to scapegoat the youngest daughter because they're afraid of what's going to happen to the family if they speak out or, worse yet, they think "Oh my God, he's going to come after me". America very much works that way.
But the other way that I look at it is that we have to hit a bottom. Something is going to have to break. Something's gonna have to fall out--something's gonna have to destabilise the equilibrium here before people will even begin to look at what's going on. Yes, we've made some enormous progress over the last five years because there's a real hunger for good information, but as far as reaching the vast majority of the American people goes, something's gonna have to knock 'em off their barstool!
Cool. How would you characterise our "democracy", the two-party system? Is there any truth to the fact that we elect our officials?
No. It's a joke. There are two ends of the same party. There are two factions. There's what I like to call a Clinton faction--even though he is leaving office--and a Bush faction. But they are like the Genoveses and the Gambinos. If I am going to be the shopkeeper who is going to be oppressed, it doesn't make any difference to me whether there's a Gambino or a Genovese sticking a gun in my face and taking the money out of my pocket. We rationalise this by saying, "Well, they keep the economy good, etc., etc." That's the blind spot.
But no one in the American political system is allowed to rise to the level where they can seriously compete for the White House unless they are already compromised. Period. I know; I've been there. I was the press spokesman for the Perot presidential campaign in Los Angeles County in 1992. I had known Ross Perot before--we had spoken on issues of the POWs, the CIA and drugs--and what I found out is that I have yet to meet a millionaire who has my best interests at heart. And what I saw done was Ross had no intention of winning; it was all fixed even as far back as '92. I don't think we've had a fair election in this country since John Kennedy, even if that was fair, so...
Can you explain some of the political adventures or misadventures that brought the CIA to the public eye around drug dealing?
Well, if you go back historically, the Agency has been real active in Central America since the Second World War. I mean, the Agency was down there, even before it was CIA, with United Fruit and all the major landowners in Central America. In 1979, Anastasio Samosa, the dictator of Nicaragua, was overthrown by the Sandino movement--the Sandinistas. They were a "Marxist" movement, and Ronald Reagan mobilised the country to stave off this alleged threat of communist imperialism on America's doorstep. It was a whole lot of rubric and Congress didn't really want to get involved in it deeply. Congress passed some amendments to the Military Appropriations Act. They were known as the Boland Amendments, and were passed first I think in 1981 and again in 1984; they were Boland 1 and 2, which limited direct military aid to the Contras, the people fighting the Sandinistas.
And so the CIA and Ronald Reagan and Bill Casey and George Bush (Vice President George Bush) were running the whole operation; we know that now. They circumvented the will of Congress and there was this explosion of drug trafficking all throughout Central America, coordinated by the CIA. And we now have the CIA's own documents, and I can show you one later. It's the CIA's Volume 2 of their own Inspector-General's Report from 1998 where, in its own words, the Agency admits that of the 58 known Contra groups, 58 were involved with drugs. And that the Agency dealt with them; it protected six traffickers, kept them out of jail. One guy moving four tons of cocaine a month was using a bank account opened by White House staffer Oliver North. Other CIA assets were caught moving 200 kilos at a time--200 kilos is not personal use--and he was saying, "Well, I can't tell you what I'm doing because I'm doing it for the National Security Council"--that's the White House organ that oversees the Central Intelligence Agency. So we saw this huge explosion.
The point I make in my lectures is that in the mid- to late '70s, we in America--those of us who are old enough to remember--dealt with cartels but we didn't deal with drug cartels, we dealt with oil cartels. We had an oil crisis and it almost crippled the American economy. We had been subsidised by very cheap oil that we acquired by, in a sense, exploiting other countries. Well, then we had cartels of cocaine and we went from 40 to 50 metric tons a year to 600 metric tons a year. And that money was moved through Wall Street and became, in effect, the capital that replaced oil in the US economy.
How do you characterise the true governance in the world, and is this national or international?
