Monday 25 October 2004

Derided by the mainstream press and taking on Reagan at the height of his popularity, the freshman senator battled to reveal one of America's ugliest foreign policy secrets.

    In December 1985, when Brian Barger and I wrote a groundbreaking story for the Associated Press about Nicaraguan Contra rebels smuggling cocaine into the United States, one U.S. senator put his political career on the line to follow up on our disturbing findings. His name was John Kerry.

    Yet, over the past year, even as Kerry's heroism as a young Navy officer in Vietnam has become a point of controversy, this act of political courage by a freshman senator has gone virtually unmentioned, even though - or perhaps because - it marked Kerry's first challenge to the Bush family.

    In early 1986, the 42-year-old Massachusetts Democrat stood almost alone in the U.S. Senate demanding answers about the emerging evidence that CIA-backed Contras were filling their coffers by collaborating with drug traffickers then flooding U.S. borders with cocaine from South America.

    Kerry assigned members of his personal Senate staff to pursue the allegations. He also persuaded the Republican majority on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to request information from the Reagan-Bush administration about the alleged Contra drug traffickers.

    In taking on the inquiry, Kerry challenged President Ronald Reagan at the height of his power, at a time he was calling the Contras the "moral equals of the Founding Fathers." Kerry's questions represented a particular embarrassment to Vice President George H.W. Bush, whose responsibilities included overseeing U.S. drug-interdiction policies.

    Kerry took on the investigation though he didn't have much support within his own party. By 1986, congressional Democrats had little stomach left for challenging the Reagan-Bush Contra war. Not only had Reagan won a historic landslide in 1984, amassing a record 54 million votes, but his conservative allies were targeting individual Democrats viewed as critical of the Contras fighting to oust Nicaragua's leftist Sandinista government. Most Washington journalists were backing off, too, for fear of getting labeled "Sandinista apologists" or worse.

    Kerry's probe infuriated Reagan's White House, which was pushing Congress to restore military funding for the Contras. Some in the administration also saw Kerry's investigation as a threat to the secrecy surrounding the Contra supply operation, which was being run illegally by White House aide Oliver North and members of Bush's vice presidential staff.

    Through most of 1986, Kerry's staff inquiry advanced against withering political fire. His investigators interviewed witnesses in Washington, contacted Contra sources in Miami and Costa Rica, and tried to make sense of sometimes convoluted stories of intrigue from the shadowy worlds of covert warfare and the drug trade.

    Kerry's chief Senate staff investigators were Ron Rosenblith, Jonathan Winer and Dick McCall. Rosenblith, a Massachusetts political strategist from Kerry's victorious 1984 campaign, braved both political and personal risks as he traveled to Central America for face-to-face meetings with witnesses. Winer, a lawyer also from Massachusetts, charted the inquiry's legal framework and mastered its complex details. McCall, an experienced congressional staffer, brought Capitol Hill savvy to the investigation.

    Behind it all was Kerry, who combined a prosecutor's sense for sniffing out criminality and a politician's instinct for pushing the limits. The Kerry whom I met during this period was a complex man who balanced a rebellious idealism with a determination not to burn his bridges to the political establishment.

    The Reagan administration did everything it could to thwart Kerry's investigation, including attempting to discredit witnesses, stonewalling the Senate when it requested evidence and assigning the CIA to monitor Kerry's probe. But it couldn't stop Kerry and his investigators from discovering the explosive truth: that the Contra war was permeated with drug traffickers who gave the Contras money, weapons and equipment in exchange for help in smuggling cocaine into the United States. Even more damningly, Kerry found that U.S. government agencies knew about the Contra-drug connection, but turned a blind eye to the evidence in order to avoid undermining a top Reagan-Bush foreign policy initiative.

    The Reagan administration's tolerance and protection of this dark underbelly of the Contra war represented one of the most sordid scandals in the history of U.S. foreign policy. Yet when Kerry's bombshell findings were released in 1989, they were greeted by the mainstream press with disdain and disinterest. The New York Times, which had long denigrated the Contra-drug allegations, buried the story of Kerry's report on its inside pages, as did the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times. For his tireless efforts, Kerry earned a reputation as a reckless investigator. Newsweek's Conventional Wisdom Watch dubbed Kerry a "randy conspiracy buff."

    But almost a decade later, in 1998, Kerry's trailblazing investigation was vindicated by the CIA's own inspector general, who found that scores of Contra operatives were implicated in the cocaine trade and that U.S. agencies had looked the other way rather than reveal information that could have embarrassed the Reagan-Bush administration.

    Even after the CIA's admissions, the national press corps never fully corrected its earlier dismissive treatment. That would have meant the New York Times and other leading publications admitting they had bungled their coverage of one of the worst scandals of the Reagan-Bush era.

    The warm and fuzzy glow that surrounded Ronald Reagan after he left office also discouraged clarification of the historical record. Taking a clear-eyed look at crimes inside Reagan's Central American policies would have required a tough reassessment of the 40th president, which to this day the media has been unwilling to do. So this formative period of Kerry's political evolution has remained nearly unknown to the American electorate.

    Two decades later, it's hard to recall the intensity of the administration's support for the Contras. They were hailed as courageous front-line fighters, like the Mujahedin in Afghanistan, defending the free world from the Soviet empire. Reagan famously warned that Nicaragua was only "two days' driving time from Harlingen, Texas."

    Yet, for years, Contra units had gone on bloody rampages through Nicaraguan border towns, raping women, torturing captives and executing civilian officials of the Sandinista government. In private, Reagan referred to the Contras as "vandals," according to Duane Clarridge, the CIA officer in charge of the operation, in his memoir, "A Spy for All Seasons." But in public, the Reagan administration attacked anyone who pointed out the Contras' corruption and brutality.

    The Contras also proved militarily inept, causing the CIA to intervene directly and engage in warlike acts, such as mining Nicaragua's harbors. In 1984, these controversies caused the Congress to forbid U.S. military assistance to the Contras - the Boland Amendment - forcing the rebels to search for new funding sources.

    Drug money became the easiest way to fill the depleted Contra coffers. The documentary evidence is now irrefutable that a number of Contra units both in Costa Rica and Honduras opened or deepened ties to Colombian cartels and other regional drug traffickers. The White House also scrambled to find other ways to keep the Contras afloat, turning to third countries, such as Saudi Arabia, and eventually to profits from clandestine arms sales to Iran.

    The secrets began to seep out in the mid-1980s. In June 1985, as a reporter for the Associated Press, I wrote the first story mentioning Oliver North's secret Contra supply operation. By that fall, my AP colleague Brian Barger and I stumbled onto evidence that some of the Contras were supplementing their income by helping traffickers transship cocaine through Central America. As we dug deeper, it became clear that the drug connection implicated nearly all the major Contra organizations.

    The AP published our story about the Contra-cocaine evidence on Dec. 20, 1985, describing Contra units "engaged in cocaine smuggling, using some of the profits to finance their war against Nicaragua's leftist government." The story provoked little coverage elsewhere in the U.S. national press corps. But it pricked the interest of a newly elected U.S. senator, John Kerry. A former prosecutor, Kerry also heard about Contra law violations from a Miami-based federal public defender named John Mattes, who had been assigned a case that touched on Contra gunrunning. Mattes' sister had worked for Kerry in Massachusetts.

    By spring 1986, Kerry had begun a limited investigation deploying some of his personal staff in Washington. As a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Kerry managed to gain some cooperation from the panel's Republican leadership, partly because the "war on drugs" was then a major political issue. Besides looking into Contra drug trafficking, Kerry launched the first investigation into the allegations of weapons smuggling and misappropriation of U.S. government funds that were later exposed as part of North's illegal operation to supply the Contras.

    Kerry's staff soon took an interest in a federal probe in Miami headed by assistant U.S. Attorney Jeffrey Feldman. Talking to some of the same Contra supporters whom we had interviewed for the AP's Contra-cocaine story, Feldman had pieced together the outlines of North's secret network.

    In a panicked memo dated April 7, 1986, one of North's Costa Rican-based private operatives, Robert Owen, warned North that prosecutor Feldman had shown Ambassador Lewis Tambs "a diagram with your name underneath and John [Hull]'s underneath mine, then a line connecting the various resistance groups in C.R. [Costa Rica]. Feldman stated they were looking at the 'big picture' and not only looking at possible violations of the Neutrality Act, but a possible unauthorized use of government funds." (For details, see my "Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press and 'Project Truth.'")

    John Hull was an American farmer with a ranch in Costa Rica near the Nicaraguan border. According to witnesses, Contras had used Hull's property for cocaine transshipments. (Hull was later accused of drug trafficking by Costa Rican authorities, but fled the country before facing trial. He returned to the United States.)

    On April 10, 1986, Barger and I reported on the AP wire that the U.S. Attorney's office in Miami was examining allegations of Contra gunrunning and drug trafficking. The AP story rattled nerves inside the Reagan administration. On an unrelated trip to Miami, Attorney General Edwin Meese pulled U.S. Attorney Leon Kellner aside and asked about the existence of this Contra probe.

