June 9, 2005

The Charmed Life of a Mass Murderer

Posada Carriles and Bush's Anti-Terror Hoax

By SAUL LANDAU

President George W. Bush has emphasized that if one of the myriad of U.S. police agencies even suspect someone of planning, abetting or carrying out a terrorist act, he will, at a minimum, get tossed into a dark hole. Indeed, Bush has thrown the Magna Carta into the garbage heap when it comes to Muslims suspected of pernicious thoughts toward the United States.

But if suspected terrorists turn their rage toward the detested Fidel Castro, these rules don't apply.

Indeed, those who try to bomb Cuban targets, or those related to Cuba, receive special treatment. This double-standard casts a shadow over the president's commitment to fight terrorism.

For example, TV footage showed Homeland Security cops arresting Posada in mid May. But the arresting officers didn't even handcuff the Western Hemisphere's most notorious terrorist. (Remember how Bush's pal Ken "Kenny Boy" Lay ­ ENRON's CEO ­ got handcuffed?) Justice Department spokespeople said they plan to charge the foremost terrorist in the western hemisphere with "illegal entry into the United States."

The FBI has reams of files on Posada, affectionately called "Bambi" by his terrorist friends. Former FBI Special Agent Carter Cornick told New York Times reporter Tim Weiner that Posada was "up to his eyeballs" in the October 1976 destruction of a Cuban commercial airliner over Barbados. All 73 passengers and crew members died. Recently published FBI and CIA documents not only confirm Cornick's statement, but also reveal that U.S. agencies had knowledge of the plot and did not inform Cuban authorities or try to stop the bombing.

Posada denied involvement at the time, but police nabbed two of the plotters who had disembarked in Barbados. They fingered Posada as the man who hired them to place the bomb on the plane. His name became ubiquitous in the files of agencies that monitored terrorists. Nevertheless, several weeks after Posada announced his presence on U.S. soil, Roger Noriega, Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, still claimed he had no information that Posada had even entered the country.

Posada himself promoted his high international profile. So that the world knew of his exploits, he boasted to New York Times reporters Anne Bardach and Larry Rohter in 1998 that he had organized a sabotage campaign of Cuban tourist spots. In 1997, one of Posada's agents in Cuba detonated a bomb at a Cuban hotel that killed an Italian tourist. Posada replied that "it was a freak accident, but I sleep like a baby." A hardened terrorist can't afford to be sentimental!

In 1999, Panamanian police discovered that the 71-year-old Posada, between visits to his proctologist, conspired with three other anti-Castro geezers to assassinate Cuba's leader in Panama. Castro was to give a public speech there.

This quartet of seniors, Guillermo Novo, Pedro Remon, Gaspar Jimenez and
Posada, planned to blow up the platform from which Castro would speak. After Panamanian police arrested them, they denied any involvement. "What proof do they have?" sneered Posada et. al. ­ a mere set of their fingerprints on the explosives found in their rented car.

This March, Posada entered the U.S. surreptitiously. He left Panama less than a year after out-going Panamanian President Mireyea Moscoso pardoned him and his accomplices.

Moscoso also apparently contravened Panamanian law by issuing the pardons before the appeals process had ended. The Panamanian press mused about the "coincidence" between the issuing of pardons and the simultaneous $4 million deposited in her Swiss bank account.

After pardoning the geezers, Moscoso phoned U.S. Ambassador Simon Ferro, saying she had complied with Washington's request to release the men.

On May 20, 2004, the four caught a waiting airplane that took them to Honduras. There, Posada, the veritable padrino of Latin American terrorism, disembarked while the other three continued to Miami so their arrival could coincide with President Bush's campaign stop. They entered the United States without problems, despite their terrorist rap sheets.

Did Homeland Security personnel read Bush's November 26, 2001 declaration? "If anybody harbors a terrorist, they're a terrorist." Did Bush send a note to anti-terrorist agencies explaining that they should make exceptions for "zealous patriots" who wanted to assassinate Castro ­ and anyone else who happened to be near him when the bomb went off?

Indeed, all four pardoned Castro-haters had for decades tried to assassinate and commit sabotage against Cuban and other officials and properties in New York, Mexico and the Caribbean.

A Washington D.C. jury had convicted Guillermo Novo first of conspiring to assassinate former Chilean Chancellor Orlando Letelier. When an appeals court reversed that conviction on procedural grounds, a second jury in 1982 found Novo guilty of perjury for lying to a grand jury about his knowledge of the assassination plot. In September 1976, five Cubans working with Chilean secret police agents on orders from Generalissimo Augusto Pinochet had car-bombed Letelier on Washington's Embassy Row.

Ronni Moffitt, Letelier's young colleague at the Institute for Policy Studies, also died in the bombing. The FBI also knew that Posada had knowledge of the plot to kill Letelier.

Born Luis Clemente Faustino Posada Carriles in Cienfuegos, Cuba in 1928, this Cuban expatriate served on dictator Fulgencio Batista's repressive forces until the January 1959 revolutionary takeover. Posada then swore vengeance.

The CIA recruited him for its 1961 invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs. But the Agency placed Posada in an anti-Castro version of the Waffen SS, a squad that would "mop up" after the invaders had prevailed. Following the April fiasco, the CIA sent Posada for "training" at Fort Benning, Georgia, to learn about spying, using explosives and other lethal devices. In 1971, working out of Venezuela, he partnered with Antonio Veciana, founder of Alpha 66, another anti-Castro terrorist group, to plan an elaborate plot to assassinate Castro.

In a 1996 interview, Veciana told me how he and Posada had recruited two Venezuelan hit men, disguised them as a TV news crew and sent them to Santiago, Chile, before Castro arrived on a visit. Meanwhile, the assassins "blended in" with the press corps. CIA technicians had outfitted their news camera with a gun. Fortunately for Fidel, the assassins chickened out. Posada, enraged over such cowardice, recruited other assassins to use the same lethal camera on Castro when he stopped in Caracas for a press conference on his return to Cuba. Those whackers also had second thoughts and the plot failed again.

Perhaps Posada's frustration over the failed 1971 hits abated after the "success" of his 1976 Barbados air sabotage. After Venezuelan authorities charged him with responsibility for the airline bombing, they tossed him into prison while appeal after appeal took place ­ until August 1985. Then, someone who knew and admired Posada ­ perhaps Jorge Mas Canosa, leader of the Cuban American Nation Foundation in Miami, who is listed with a $50 note next to his name in Lt. Col. Oliver North's notebooks, published by the Iran-Contra Congressional subcommittees --­ bribed prison authorities to help Posada "escape."

Following his "escape," North then engaged this fugitive to re-supply the CIA-backed Contras from El Salvador. When the United States stopped funding the Contra War, with the 1990 electoral defeat of the Sandinista government in Nicaragua, Posada returned to the bombing business. This time, he selected bombing hotels in Cuba, a strategic target that would impair Castro's foreign exchange source by making the island a dangerous spot for European tourists. Posada told Times reporters Bardach and Rohter that the money came from wealthy Cubans in Miami.

Given Posada's own boasting and from the available evidence in published documents, the Justice Department had to either try him for terrorist acts or deport him to Venezuela, which has requested his extradition. He plotted the 1976 airliner bombing from Caracas and escaped from prison there. He also apparently committed murder and torture there as well. Despite this overwhelming documentation, however, the Justice Department rejected Venezuela's May 2005 extradition request to try Posada for this crime on the grounds that the request lacked sufficient detail.

One wonders: Did Posada announce his illegal presence in the United States with the idea that U.S. government complicity in aiding and abetting his past acts of terrorism would protect him? U.S. authorities didn't inform Cuba or try to stop the 1976 air-bombing plot, and in 1971, as Veciana stated, the CIA made the gun that Posada's agents placed inside the camera to assassinate Castro. And Ollie North has knowledge of Posada's covert activities for U.S. intelligence as well.

Given Washington's decade long history of terrorism aimed at Cuba, Bush might ask his staff to re-word the doctrinaire anti-terrorist statements they write for his press conferences.

After the foul 9/11 deeds, a few wise counselors had recommended that Bush leave the anti-terrorist campaign to police and judicial agencies. But Bush insisted on war. By employing the military to this task and in the process justifying the erosion of human rights as necessary to fighting terrorism, the world has come to think of the U.S. government as hypocritical ­ at best.

Posada, an old U.S. terrorist chicken, has come home to roost in Bush's nest. He has also exposed Bush's anti-terrorist policies as a hoax.

Saul Landau teaches at Cal Poly Pomona University and is a fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies. He wrote Assassination on Embassy Row, an account of the Letelier-Moffitt murders, (with John Dinges). A version of this article appeared in Foreign Policy In Focus.
http://www.counterpunch.org/landau06092005.html

How Authentic Journalists Caught an International Terrorist in Mexico

The Daily Por Esto! Found Posada Carriles on Isla Mujeres but George W. Bush Is Trying to Set Him Free in Miami

By Al Giordano
Special to The Narco News Bulletin

June 21, 2005

“He who protects a terrorist is a terrorist”        

-George W. Bush

Mérida, Yucatán, June 2005: On Mexico’s Caribbean island of Isla Mujeres, on March 14, Authentic Journalist Yolanda Gutiérrez Sagrero and photojournalist Mario Alonzo pulled the first threads on a curtain that now disintegrates in tatters. Sunlight now shines upon the darkest recesses and hypocrisies of George W. Bush’s so-called “War on Terrorism,” and thus, Bush’s terror war is in doubt as never before.

Gutiérrez, Alonzo, and their colleagues at Mexico’s daily Por Esto! tugged on the threads and found América’s most-wanted fugitive behind that curtain: Luis Posada Carriles, the Cuban-born, Miami-fed, CIA-paid, confessed architect of the 1976 terrorist passenger jet bombing that killed 73 civilians, including the teenage members of Cuba’s Olympic fencing team.