Well, I think some of this is really traceable. Some people talk about something called the Illuminati. I've never met any Illuminati. When people start to talk to me about the Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations and the Bilderbergers--those are all readily identifiable groups of people who are the wealthiest of the wealthy in the world. And we find the Rothschilds and there are groups of wealth in the world that are so powerful that political movements don't ever touch them. And yes, they are in effect a guiding unseen hand. I have yet to see one individual person--I don't think there's a Mr Big somewhere, like in the Wizard of Oz, pulling levers--that's responsible for all the evil. I've never yet found one person who, if they were killed, would take away all the evil.
I want to talk about Clinton for a bit because it's incredible that most people don't even understand Mena. Is he not the ultimate millennial politician, and can you just tell us a little about who he really is?
Bill Clinton... Well, first of all, he was up to his eyeballs in CIA cocaine in Mena, Arkansas. Again, it's provable; the Wall Street Journal covered it. The New York Times covered the aspects of that. Gary Webb in his fabulous book, Dark Alliance, produced documents showing that CIA contracts at the Mena airport were negotiated by the Rose Law Firm--Hillary's law firm. There is no question that Bill came up in that milieu. My democratic drug money piece also covered this, showing that the CIA has been under Clinton control, funnelling money into the Democratic Party.
Bill Clinton is a guy who came up with this driving ambition to become President. He would do anything to be President. And he did do anything to become President. He is a lean, mean, vicious, ruthless streetfighter. Yes, he came from humble beginnings; his mother was a nurse, there was drinking in the background, his father died in a car crash. Some people have speculated that his real father might be Winthrop Rockefeller--who knows? But he is not a guy who came up in the fourth-generation in-bred George W. Bush style, you know, who has never had to fight a fair fight in his life. And my personal belief is that one on one, or politically even, the Clinton faction would kick the Bush faction every time--except the Bush faction just has lots more money!
Clinton played the games he had to play. I firmly believe that Bill Clinton was connected to the CIA as far back as when he was at Oxford. I believe his trip to Moscow was not to protest the war. I believe it was to spy on Americans. He was making his bones. And I've documented this very completely, about how Bill Clinton blackmailed his way out of the impeachment with the proof in the CIA investigations that Reagan and Bush had been dealing cocaine and ordering it, that Bush was involved in it first-hand; and that's where we got it--volume two of the report.
The big side-story of this is that the Gary Webb story was broken in August '96. We were promised all these investigations. [Democrat Congresswoman] Maxine Waters jumped in and was running all around the country screaming about CIA and cocaine. In March of 1998, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, did a walking tour of South Central and Maxine received a 300-million-dollar empowerment grant. Then, in May, Maxine Waters received a "smoking gun" letter from Reagan Attorney-General William French Smith to Bill Casey, where it said the CIA no longer has to report drug trafficking by its agents! It's in writing!
Then, in October of '98, CIA Inspector-General Frederick Hitz released a report...well, actually, he didn't release it; he had finished a report as far back as May or June of '98 and it was classified as Top Secret; and it was left to the CIA Director George Tenet to declassify it for public consumption. Well, George Tenet works for Bill Clinton. Bill Clinton appoints the head of the CIA. Head of the CIA takes Clinton's orders. That report--that CIA report that absolutely destroys George Bush--is a public document; you can access it off my website copvcia.com, and I have these extracts that I sell. It was released to the public on October 8, 1998, one hour after Henry Hyde's committee on the judiciary voted to start the impeachment of Bill Clinton. Bill Clinton picked up the phone and said: "They're gonna impeach me? George Tenet, CIA, release the report that sinks George Bush; we'll see how far they want to go." Click. Maxine Waters stops screaming about CIA and drugs, and she starts supporting Bill Clinton.
Now the interesting thing that my investigations have revealed is that one of the people who helped negotiate the smoking-gun memorandum was a guy on the Attorney-General's staff named Ken Starr. That's the guy who was prosecuting Clinton! Clinton was blackmailing the Republicans. Both sides played the same game, and Clinton basically says: "You wanna take me down? I'll bring the whole government down!"