    Back in Washington, other major news organizations began to sniff around the Contra-cocaine story but mostly went off in wrong directions. On May 6, 1986, the New York Times relied for a story on information from Meese's spokesman Patrick Korten, who claimed "various bits of information got referred to us. We ran them all down and didn't find anything. It comes to nothing."

    But that wasn't the truth. In Miami, Feldman and FBI agents were corroborating many of the allegations. On May 14, 1986, Feldman recommended to his superiors that the evidence of Contra crimes was strong enough to justify taking the case to a grand jury. U.S. Attorney Kellner agreed, scribbling on Feldman's memo, "I concur that we have sufficient evidence to ask for a grand jury investigation."

    But on May 20, less than a week later, Kellner reversed that recommendation. Without telling Feldman, Kellner rewrote the memo to state that "a grand jury investigation at this point would represent a fishing expedition with little prospect that it would bear fruit." Kellner signed Feldman's name to the mixed-metaphor memo and sent it to Washington on June 3.

    The revised "Feldman" memo was then circulated to congressional Republicans and leaked to conservative media, which used it to discredit Kerry's investigation. The right-wing Washington Times denounced the probe as a wasteful political "witch hunt" in a June 12, 1986, article. "Kerry's anti-Contra efforts extensive, expensive, in vain," screamed the headline of a Washington Times article on Aug. 13, 1986.

    Back in Miami, Kellner reassigned Feldman to unrelated far-flung investigations, including one to Thailand.

    The altered memo was instrumental in steering Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Richard Lugar, R-Ind., away from holding hearings, Kerry's later Contra-drug report, "Law Enforcement and Foreign Policy," stated. "Material provided to the Committee by the Justice Department and distributed to members following an Executive Session June 26, 1986, wrongly suggested that the allegations that had been made were false," the Kerry report said.

    Feldman later testified to the Senate that he was told in 1986 that representatives of the Justice Department, the Drug Enforcement Administration and the FBI had met "to discuss how Senator Kerry's efforts to get Lugar to hold hearings on the case could be undermined."

    Mattes, the federal public defender in Miami, watched as the administration ratcheted up pressure on Kerry's investigation. "From a political point of view in May of '86, Kerry had every reason to shut down his staff investigation," Mattes said. "There was no upside for him doing it. We all felt under the gun to back off."

    The Kerry that Mattes witnessed at the time was the ex-prosecutor determined to get to the bottom of serious criminal allegations even if they implicated senior government officials. "As an investigator, he had a sense it was there," said Mattes, who is now an investigative reporter for Fox News in San Diego. "Kerry was a crusader. He was the consummate outsider, doing what you expect people to do. ... At no point did he flinch."

    Years later, in the National Archives, I discovered a document showing that the Central Intelligence Agency also was keeping tabs on Kerry's investigation. Alan Fiers Jr., who served as the CIA's Central American Task Force chief, told independent counsel Lawrence Walsh's Iran-Contra investigators that the AP and Feldman's investigations had attracted the hostility of the Reagan-Bush administration. Fiers said he "was also getting a dump on the Senator Kerry investigation about mercenary activity in Central America from the CIA's legislative affairs people who were monitoring it."

    Negative publicity about the Contras was particularly unwelcome to the Reagan-Bush administration throughout the spring and summer 1986 as the White House battled to restore U.S. government funding to the Contras. In the politically heated atmosphere, the administration sought to smear anti-Contra witnesses cooperating with Kerry's investigation.

    In a July 28 memo, initialed as read by President Reagan, North labeled onetime Contra mercenary Jack Terrell as a "terrorist threat" because of his "anti-Contra and anti-U.S. activities." North said Terrell had been cooperating "with various congressional staffs in preparing for hearings and inquiries regarding the role of U.S. government officials in illegally supporting the Nicaraguan resistance."

    In August 1986, FBI and Secret Service agents hauled Terrell in for two days of polygraph examinations on suspicion that Terrell intended to assassinate President Reagan, an allegation that proved baseless. But Terrell told me later that the investigation had chilled his readiness to testify about the Contras. "It burned me up," he said. "The pressure was always there."

    Beyond intimidating some witnesses, the Reagan administration systematically worked to frustrate Kerry's investigation. Years later, one of Kerry's investigators, Jack Blum, complained publicly that the Justice Department had actively obstructed the congressional probe. Blum said William Weld, who took over as assistant attorney general in charge of the criminal division in September 1986, was an "absolute stonewall" blocking the Senate's access to evidence on Contra-cocaine smuggling. "Weld put a very serious block on any effort we made to get information," Blum told the Senate Intelligence Committee a decade after the events. "There were stalls. There were refusals to talk to us, refusals to turn over data."

    Weld, who later became Massachusetts governor and lost to Kerry in the 1996 Senate race, denied that he had obstructed Kerry's Contra probe. But it was clear that the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was encountering delays in getting information that had been requested by Chairman Lugar, a Republican, and Rhode Island Sen. Claiborne Pell, the ranking Democrat. At Kerry's suggestion, they had sought files on more than two dozen people linked to the Contra operations and suspected of drug trafficking.

    Inside the Justice Department, senior career investigators grew concerned about the administration's failure to turn over the requested information. "I was concerned that we were not responding to what was obviously a legitimate congressional request," Mark Richard, one of Weld's top deputies, testified in a deposition. "We were not refusing to respond in giving explanations or justifications for it. We were seemingly just stonewalling what was a continuing barrage of requests for information. That concerned me no end."

    On Sept. 26, 1986, Kerry tried to spur action by presenting Weld with an 11-page "proffer" statement from a 31-year-old FBI informant who had worked with the Medellin cartel and had become a witness on cartel activities. The woman, Wanda Palacio, had approached Kerry with an account about Colombian cocaine kingpin Jorge Ochoa bragging about payments he had made to the Nicaraguan Contras.

    As part of this Contra connection, Palacio said pilots for a CIA-connected airline, Southern Air Transport, were flying cocaine out of Barranquilla, Colombia. She said she had witnessed two such flights, one in 1983 and the other in October 1985, and quoted Ochoa saying the flights were part of an arrangement to exchange "drugs for guns."

    According to contemporaneous notes of this "proffer" meeting between Weld and Kerry, Weld chuckled that he was not surprised at allegations about corrupt dealings by "bum agents, former and current CIA agents." He promised to give serious consideration to Palacio's allegations.

    After Kerry left Weld's office, however, the Justice Department seemed to concentrate on poking holes in Palacio's account, not trying to corroborate it. Though Palacio had been considered credible in her earlier testimony to the FBI, she was judged to lack credibility when she made accusations about the Contras and the CIA.

    On Oct. 3, 1986, Weld's office told Kerry that it was rejecting Palacio as a witness on the grounds that there were some contradictions in her testimony. The discrepancies apparently related to such minor points as which month she had first talked with the FBI.

    Two days after Weld rejected Palacio's Contra-cocaine testimony, other secrets about the White House's covert Contra support operations suddenly crashed -literally - into view.

    On Oct. 5, a quiet Sunday morning, an aging C-123 cargo plane rumbled over the skies of Nicaragua preparing to drop AK-47 rifles and other equipment to Contra units in the jungle below. Since the Reagan administration had recently won congressional approval for renewed CIA military aid to the Contras, the flight was to be one of the last by Oliver North's ragtag air force.

    The plane, however, attracted the attention of a teenage Sandinista soldier armed with a shoulder-fired surface-to-air missile. He aimed, pulled the trigger and watched as the Soviet-made missile made a direct hit on the aircraft. Inside, cargo handler Eugene Hasenfus, an American mercenary working with the Contras, was knocked to the floor, but managed to crawl to an open door, push himself through, and parachute to the ground, where he was captured by Sandinista forces. The pilot and other crew members died in the crash.

    As word spread about the plane crash, Barger - who had left the AP and was working for a CBS News show - persuaded me to join him on a trip to Nicaragua with the goal of getting an interview with Hasenfus, who turned out to be an unemployed Wisconsin construction worker and onetime CIA cargo handler. Hasenfus told a press conference in Managua that the Contra supply operation was run by CIA officers working with the office of Vice President George Bush. Administration officials, including Bush, denied any involvement with the downed plane.

    Our hopes for an interview with Hasenfus didn't work out, but Sandinista officials did let us examine the flight records and other documents they had recovered from the plane. As Barger talked with a senior Nicaraguan officer, I hastily copied down the entries from copilot Wallace "Buzz" Sawyer's flight logs. The logs listed hundreds of flights with the airports identified only by their four-letter international codes and the planes designated by tail numbers.

    Upon returning to Washington, I began deciphering Wallace's travels and matching the tail numbers with their registered owners. Though Wallace's flights included trips to Africa and landings at U.S. military bases in the West, most of his entries were for flights in Central and South America.