Known as “the Latin American Osama bin Laden,” Posada Carriles, 77, has publicly confessed, as well, to bombings of civilian targets in tourist hotels, and additional terrorist acts. His trail of violence under a cloak of official protection goes back decades. A recent book even places him at Dealey Plaza, in Dallas, in 1963, at the hour when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated there. Whether or not he also helped kill JFK, Posada Carriles, with 40 years of collaboration with the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), is not somebody that the U.S. government wants talking too much, or too honestly, or too loudly about what he’s seen and done, and with whom, and on whose authority (dad’s, Mr. President?) to the press. Read it and weep, citizens of the United States: A terrorist named Luis Posada Carriles is blackmailing your president, George W. Bush, today in order to win “political asylum.” And, so far, the cowardly Bush doesn’t have the courage to stop him.

Ever since his pardon and release from Panamanian prison in the final hours of the presidency of Mireya Moscoso in August of last year, this terrorist successfully eluded an international manhunt. He is wanted by the government of Venezuela (the country where he is a naturalized Cuban-born citizen) to face trial for the 1976 passenger jet bombing. He was free as an ocean pirate until the boat that took him to the United States washed up against the sandbars of Isla Mujeres, which, unfortunately for Posada Carriles (but fortunately for everyone else) is an isle where the flag of the Authentic Journalism renaissance waves higher than his own Jolly Roger.

The latest chapter in this saga of an international terrorist and those who protect him began with the March 14th report of what seemed to be a routine story about a shrimp boat adrift off of Isla Mujeres – poetically, it is also the island campus of the first Narco News School of Authentic Journalism – by Isla bureau chief Yolanda Gutiérrez…

A Terrorist Trawler Adrift

Another day on the job, another seemingly routine story to be reported: Early on the morning of March 14, journalist Yolanda Gutiérrez learned that a 90-foot shrimp boat was stranded near a sand bar off the shores of the island. She leaped into action. After all, the journalist Gutiérrez has steadfastly defended the nearby endangered coral reefs from environmental destruction, and the locals were worried that this boat adrift might do them more harm.

Isla Mujeres fishermen save the S.S. Santrina run ashore on a sandbar on March 14, 2005 Photo: D.R. 2005 Mario Alonzo, Por Esto!

“ISLA MUJERES, March 14: A shrimp boat from the United States with five crew members aboard was stranded for various hours while it attempted to enter the navigation canal and drifted to close to shore, although sources of the Port Captain’s office said that it did not affect any coral reef zones.        

“The boat named ‘Santrina,’ approximately 90 feet long and five or six meters wide, with license number 604553 went adrift at about 7:45 a.m. when it attempted to arrive in the Isla Mujeres port from the North.

       

“The crew and its captain, José Pujol, had left from the Bahamas and came to the island to stock up on food, water and fuel, in order to continue its route, which is unknown because the captain refused to speak with reporters…”

Cuban-American crew members of the S.S. Santrina, United States license #604553, and sporting the American flag, try to pull their boat to safety. Photo: D.R. 2005 Mario Alonzo, Por Esto!

There’s more to Yolanda’s report:

“Personnel from the Port Captain’s office coordinated the rescue efforts with the help of the S.S. 3 de Diciembre, a boat belonging to Javier Ayala Rejon, and two speedboats belonging to the tourist boat co-op of Isla Mujeres…        

“The S.S. Santrina finally escaped from the sand bank at 12:30 p.m., near the concrete docks, where the crew immediately presented itself to the Mexican Marines who conducted a routine inspection with drug-sniffing canines…

       

“…the officials of the National Marine Park conducted an inspection of the area where the boat had been adrift to confirm that there had been no damage to the marine ecosystem… International Sanitary inspectors, immigration, and customs agents also inspected the boat…”

And there it stood: solid daily journalism on what seemed to be a small story but one important to the island’s residents who care deeply about the preservation of the local coral reefs.

Five Men Arrived, and Six Launched Out: According to local fishermen and witnesses, the S.S. Santrina left for Miami with an extra passenger on board. Photo: D.R. 2005 Mario Alonzo, Por Esto!

Authentic Photojournalist Mario Alonzo snapped pictures of the skipper and crew, and his latest models were none too happy about it, refusing to talk to the press.

Little did anybody know – until those photos received scrutiny across the Caribbean – that the remodeled shrimp boat was carrying a monster onto U.S. shores.

Two Weeks Later, a Terrorist Appears in Miami

On March 29, Channel 41 TV of Miami (a controversial Spanish-language station that, in 2004, conducted interviews with armed paramilitaries who said they were plotting violent overthrows of the Cuban and Venezuelan governments), a broadcaster that counts with the nephew of former Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista as one of its program hosts, announced that Posada Carriles was in South Florida and would seek political asylum in the United States.

Luis Posada Carriles Photo: D.R. 2005 Por Esto!

“If Posada is indeed in Miami, his visit mirrors his shadowy career as a CIA-trained spy, an explosives expert, escape artist, security advisor to presidents across the Caribbean and—some say—terrorist…        

Born in 1928 in the south-central port of Cienfuegos, Posada quickly soured on Castro’s revolution and joined Brigade 2506 before its disastrous landing at the Bay of Pigs.

       

“His ship never hit shore, and he went on to be a CIA operative in Miami, specially trained in the science of explosives.

       

“But by 1967 he was working with the Venezuelan police, tracking down pro-Castro guerrillas. And until 1976, when he and Miami pediatrician Orlando Bosch were arrested in Caracas for the midair bombing of a Cuban airliner that killed 73 people, he had been just another anti-Castro militant.

       

“Venezuela’s cumbersome legal system never convicted either man for the airplane bombing. Bosch eventually won his freedom, but Posada escaped from prison, while awaiting a prosecutor’s appeal, in August 1985.

       

“One year later he turned up in El Salvador, secretly working for U.S. National Security Council member Lt. Col. Oliver North and managing part of the supply operations for contra guerrillas fighting the Marxist-led Sandinista government in Nicaragua….

       

“In 1997, a dozen or so bombs went off in tourist spots around Havana for the first time in decades, killing one tourist and wounding half a dozen others. A young Salvadoran, Raul Ernesto Cruz Leon, was arrested in Havana.

       

“Herald reports linked Posada to the bombings and said Cuban exiles in South Florida had provided $15,000 in funding. The next year, the New York Times quoted Posada as saying he was responsible for the bombings and that leaders of the Cuban American National Foundation had ‘’supported’’ his efforts to topple Castro. Posada later said he lied to the newspaper, and denied a role in the bombings.

       

“Posada then melted back into shadows until November 2000, when he and Miami exiles Pedro Remón, Gaspar Jiménez and Guillermo Novo were arrested in Panama for allegedly plotting to assassinate Castro during a summit there.

       

“They were convicted only on charges of endangering public safety and sentenced to up to eight years, but Panamanian President Mireya Moscoso pardoned them in late 2004. The three Miami men came home, but Posada went into hiding…”

Soon after the report that the terrorist had come ashore in Florida, Miami attorney Eduardo Soto, representing Posada Carriles, announced that his client was “asking for political asylum” in the United States. He claimed, curiously, that Posada Carriles had entered the U.S. over land from Mexico to Texas, “like thousands of people do each day.”

S.S. Santrina captain José Hilario Pujol with the boat’s reputed owner, Santiago Álvarez, being questioned in the office of the Port Captain of Isla Mujeres. Photo: D.R. 2005 Mario Alonzo, Por Esto!

There, in the photos, on the S.S. Santrina, were Santiago Álvarez Fernández-Magriña, owner of the S.S. Santrina, and ship captain José Pujol, a.k.a. ‘Pepín’… considered to be terrorist accomplices of Posada Carriles by Cuban Intelligence.

Por Esto! in Hand, Fidel Takes to the Airwaves

“What is the United States doing giving asylum to someone who exploded a civilian airliner?” boomed Comandante Fidel Castro, waving a copy of the March 16 issue of Por Esto! in the air.

“Look!” he lectured the international journalists present: “Look at what a newspaper can do! This is Authentic Journalism!”

“This is Authentic Journalism!” On April 15, Fidel Castro informs the international press that photographs and reports in the Mexican daily Por Esto! reveal the maritime path of terrorist Luis Posada Carriles toward the United States. Photo: D.R. 2005 Por Esto!

The Associated Press later quoted Mexican immigration officials, who were among the authorities that revised the papers of the crew of the S.S. Santrina back on March 14, as claiming that “all of them were U.S. citizens” and that “the five crew members identified themselves as employees of the Caribbean Dive and Research Foundation, an organization dedicated to oceanic investigation with its headquarters in Miami. The boat was also reported as property of this company.” Mexican immigration confirmed that the boat, when it left Isla Mujeres, did indeed head toward Miami.

By April 18, the daily Por Esto! had learned more details:

• Captain Jose Hilario Pujol’s United States Passport #301981339 lists his date and place of birth as October 21, 1929 in Cuba: Smuggling an illegal alien such as Posada Carriles into the U.S. could result in revocation of his citizenship. Photo: D.R. 2005 Por Esto!

  That the S.S. Santrina, en route from the Bahamas to Miami, had to veer off course in order to go to Isla Mujeres: an island that would not normally be along that route;
  
  
• That the boat’s owner, Santiago Alvarez Fernández Magriña was the same person who, last August 26, sent two executive airplanes to the Panama City airport to retrieve Posada Carriles and his accomplices after their pardon for an assassination attempt during the 2000 presidential summit in that country;
  
  
• That, last August, the U.S. citizens in that assassination plot were brought in one plane to Florida, while the other plane brought Posada Carriles to the San Pedro Sula Airport in Honduras, where he was received by alleged anti-Cuban terrorist Rafael Hernández Nodarse;
  
  
• That, to enter Honduras, Posadas Carriles used a United States passport with the name of Melvin C. Thompson;
  
  
• That Posada Carriles remained various months in Honduras, also traveling in El Salvador, Costa Rica, Guatemala and Belize, from where he entered Mexico through the border city of Chetumal, south of Cancún;
  
  
• That the identity of another “crew member” that Por Esto! had photographed on the S.S. Santrina was that of Miguel Alvarez, another accused terrorist sought by the Cuban government.