I had six hits on my website on February 11, 1999, when the Senate was doing the trial of Bill Clinton. They were reading my stories on the impeachment, and that's when the whole story caved in.
What would you say to young people now? Do we have to be guerrillas? Once we get what you're saying, what should we do?
Follow the money. Understand how money works. If you have a sense in some part of your body, some part of your soul, that something's not right, you're probably right. Something isn't right. I grew up in the '50s and '60s and, you know, one of the things was to question authority. Question authority. Do not accept the mind control that's being fed to you; just don't do it!
With Colombia, explain how that war is being constructed and how it is being played out in the press?
Let's work on the structure of the war in Colombia first. I think that's far more important to understand why Colombia is like Vietnam. There are so many similarities between Colombia and Vietnam. First of all, Colombia will be a regional conflict like Vietnam was. The Vietnam War was not just Vietnam; it was North Vietnam, South Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Guam, China, the whole surrounding region. And the Colombian conflict will be Colombia, Venezuela, Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, Panama, maybe even Mexico, Puerto Rico certainly. We've admitted that we are going to stage for invasion or for intervention in Puerto Rico when we go in. Marines are now training and they've been landing on Colombian beaches. You haven't been hearing that.
One of the reasons why Colombia is like Vietnam is because we already have about 300 Special Forces Green Beret advisers on the ground, training Colombian troops, but we have maybe 500 to 1,000 former--and I use that term real loosely--CIA Special Forces personnel who have supposedly retired from the military and are now working for two corporations: Dyncorp and MPRI. And they're in Colombia as "civilian advisers" but they're going out on combat missions. They're flying airplanes, they're shooting, they're being shot. We've had Army personnel shot down already. About a year ago we had an Army plane shot down by a SAM [surface-to-air missile].
We have major investment corporations like Nicholas Brady's Darby Investments. Nicholas Brady was George Bush's Secretary of the Treasury. He has just opened a billion-dollar investment partnership with a group called Corfinsura, based in Medellín, Colombia, to build roads and dams. And it's like what we saw in Vietnam with major companies like Brown & Root going in to build Cam Ranh Bay, making billions of dollars in profit.
So we're going in to suck out. You see, for twenty or thirty years now, the drug money has been building up in Colombia. There's trillions of dollars in equity that's accumulated and it's become a threat to Wall Street's control, so we have to go down and blow the country up to take the money back to make sure it doesn't become powerful. Venezuela is not going along with this, like Cambodia would not go along with the Vietnam War and Laos wouldn't either. President Hugo Chavez is denying overflight to American planes, so we're gonna sabotage the Venezuelan economy! This is going to suck us into a hemispheric conflict just like Vietnam.
This is the difference. With Vietnam, we were told we were going in to fight the evil Communists. Well, we don't have any more Communist bogeymen. I mean, China is there but it's not really a military threat unless you're on the far right and totally needing lithium. But what we see is that we're being told that we're going to fight the evil drug lords. Well, the American Press even now is having trouble selling that to the American people. And even now, in the first or second week in September of 2000, we're starting to have body counts turn up in the news. It's just like Vietnam, but the Press is having a real hard time dealing with it. This is the sign of the end of the road for this system. It's starting to crumble right now.
But they are reporting this like Vietnam. And I will never forget the coverage from Vietnam exactly the way it played out, because these were my high school classmates that were dying. And it's sounding very similar right now.
Last question. What is the power of money? At the end of the day, drugs means money. Talk a bit about that and what it does to policemen, or to law and order?
Well, I think it's the whole system. Most rank-and-file policemen on the street are not what I would call innovative free-thinkers. They aren't the kind of guys who would see an opportunity to go illegal and just kind of do that on their own initiative. They have to see or sense that it's going on in a climate that allows them to get away with it. So we see the corruption working throughout society. When drug money is going directly into Wall Street--well, why not, you know, if you're a cop...
A secret pact between
the Dept. of Justice
and the CIA:
The CIA was released from the requirement to
report suspected drug trafficking by
CIA agents and operatives.