    Meanwhile, in Kerry's Senate office, witness Wanda Palacio was waiting for a meeting when she noticed Sawyer's photo flashing on a TV screen. Palacio began insisting that Sawyer was one of the pilots whom she had witnessed loading cocaine onto a Southern Air Transport plane in Barranquilla, Colombia, in early October 1985. Her identification of Sawyer struck some of Kerry's aides as a bit too convenient, causing them to have their own doubts about her credibility.

    Though I was unaware of Palacio's claims at the time, I pressed ahead with the AP story on Sawyer's travels. In the last paragraph of the article, I noted that Sawyer's logs revealed that he had piloted a Southern Air Transport plane on three flights to Barranquilla on Oct. 2, 4, and 6, 1985. The story ran on Oct. 17, 1986.

    Shortly after the article moved on the AP wires, I received a phone call from Rosenblith at Kerry's office. Sounding shocked, the Kerry investigator asked for more details about the last paragraph of the story, but he wouldn't say why he wanted to know. Only months later did I discover that the AP story on Sawyer's logs had provided unintentional corroboration for Palacio's Contra-drug allegations.

    Palacio also passed a polygraph exam on her statements. But Weld and the Justice Department still refused to accept her testimony as credible. (Even a decade later, when I asked the then-Massachusetts governor about Palacio, Weld likened her credibility to "a wagon load of diseased blankets.")

    In fall 1986, Weld's criminal division continued to withhold Contra-drug information requested by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. According to Justice Department records, Lugar and Pell - two of the Senate's most gentlemanly members - wrote on Oct. 14 that they had been waiting more than two months for information that the Justice Department had promised "in an expeditious manner."

    "To date, no information has been received and the investigation of allegations by the committee, therefore, has not moved very far," Lugar and Pell wrote in a joint letter. "We're disappointed that the Department has not responded in a timely fashion and indeed has not provided any materials."

    On Nov. 25, 1986, the Iran-Contra scandal was officially born when Attorney General Edwin Meese announced that profits from secret U.S. arms sales to Iran had been diverted to help fund the Nicaraguan Contras.

    The Washington press corps scrambled to get a handle on the dramatic story of clandestine operations, but still resisted the allegations that the administration's zeal had spilled over into sanctioning or tolerating Contra-connected drug trafficking.

    Though John Kerry's early warnings about White House-aided Contra gunrunning had proved out, his accusations about Contra drug smuggling would continue to be rejected by much of the press corps as going too far.

    On Jan. 21, 1987, the conservative Washington Times attacked Kerry's Contra-drug investigation again; his alleged offense this time was obstructing justice because his probe was supposedly interfering with the Reagan administration's determination to get at the truth. "Kerry's staffers damaged FBI probe," the Times headline read.

    "Congressional investigators for Sen. John Kerry severely damaged a federal drug investigation last summer by interfering with a witness while pursuing allegations of drug smuggling by the Nicaraguan resistance, federal law enforcement officials said," according to the Times article.

    The mainstream press continued to publish stories that denigrated Kerry's investigation. On Feb. 24, 1987, a New York Times article by reporter Keith Schneider quoted "law enforcement officials" saying that the Contra allegations "have come from a small group of convicted drug traffickers in South Florida who never mentioned Contras or the White House until the Iran-Contra affair broke in November."

    The drift of the article made Kerry out to be something of a dupe. His Contra-cocaine witnesses were depicted as simply convicts trying to get lighter prison sentences by embroidering false allegations onto the Iran-Contra scandal. But the information in the Times story was patently untrue. The AP Contra-cocaine story had run in December 1985, almost a year before the Iran-Contra story broke.

    When New York Times reporters conducted their own interview with Palacio, she immediately sensed their hostility. In her Senate deposition, Palacio described her experience at the Times office in Miami. She said Schneider and a "Cuban man" rudely questioned her story and bullied her about specific evidence for each of her statements. The Cuban man "was talking to me kind of nasty," Palacio recalled. "I got up and left, and this man got all pissed off, Keith Schneider."

    The parameters for a "responsible" Iran-Contra investigation were being set. On July 16, 1987, the New York Times published another story that seemed to discredit the Contra-drug charges. It reported that except for a few convicted drug smugglers from Miami, the Contra-cocaine "charges have not been verified by any other people and have been vigorously denied by several government agencies."

    Four days later, the Times added that "investigators, including reporters from major news outlets, have tried without success to find proof of ... allegations that military supplies may have been paid for with profits from drug smuggling." (The Times was inaccurate again. The original AP story had cited a CIA report describing the Contras buying a helicopter with drug money.)

    The joint Senate-House Iran-Contra committee averted its eyes from the Contra-cocaine allegations. The only time the issue was raised publicly was when a demonstrator interrupted one hearing by shouting, "Ask about the cocaine." Kerry was excluded from the investigation.

    On July 27, 1987, behind the scenes, committee staff investigator Robert A. Bermingham echoed the New York Times. "Hundreds of persons" had been questioned, he said, and vast numbers of government files reviewed, but no "corroboration of media-exploited allegations of U.S. government-condoned drug trafficking by Contra leaders or Contra organizations" was found. The report, however, listed no names of any interview subjects nor any details about the files examined.

    Bermingham's conclusions conflicted with closed-door Iran-Contra testimony from administration insiders. In a classified deposition to the congressional Iran-Contra committees, senior CIA officer Alan Fiers said, "with respect to [drug trafficking by] the Resistance Forces [the Contras] it is not a couple of people. It is a lot of people."

    Despite official denials and press hostility, Kerry and his investigators pressed ahead. In 1987, with the arrival of a Democratic majority in the Senate, Kerry also became chairman of the Senate subcommittee on terrorism, narcotics and international operations. He used that position to pry loose the facts proving that the official denials were wrong and that Contra units were involved in the drug trade.

    Kerry's report was issued two years later, on April 13, 1989. Its stunning conclusion: "On the basis of the evidence, it is clear that individuals who provided support for the Contras were involved in drug trafficking, the supply network of the Contras was used by drug trafficking organizations, and elements of the Contras themselves knowingly received financial and material assistance from drug traffickers. In each case, one or another agency of the U.S. government had information regarding the involvement either while it was occurring, or immediately thereafter."

    The report discovered that drug traffickers gave the Contras "cash, weapons, planes, pilots, air supply services and other materials." Moreover, the U.S. State Department had paid some drug traffickers as part of a program to fly non-lethal assistance to the Contras. Some payments occurred "after the traffickers had been indicted by federal law enforcement agencies on drug charges, in others while traffickers were under active investigation by these same agencies."

    Although Kerry's findings represented the first time a congressional report explicitly accused federal agencies of willful collaboration with drug traffickers, the major news organizations chose to bury the startling findings. Instead of front-page treatment, the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times all wrote brief accounts and stuck them deep inside their papers. The New York Times article, only 850 words long, landed on Page 8. The Post placed its story on A20. The Los Angeles Times found space on Page 11.

    One of the best-read political reference books, the Almanac of American Politics, gave this account of Kerry's investigation in its 1992 edition: "In search of right-wing villains and complicit Americans, [Kerry] tried to link Nicaraguan Contras to the drug trade, without turning up much credible evidence."

    Thus, Kerry's reward for his strenuous and successful efforts to get to the bottom of a difficult case of high-level government corruption was to be largely ignored by the mainstream press and even have his reputation besmirched.

    But the Contra-cocaine story didn't entirely go away. In 1991, in the trial of former Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega for drug trafficking, federal prosecutors called as a witness Medellin cartel kingpin Carlos Lehder, who testified that the Medellin cartel had given $10 million to the Contras, a claim that one of Kerry's witnesses had made years earlier. "The Kerry hearings didn't get the attention they deserved at the time," a Washington Post editorial on Nov. 27, 1991 acknowledged. "The Noriega trial brings this sordid aspect of the Nicaraguan engagement to fresh public attention."

    Kerry's vindication in the Contra drug case did not come until 1998, when inspectors general at the CIA and Justice Department reviewed their files in connection with allegations published by the San Jose Mercury News that the Contra-cocaine pipeline had contributed to the crack epidemic that ravaged inner-city neighborhoods in the 1980s. (Ironically, the major national newspapers only saw fit to put the Contra-cocaine story on their front pages in criticizing the Mercury News and its reporter Gary Webb for taking the allegations too far.)

    On Oct. 4, 1996, the Washington Post published a front-page story, with two more pages inside, that was critical of the Mercury News. But while accusing the Mercury News of exaggerating, the Post noted that Contra-connected drug smugglers had brought tons of cocaine into the United States. "Even CIA personnel testified to Congress they knew that those covert operations involved drug traffickers," the Post reported.

    A Post editorial on Oct. 9, 1996, reprised the newspaper's assessment that the Mercury News had overreached, but added that for "CIA-connected characters to have played even a trivial role in introducing Americans to crack would indicate an unconscionable breach by the CIA."

    In the months that followed, the major newspapers - including the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times - joined the Post in criticizing the Mercury News while downplaying their own inattention to the crimes that Kerry had illuminated a decade earlier. The Los Angeles Times actually used Kerry's report to dismiss the Mercury News series as old news because the Contra cocaine trafficking "has been well documented for years."