At his next press conference, Cuban leader Fidel Castro noted, again, the work of Por Esto!, “a newspaper that has shined a lot of light, has continued investigating, and has revealed very interesting details.”

By the morning of April 20, at his six a.m. press conference, Castro began reading the Por Esto! reports aloud on national television. Complaining about “the total silence” by the governments of Mexico, Honduras and Guatemala regarding Posada Carriles’ stays in those countries, Castro said: “What we do have are new reports about what happened in Isla Mujeres. Por Esto! has kept on investigating and reports new facts….”

Fidel Goes to J-School

Por Esto! publisher Mario Menéndez (standing in the center) converses with students and professors of the Narco News School of Authentic Journalism, Mérida, Yucatán, 2003. Standing with him are his wife, Por Esto!’s director of international relations Alicia Figueroa, and Al Giordano. Seated left to right: Andrea Daugirdas Hawes, Ugo Vallauri and Sunny Angulo. Photo: D.R. 2003 Jeremy Bigwood

Watching that televised phone interview, in Havana, was Fidel Castro, who the next morning again convened the press. He said:

“The fact that the editor of Por Esto! has lived here (in Cuba) is not a problem, because nobody can say that (the Posada Carriles news story) is an invention of Castro or anyone else. The monster, Posada Carriles, is there, among them. He is one of them. He was brought from Isla Mujeres to Miami and this has become a nightmare for Washington. The whole world knows that the man is there! They don’t know what to do with him, but they have the monster with them. Meanwhile, Por Esto! continues doing its own thing: It continues investigating.”

Photo: D.R. 2003 Jeremy Bigwood

In a reference to Menéndez’s role as a professor of the Narco News School of Authentic Journalism, Castro added: “Now he even teaches Authentic Journalism to North American journalists!”

Terrorist Spottings: Civil Society Steps Forward

Meanwhile, fishermen and citizens of Isla Mujeres (where Por Esto! is the dominant daily newspaper) began to step forward as to what they had witnessed: “Five Men Arrived and Six Launched Out” was the headline in the newspaper’s April 24 edition. “Six persons could be seen on the boat” as the S.S. Santrina left Isla Mujeres on March 15, reported Yolanda Gutiérrez, based on interviews with eyewitnesses “who for obvious reasons asked not to be named.”

“One of the crew members noticed that (the people on) a small boat that was entering the Macax lagoon were observing them and, immediately, one of the people who could be seen on the S.S. Santrina ran to take cover inside the boat, although at the moment nobody suspected what was really happening,” reported Gutiérrez. (True to the week’s script, Fidel Castro read her article on national TV the next morning.)

In a May 17 “exclusive interview” with the Miami Herald, Posada Carriles repeated his attorney’s claim that he had entered the United States, over land, from Mexico to Texas, and spun an elaborate account of his supposed Greyhound bus trip to Florida from there.

And yet, contradicting the veracity of his own claims, Posada also told the Herald:

“Posada said that sometime earlier this year, a friend drove him across the border into Belize and then into the Cancún area of Mexico.        

“That was around the same time that the Santrina was docked at Isla Mujeres. Posada declined to say whether he met Alvarez there.”

“Posada declined to say whether he met Alvarez there,” according to the Miami Herald: Crew members of the S.S. Santrina, reportedly owned by Santiago Alvarez of Miami, in Isla Mujeres while terrorist Luis Posada Carriles admits to being nearby. Photo: D.R. 2005 Mario Alonzo, Por Esto!

That might explain the bizarre story offered by Posada Carriles and his attorneys that he somehow entered the U.S. through Texas and not via the easier route from Yucatán to Florida. Yet, it simply does not make sense that someone with Posada Carriles’ economic means and with generous support from the wealthy Miami ex-Cuban mafia would enter Mexico from Belize and travel, at age 77, the arduous 90-hour exodus via land from Cancún to Miami, at the precise moment when his buddies were docked in nearby Isla Mujeres.

Meanwhile, other citizens came forward – in Chetumal, in Cancun and in Isla Mujeres – to bear witness to the presence of the international terrorist Posada Carriles in their locales.

“I saw Luis Posada Carriles,” the former mayor of Isla Mujeres Fidel Villanueva told Por Esto! on May 19. “We all saw him. In reality, don Luis was there. I tied my boat at the Isla Mujeres port and he was there. On a Saturday, we saw him there, watching the boats, but we didn’t know who he was.”

School of Authentic Journalism Class of 2003 on Narco News’ Isla Mujeres Campus. Photo: D.R. 2003 Jeremy Bigwood

“I saw him just as many people in the Isla Mujeres port saw him,” continued former Mayor Villanueva.

On May 26, the daily El Sol of Zacatecas, Mexico, published an interview with the Secretary of the Navy in Mexico, Marco Antonio Peyrot, who confirmed that Posada Carriles entered the United States on the remodeled shrimp boat, the S.S. Santrina, that launched from Isla Mujeres. “This is the Mexican Navy!” proclaimed Fidel Castro, in Havana, at his May 27 press conference. “The Secretary of the Navy in Mexico!”

By protecting his smugglers with an incredible tale that he entered the U.S. through Texas, Posada Carriles’ claim has led to his own immigration hearings being held in El Paso. But, lo’ and behold, his attorneys have filed for a change of venue to Miami, where a federal judiciary, historically supportive of the ex-Cuban “exile community” in South Florida, would be more likely to protect him. (There’s an analysis of the legal questions surrounding Posada’s plea for asylum by Arthur Shaw, published at Vheadline.) And… this just in! A judge has ruled that Posada Carriles will have to press his case not on the home court of Miami, but in Texas.

Meanwhile, along Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, and up and down this hemisphere, an Authentic Journalism “swarm” of the type that just eleven days ago shook Bolivia, is digging deeper into the facts…

The Scent of the Narco

D.R. 2005 Nuez

As Por Esto! and its journalists dug deeper into the path of terrorist Luis Posada Carriles along that same coastline into the United States – the same path as the cocaine, after all – the newspaper began to find an ugly confluence between the maritime smuggling of illegal immigrants from Cuba into Mexico (with the protection of the U.S. and Mexican governments) and the historic maritime smuggling of the drug cocaine (with the protection of the U.S. and Mexican governments) in the same waters.

Renan Castro explains the routes of narco-trafficking in the Caribbean to students and professors of the 2003 Narco News School of Authentic Journalism, at the daily Por Esto! offices in Cancun. Visible left to right: Charlie Hardy, Alex Contreras, Zabeth Flores, Andrea Arenas, Ava Salazar, and Ashley Kennedy. Photo: D.R. 2003 Jeremy Bigwood

Invited to give a presentation at the World Summit Against Terrorism and for Truth and Justice in Havana, Cuba, early this month, Por Esto!’s Quintana Roo editor (and professor of the School of Authentic Journalism) Renán Castro explained that the Posada Carriles story is “the tip of the iceberg of a dangerous operation for all the nations in the region, and specifically for the Republic of Cuba and for my country, Mexico.”

Authentic Journalist Renán Castro addresses the World Summit Against Terrorism and for Justice and Truth in Havana, Cuba, June 2005. Photo: D.R. 2005 Por Esto!

“The dangerous international terrorist Luis Posada Carriles was protected in Guatemala, Belize and Mexico by narco-traffickers that belong to the Central American cartel headed by capo Otto Herrera García, who is associated with Mexican criminal organizations led by Ismael Zambada (a.k.a. El Mayo) and Joaquin “Chapo” Guzmán, all of them associated with the Cuban-American mafia located in Cancún. They directed all the logistics so that (Posada Carriles) could remain for more than a week inside Mexican territory without being detected officially by Mexican authorities.        

“In Cancún, in the state of Quintana Roo, Posada Carriles was supported by a known trafficker of illegal Cuban immigrants named Juan Carlos Riberol (a.k.a. El Profe), who for more than seven years has led a powerful criminal network linked to a group of Cuban-American drug traffickers known as Los Marielitos, who maintain a close relationship with the Cuban-American Foundation with its headquarters in Miami…

       

“We believe the reports of the courageous Colombian journalist Hernando Calvo Ospina who in his presentation here mentioned that the Cuban-American Foundation has, since the 1980s, maintained connections with Colombian narco-traffickers to finance subversive acts against the revolutionary government of Cuba…

       

“The most serious element in all of this is the participation of the Cuban-American Foundation in all these operations that are being constructed to allow for 55 to 100 illegal Cuban immigrants to arrive in Quintana Roo each week, who are then taken to the United States and, when they don’t have family members in Miami, Florida, who can pay the costs of their transport, they are used to smuggle drugs onto U.S. territory.”

“There are things that nobody dares say, and what you have just said here are the words of the valiant,” responds Fidel Castro, to Renan Castro’s presentation about the links between drug trafficking and Posada Carriles’ voyage to the United States. Photo: D.R. 2005 Por Esto!

“There are things that nobody dares say, and what you have just said here are the words of the valiant. They use those boats for drugs. You have denounced something that has not been mentioned until now, that the boat is also dedicated to drug trafficking. That’s serious. But the most serious thing is what they did in violation of United States laws, smuggling terrorists, something that is severely punished in the United States…”

Authentic Journalists: Pull This Thread

Writing from Florida in this month’s Clamor magazine, Narco News School of Authentic Journalism professor Andrew Stelzer writes about his fulltime job as a radio reporter:

“It’s a grind, and often I feel as if I’m not doing what I should be — going deeper into stories, uncovering hidden secrets buried inside the machinery of government and corporations, and holding the powerful accountable for wrongs against society.”

Stelzer speaks of the difficulty for journalists like his colleague and ours, the late Gary Webb, who dug so deeply into the cocaine-trafficking scandals in which Posada Carriles was involved in the 1980s that his newspaper editor, Jerry Ceppos, betrayed the search for the truth and cast Gary out as an industry pariah.