As Michael Levine commented, "..[to] a trained DEA agent this literally means that the CIA had been granted a license to obstruct justice in our so-called war on drugs; a license that lasted, so the CIA claims, from 1982 to 1995."
Firstly, the actual request from Central Intelligence Agency Director William Casey to then-Attorney General William French Smith still isn't in the public domain. But two letters, one from Smith thanking Casey for his request, and a follow-up by Casey, are both available. They were released as part of a internal CIA report that explored allegations of CIA involvement in drug trafficking. In the first document, Smith thanks Casey for his letter (the one that isn't public) and says:
Casey in return thanks the Attorney General for his understanding:"...in view of the fine cooperation the Drug Enforcement Administration has received from CIA, no formal requirement regarding the reporting of narcotics violations has been included in these procedures."--William French Smith, Attorney General.
"I am pleased that these procedures, which I believe strike the proper balance between enforcement of the law and protection of intelligence sources and methods, will now be forwarded to other agencies..." --William J. Casey, Director, Central Intelligence Agency
The two men then codified their agreement in a Memorandum of Understanding. According to the agreement, intelligence agencies would not have to report if any of their agents were involved in drug running. (By agents, the agreement meant CIA sources and informants. Full-time employees still couldn't deal drugs.) That understanding remained in effect until August of 1995, when current Attorney General Janet Reno rescinded the agreement.
It's reasonable that the CIA be allowed to keep its mouth shut if it knows that some of its agents are involved in minor illegal affairs. Presumably some of the value of informants comes from the fact that they keep company with shady characters who engage in unlawful activities.
But why would the CIA ask to be exempt specifically from drug enforcement laws? According to Congresswoman Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), who is calling for full disclosure of the facts, "The CIA knew that the Contras were dealing drugs. They made this deal with the Attorney General to protect themselves from having to report it."
Subj: US: Don't Ask, Don't Tell
Source: In These Times
Contact: itt@inthesetimes.com
Website: http://www.inthesetimes.com/
Pubdate: May 1998
Author: Martha Honey
DON'T ASK, DON'T TELL
In testimony before the House Select Committee on Intelligence on March
16, the Central Intelligence Agency once again suffered a blow to its
reputation. This time the injury was self-inflicted. The CIA's own top
watchdog, Inspector General Frederick P. Hitz, admitted that although
"dozens of individuals and a number of companies" involved in the agency's
covert war against Nicaragua during the '80s were suspected drug
traffickers, the CIA had legal authority to ignore their crimes as long as
they were helping contra rebels fight the left-wing Sandinista government.
Hitz revealed that between 1982 and 1995 the spy agency had an agreement
with the Justice Department, allowing it to ignore drug trafficking by its
"agents, assets and non-staff employees." The directive, known as a
"Memorandum of Understanding" (MOU), did not exempt the agency's full-time,
career employees, who are known as CIA "officials." However, the agency did
not have to tell the Justice Department about the criminal activities of
"agents" or "assets" -- terms used interchangeably to refer to its paid and
unpaid spies. Also exempt were CIA contractors, such as pilots, accountants
and military trainers, who supplied the agency with specific goods and
services rather than intelligence. "There was no official requirement to
report on allegations of drug trafficking with respect to non-employees of
the agency," Hitz told the committee.
Hitz said this agreement, which he termed "a rather odd history," has since
been changed. But it was not until 1995 -- five years after the end of the
war in Nicaragua and three years into Clinton's first term -- that the
agreement was revised to include agents, assets and contractors as
"employees" whose suspected criminal activities, such as drug trafficking,
must be reported to the Justice Department.
Disclosure of this agreement is another black eye for the CIA at a time
when the agency is trying to distance itself from persistent allegations of
drug trafficking, including the provocative August 1996 "Dark Alliance"
series in the San Jose Mercury News. Veteran journalists, investigators,
policy analysts and members of Congress interviewed by In These Times all
say they were unaware of the directive. "This previously unknown agreement
enabled the CIA to keep known drug smugglers out of jail and on the payroll
of the American taxpayer," says Peter Kornbluh, a senior analyst with the
National Security Archive, who has written extensively on the CIA and the
war in Nicaragua. "CIA officials realized collaborating with pro-contra
drug smugglers was important to the goal of overthrowing the Sandinistas
and it sought protection from the Justice Department."