    While the major newspapers gloated when reporter Gary Webb was forced to resign from the Mercury News, the internal government investigations, which Webb's series had sparked, moved forward. The government's decade-long Contra cocaine cover-up began to crumble when CIA inspector general Frederick Hitz published the first of two volumes of his Contra cocaine investigation on Jan. 29, 1998, followed by a Justice Department report and Hitz's second volume in October 1998.

    The CIA inspector general and Justice Department reports confirmed that the Reagan administration knew from almost the outset of the Contra war that cocaine traffickers permeated the CIA-backed army but the administration did next to nothing to expose or stop these criminals. The reports revealed example after example of leads not followed, witnesses disparaged and official law-enforcement investigations sabotaged. The evidence indicated that Contra-connected smugglers included the Medellin cartel, the Panamanian government of Manuel Noriega, the Honduran military, the Honduran-Mexican smuggling ring of Ramon Matta Ballesteros, and Miami-based anti-Castro Cubans.

    Reviewing evidence that existed in the 1980s, CIA inspector general Hitz found that some Contra-connected drug traffickers worked directly for Reagan's National Security Council staff and the CIA. In 1987, Cuban-American Bay of Pigs veteran Moises Nunez told CIA investigators that "it was difficult to answer questions relating to his involvement in narcotics trafficking because of the specific tasks he had performed at the direction of the NSC."

    CIA task force chief Fiers said the Nunez-NSC drug lead was not pursued then "because of the NSC connection and the possibility that this could be somehow connected to the Private Benefactor program [Oliver North's fundraising]. A decision was made not to pursue this matter."

    Another Cuban-American who had attracted Kerry's interest was Felipe Vidal, who had a criminal record as a narcotics trafficker in the 1970s. But the CIA still hired him to serve as a logistics officer for the Contras and covered up for him when the agency learned that he was collaborating with known traffickers to raise money for the Contras, the Hitz report showed. Fiers had briefed Kerry about Vidal on Oct. 15, 1986, without mentioning Vidal's drug arrests and conviction in the 1970s.

    Hitz found that a chief reason for the CIA's protective handling of Contra-drug evidence was Langley's "one overriding priority: to oust the Sandinista government ... [CIA officers] were determined that the various difficulties they encountered not be allowed to prevent effective implementation of the Contra program."

    According to Hitz's report, one CIA field officer explained, "The focus was to get the job done, get the support and win the war."

    This pattern of obstruction occurred while Vice President Bush was in charge of stanching the flow of drugs to the United States. Kerry made himself a pest by demanding answers to troubling questions.

    "He wanted to get to the bottom of something so dark," former public defender Mattes told me. "Nobody could imagine it was so dark."

    In the end, investigations by government inspectors general corroborated Kerry's 1989 findings and vindicated his effort. But the muted conclusion of the Contra-cocaine controversy 12 years after Kerry began his investigation explains why this chapter is an overlooked - though important - episode in Kerry's Senate career. It's a classic case of why, in Washington, there's little honor in being right too soon. Yet it's also a story about a senator who had the personal honor to do the right thing.

  -------

Date: Mon, 13 Dec 2004 09:53:50 -0800 (PST)
From: judson witham
Subject: Fwd: Gary Webb, Dead at 49 - Linked CIA to Drug Sales
To: martindom@yahoo.com
CC: APFN@apfn.org, jeffandmary@ozarkopathy.org,
PeopleBeforeLawyers@yahoogroups.com, slmays007@aol.com

New evidence links George Bush to Los Angeles drug operation

by Edward Spannaus © Executive Intelligence Review (LaRouche)

On Oct. 27, 1986, federal and local law enforcement officials executed search warrants on more than a dozen locations connected to a major cocaine-trafficking ring in southern California centered around Danilo Blandon.. One of the locations raided was the home of a former Laguna Beach police officer by the name of Ronald Lister.

Los Angeles Sheriff's Department detectives reported that when they raided Lister's house, they found ``films of military operations in Central America, technical manuals, information on assorted military hardware and communications, and numerous documents indicating that drug money was being used to purchase military equipment for Central America.'' Documents were also found which diagrammed ``the route of drug money out of the United States, back into the United States purchasing weaponry for the Contras.''

An official report by one of the detectives from the 1986 raid stated: ``Mr. Lister ... told me he had dealings in South America and worked with the CIA and added that his friends in Washington weren't going to like what was going on. I told Mr. Lister that we were not interested in his business in South America. Mr. Lister replied that he would call Mr. Weekly of the CIA and report me.''

New evidence has now surfaced showing who some of Lister's ``friends in Washington'' were, and we shall see that these ``friends'' ran all the way up to the Office of the Vice President, at that time George Bush.

Mark Richard's tell-tale notes

Around the same time as the October 1986 drug raid, ``Mr. Weekly,'' whose full name is David Scott Weekly, became the subject of a federal investigation opened for the purpose of prosecuting him on federal explosives charges. According to later testimony, this investigation was under way for some time before Weekly himself first learned about it, which was on Dec. 21-22, 1986.

But ten days before Weekly learned that he was being targetted, Bill Price, the U.S. Attorney in Oklahoma City handling Weekly's case, had a telephone conversation with a top official at Justice Department headquarters about some of the stickier aspects of the investigation. The official to whom Price talked was Mark Richard, a Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Criminal Division, and the career Justice Department official who served as the Department's liaison to the intelligence agencies.

The question arises: What might have triggered this conversation between Mark Richard--the DOJ's point of contact for the NSC, CIA, and military intelligence agencies--and the Oklahoma prosecutor?

First of all, on Oct. 5, 1986, a C-123 cargo plane, flying from El Salvador's Ilopango military air base, had been shot down over Nicaragua. Three crewmen were killed, and the fourth, Eugene Hasenfus, was captured by the Nicaraguan Sandinistas. This was the beginning of the public unravelling of what became known as the ``Iran-Contra'' affair.

Then came the Oct. 27 raid in Los Angeles, after which the Los Angeles FBI office communicated to FBI headquarters what had transpired, including Lister's claims of involvement in arming the Contras, and his citation of ``Mr. Weekly'' as being ``CIA'' and a ``DIA subcontractor''--referring to the Defense Intelligence Agency. (The FBI had already interviewed a businessman to whom Lister had bragged, on Aug. 1, that he was involved in arming the Contras, and that his arms deals were ``CIA approved.'')

On Nov. 10, 1986, the FBI sent a teletype to various sections of the CIA, inquiring about Lister, Blandon, Weekly, and some others. The inquiry, over the name of the FBI Director, asked diplomatically if any of these individuals were ``of operational interest'' to the CIA.

FBI documents also show that a teletype was sent to FBI headquarters on Dec. 9, followed up by a phone conversation with an FBI supervisor on Dec. 11--the same day that Mark Richard spoke to the prosecutor in Oklahoma City--who was at the time secretly preparing his case against Scott Weekly.

In August 1987--less than a year later--Mark Richard was required to give testimony in the Congressional Iran-Contra investigation. While being interrogated about various matters in which there were allegations of Justice Department interference in Contra-related cases, Richard was specifically questioned about handwritten notes he had made during his Dec. 11 conversation with prosecutor Bill Price. Richard said that Bill Hendricks of the DOJ's Public Integrity Section, which was dealing with a lot of the Iran-Contra matters, had previously been in touch with Price. After examining his own notes, Richard said that the conversation pertained to ``an individual who had been arrested and his possible involvement in some CIA/Contra-related activities.'' (In fact, Scott Weekly was out of the country on Dec. 11, and had not yet been arrested.)

Richard was asked about the portion of the notes which read: ``Weekly posts on tape that he's tied into CIA and Hasenfus. Said he reports to people reporting to Bush.'' Richard disclaimed any knowledge of what this meant, and said that the matter had been referred to the Independent Counsel. He said that in his notes, ``There is a suggestion of a relationship to the CIA and the exportation of explosives to the--countries.''

Richard was then asked: ``And he's alleging or indicating to someone that he's connected with the CIA and he is reporting to people who report to Bush?'' Richard answers: ``That's what he's asserting.''

Richard's notes, printed in Appendix B, Volume 23 of the Congressional Iran-Contra Report, also reference Weekly's toll calls to ``Col. Nestor Pino, Spec Asst to Undersecretary for Security Assistance,'' apparently made in September-October 1986, and also ``Phone calls from Weekly to Alex, Va.--Tom Harvey of NSC,'' apparently on Oct. 30, 1986.

Richard's reference to Tom Harvey is most significant. {EIR'}s investigations have shown that Harvey was operating out of George Bush's office, and was definitely one of the ``people who report to Bush.'' Nestor Pino was likewise deeply involved in the drug-ridden Contra supply operation, which was being run out of Bush's office though Felix Rodriguez, as well as by Oliver North, under the direct supervision of Bush's national security adviser Donald Gregg.

What has misled many investigators--and has continued to confuse the issue--is that many of these operatives, even Bush himself, at one point or another worked for the CIA. But the Contra-drug operation was not a ``CIA'' operation: It was run at a level {higher} than the CIA, primarily through military and private networks deployed out of the National Security Council, which in turn was operating in these matters under the direction of Vice President Bush.