Andrew Stelzer, at the 2004 session of the Narco News School of Authentic Journalism in Cochabamba, Bolivia. Photo: D.R. 2004 Jeremy Bigwood

But, as in the case of Authentic Journalist Yolanda Gutiérrez rising early on the morning of March 14 on Isla Mujeres to report one of those seemingly routine stories, only to end up tugging on a thread that now unravels the gigantic, previously impenetrable, falsehood of Washington’s “wars” against terrorism and drugs, this kind of daily journalism work can be, and is, immensely important.

What Gutiérrez, and photojournalist Mario Alonzo, and Renán Castro, and the rest of the Por Esto! team have that Gary Webb did not have at the San Jose Mercury News in the 1990s is the knowledge and faith that they count with a publisher that will back them to the ultimate consequences as long as they report the truth, and, now, an international network of Authentic Journalists to spread the story far and wide across borders and languages.

Gary Webb – Presente Photo: D.R. 2003 Jeremy Bigwood

And so it is no longer a surprise when someone like Hugo Chávez reads Narco News aloud on his national radio show, or when Fidel Castro reads aloud from Por Esto! on national television. Nor is it any surprise when these developments get translated and exported across the globe, basking the isolated journalists in the sunlight of public protection.

Authentic Journalists of the world: Yolanda Gutiérrez pulled a thread three months ago. She and her Por Esto! colleagues were and are backed by everyone at her newspaper and in our Authentic Journalism renaissance. The informational curtain that had kept the truth about a state-sponsored international terrorist from public view is shredded and coming apart wider each day. There are a thousand frays already. Grab one of those strings, right now, and start pulling. The Posada Carriles case can topple an Empire that is no more formidable than a shrimp boat adrift in a sea of terrorism and narco-trafficking. Pull this string. Yank hard, and do it for justice. Avenge the lies. Do it for Gary Webb.

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Whiteout
The CIA, Drugs and the Press

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Webb's Big Story

Sunday, August 18, 1996, was not a major news day for most American newspapers. The big story of the hour was the preview of the Democratic convention in Chicago.

    About 2,500 miles west of Chicago lies Silicon Valley. Its big newspaper is the San Jose Mercury News, which has a solid reputation as a good regional paper. Like other Knight-Ridder properties, such as the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Detroit Free Press, it has a middle-of-the-road political cast slightly tilted to the Democratic side.

    As the citizens of Santa Clara County browsed through their newspaper that Sunday morning, many of them surely stopped at the first article of a three-part series, under the slightly sinister title "Dark Alliance," subtitled "The Story Behind the Crack Explosion." The words were superimposed on a murky picture of a black man smoking a crack pipe, said image overlaid on the seal of the Central Intelligence Agency. The first day's headline was "America's Crack Plague Has Roots in Nicaraguan War," just above the byline of the author of the series, a reporter in the Mercury News Sacramento bureau named Gary Webb.

    Within a couple of weeks, the story that Webb laid across August 18, 19 and 20 in the San Jose Mercury News would convulse black America and prompt the Central Intelligence Agency first to furious denials and then to one of the most ruthless campaigns of vilification of a journalist since the Agency went after Seymour Hersh in the mid 1970s. Within three weeks, both the Justice Department and the CIA bowed to fierce demands by California Senator Barbara Boxer and Los Angeles Representative Maxine Waters for thorough a investigation. By mid-November, a crowd of 1,500 locals in Waters's own district in South Central Los Angeles would be giving CIA director John Deutch one of the hardest evenings of his life. In terms of public unease about the secret activities of the US government, Webb's series was the most significant event since the Iran/Contra affair nearly blew Ronald Reagan out of the water.

    From the savage assaults on Webb by other members of his profession, those unfamiliar with the series might have assumed that Webb had made a series of wild and unsubstantiated charges, long on dramatic speculation and short on specific data or sourcing. In fact, Webb's series was succinct and narrowly focused.

    Webb stuck closely to a single story line: how a group of Nicaraguan exiles set up a cocaine ring in California, establishing ties with the black street gangs of South Central Los Angeles who manufactured crack out of shipments of powder cocaine. Webb then charted how much of the profits made by the Nicaraguan exiles had been funneled back to the Contra army -- created in the late 1970s by the Central Intelligence Agency, with the mission of sabotaging the Sandinista revolution that had evicted Anastasio Somoza and his corrupt clique in 1979.

    The very first paragraph of the series neatly summed up the theme. It was, as they say in the business, a strong lead, but a justified one. "For the better part of a decade, a San Francisco Bay Area drug ring sold tons of cocaine to the Crips and Bloods street gangs of Los Angeles and funneled millions in drug profits to a Latin American guerrilla army run by the CIA." That San Francisco drug ring was headed by a Nicaraguan exile named Norwin Meneses Cantarero, who served "as the head of security and intelligence" for the leading organization in the Contra coalition, the FDN or Fuerza Democratico Nicaraguense. The FDN was headed by Enrique Bermudez and Adolfo Calero, who had been installed in those positions under the oversight of the CIA. Meneses came from a family intimately linked to the Somoza dictatorship. One brother had been chief of police in Managua. Two other brothers were generals in the force most loyal to Somoza, the National Guard. While his brothers were assisting Somoza in the political dictatorship that darkened Nicaragua for many decades, Norwin Meneses applied his energies mostly to straightforwardly criminal enterprises in the civil sector. He ran a car theft ring and was also one of the top drug traffickers in Nicaragua, where he was known as El Rey del Drogas (the king of drugs). Meneses worked with the approval of the Somoza clan, which duly received its rake-off.

    In 1977, Norwin Meneses felt it necessary to register his disquiet at a Nicaraguan customs probe into his smuggling of high-end North American cars from the US into Nicaragua. The Meneses gang murdered the chief of customs. Owing to Norwin's powerful family, the case was never prosecuted.

    The US Drug Enforcement Agency and other agencies had been keeping files on Meneses since at least 1974. Yet he was granted political refugee status in July 1979, when he and other members of Somoza's elite fled to the US. Meneses landed in San Francisco as part of what became known locally as the Nicaraguan "gold rush." Here he lost no time in rebuilding his criminal enterprises in stolen cars and drugs.

    Meneses's contact in Los Angeles was another Nicaraguan exile, Oscar Danilo Blandon. Blandon had left Managua in June 1979, a month before Meneses, on the eve of Somoza's downfall. The son of a Managua slumlord, Blandon had earned a master's degree in marketing from the University of Bogota in Colombia and had headed Somoza's agricultural export program. Agricultural exports were an important component of the country's mainly ranching- and coffee-based economy, with the Somoza family itself owning no less than a quarter of the nation's agricultural land.

    In his position as head of the export program, Blandon had developed close ties to the US Department of Commerce and the US State Department. He secured $27 million in USAID funding and was well known to the US military and the Central Intelligence Agency, both of which had a commanding presence in Somoza's Nicaragua. (Somoza had sent his officer corps for training in the US, and the CIA station chief was the most powerful foreigner in Managua.)

    Blandon's wife, Chepita, also came from a powerful clan, the Murillo family. One of her relatives was the mayor of Managua. Like many other Somoza supporters, both the Blandon and Murillo families lost most of their fortunes in the 1979 revolution and burned with the desire to evict the popular government headed by the Sandinista commanders.

    Blandon and his wife settled in Los Angeles, where he started a used-car business. He also began to involve himself in Nicaraguan emigre politics. Testifying on February 3, 1994 as a government witness before a federal grand jury investigating the Meneses family's drug ring in San Francisco, Blandon said he drove to San Francisco for several meetings with Norwin Meneses "to start the movement, the Contra revolution." Blandon had known the Meneses family in Nicaragua. In fact, Blandon said, his mother shared Meneses's last name of Cantarero, "so we are related." He said he and Meneses "met with the politics people," but couldn't find a way to raise big sums of cash.

    In the spring of 1981, Blandon got a phone call from an old friend and business associate from Managua named Donald Barrios. Barrios, then living in Miami, was moving in high-level Nicaraguan emigre circles. This group included General Gustavo Medina, once an important intelligence officer in Somoza's National Guard, a position in which he had long-standing ties to the CIA. Blandon later testified that Barrios "started telling me we had to raise some money and send it to Honduras." Barrios instructed Blandon to go to Los Angeles International Airport to meet Meneses. Blandon and Meneses then flew to Honduras and, in the capital city of Tegucigalpa, met with Enrique Bermudez, former National Guardsman and military commander of the FDN.

    In Somoza's final days, President Jimmy Carter had made a last-ditch effort to maintain a US-backed regime in Nicaragua even if Somoza should be forced to quit. The plan was to preserve the bloodthirsty National Guard as the custodian of US interests. When this plan failed and the Sandinistas swept to power, Carter ordered the initial organization of what later became known as the Contras, operating out of Honduras. The CIA mustered Argentinian officers fresh from their own death squad campaigns, and these men began to organize the exiled National Guardsmen into a military force.

    Bermudez was key to this CIA-organized operation from the start. He had been a colonel in the National Guard, had trained at the US National Defense College outside Washington, D.C., and had served from 1976 to July 1979 as Somoza's military attache in Washington. Furnished with $300,000 in CIA money, Bermudez took command of the fledgling Contra force in Honduras. In the summer of 1981, at the dawn of the Reagan administration, Bermudez held a press conference in Honduras. In language drafted by his CIA handlers, Bermudez announced the formation of the FDN and his own position as commander of its military wing. The CIA script later installed Adolfo Calero, formerly the Coca-Cola concessionaire in Managua, as the FDN's civilian head, operating mainly out of the United States, where he was under tight CIA supervision.

    Blandon and Meneses arrived to meet Bermudez at a moment of financial strain for the Contra army, then in formation. The CIA had provided seed money, but it wasn't until November 23, 1981 that Reagan approved National Security Directive 17, which provided a budget of $19.3 million for the Contras, via the CIA. The Contras, Bermudez said, needed money urgently, and, Blandon later testified to a US federal grand jury, it was at this meeting that the need for drug money to finance the Contras was proposed. "There's a saying," Blandon testified, "that `the ends justify the means.' And that's what Mr. Bermudez told us in Honduras."