In 1982, when the MOU was implemented, the United States was gearing up for
a covert war in Central America aimed at toppling the Sandinistas. Over the
next eight years, the CIA hired scores of Latin American, Cuban and
American spies, as well as dozens of aviation, fishing and real estate
companies, to support the contras. Simultaneously, cocaine began flooding
into the United States, fueling the crack epidemic that has devastated Los
Angeles, Baltimore and other cities.
David MacMichael, who was a senior CIA officer in the early '80s, says that
while he was not aware of this MOU, he does recall that "in 1981, [CIA
Director William] Casey went to attorney general [William French] Smith
looking for a blanket exemption from prosecution for CIA officers for
crimes committed in the line of duty." Smith demurred, he says.
Since the mid-'80s, a spate of media reports, congressional inquiries, and
court cases in the United States and Central America have linked contra
officials and collaborators with cocaine traffickers, money launderers and
various front companies. Many of those implicated also claimed or were
alleged to be working for the CIA. In 1996, the accusations erupted anew
with the publication of Gary Webb's Mercury News series, which detailed how
a Nicaraguan drug ring used black street gangs to sell crack cocaine in Los
Angeles. Over the years, the CIA has repeatedly denied allegations that it
dealt with drug dealers.
Those denials have been championed by Washington Post reporter Walter
Pincus, a specialist in national security affairs and a leading critic of
the Mercury News series. Pincus, who has yet to report on Hitz's testimony,
says he had not been previously aware the directive. "I am still trying to
get a clarification of it," he says, adding that it may not be very
significant. "All it admits is that what they were doing was legal. On
occasion they were dealing with people who may or may not have been dealing
in drugs."
In December 1985, reporters Robert Parry and Brian Barger wrote the first
story tying the CIA's contra operation to cocaine smuggling. The piece for
The Associated Press angered Reagan administration officials, who tried
unsuccessfully to block its publication. During the contra war, most of the
media either ignored or discredited the drug trafficking reports. Parry
maintains that his pursuit of this story helped cost him jobs at AP and
Newsweek. "Historically we were correct," Parry says. "We pointed to a
serious problem in a timely fashion, and we were all punished and
ridiculed. The reporters who put this story down have gone on to fame and
fortune."
Parry calls Hitz's disclosure "extremely significant." "It amounts to a
blank check for dealing with drug traffickers," he says. "The agency is
admitting that it engaged in covering up drug crimes by the contras and
that this was legal."
Major media also ignored the 1989 findings of Sen. John Kerry's (D-Mass.)
Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics and International Operations. The
Kerry committee's two-year investigation turned up substantial evidence of
cocaine smuggling and money laundering by persons connected to the contras
and the CIA. Among the conclusions of its 1,166-page report:
*"Drug traffickers used the contra war and their ties to the contras as a
cover for their criminal enterprises in Honduras and Costa Rica. Assistance
from the drug lords was crucial to the contras, and the traffickers in turn
promoted and protected their operations by associating with the contra
movement."
*"Drug traffickers provided support to the contras and used the supply
network of the contras. Contras knowingly received both financial and
material assistance from the drug traffickers."
*"Drug traffickers contributed cash, weapons, planes, pilots, air supply
services and other materials to the contras."
*"In each case, one or another U.S. government agency had information
regarding these matters either while they were occurring, or immediately
thereafter."
The report was all but ignored by the three major networks and buried in
the back pages of the major newspapers. Combined, the stories in the
Washington Post, New York Times and Los Angeles Times totalled less than
2,000 words.
At the March congressional hearing, Hitz explained that the MOU between the
agency and the Justice Department was modified slightly in 1986,
prohibiting the CIA from paying those suspected of involvement in drug
trafficking. The CIA, however, could legally continue to use suspected drug
smugglers and not report their activities, as long as they received no
money from the agency.