The case at hand--of Ron Lister, Scott Weekly, and Tom Harvey--is a very good example of how such things actually worked, in contrast to popular fairy tales about the ``CIA.''

Who is Ron Lister?

Before discussing Lister's ``friends,'' a few salient facts about Lister himself.

The investigation of the Blandon drug ring--the Contra-linked cocaine-smuggling operation featured in the controversial {San Jose Mercury News} series last Fall--appears to have begun in late 1984, with a probe into a Colombian money-laundering operation in the city of Bell, California, near southeast Los Angeles. The police officer who initiated the investigation, which was done at the request of agents from the U.S. Internal Revenue Service and Customs Service, identified former Laguna Beach police officer Ronald Lister as transporting large amounts of cocaine and ``millions of dollars'' for Danilo.

During interviews with the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department last year, as part of their internal investigation of the {San Jose Mercury News} series, Lister acknowledged that he and Blandon were in the drug business, and he told Sheriff's investigators that ``he had moved $50-60 million for Blandon.'' Lister also admitted that he himself had been a user of cocaine from 1985 to 1989.

In a well-researched article in the May 22 issue of the {Los Angeles Weekly}, investigative reporter Nick Schou has documented some of Lister's ties to former CIA officials. A San Diego weapons dealer, Timothy LaFrance (mentioned in Mark Richard's notes), told Schou that Lister's company, Pyramid International Security Consultants, was a ``private vendor that the CIA used'' to do things that the agency itself couldn't do. LaFrance said he had made a number of trips to Central America with Lister, providing weapons to the Contras. Another employee of Pyramid was Paul Wilker, a former CIA officer who, after leaving the CIA, had worked for a company called ``Intersect'' in Orange County, California. One of the founders of Intersect was still another former CIA officer, John Vandewerker. Vanderwerker told reporter Schou that he had met Lister through Wilker, his former employee. Vanderwerker also said that either Lister or Wilker had helped him apply for a job at Fluor Corporation, the large construction firm, with Bill Nelson, then Fluor's vice president for security and administration. Nelson was a well-known figure, having been the CIA Deputy Director for Operations in the 1973-76 period. According to Schou, Nelson, Wilker, and Vanderwerker all retired from the agency around 1976, when they set up Intersect. (This was prior to the late 1970s purge of the CIA's Operations Directorate under Adm. Stansfield Turner; the Turner housecleaning spun off many of the privatized ``asteroid'' operations, which then played such an important role during the 1980s.)

To round out the picture of Lister's associates, we note that in ten pages of notes seized from Lister's house in the 1986 raid, is a list of six names, which starts with Bill Nelson, and ends with Roberto D'Aubuisson, the military strongman of El Salvador in that period.

Also in the list is Scott Weekly. Elsewhere in Lister's ten paes of notes, he had written: ``I had regular meeting with DIA Subcontractor Scott Weekly. Scott had worked in El Salvador for us. Meeting concerned my relationship with the Contra grp. in Cent. Am.''

Ron Lister's `friends in Washington'

Recall, that among the names mentioned in Mark Richard's notes were those of Nestor Pino and Tom Harvey.

Nestor Pino, an Army colonel, worked with one William Bode; both Pino and bode were designated as special assistants to the Undersecretary of State for Security Assistance. Pino was posted to the State Department from the Pentagon's Defense Security Assistance Agency. Both Bode and Pino were deeply involved in the then-secret program supplying arms and supplies to the Contras. This program is often described as ``guns down, drugs back.'' It is not surprising, therefore, that Pino and Bode were also both closely tied to Felix Rodriguez, one of the top drug-runners in the Contra operation, who was directly deployed out of Bush's office through Bush's national security adviser Donald Gregg--another former CIA official.

It was William Bode who introduced Felix Rodriguez to Oliver North in December 1984, as Rodriguez was on his way to meet with Gregg. (A few weeks after this, Gregg introduced Rodriguez personally to Bush, in the Vice Presidents's office.)

In his book {Shadow Warrior}, Rodriguez describes Pino as a close buddy of his from the days of the Bay of Pigs ``2506 Brigade.'' Rodriguez says that at the ``2506'' training camp in Guatemala, he became friends with both Nestor Pino, and with Jose Basulto--more recently known for his provocative actions as part of the ``Brothers to the Rescue'' operation.

Scott Weekly's involvement with Bode and Pino came about in the following way. In August 1986, Bode contacted Col. James ``Bo'' Gritz, the retired, highly decorated special forces commander, and asked him to come to Washington to discuss a training program for Afghanistan mujahideen general-staff officers--another of the clandestine operations being run by the intelligence community simultaneously with the Contra operation. Gritz meet with Bode and Pino at the State Department twice in early August, and then, with his longtime associate Scott Weekly, launched a training program in unconventional warfare for the Afghanis, conducted on federal land in Nevada.

The training program, as Gritz later testified, was financed by $50,000, paid through Albert Hakim's Stanford Technology Group--one of the companies used by Oliver North, Richard Secord, et al. for shipping arms to Iran and to the Contras. The Stanford group was found by Iran-Contra Independent Counsel prosecutor Lawrence Walsh to have been at the heart of what he called ``The Enterprise.''

Now, there is no evidence whatsoever that Gritz had any knowledge of Weekly's ties to the drug-dealer and money-launderer Ron Lister, much less any involvement in it. Indeed, Gritz is well-known for his opposition to drug trafficking; he was prosecuted by the federal government in the late 1980s after exposing the role of certain Reagan-Bush government officials in drug smuggling in Southeast Asia--as we shall see below.

Scott Weekly was a weapons specialist, working as part of a team created by Gritz, after Gritz had been requested in 1979 by the deputy director of the Defense Intelligence Agency to officially resign from the U.S. Army, and carry out a private intelligence operation in Southeast Asia. Gritz's team carried out a number of U.S. government-backed missions into Thailand, Laos, and Burma between 1982 and 1986, to determine whether America POWs were still alive in Southeast Asia.

In his 1991 book {Called To Serve,} Gritz described how he formed a ``private'' team with the assistance of the DIA, CIA, and the Army's Intelligence Support Activity (ISA). The ISA was a secret Army special operations unit, involved in counter-terrorist activity, and also in support for the Nicaraguan Contras in Central America. Sworn evidence exists showing that, during most of the 1980s, Gritz was reporting to military intelligence officials through an intermediary known as a ``cut-out.''

To return to our narrative: In late October 1986, as the first round of the Afghan training program was being completed, and just before the Los Angeles Sheriff's raid on the Blandon drug ring, Gritz was contacted by an NSC staff officer, Lt. Col. Thomas Harvey. (The misnamed ``NSC staff'' is not a staff for the National Security Council, but it serves the President--and in this case the vice president--on national security matters.)

Colonel Harvey told Gritz that information had recently been given to Vice President Bush indicating that Burmese drug lord Khun Sa had information on U.S. prisoners of war still being detained in Southeast Asia. Harvey asked Gritz if he could go to the Golden Triangle area of Southeast Asia to attempt to verify this report. He could, Gritz said, but he told Harvey that he would need special documents for such a mission.

A few days later, Harvey told Gritz to come to Washington. On Oct. 29, 1986, Gritz and Scott Weekly flew there, and met Harvey near the White House. Harvey provided them with two letters, one for Gritz on White House letterhead, and one for Weekly on National Security Council letterhead, stating that Gritz and Weekly were cooperating with the U.S. government.

The letter given to Weekly states:

• ``The bearer and undersigned of the only original of this document is David Scott Weekly. Mr. Weekly is cooperating in determining the authenticity of reported U.S. prisoner of war sightings....

  ``Mr. Weekly is an operational agent cooperating with this office....''

This was Oct. 29. Mark Richard's notes also indicate a toll call by Weekly to Tom Harvey the next day.

`CIA' was the cover story

As to the claims by Lister, Weekly, and others that Weekly was working for the CIA, Gritz has more recently had a number of highly pertinent things to say.

In his {Center for Action} newsletter, Dec. 5, 1996, while discussing the FBI's confusion over whom Weekly worked for when he was working for Gritz, Gritz wrote:

• ``The FBI never knew exactly who I was working for.''

Gritz indicates that he was working for ISA--the Army's Intelligence Support Activity, and explains:

• ``The truth is that the initials `ISA' were above Top Secret to the point where CIA was our cover. ISA worked directly for the National Security Council.''

Gritz then says that he initially worked for DIA, and was then transferred to J-5 (Strategic Plans and Policy) of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, when his POW operations went into the field.

• ``Toward the end it was ISA that picked up the effort.''

He describes how he was called into the White House by Adm. Bobby Inman, then deputy director of the CIA, just before the POW mission was taken away from ISA and given back to DIA.

Gritz continues:

• ``It is no wonder the FBI had no idea who was actually carrying the ball! Scott Weekly never worked for DIA--he worked for me.''