    Bermudez was not repelled by the moral implications of drug smuggling. In fact, evidence gathered during congressional hearings in the mid-1980s suggests that Bermudez himself had previously had a hand in the drug trade. "Bermudez was the target of a government-sponsored drug sting operation," said Senator John Kerry, who chaired a committee that investigated charges of Contra cocaine smuggling. "He has been involved in drug running." Kerry charged that the CIA had protected Bermudez from arrest. "The law enforcement officials know that the sting was called back in the interest of protecting the Contras," Kerry concluded.

    Back in San Francisco, Meneses began educating Blandon, the graduate in marketing, on the finer points of cocaine wholesaling. Trained in accountancy, Blandon did some work on Meneses's books and rapidly became aware of the substantial scale of his cocaine operation. In 1981 alone, Blandon later testified, the Meneses ring moved 900 kilos of cocaine. At that time the wholesale price of a kilo of cocaine was $50,000. The cocaine was coming from Colombia via Mexico and Miami and then to the Bay Area, where it was stashed in about a dozen warehouses. Meneses was also keeping cocaine at the house of his mistress, Blanca Margarita Castano, who lived near the old Cow Palace in the Hunters Point area. Eventually Meneses's romantic complications prompted him to relocate his wife and young children to Los Angeles, with Mrs. Meneses ensconced in a silk-screening business under the eye of Blandon, who also set up a restaurant for Mrs. Meneses called Chickalina. Both the silk-screen shop and the restaurant became fronts for the drug business. As Blandon put it, "It was marketing, okay? Marketing."

    As a cocaine wholesaler in Los Angeles, Blandon got off to a slow start. He'd pick up a couple of kilos from Meneses, along with a list of local buyers, and he'd do the rounds in his white Toyota. But business remained static until he made a fateful contact with a young black fellow living in South Central named Rick Ross. Ross was born in Troup, Texas and as a young child moved to Los Angeles with his mother. He'd shown promise as a tennis player in high school and had set his sights on a college scholarship, when his coach found he could neither read nor write and dropped him. Ross went to Los Angeles Trade Technical College, was number three on the tennis team, and entered a course in bookbinding. To make some money he started selling stolen car parts, was arrested, and had to quit school.

    Ross first heard about cocaine, at the time a middle-class drug, from a college friend, and it wasn't long before he made a connection with a Nicaraguan dealer named Henry Corrales. Corrales gave Ross a good price, and he was able to make a decent profit in reselling to the Crips gang in South Central and Compton.

    As we shall see, the economics of cocaine became a bitter issue in the uproar over Webb's series. Was it true that the cocaine prices set by the Nicaraguans rendered the drug affordable to poor people for the first time? Arguably, this was the case -- and indeed there is more evidence to substantiate such a thesis than Webb was able to offer in his tightly edited series. Cheap cocaine began to appear in South Central Los Angeles in early 1982. Ross got it from Corrales, who worked for Meneses and Blandon, and it wasn't long before Ross went directly to Blandon.

    As Ross later told Webb, the prices offered by Blandon gave him command of the Los Angeles market. He was buying his cocaine supplies at sometimes $10,000 less per kilo than the going rate. "It was unreal," Ross remembered. "We were just wiping everyone out." His connections to the Bloods and Crips street gangs solved the distribution problems that had previously beleaguered Blandon. By 1983, Ross -- now known as "Freeway Ricky" -- was buying over a 100 kilos of cocaine a week and selling as much as $3 million worth of crack a day.

    Drugs weren't the only commodity Blandon was selling to Ross. The young entrepreneur was also receiving from the Nicaraguan a steady stream of weapons and surveillance equipment, including Uzi submachine guns, semi-automatic handguns, miniature videocameras, recording equipment, police scanners and Colt AR-15 assault rifles. Ross told Webb that Blandon even tried to sell his partner a grenade launcher.

    Blandon's source for this equipment was a man named Ronald J. Lister. Lister, who figures prominently in the story, was a former Laguna Beach police detective who at that time was running two security firms -- Mundy Security and Pyramid International Security Consultants. Blandon testified at Rick Ross's trial in March 1996 that Lister would attend meetings of Contra supporters in Southern California to demonstrate his arsenal. Lister had worked as an informant for the DEA and FBI, and boasted of his ties to the CIA during the 1980s, when the Reagan administration was waging war in Central America.

    Business was indeed booming. In 1981 Meneses had, according to Blandon's reading of his account books, been moving 900 kilos a year. Two years later the numbers had surged to around 5,000 kilos a year -- and the latter figure represents just the amount Blandon's LA operation was handling. Ross was a brilliant businessman. His greatest coup was to recognize the potential in recent technological innovations for the mass marketing of cocaine. Ross didn't invent the process whereby powder cocaine was converted into the "rocks" of crack that could be sold at affordable street prices; crack had first appeared in poor city neighborhoods on the West Coast in 1979. But Ross was the first to take full advantage. Crack could be bought for $4 to $5 a hit. It gave an intense, although brief, high, and was highly addictive. Consequently, as the furious black reaction to the Webb series tells us, crack engendered social disaster in neighborhoods such as South Central. Families were ravaged by addiction. Addicts stole and robbed to buy the next hit. Gangs fought bloody battles for control of turf. The plague elicited a savage response from the state. Prison sentences were a hundred times more severe for crack-related offenses than for powder cocaine.

    By 1985, Ross and his affiliates in the street gangs had begun exporting their crack operation to what the DEA reckoned to be at least a dozen other cities. Obviously, the sums accruing to Danilo Blandon in the drug trade were enormous, and he testified at Ross's trial that "whatever we were running in LA, the profit was going to the Contra revolution." Duane "Dewey" Clarridge, the CIA officer in charge of covert operations in Latin America, has denied, both in the press and in his memoir, allegations that the CIA would have sanctioned or turned a blind eye to Contra drug shipments for funding reasons. The CIA's Contra operation, said Clarridge, "was funded by the US government. There was enough money to fund the operation. We didn't need, and neither did the Contras need the money from anybody else."

    But from the beginning, Clarridge's plans for the Contras were much more ambitious than the initial scheme of the Reagan administration, which was to use them as part of an effort to seal off Nicaragua and try to stop it from aiding guerrilla struggles in neighboring countries. Clarridge wanted a covert war. In the summer of 1981, a week after becoming head of the CIA's Latin American operations, he took his recommendations to CIA chief William Casey: "My plan was simple. 1. Take the war to Nicaragua. 2. Start killing Cubans." This quickly evolved into a far-ranging program of assassinations, industrial sabotage and incursions into Nicaraguan territory from bases in Honduras and Costa Rica.

    The problem for Clarridge and for the CIA was that the US Congress tended to be dubious of such large plans, which were not politically popular. The initial appropriation was meager, amounting to only $19 million in 1982 for the CIA's covert operations against Nicaragua. In the spring of 1982 such covert costs soared when the Argentinians who had been supervising day-to-day military training for the fledgling Contra force in Honduras pulled out at the onset of the Falklands/Malvinas War. Later that year, Congress moved to restrict CIA aid for the Contras. At the last second Rep. Edward Boland of Massachusetts introduced an amendment to the Defense Appropriations Bill for fiscal 1983, prohibiting the CIA from spending any money "for the purpose of overthrowing the government of Nicaragua." The Agency was given only $21 million outside Boland's restrictions for activities related to the Contras.

    In December 1983 Congress capped Contra funding for fiscal 1984 at only $24 million, which was roughly a quarter of what the Reagan administration had claimed was necessary for a proper fighting force. The shortfall was what drove Robert McFarlane and Oliver North to hunt for alternative sources of funding -- for example, asking the Saudis for $1 million a month. Clarridge went on a similar mission to South Africa. North was in the process of setting up covert bank accounts in mid-1984.

    In April 1984, it emerged that the CIA had undertaken the mining of Nicaraguan harbors. The political uproar in the US resulted in the most restrictive of the Boland amendments, passed by Congress in October 1984. During fiscal 1985, the amendment read, "no funds available to the Central Intelligence Agency, the Department of Defense, or any other agency or entity of the United States involved in intelligence activities may be obligated or expended for the purpose or which have the effect of supporting, directly or indirectly, military or paramilitary operations in Nicaragua by any nation, group, organization, movement, or individual." The year 1985 also marked the peak of the Meneses-Blandon drug sales, at the time of the CIA's greatest need for money for its Contra army. The Boland amendment expired on October 17, 1986, and immediately the portion of the CIA budget allocated for the Contras rose to $100 million.

    During this stressful period of desperate Contra need for cash, when Reagan secretly decreed to National Security Adviser McFarlane that whatever Congress might stipulate, the Contras had to be kept together "body and soul," the drug operation run by Contra supporters Meneses and Blandon led a charmed life, without any disruption of its activities by law enforcement. Indeed, several law enforcement officers have complained publicly that actions targeted against Meneses were blocked by NSC officers in the Reagan administration and by the CIA.

    Only a few weeks after the Blandon-Meneses partnership was launched in the summer of 1981, a young DEA agent in San Francisco named Susan Smith began an investigation of Norwin Meneses. Smith had picked up rumors on the street that a group of Nicaraguan exiles headed by Meneses was selling cocaine in the Bay Area and sending money and weapons back to Central America. She checked the DEA files on Meneses and found a bulging record of the man's criminal activities, dating back to a 1978 FBI report charging that Norwin and his brother Ernest were "smuggling 20 kilos of cocaine at a time into the United States." One of the entry points for Meneses's cocaine was apparently New Orleans, where Smith came across records from the DEA's "Operation Alligator." This government sting had busted a large cocaine ring in New Orleans. One of the arrested men, Manuel Porro, told DEA agent Bill Cunningham that Meneses was the source of the cocaine. However, Meneses was never arrested.