But for major drug traffickers, being allowed to operate under the CIA's
umbrella was payment enough. The Kerry committee's report, along with most
press accounts of the CIA-cocaine connection, alleges that the contras
accepted money and supplies from drug smugglers and money launderers -- not
the other way around.
John Mattes, a young public defender in Miami in the mid-80s, stumbled upon
the allegations of drug trafficking by Cuban-Americans working with the
contras. Mattes, who represented several cocaine traffickers and
soldiers-of-fortune who testified before the Kerry committee, says
traffickers were seeking protection, not money, from the CIA. "There was a
marriage of convenience between the contras and the coke smugglers," he
says. The smugglers had cash, planes and pilots, while the Contras had
intelligence, airstrips and, most importantly, unimpeded access to the
United States. "And that, to a drug smuggler," he says, "is worth all the
tea in China."
During the '80s, the CIA conducted several internal inquiries and announced
it found no substantial evidence that contra leaders and other persons
working for the CIA had connections to cocaine traffickers. Then, the "Dark
Alliance" series touched off a volatile, nationwide controversy over the
agency's role in introducing crack to Southern California street gangs. To
help quell public and congressional anger, both the CIA and Justice
Department launched separate internal investigations. Both reports were
scheduled to be released last December, but were withheld at the last
minute without explanation.
Attorney General Janet Reno subsequently announced that she had blocked the
release of the Justice Department report (rumored to be the more
substantial and significant of the two) for unspecified "law enforcement
reasons." Justice Department sources told in These Times that one of the
people named in the report is a government witness in an ongoing criminal
case, whose identity must be protected. However, Jack Blum, a Washington
attorney and investigator for the Kerry committee, doubts that the Justice
Department will ever release its report. Blum says law enforcement
officials often claim disclosures will jeopardize ongoing cases, and he
wonders why the report was not simply edited to protect the informant's
identity.
In late January, the CIA released a declassified version of volume one of
its two-part report. Entitled "The California Story," this 149-page report
focuses on the cocaine network described in the "Dark Alliance" series,
which detailed the activities of two Nicaraguan drug smugglers, Danilo
Blandon and Juan Norwin Meneses. In the early '80s, Meneses and Blandon
supplied large quantities of powder cocaine to Ricky Ross, an
African-American drug dealer, who then turned it into crack for sale to two
Los Angeles gangs. Webb alleges that the Nicaraguans gave some of their
drug profits to top contra officials who were working with the CIA.
Hitz called the CIA's 18-month investigation "the most comprehensive and
exhaustive ever conducted" by the agency. He told the congressional
committee: "We found absolutely no evidence to indicate that the CIA as an
organization or its employees were involved in any conspiracy to bring
drugs into the United States," But, taken in conjunction with what Hitz
said about the MOU, "employees" here may pertain only to CIA career
officials -- not agents, assets or contractors.
Webb, whose reporting touched off the controversy, describes the report as
"schizophrenic." "The Executive Summary says there's no CIA involvement,"
says Webb. "The actual report shows there are CIA fingerprints all over
this drug operation."
For example, upon the release of volume one, CIA Director George Tenet
proclaimed that the Agency "left no stone unturned" in reaching its
conclusion that the CIA had "no direct or indirect" ties to Blandon and
Meneses. Yet, the report contains a compendium of indirect links between
the CIA's contra army and drug traffickers. The most obvious admissions
contained in the report include:
- --An October 22, 1982, cable from the CIA's Directorate of Operations that
reports, "There are indications of links between (a U.S. religious
organization) and two Nicaraguan counter-revolutionary groups...These links
involve an exchange in (the United States) of narcotics for arms." The
report goes on to say that there was to be a meeting in Costa Rica of
contras, several U.S. citizens and Renato Pena, a convicted drug dealer who
was part of Meneses' operation. Astonishingly, a November 3, 1982, cable
from CIA headquarters says that the agency decided "not to pursue the
matter further" because of "the apparent participation of U.S. persons
throughout."