When Gritz was reached by {EIR}, he confirmed and elaborated what he had written in his newsletter. Gritz disavowed any knowledge of a link between Weekly and Ron Lister, and said that Weekly only had a few contacts with the CIA, and that those were through Gritz. Gritz confirmed that he himself was actually working for the ISA.

• ``It was identified, incorrectly, as a low-level Army intelligence effort,''

Gritz explained,

• ``but it really worked directly for the National Security Council. Otherwise, how in the hell could we have been doing all the weird things we were doing? And we used the CIA as a cover, when you had to get messages, and this kind of stuff.''

  ``When I came on board,''

Gritz continued,

• ``I was carefully briefed: `We are not under the CIA, we are not under Defense Intelligence; we work for the National Security Council.'|''

He also said that ISA coordinated with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, which provided the ``muscle'' for ISA, using Delta Force special operations forces.

Tom Harvey, Bush, and `the families'

Now, to the matter of Col. Thomas Harvey.

Thomas Nelson Harvey graduated from West Point in the early 1970s, and was posted to a SHAPE (Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe) support group position. In 1975, he trained as a Foreign Area Specialist in Yugoslav studies. Harvey was later assigned to the headquarters of the Ninth Army Division (which has responsibilities throughout the Pacific), and in 1983 attended the Command and General Staff College, thus becoming eligible to serve with the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Informed sources indicate that Harvey is a proteage of Richard Armitage, who was Assistant Secretary of State for International Affairs. Armitage is a notorious intelligence community ``Asia hand'' whose career has been colored with allegations of gun running, drug smuggling, and privateering on a grand scale. During Gritz's mission to Khun Sa in 1986, Khun Sa identified Armitage as playing a central role in ``Golden Triangle'' drug trafficking--which has some bearing on Harvey's behavior after Gritz returned from his 1986 mission.

From 1983 until his retirement in 1991, Harvey was usually listed in Pentagon directories as located in the office of the Deputy Chief of Staff of the Army; he was, among other things, a speechwriter responsible for space, arms control, and low-intensity operations. According to his own testimony, he held numerous sensitive intelligence positions during that time. Among these, were his serving as a military assistant to the Senate Armed Services Committee, where he worked closely with Senators Strom Thurmond (R-S.C.) and John Warner (R-Va.).

Asked about Tom Harvey, Gritz told this reporter that Harvey was actually working out of George Bush's office.

• ``Harvey was the military adviser to Sen. John Warner, and he was also, of course, in the NSC, working in the Vice President's Office--George Bush at the time,''

Gritz said.

• ``Harvey was the Ollie North look-alike for George Bush.''

It was apparently while Harvey was at the NSC in 1985-86, that he was instrumental in the creation of a bizarre ``private'' paramilitary unit in Loudoun County, Virginia, called ``ARGUS'' (Armored Response Group U.S.). ARGUS's ostensible purpose was to provide surplus armored military equipment for use in ``anti-terrorist'' and other crisis situations by local law enforcement agencies in the mid-Atlantic region. Among its acquisitions were a C-130 military aircraft, an armored personnel carrier, and an armored forklift.

One of the few times that ARGUS equipment was actually deployed, to be on standby, was during the Oct. 6-7, 1986 raid, by federal, state, and local agents, on the offices of organizations associated with Lyndon LaRouche in Leesburg, Virginia. That raid was officially run by the FBI, but it was later learned that planning for the raid included the ``focal point'' office of the J-3 Special Operations Division of the Pentagon's Joint Chiefs of Staff. Two truckloads of seized documents were taken to highly secure U.S. Marine Corps facilities at Henderson Hall in Arlington, Virginia, where they were presumably culled over by intelligence specialists, before being reviewed by state and federal prosecutors.

ARGUS was a project of the oligarchal families based in the Loudoun County ``Hunt Country'' (see article, p.|64). Magalen Ohrstrom Bryant and John W. Hanes were both officials and funders of ARGUS; at the same time, Bryant and Hanes were both funding Oliver North's secret Contra operations as well.

In 1988, by which time Harvey was posted to Senator Warner's staff, he was able to set up ARGUS's training base at the Army's Cameron Station base in Alexandria, Virginia. ARGUS also housed some of its specialized armored vehicles at Cameron Station. iven that ARGUS was supposedly a completely private operation, this was rather extraordinary--except that ARGUS was obviously {not} ``private;'' it was rather part of the {privatized} military-intelligence operations which flourished under the authority of Executive Order 12333 and Bush's ``secret government'' apparatus.

After his retirement from active military service in 1991, Harvey continued to work for these same intelligence-related ``family'' networks. He became the chairman and CEO of the Global Environmental & Technology Foundation. On Global's Board of Directors, naturally, is Maggie Bryant, also listed as chairperson of the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation. It is reported that Harvey was personally selected for this role by Maggie Bryant, who has called him one of her most trusted operatives. Among Global's projects is what is called the ``Defense and Environmental Initiative,'' which, in their words, involves ``integrating environmental considerations into America's national and international security mission.''

`Erase and forget'

Now, back to Gritz's dealings with Tom Harvey in 1986-87.

Gritz and his team, including Scott Weekly, did go to Burma, where they met with Khun Sa. Khun Sa told Gritz that he did not have any American POWs, but he proposed a deal with the United States: that he would stop all drug flows out of the Golden Triangle, in return for recognition of his Shan State. He would guarantee the eradication of opium production in the Golden Triangle, which was the major source of heroin coming into the United States--although it was rapidly being supplanted by drugs from the ``Golden Crescent'' of Afghanistan and Pakistan as a by-product of the arms and money flowing into the Afghan War. The parallels between the Bush ``secret government'' clandestine operations in Central American and those in Afghanistan are striking: The net result of both was a massive increase in drugs coming from those areas into the United States. Guns and drugs, like love and marriage, go together like the proverbial horse and carriage. (The Afghan operation gave us something else: the world-wide British-controlled terrorist network known today as the ``Afghansi.'')

The other thing which Khun Sa offered--even more explosive--was that he would name the names of U.S. government officials involved in illegal arms and drug trafficking.

Gritz and his team returned just before Christmas, 1986. In his book, Gritz reports that he submitted his after-action report to Harvey; a few days later, Harvey called. When Gritz asked Harvey about the reaction to Khun Sa's proposal to stop the drug trade, Harvey told Gritz:

• ``Bo, there's no one around here who supports that.''

Gritz's account continues:

• ``I reminded him that Vice President George H.W. Bush was appointed by his boss, the President of the United States, as the `Number-One Cop' for stopping drugs before they got to the United States. Reagan had declared war on drugs, and Bush was his so-called `Czar.'"

Harvey reiterated, this time in a more forcible tone,

• {`Bo, what can I tell you? There's no interest in doing that.'}

  ``I knew then that we were treading on some very sensitive toes,'' Gritz writes, ``but I didn't know whose.''

Almost immediately, Scott Weekly was charged with illegal shipments of explosives (the C4 used in the Afghani training program) and he was induced to plead guilty without a trial, and even without a lawyer.

In May 1987, Gritz was told in no uncertain terms to cease and desist all of his activities related to the Golden Triangle and drugs. He was contacted by Joseph Felter, his close friend and the former head of Wedtech, the scandalized defense contractor. Felter told Gritz that he was conveying a message from Tom Harvey and a State Department official named William Davis: that Gritz was to ``erase and forget'' everything about his trip to the Golden Triangle. Felter told Gritz that Harvey and Davis said that ``if you don't stop everything you're doing ... you're gonna serve 15 years in prison as a felon!'' (Felter later confirmed the thrust of his remarks, and that he was acting on behalf of Harvey, in a sworn affidavit.)

Gritz was at the time about to be charged with using a false passport, for travelling to Southeast Asia on a passport in a different name which had in fact been provided to him by the U.S. government, through the NSC-run ISA. Gritz was also threatened with charges for neutrality violations, for the Afghan training operation. Gritz says that when he was finally indicted in 1989, Tom Harvey showed up, and told him privately:

• ``Bo, we're so angry with you! Your focus is supposed to be prisoners of war. Why do you insist on getting involved in this government drug operation?''

The coverup continues to this day. The attacks on Bo Gritz to prevent exposure of the U.S. government complicity in the Golden Triangle drug trade, and the frantic efforts in late 1986-87 to suppress any exposure of the Contra drugs-for-guns dealings--as shows up in the Lister-Weekly case--were clearly one and the same.

And in both cases, we see that the trail leads directly to the same place: George Bush.

1. For a more thorough description and documentation of this structure, which operated under the authority of Executive Order 12333 and various National Security Decision Directives, see the two {EIR Special Reports}: ``Would a President Bob Dole Prosecute Drug Super-Kingpin George Bush?'' September 1996; and ``George Bush and the 12333 Serial Murder Ring,'' October 1996.

November 22, 1996-

In an ongoing scandal ballooning by the day,  the Wall Street Journal
reported today that a CIA asset in Venezuela has been indicted by a
Miami federal grand jury on charges of smuggling more than 20,000 kilos
of pure cocaine into the United States.  