    A few months later, Smith discovered, the San Francisco DEA office received a tip that Meneses was also the supplier for cocaine seized in a major bust in Tampa, Florida in February 1980. The cocaine had apparently been flown to Tampa from Meneses's ranch in Costa Rica, to be distributed by Meneses's relatives. Smith also learned that, beginning in early June 1981, Detective Joseph Lee of the Baldwin Park Police Department in Los Angeles had been investigating a Nicaraguan dealer named Julio Bermudez who was making two trips a month to San Francisco, where he would pick up 20 pounds of cocaine at a time from Meneses's warehouses.

    Smith mustered this information into an affidavit for a search warrant. dated November 16, 1981, and began trailing Meneses and his dealers. On one occasion, Smith followed Meneses's men to a house in Daly City, just south of San Francisco, which was owned by Carlos Cabezas, a Nicaraguan lawyer and accountant who had served as a pilot in Somoza's National Guard. Cabezas was a leading figure in the anti-Sandinista movement in California.

    Then Smith's superiors abruptly terminated her investigation and she was reassigned to cover drug dealing by motorcycle gangs in Oakland. Despite her huge file on Meneses, Smith told Webb, DEA managers evinced no interest. Smith quit the DEA in 1984, asking her superiors if they wanted her extensive files on the Meneses drug ring. They declined, and the files were shredded.

    What's more than a little curious about the DEA's lack of interest in Meneses in 1984 is that in February 1983 the FBI had scored one of the largest cocaine seizures in California history, in the so-called Frogman case. Members of the Meneses drug syndicate had been caught attempting to swim ashore at the San Francisco docks from a Colombian freighter, the Ciudad de Cuta, with 400 pounds of cocaine. According to the DEA, the drugs had a street value at that time of more than $100 million. Ultimately, thirty-five people were arrested in the Frogman case, including Julio Zavala and the man whose house Susan Smith had staked out, Carlos Cabezas. The Frogman trial was going on at the very moment the DEA was telling Susan Smith that information about Cabezas and Meneses held no interest for it.

    But then again, the Frogman case was not exactly your run-of-the-mill drug trial. On November 28, 1984, Cabezas testified in that trial that this cocaine-smuggling operation was a funding source for the Contras. Furthermore, he testified that the cocaine he brought into the US came from Norwin Meneses's ranch in Costa Rica. His testimony at the trial was limited, because the judge would not allow the defense to explore the CIA's role in any detail. In a subsequent interview recorded for a British TV documentary, Cabezas said that the CIA was aware of, and in fact had supervised, a crucial phase of his drug-trafficking operation. "It wasn't until the second trip that I had to go to Costa Rica," Cabezas said, "when I met this guy [Ivan Gomez] that's supposed to be the CIA agent. They told me who he was and the reason he was there, it was to make sure that the money was given to the right people and nobody was taking advantage of the situation and nobody was taking profits that they were not supposed to. And that was it. He was making sure that the money goes to the Contra revolution."

    Concerns that the drug money might have been diverted to the bank accounts of Contra leaders were not without foundation. Two of Cabezas' colleagues in this Costa Rica/San Francisco cocaine enterprise were Troilo and Ferdinand Sanchez, close relatives of Contra leader Aristides Sanchez. Sanchez was a member of the FDN's directorate. He and his relatives maintained an offshore bank account in the Dutch Antilles, which Oliver North's aide Robert Owen suspected was being refreshed with cash intended for the Contra effort. Owen wrote a memo to North that he believed that "the CIA is being had." North took no action. Clearly, Reagan's National Security staff knew well that drug money from the Meneses syndicate was supposed to go, with CIA approval, to the Contra war effort, and they were chagrined that the money might have been diverted from that mission.

    One of the other leaders of the Frogman operation was Julio Zavala, a brother-in-law of Cabezas. After his arrest, FBI agents seized $36,800 in cash from Zavala, which the government considered to be drug money and therefore subject to seizure. Zavala claimed that the money was cash meant to buy weapons for the Contras. His attorney, Judd Iverson, submitted letters to the court from two Contra leaders backing up Zavala's story. US District Attorney Joseph P. Russoniello, who had also been urged by the CIA to return the money, stipulated in a court filing on October 2, 1984 that the money would be given back. In 1987 this deal came to the attention of Jack Blum, investigator for Senator John Kerry's committee probing the stories of Contra drug running. Blum and Kerry called Russoniello to ask about the case. "We had a telephone conversation with Mr. Russoniello," Blum recalled during his testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee on October 23, 1996, "and he shouted at us. He shouted at Senator John Kerry, who chaired the committee. He accused us of being subversives for wanting to get into it."

    So Zavala got his money back, though he did spend some time in prison. Norwin Meneses, the kingpin of the operation, was never indicted or arrested for his part in the Frogman case. Witnesses testified before Kerry's committee in 1988 that Meneses had been tipped off about the planned arrest "by his sources in US law enforcement." Another witness said he believed that Meneses was working "as an FBI informant" at the time of the arrest.

    In fact, the US government did not indict Norwin Meneses until 1989, after the end of the Contra war, and the indictment was for conspiracy to sell precisely 1 kilo of cocaine in 1984. By then Meneses, sensing his veil of protection might have worn thin, had left San Francisco for his ranch in Costa Rica. No attempt was made to secure Meneses's arrest or to persuade the Costa Rican government to extradite him. The indictment wasn't made public and was kept under seal in San Francisco at the request of the federal government. Interestingly enough, 1984 -- the year for which the US government chose to charge Meneses with dealing in cocaine -- was the very year in which he had been most conspicuous as a big figure in the Nicaraguan emigre movement supporting the Contras. During that year Meneses had been entertaining Contra leaders, hosting Contra fundraising dinners and having his photograph taken with Adolfo Calero.

    Webb uncovered evidence that even Contra supporters in San Francisco were uncomfortable about the source of Meneses's disbursements in the Contra cause. The Mercury News series included an interview with, Dennis Ainsworth, a former Cal State/Hayward economics professor who was a well-connected Reagan Republican and active in the Contra cause. In 1985 he was told by Renato Pena, an FDN leader in San Francisco, "that the FDN is involved in drug smuggling with the aid of Norwin Meneses who also buys arms for Enrique Bermudez, a leader of the FDN." Ainsworth finally told his friends in the Reagan administration about Meneses, and asked what they knew about the Nicaraguan. He was told that the DEA had a drug file on Meneses "two feet thick." Ainsworth gave a detailed interview to the FBI on February 27, 1987, a severely edited version of which had recently been declassified by the US National Archives. In this interview, Ainsworth not only backed the contention that Meneses was using drug profits to buy weapons for the Contras, but also gave details of how US Customs and DEA agents trying to investigate Meneses "felt threatened and intimidated by National Security interference in legitimate narcotics smuggling investigations."

    Norwin Meneses was finally arrested in 1990, when Nicaraguan authorities caught him trying to transport 750 kilos of cocaine. Reporters in Managua soon unearthed the sealed San Francisco indictment. The Nicaraguan police and the Nicaraguan judge presiding over Meneses's trial expressed outrage that the United States had known about the drug lord's activities for fifteen years, but had never arrested him. "We always felt there was an unanswered question," recalled Rene Vita, a former narcotics investigator, to the British TV documentary crew. "How was it that this man, who was known to be involved in drug-related activities, moved so freely around Central America, the US and Mexico?"

    Meneses had been turned in to the Nicaraguan police by his longtime associate Enrique Miranda, a former intelligence officer in Somoza's National Guard, who had been Meneses's link to the Bogota cocaine cartel in Colombia. Miranda testified that from 1981 through 1985 Meneses transported his cocaine out of Colombia through the services of Marcos Aguado, a Nicaraguan who had become a senior officer in the Salvadoran air force. Aguado was a contract pilot for the US "humanitarian aid" flights to the Contras, based at Ilopango airbase in San Salvador. The overseer for such operations at this airport was a career CIA officer, Felix Rodriguez. Miranda testified that Aguado flew Salvadoran air force planes to Colombia to pick up cocaine shipments and delivered them to US Air Force bases in Texas. On the basis of Miranda's testimony, Norwin Meneses was sentenced by the Nicaraguan court to thirty years in prison.

    Danilo Blandon enjoyed good fortune as far as any intrusion by law enforcement into his affairs was concerned. All the way through the first half of the 1980s, the prime wholesaler of cocaine to Los Angeles was not once raided or inconvenienced in any way by any authorities. The Boland amendment barring aid to the Contras was lifted on October 17, 1986. On October 27, 1986, warrants were issued by the FBI, IRS and Los Angeles County Sheriff's office for the arrest of Blandon and his wife. The arrest warrants from the LA Sheriff's office included an affidavit from Sergeant Tom Gordon, charging that "Danilo Blandon is in charge of a sophisticated cocaine smuggling and distribution organization operating in southern California. The moneys gained from the sales of cocaine are transported to Florida and laundered through Orlando Murillo who is a high-ranking officer of a chain of banks in Florida named Government Securities Corporation. From this bank the moneys are filtered to the Contra rebels to buy arms in the war in Nicaragua." Orlando Murillo was a cousin of Blandon's wife, Chepita. Police raided twelve warehouses suspected of being used by Blandon. No drugs were found. The police were convinced that Blandon had received a tip-off about the impending raids and had cleaned up.

    One of the targets in those early morning raids on October 27 was the Mission Viejo home of Ronald Lister, the former Laguna Beach police detective who had been the arms supplier to the Blandon ring. Lister opened the door wearing his bathrobe, and sheriff's deputies flooded in. Lister became belligerent and told the deputies they were "making a big mistake." He informed the police that he didn't deal drugs, but that he did do a lot of business in Latin America for the US government, and that his friends in the government weren't going to be happy about the deputies ransacking his house.