- --The CIA directly intervened in the 1983 "Frogman Case," in which San
Francisco police seized 430 pounds of cocaine and arrested 50 individuals,
including a number of Nicaraguans. Because the CIA feared the agency's
connections to some of the contras involved had "potential for disaster,"
an unidentified CIA lawyer convinced the U.S. Attorney in San Francisco and
Justice Department officials to cancel plans to take depositions from
contra leaders in Costa Rica and to return $36,800 seized in the drug raid
to one of the contra factions. "There are sufficient factual details which
would cause certain damage to our image and program in Central America,"
CIA assistant general counsel Lee Strickland wrote in a August 22, 1984,
memo quoted in the report.
- --Blandon and Meneses met on various occasions with the contras' military
commander, Enrique Bermudez, who worked for the CIA. At one meeting in
Honduras in 1982, Bermudez, arguing that "the ends justify the means,"
asked the pair for help "in raising funds and obtaining equipment" and arms
for the contras. After the meeting, a group of contras escorted Blandon and
Meneses to the Tegucigalpa airport, where the pair was arrested by Honduran
authorities because they were carrying $100,000 in cash, profits from a
Bolivian drug deal. The contras intervened and the money was returned to
Blandon and Meneses. The report inexplicably concludes that there is no
evidence that Bermudez knew the duo were drug traffickers, even though CIA
cables show the agency was aware that Meneses had been a "drug king-pin"
since the '70s.
At the congressional hearings, lawmakers cited these and other portions of
the report, questioning the agency's capacity to investigate itself. Among
the most vocal critics were Los Angeles Democratic Reps. Maxine Waters and
Juanita Millender-McDonald, whose districts have been the epicenter of the
crack epidemic. Waters charged that the report was "fraught with
contradictions and illogical conclusions," saying that the CIA's cleverly
worded denials of links to drug traffickers in Southern California "defies
the evidence."
Volume two of the report, which covers the entire Nicaraguan war, was
scheduled to be turned over to the House and Senate intelligence committees
in late March. But, as of mid-April, CIA officials told In These Times, the
report had not been released to Congress. In his congressional testimony,
Hitz said that volume two will contain "a detailed treatment of what was
known to CIA regarding dozens of people and a number of companies connected
in some fashion to the contra program or the contra movement, that were the
subject of any sort of drug trafficking allegations."
Previewing the report, Hitz admitted: "There are instances where the CIA
did not, in an expeditious or consistent fashion, cut off relationships
with individuals supporting the contra program, who are alleged to have
engaged in drug trafficking activity or take action to resolve the
allegation." Several congressional sources say that they suspect the report
will never be released.While the precise wording of the MOU has not been
made public, some say the directive may be considerably broader than
implied at the hearing. At one point in his testimony, Hitz said the MOU
applied to "intelligence agencies," indicating that it also may include the
dozen or so U.S. agencies involved in intelligence work, not just the CIA.
Hitz declined requests for an interview.
But the CIA may not be able to get away without further disclosures. The
National Security Archive and other public interest groups, as well as
Reps. John Conyers (D-Mich.) and Waters, are mounting a campaign for the
declassification and release of the text of the MOU, the Justice Department
report, volume two of the CIA report, tens of thousands of pages of
documents and hundreds of interviews compiled by the two agencies in the
course of their internal investigations. Attorney Blum warns that CIA
officials who testified before the Kerry committee may have perjured
themselves in denying they knew of any links between the CIA, the contras
and cocaine traffickers. And investigative journalists Parry and Webb,
among others, say Hitz's admission may be the smoking gun that conclusively
proves that the CIA colluded with and then concealed its involvement with
cocaine traffickers.
Martha Honey is director of the Peace and Security program at the Institute
for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C. During the '80s, she covered the war
in Nicaragua as a journalist in Costa Rica
for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C. During the '80s, she covered the war
in Nicaragua as a journalist in Costa Rica
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