So far one CIA agent was forced to resign, a second disciplined and the
careers of two Drug Enforcement Administration officers effectively
ended in the plot.  

An internal investigation grew more complicated with the discovery that
the male CIA agent and the two Venezuelan men had sexual relationships
with the two female DEA agents. The case involves the same program under
which the agency created a Haitian intelligence service whose officers
became involved in drug trafficking and acts of political terror. Its
exposure comes amidst Justice Department and CIA investigations into
allegations the CIA helped finance the Contra war in the 1980s with
profits from cocaine smuggled into the United States by members of its
Contra army.  

In the mid-1980's, under orders from President Ronald Reagan, the
agency began to set up anti-drug programs in the major cocaine-producing
and trafficking capitals of Central and South America. In Venezuela it
worked with the country's National Guard, a paramilitary force that
controls the highways and borders. Government officials said that the
joint CIA-Venezuelan force was headed by Gen. Ramon Guillen Davila who
was indicted today,  and that the ranking CIA officer was Mark McFarlin,
who had worked with anti-guerrilla forces in El Salvador in the 1980's.  

Guillen worked for Venezuelan drug organizations, and he worked for
Colombian drug organizations a source said.  In late 1990, police
tipped the DEA that Guillen's men were guarding a cocaine shipment
instead of seizing it.  The DEA investigated and informed the CIA.  The
CIA allowed the cocaine deals to continue, CIA agent McFarlin said, in
order to keep information channels with Guillen open.  

In an interview from his modest home in Caracas, Guillen told the Wall
Street Journal his Venezuelan National Guard anti-narcotics unit sent
about 4,100 pounds of cocaine to the United States with the knowledge of
the CIA and the DEA to help U.S. officials snare drug traffickers.
But law-enforcement officials familiar with the case told the newspaper
Guillen's unit shipped as much as 22 tons of cocaine into the United
States during the period when he headed it, between 1987 and 1991.

22 tons of cocaine, the equivalent of 20,000 kilos, would have a street
value in the United States of $4 billion dollars if sold in powder
form.  When formulated into crack cocaine the street value is estimated
at more than $7 billion dollars.










opyright 1995 Burrelle's Information Services  
                              CBS News Transcripts
                        SHOW: 60 MINUTES (7:00 PM ET)  
                           September 03, 1995, Sunday
TYPE: Profile
LENGTH: 2600 words
HEADLINE: THE CIA'S COCAINE; USE OF TAXPAYER MONEY FOR CIA INVOLVEMENT IN DRUG
TRAFFICKING AND DRUG SMUGGLING
ANCHORS: MIKE WALLACE
 BODY:
   THE CIA'S COCAINE
   MIKE WALLACE, co-host:


                CBS News Transcripts, September 03, 1995, Sunday                
                                                                                
   A ton of cocaine, pure cocaine worth hundreds of millions of dollars,
smuggled into the United States.  Sound familiar?  Not the way this ton of
cocaine got here, according to the former head of the Drug Enforcement
Administration.  This drug shipment got here courtesy of what he called drug
trafficking by the CIA in partnership with the Venezuelan national guard.  When 
we first broadcast this report two years ago, rumors of CIA involvement in drug 
trafficking had been circulating for years, but no one in the US government had 
ever before publicly charged the CIA with doing it.  For it's surely not the
kind of accusation anyone in the US government would make without thinking long 
and hard.
   (Footage of Judge Robert Bonner)
   WALLACE: Let me understand what you're saying.  A ton of cocaine was smuggled
into the United States of America by the Venezuelan national guard...
   Judge ROBERT BONNER (Former Head, Drug Enforcement Administration): Well,
they...
   WALLACE: ...in cooperation with the CIA?


                CBS News Transcripts, September 03, 1995, Sunday                
                                                                                
   Judge BONNER: That's what--that's exactly what appears to have happened.
   (Footage of Wallace and Bonner walking)
   WALLACE: (Voiceover) Until last month, Judge Robert Bonner was the head of
the Drug Enforcement Administration, the DEA.  And Judge Bonner explained to us 
that only the head of the DEA is authorized to approve the transportation of any
illegal narcotics, like cocaine, into this country, even if the CIA is bringing 
it in.
   Judge BONNER: Let me put it this way, Mike.  If this has not been approved by
DEA or an appropriate law-enforcement authority in the United States, then it's 
illegal.  It's called drug trafficking.  It's called drug smuggling.
   WALLACE: So what you're saying, in effect, is the CIA broke the law, simple
as that.
   Judge BONNER: I don't think there's any other way you can rationalize around 
it, assuming, as I think we can, that there was some knowledge on the part of
CIA.  At least some participation in approving or condoning this to be done.


                CBS News Transcripts, September 03, 1995, Sunday                
                                                                                
   (Footage of Wallace and Bonner; the CIA seal)
   WALLACE: (Voiceover) Judge Bonner says he came to that conclusion after a
two-year secret investigation conducted by the DEA's Office of Professional
Responsibility, in cooperation with the CIA's own inspector general.  And what
reason did the CIA have for promoting this drug smuggling?
   Judge BONNER: Well, the only rationale that's ever been offered is that
that--this would lead to some valuable drug intelligence about the Colombian
cartels.
   (Footage of a drug inspection; a ship; trucks; a building; General Ramon
Guillen Davila)
   WALLACE: (Voiceover) Over half of the Colombian drug cartel's cocaine crosses
the border with Venezuela on its way to the United States and Europe.  Back in
the 1980s, the CIA was mandated by then-President Reagan to develop intelligence
on the Colombian drug cartels.  And so the CIA, with Venezuela's guardia
nacional, or national guard, set up an undercover operation, a drug-smuggling
operation in Venezuela that could handle the trans-shipment of the Colombian
cartel's cocaine on its way to market.  The plan was to infiltrate the cartel,


                CBS News Transcripts, September 03, 1995, Sunday                
                                                                                
and it worked, for the CIA-national guard undercover operation quickly
accumulated this cocaine, over a ton and a half that was smuggled from Colombia 
into Venezuela inside these trucks and then was stored here at the CIA-financed 
Counternarcotics Intelligence Center in Caracas.  The center's commander and the
CIA's man in Venezuela was national guard General Ramon Guillen Davila.
   Ms.  ANNABELLE GRIMM (Drug Enforcement Agency): I tried to work together with
them.  I was always aware that they were not telling me everything they were
doing.
   (Footage of Grimm; a building; Mark McFarlin; a plane taking off)
   WALLACE: (Voiceover) Annabelle Grimm was a DEA agent with 18 years'
experience when she was made agent-in-charge in Caracas.  And she says that the 
CIA station chief, James Campbell, and this man, Mark McFarlin, the CIA officer 
in charge at the center, told her that to keep the undercover smuggling
operation credible, they had to keep the cartel happy, and the way to do that
was simple: deliver their dope, untouched by US law enforcement, to the cartel's
distributors, their dope dealers in the United States.


                CBS News Transcripts, September 03, 1995, Sunday                
                                                                                
   Ms.  GRIMM: The CIA and the guardia nacional wanted to let cocaine go on into
the traffic without doing anything.  They wanted to let it come up to the United
States, no surveillance, no nothing.
   WALLACE: In other words, you weren't going to stop them in Miami or Houston
or wherever.  These drugs were simply going to go to the United States and then 
go into the traffic and eventually rich--reach the streets.
   Ms.  GRIMM: That's what they wanted to do, yes.  And we had very, very
lengthy discussions where I told them what the US law was and the fact that we
could not do this.
   WALLACE: So here you've got Jim Campbell, chief of station, who knows about
this; Mark McFarlin, CIA officer, knows about this and are stimulating
this--this business of sending what are uncontrolled deliveries of
drugs--smuggling drugs into the United States, right?
   Ms.  GRIMM: Right.
   WALLACE: Why in the world would they want to do that?


                CBS News Transcripts, September 03, 1995, Sunday                
                                                                                
   Ms.  GRIMM: As they explained to me, that--this would enable them to gain the
traffickers' confidence, keep their informant cool and it would result in future
seizures of larger quantities of drugs.  And also, they hoped to--I guess they
thought they were going to get Pablo Escobar at the scene of the crime or
something, which I found personally ludicrous.
   WALLACE: But if Annabelle Grimm thought this was ludicrous, the CIA station
chief, James Campbell, did not.  He enlisted the assistance of CIA headquarters 
in Washington to get approval for the drug shipments. And his bosses at the CIA 
in Washington went over Annabelle Grimm's head, directly to her bosses at DEA
headquarters in Washington.
   Judge BONNER: They made this proposal and we said, 'No, no way.  We will not 
permit this.  It should not go forward.' And then, apparently, it went forward
anyway.
   (Footage of Wallace and Bonner; a guardia national truck; inspectors)
   WALLACE: (Voiceover) The joint DEA-CIA investigation we mentioned earlier
confirmed that over a ton of cocaine made its way from the Counternarcotics
Center in Caracas to the streets of the United States. And they discovered


                CBS News Transcripts, September 03, 1995, Sunday                
                                                                                
that at one point, General Guillen's national guard tried to ship 1,500 kilos 
at once.
   Ms.  GRIMM: They were not successful in that because apparently the package
they had put together was too large.  It wouldn't fit on the plane.
   (Footage of Guillen)
   WALLACE: (Voiceover) General Guillen admits to the bungled operation.
   General RAMON GUILLEN DAVILA (Venezuelan Guardia Nacional): (Through
Translator) It was too big for the airplane door because the plane was a 707.
   WALLACE: The box was too big to get into the airplane, $ 30 million worth of 
cargo, drugs?  All these officials--the Venezuelans, the Americans,
the--the--the Colombians--all so stupid that they don't have a box that's small 
enough to fit inside their own airplane?
   Gen.  GUILLEN: (Through Translator) The traffickers made a mistake with the
plane.