    Then Lister picked up the phone and said he was calling his friend "Scott Weekly of the CIA." The cops continued in the search, and though they found no cocaine, they did turn up an amazing cache of weapons, military manuals and training videotapes. Even though Lister escaped arrest, the police seized boxes of military material. Again, the police were convinced that someone had tipped Lister to the impending raid. These suspicions magnified when, less than a week later, all of the evidence carted from Lister's house mysteriously disappeared from the Sheriff's Department's property room.

(C) 1998 Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair All rights reserved. ISBN: 1-85984-897-4

Question and Answer Session

Gary Webb: I've been instructed to repeat the question, so...

Voice From the Audience: You talked about George Bush pardoning people. Given George Bush's history with the CIA, do you know when he first knew about this, and what he knew?

Gary Webb: Well, I didn't at the time I wrote the book, I do now. The question was, when did George Bush first know about this? The CIA, in its latest report, said that they had prepared a detailed briefing for the vice president -- I think it was 1985? -- on all these allegations of contra drug trafficking and delivered it to him personally. So, it's hard for George to say he was out of the loop on this one.

I'll tell you another thing, one of the most amazing things I found in the National Archives was a report that had been written by the U.S. Attorney's Office in Tampa -- I believe it was 1987. They had just busted a Colombian drug trafficker named Allen Rudd, and they were using him as a cooperating witness. Rudd agreed to go undercover and set up other drug traffickers, and they were debriefing him.

Now, let me set the stage for you. When you are being debriefed by the federal government for use as an informant, you're not going to go in there and tell them crazy-sounding stories, because they're not going to believe you, they're going to slap you in jail, right? What Rudd told them was, that he was involved in a meeting with Pablo Escobar, who was then the head of the Medellín cartel. They were working out arrangements to set up cocaine shipments into South Florida. He said Escobar started ranting and raving about that damned George Bush, and now he's got that South Florida Drug Task Force set up which has really been making things difficult, and the man's a traitor. And he used to deal with us, but now he wants to be president and thinks that he's double-crossing us. And Rudd said, well, what are you talking about? And Escobar said, we made a deal with that guy, that we were going to ship weapons to the contras, they were in there flying weapons down to Columbia, we were unloading weapons, we were getting them to the contras, and the deal was, we were supposed to get our stuff to the United States without any problems. And that was the deal that we made. And now he double-crossed us.

So the U.S. Attorney heard this, and he wrote this panicky memo to Washington saying, you know, this man has been very reliable so far, everything he's told us has checked out, and now he's saying that the Vice President of the United States is involved with drug traffickers. We might want to check this out. And it went all the way up -- the funny thing about government documents is, whenever it passes over somebody's desk, they have to initial it. And this thing was like a ladder, it went all the way up and all the way up, and it got up to the head of the Criminal Division at the Justice Department, and he looked at it and said, looks like a job for Lawrence Walsh! And so he sent it over to Walsh, the Iran-contra prosecutor, and he said, here, you take it, you deal with this. And Walsh's office -- I interviewed Walsh, and he said, we didn't have the authority to deal with that. We were looking at Ollie North. So I said, did anybody investigate this? And the answer was, "no." And that thing sat in the National Archives for ten years, nobody ever looked at it.

Voice From the Audience: Is that in your book?

Gary Webb: Yeah.

Voice From the Audience: Thank you.

Audience Member #1: Well, first of all, I'd like to thank you for pursuing this story, you have a lot of guts to do it.

[Applause from the audience.]

Gary Webb: This is what reporters are supposed to do. This is what reporters are supposed to do. I don't think I was doing anything special.

Audience Member #1: Still, there's not too many guys like you that are doing it.

Gary Webb: That's true, they've all still got jobs.

[Laughter, scattered applause.]

Audience Member #1: I just had a couple of questions, the first one is, I followed the story on the web site, and I thought it was a really great story, it was really well done. And I noticed that the San Jose Mercury News seemed to support you for a while, and then all the sudden that support collapsed. So I was wondering what your relationship is with your editor there, and how that all played out, and when they all pulled out the rug from under you.

Gary Webb: Well, the support collapsed probably after the LA Times... The Washington [Post] came out first, the New York Times came out second, and the LA Times came out third, and they started getting nervous. There's a phenomenon in the media we all know, it's called "piling on," and they started seeing themselves getting piled on. They sent me back down to Central America two more times to do more reporting and I came back with stories that were even more outrageous than what they printed in the newspaper the first time. And they were faced with a situation of, now we're accusing Oliver North of being involved in drug trafficking. Now we're accusing the Justice Department of being part and parcel to this. Geez, if we get beat up over accusing a couple of CIA agents of being involved in this, what the hell is going to happen now? And they actually said, I had memos saying, you know, if we run these stories, there is going to be a firestorm of criticism.

So, I think they took the easy way out. The easy way out was not to go ahead and do the story. It was to back off the story. But they had a problem, because the story was true. And it isn't every day that you're confronted with how to take a dive on a true story.

They spent several months -- honestly, literally, because I was getting these drafts back and forth -- trying to figure out how to say, we don't support this story, even though it's true. And if you go back and you read the editor's column, you'll see that the great difficulty that he had trying to take a dive on this thing. And he ended up talking about "gray areas" that should have been explored a little more and "subtleties" that we should have not brushed over so lightly, without disclosing the fact that the series had originally been four parts and they cut it to three parts, because "nobody reads four part series' anymore." So, that was one reason.

The other reason was, you know, one of the things you learn very quickly when you get into journalism is that there's safety in numbers. Editors don't like being out there on a limb all by themselves. I remember very clearly going to press conferences, coming back, writing a story, sending it in, and my editor calling up and saying, well gee, this isn't what AP wrote. Or, the Chronicle just ran their story, and that's not what the Chronicle wrote. And I'd say, "Fine. Good." And they said, no, we've got to make it the same, we don't want to be different. We don't want our story to be different from everybody else's.

And so what they were seeing at the Mercury was, the Big Three newspapers were sitting on one side of the fence, and they were out there by themselves, and that just panicked the hell out of them. So, you have to understand newspaper mentality to understand it a little bit, but it's not too hard to understand cowardice, either. I think a lot of that was that they were just scared as hell to go ahead with the story.

Audience Member #1: Were they able to look you in the eye, and...

Gary Webb: No. They didn't, they just did this over the phone. I went to Sacramento.

Audience Member #1: When did you find out about it, and what did you...

Gary Webb: Oh, they called me up at home, two months after I turned in my last four stories, and said, we're going to write a column saying, you know, we're not going ahead with this. And that's when I jumped in the car and drove up there and said, what the hell's going on? And I got all these mealy-mouthed answers, you know, geez, gray areas, subtleties, one thing or another... But I said, tell me one thing that's wrong with the story, and nobody could ever point to anything. And today, to this day, nobody has ever said there was a factual error in that story.

[Inaudible question from the audience.]

Gary Webb: The question was, the editors are one thing, what about the readers? Um... who cares about the readers? Honestly. The reader's don't run the newspaper.

[Another inaudible question from the audience regarding letters to the editor and boycotts of the newspaper.]

Gary Webb: Well, a number of them did, and believe me, the newspaper office was flooded with calls and emails. And the newspaper, to their credit, printed a bunch of them, calling it the most cowardly thing they'd ever seen. But in the long run, the readers, you know, don't run the place. And that's the thing about newspaper markets these days. You folks really don't have any choice! What else are you going to read? And the editors know this.

When I started in this business, we had two newspapers in town where I worked in Cincinnati. And we were deathly afraid that if we sat on a story for 24 hours, the Cincinnati Inquirer was going to put it in the paper, and we were going to look like dopes. We were going to look like we were covering stuff up, we were going to look like we were protecting somebody. So we were putting stuff in the paper without thinking about it sometimes, but we got it in the paper. Now, we can sit on stuff for months, who's going to find out about it? And even if somebody found out about it, what are they going to do? That's the big danger that everybody has sort of missed. These one-newspaper towns, you've got no choice. You've got no choice. And television? Television's not going to do it. I mean, they're down filming animals at the zoo!

[Laughter and applause.]

Audience Member #2: I assume you have talked to John Cummings, the one that wrote Compromised, that book?

Gary Webb: I talked to Terry Reed, who was the principal author on that, yeah.

Audience Member #2: Well, that was a well-documented book, and I had just finished reading this when I happened to look down and see the headlines on the Sunday paper. And he stated that Oliver North told him personally that he was a CIA asset that manufactured weapons.

Gary Webb: Right.

Audience Member #2: When he discovered that they were importing cocaine, he got out of there. And they chased him with his family across country for two years trying to catch him. But he had said in that book that Oliver North told him that Vice President Bush told Oliver North to dirty Clinton's men with the drug money. Which I assumed was what Whitewater was all about, was finding the laundering and trying to find something on Clinton. Do you know anything about that?

Gary Webb: Yeah, let me sum up your question. Essentially, you're asking about the goings-on in Mena, Arkansas, because of the drug operations going on at this little air base in Arkansas while Clinton was governor down there. The fellow you referred to, Terry Reed, wrote a book called Compromised which talked about his role in this corporate operation in Mena which was initially designed to train contra pilots -- Reed was a pilot -- and it was also designed after the Boland Amendment went into effect to get weapons parts to the contras, because the CIA couldn't provide them anymore. And as Reed got into this weapons parts business, he discovered that the CIA was shipping cocaine back through these weapons crates that were coming back into the United States. And when he blew the whistle on it, he was sort of sent on this long odyssey of criminal charges being filed against him, etcetera etcetera etcetera. A lot of what Reed wrote is accurate as far as I can tell, and a lot of it was documented.

There is a House Banking Committee investigation that has been going on now for about three years, looking specifically at Mena, Arkansas, looking specifically at a drug trafficker named Barry Seal, who was one of the biggest cocaine and marijuana importers in the south side of the United States during the 1980s. Seal was also, coincidentally, working for the CIA, and was working for the Drug Enforcement Administration.