                CBS News Transcripts, September 03, 1995, Sunday                
                                                                                
   (Footage of Guillen)
   WALLACE: (Voiceover) Is it possible that General Guillen was doing this on 
his own, without the knowledge of the CIA?
   Ms.  GRIMM: I would find it very difficult, for several reasons, to believe
that they did not know what was going on.  They built, they ran, they controlled
that center.  General Guillen and his officers didn't go to the bathroom
without telling Mark McFarlin or the CIA what they were going to do.
   (Footage of traffic; a Colombia road sign; an airplane landing)
   WALLACE: (Voiceover) The drug-smuggling operation finally unraveled nearly a 
year after Annabelle Grimm says she told the CIA and General Guillen that it
was illegal to send drugs uncontrolled into the US.  Then a shipment arrived at 
Miami's International Airport and was seized, coincidentally, by US Customs.
Customs traced those drugs back to the Venezuelan national guard, but General
Guillen told us that operation had been approved by US authorities.
   Gen.  GUILLEN: (Through Translator) Look, what I see here is that there is 
a problem between the CIA and the DEA, and perhaps they are trying to find a


                CBS News Transcripts, September 03, 1995, Sunday                
                                                                                
fall guy, who is General Guillen.  If I had anything to do with illegal drug
trafficking, I wouldn't be sitting here talking to you.
   (Footage of Guillen; a document)
   WALLACE: (Voiceover) General Guillen is right about one thing.  He could
travel to New York to talk to us about Judge Bonner's charges only because he
had already been granted immunity from prosecution in that DEA-CIA inspector
general's investigation.  So we confronted the general with this document, a
report from that investigation that reads like his confession.
   (Reading) 'Guillen lost his composure, and when directly confronted
concerning his involvement in the unauthorized and illegal shipment of cocaine
to the US, confesses.'
   Gen.  GUILLEN: (Through Translator) Look, I say that that confession is not
true.  In that report, there are a lot of lies.  It's useless.  I have not
confessed anywhere.
   WALLACE: So you're clean?


                CBS News Transcripts, September 03, 1995, Sunday                
                                                                                
   Gen.  GUILLEN: (Through Translator) Clean until the last day God has for
me.
   (Footage of Guillen; buildings; a document; McFarlin in a truck; a
photograph of James Campbell; the CIA logo)
   WALLACE: (Voiceover) So far there has been no legal action against General
Guillen.  As for the CIA officers?  Well, Judge Bonner may believe that
someone at the agency must have known, but the CIA and the US Department of
Justice say they have discovered, quote, "No evidence of criminal wrongdoing."
However, the CIA did acknowledge to us that the investigation, quote, "Did
reveal instances of poor judgment and management, leading to disciplinary
actions for several CIA officers." Mark McFarlin, the CIA officer in charge of
the Counternarcotics Center, resigned from the agency last year.  We tried to
talk to him, but he told us the CIA would take legal action against him if he
violated his secrecy agreement with the agency.  As for James Campbell, the CIA 
station chief, we learned he was brought back to the US and promoted, but then
he retired.  Campbell did tell us, quote, "I've devoted my life to my country
and feel like a victim in this thing.  This happened without our knowledge.  We 
were there to prevent it." While CIA headquarters declined to answer our
questions on camera, off camera a CIA official involved in the Venezuelan


                CBS News Transcripts, September 03, 1995, Sunday                
                                                                                
cocaine operation did.
   We talked to some people at CIA.  They say, 'The DEA does the same thing all 
the time.  They let drugs walk.  They let drugs into the traffic, and look the
other way to further a more important goal.'
   Judge BONNER: It's absolutely untrue.  And frankly, maybe it--it--it displays
the kind of ignorance that makes the CIA dangerous in this area. It is wrong for
an agency of the US government to facilitate and participate in allowing drugs
to reach the streets.  And apparently--you know, if the--if the CIA doesn't
understand that, then I--I would be concerned that this kind of incident could
be repeated.
   (Footage of Wallace and Dennis DeConcini)
   WALLACE: (Voiceover) The CIA advised us they had recently briefed the
chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Senator Dennis DeConcini, and
they urged us to talk with him, apparently believing he would defend the
operation.


                CBS News Transcripts, September 03, 1995, Sunday                
                                                                                
   Senator DENNIS DeCONCINI (Senate Intelligence Committee): Here we--it was an 
operation that I don't think they should have been involved in.
   WALLACE: No question, the drugs got in?
   Sen.  DeCONCINI: I don't doubt that the drugs got in here.
   WALLACE: You'd think that maybe the agency would want to say, 'OK, we made a 
mistake.'
   Sen.  DeCONCINI: I think they made a mistake.
   WALLACE: Yeah.
   Sen.  DeCONCINI: And I--you know, you hope when these mistakes are made that,
hell, not too many more of them are, particularly when the mistake is a large
quantity of substance like this that can kill people, and probably did.
   (Footage of Wallace and DeConcini)


                CBS News Transcripts, September 03, 1995, Sunday                
                                                                                
   WALLACE: (Voiceover) We asked the senator why no one in the CIA has been
prosecuted for bringing in the drugs.
   Sen.  DeCONCINI: It--you would seem to think there would be a good case
there.
   WALLACE: A case against?
   Sen.  DeCONCINI: Against an American who knew anything about it.  But, you
know, I've been a prosecutor, Mike, and you have to look at the case, convince
a--a jury or a judge not to throw the case out.  The Justice Department reviewed
that and they decided not to prosecute these individuals from the agency.
   (Footage of the Venezuelan intelligence agency)
   WALLACE: (Voiceover) And what about the vaunted intelligence gathered from
the whole CIA, anti-drug caper in Venezuela?
   Judge BONNER: Well, let me tell you, I--first of all, I don't know of any.
Because from what I know, no valuable intelligence of any kind was produced from
this operation.


                CBS News Transcripts, September 03, 1995, Sunday                
                                                                                
   WALLACE: What intelligence was generated by the shipment of this 1,000 to
1,500 kilos, controlled or uncontrolled?
   Gen.  GUILLEN: (Through Translator) It was very positive.
   WALLACE: Really?  Who--who--who did you finger?  What did you find out?
   Gen.  GUILLEN: (Through Translator) Right now, a truck driver and the truck
that were trafficking drugs into Venezuela are under arrest.  There was another 
truck and two similar van types were also caught.
   WALLACE: So what you're saying is that you captured three or four or five
truck drivers.  I'm asking about intelligence in the United States that was
generated by the actual shipment of these kilos into the United States.
   Gen.  GUILLEN: (Through Translator) Now whether or not here in the United
States they arrested anyone or the intelligence gathered was useless, that is
the responsibility of the Americans.
   WALLACE: After speaking to us, General Guillen traveled to Miami, where
federal agents found him and served him with a subpoena to appear before a


                CBS News Transcripts, September 03, 1995, Sunday                
                                                                                
newly revived grand jury investigation into the CIA's cocaine.  But the word out
of Venezuela is that the government there will not permit him to testify.
   Ms.  GRIMM: I look at that 1,000 kilos, at least that 1,000 kilos.  I look at
the fact--I mean, Mike, you're a taxpayer and that was US taxpayer money that
built that center, that funded it, that maintained it.  And I really take great 
exception to the fact that that 1,000 kilos came in funded by US taxpayer money 
and it hit the streets of the United States.  I found that particularly
appalling when you look at all the damaged lives that 1,000 kilos represents.
   WALLACE: After that broadcast two years ago, and following our interview,
Venezuela's General Guillen was served with a subpoena to appear before a
federal grand jury in Miami that was investigating the CIA cocaine episode.  But
he decided to skip that appearance and he returned to Venezuela where he
promptly retired, and received a blanket pardon for any drug crimes he might
have committed, while he was head of his country's anti-narcotics effort.
   Meantime, sources in the US drug enforcement community tell us now the CIA
has changed its ways.  For instance, the CIA provided major assistance that led 
to the recent arrests of the high command of the Cali drug cartel in Colombia.
And the CIA, under its new director, John Deutch, has made working with law


                CBS News Transcripts, September 03, 1995, Sunday                
                                                                                
enforcement to stem the tide of illegal drugs into the United States its highest
priority.