I don't know how many of you remember this, but one night Ronnie Reagan got on TV and held up a grainy picture, and said, here's proof that the Sandanistas are dealing drugs. Look, here's Pablo Escobar, and they're all loading cocaine into a plane, and this was taken in Nicaragua. This was the eve of a vote on the contra aid. That photograph was set up by Barry Seal. The plane that was used was Seal's plane, and it was the same plane that was shot down over Nicaragua a couple of years later that Eugene Hasenfus was in, that broke open the whole Iran-contra scandal.

The Banking Committee is supposed to be coming out with a report in the next couple of months looking at the relationship between Barry Seal, the U.S. government and Clinton's folks. Alex Cockburn has done a number of stories on this company called Park-On Meter down in Russellville, Arkansas, that's hooked up with Clinton's family, hooked up with Hillary's law firm, that sort of thing. To me, that's a story people ought to be looking at. I never thought Whitewater was much of a story, frankly. What I thought the story was about was Clinton's buddy Dan Lasater, the bond broker down there who was a convicted cocaine trafficker. Clinton pardoned him on his way to Washington. Lasater was a major drug trafficker, and Terry Reed's book claims Lasater was part and parcel with this whole thing.

Voice From the Audience: Cockburn's newsletter is called CounterPunch, and he's done a good job of defending you in it.

Gary Webb: Yeah, Cockburn has also written a book called Whiteout, which is a very interesting look at the history of CIA drug trafficking. Actually, I think it's selling pretty well itself. The New York Times hated it, of course, but what else is new?

Audience Member #2: Well I just wanted to mention that he states also -- I guess it was Terry Reed who was actually doing the work -- he said Bush was running the whole thing as vice president.

Gary Webb: I think that George Bush's role in this whole thing is one of the large unexplored areas of it.

Audience Member #2: Which is why I think Reagan put him in as vice president, because of his position with the CIA.

Gary Webb: Well, you know, that whole South Florida Drug Task Force was full of CIA operatives. Full of them. This was supposed to be our vanguard in the war against cocaine cartels, and if those Colombians are to be believed, this was the vehicle that we were using to ship arms and allow cocaine into the country, this Drug Task Force. Nobody's looked at that. But there are lots of clues that there's a lot to be dug out.

Audience Member #3: Thank you, Gary. I lost my feature columnist position at my college paper for writing a satire of Christianity some years ago, and...

Gary Webb: That'll do it, yeah. [Laughter from the audience.]

Audience Member #3: And I lost my job twice in the last five years because of my activism in the community, but I got a job [inaudible]. But my question is, I knew someone in the mid-'80s who said that he was in the Navy, and that he had information that the Navy was involved in delivering cocaine to this country. Another kind of bombshell, I'd like to have you comment on it, I saw a video some years ago that said the UFO research that's being done down in the southwest is being funded by drug money and cocaine dealings by the CIA, and that there are 25 top secret levels of government above the Top Secret category, and that there are some levels that even the president doesn't know about. So there's another topic for another book, I just wanted to have you comment...

Gary Webb: A number of topics for another book. [Laughter from the audience.] I don't know about the UFO research, but I do know you're right that we have very little idea how vast the intelligence community in this country is, or what they're up to. I think there's a great story brewing -- it's called the ECHELON program, and it involves the sharing of eavesdropped emails and cell phone communications, because it is illegal for them to do it in this country. So they've been going to New Zealand and Australia and Canada and having those governments eavesdrop on our conversations and tell us about it. I've read a couple of stories about it in the English press, and I read a couple of stories about it in the Canadian press, but I've seen precious little in the American press. But there's stuff on the Internet that circulates about that, if you're interested in the topic. I think it's called the ECHELON program.

Audience Member #4: I'm glad you brought up James Burke and his Connections, because there are a lot of connections here. One I didn't hear too much about, and I know you've done a lot of research on, was how computers and high tech was used by the Crips and Bloods early on. I lived in south LA prior to this, knew some of these people, and you're right, they had virtually no education. And to suddenly have an operation that's computer literate, riding out of Bakersfield, Fresno, on north and then east in a very quick period -- I'm still learning the computer, I'm probably as old as you are, or older -- so I'd like to hear something on that. The whole dislocation of south LA that occurred -- the Watts Festival, the whole empowerment of the black community was occurring beginning in the late '60s and into the early '70s and mid-'70s, and then collapses into a sea of flipping demographics, and suddenly by 1990 it is El Salvadoran-dominated. And that's another curious part of this equation as we talk about drugs.

Gary Webb: Well, that's quite a bevy of things there. As far as the sophistication of the Crips and the Bloods, the one thing that I probably should have mentioned was that when Danilo Blandón went down to South Central to start selling this dope, he had an M.B.A. in marketing. So he knew what he was doing. His job for the Somoza government was setting up wholesale markets for agricultural products. He'd received an M.B.A. thanks to us, actually -- we helped finance him, we helped send him to the University of Bogata to get his M.B.A. so he could go back to Nicaragua, and he actually came to the United States to sell dope to the gangs. So this was a very sophisticated operation.

One of the money launderers from this group was a macro-economist -- his uncle, Orlando Murillo, was on the Central Bank of Nicaragua. The weapons advisor they had was a guy who'd been a cop for fifteen years. They had another weapons advisor who had been a Navy SEAL. You don't get these kinds of people by putting ads in the paper. This is not a drug ring that just sort of falls together by chance. This is like an all-star game. Which is why I suspect more and more that this thing was set up by a higher authority than a couple of drug dealers.

Audience Member #5: Hi Gary, I just want to thank you for going against the traffic on this whole deal. I'm in the journalism school up at U. of O., and I'm interested in the story behind the story. I was hoping you could share some anecdotes about the kind of activity that you engaged in to get the story. For example, when you get off a plane in Nicaragua, what do you do? Where do you start? How do you talk to "Freeway" Ricky? How do you go against a government stonewall?

Gary Webb: The question is, how do you do a story like this, essentially. Well, thing I've always found is, if you go knock on somebody's door, they're a lot less apt to slam it in your face than if you call them up on the telephone. So, the reason I went down to Nicaragua was to go knock on doors. I didn't go down there and just step off a plane -- I found a fellow down in Nicaragua and we hired him as a stringer, a fellow named George Hidell who is a marvelous investigative reporter, he knew all sorts of government officials down there. And I speak no Spanish, which was another handicap. George speaks like four languages. So, you find people like that to help you out.

With these drug dealers, you know, it's amazing how willing they are to talk. I did a series while I was in Kentucky on organized crime in the coal industry. And it was about this mass of stock swindlers who had looted Wall Street back in the '60s and moved down to Kentucky in the '70s while the coal boom was going on, during the energy shortage. The lesson I learned in that thing -- I thought these guys would never talk to me, I figured they'd be crazy to talk to a reporter about the scams they were pulling. But they were happy to talk about it, they were flattered that you would come to them and say, hey, tell me about what you do. Tell me your greatest knock-off. Those guys would go on forever! So, you know, everybody, no matter what they do, they sort of have pride in their work... [Laughter from the audience.] And, you know, I found that when you appeared interested, they would be happy to tell you.

The people who lied to me, the people who slammed doors in my face, were the DEA and the FBI. The DEA called me down -- I wrote about this in the book -- they had a meeting, and they were telling me that if I wrote this story, I was going to help drug traffickers bring drugs into the country, and I was going to get DEA agents killed, and this, that and the other thing, all of which was utterly bullshit. So that's the thing -- just ask. There's really no secret to it.

Audience Member #6: I'd like to ask a couple of questions very quickly. The first one is, if you wouldn't mind being a reference librarian for a moment -- there was the Golden Triangle. I was just wondering if you've ever, in your curiosity about this, touched on that -- the drug rings and the heroin trade out of Southeast Asia. And the second one is about the fellow from the Houston Chronicle, I don't remember his name right off, but you know who I'm talking about, if you could just touch on that a little bit...

Gary Webb: Yes. The first question was about whether I ever touched on what was going on in the Golden Triangle. Fortunately, I didn't have to -- there's a great book called The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, by Alfred McCoy, which is sort of a classic in CIA drug trafficking lore. I don't think you can get any better than that. That's a great reference in the library, you can go check it out. McCoy was a professor at the University of Wisconsin who went to Laos during the time that the secret war in Laos was going on, and he wrote about how the CIA was flying heroin out on Air America. That's the thing that really surprised me about the reaction to my story was, it's not like I invented this stuff. There's a long, long history of CIA involvement in drug traffic which Cockburn gets into in Whiteout.

And the second question was about Pete Brewton -- there was a reporter in Houston for the Houston Post named Pete Brewton who did the series -- I think it was '91 or '92 -- on the strange connections between the S&L collapses, particularly in Texas, and CIA agents. And his theory was that a lot of these collapses were not mismanagement, they were intentional. These things were looted, with the idea that a lot of the money was siphoned off to fund covert operations overseas. And Brewton wrote this series, and it was funny, because after all hell broke loose on my story, I called him up, and he said, "Well, I was waiting for this to happen to you." And I said, "Why?" And he said, "I was exactly like you are. I'd been in this business for twenty years, I'd won all sorts of awards, I'd lectured in college journalism courses, and I wrote a series that had these three little letters C-I-A in it. And suddenly I was unreliable, and I couldn't be trusted, and Reed Irvine at Accuracy In Media was writing nasty things about me, and my editor had lost confidence in me, so I quit the business and went to law school."

Brewton wrote a book called The Mafia, CIA and George Bush. It's hard to find, but it's worth looking up if you can find it. It's all there, it's all documented. See, the difference between his story and my story was, we put ours out on the web, and it got out. Brewton's story is sort of confined to the printed page, and I think the Washington Journalism Review actually wrote a story about, how come nobody's writing about this, nobody's picking up this story. Nobody touched this story, it just sort of died. And the same thing would have happened with my series, had we not had this amazing web page. Thank God we did, or this thing would have just slipped underneath the waves, and nobody would have ever heard about it.

Audience Member #7: I'm glad you're here. I guess the CIA, there was something I read in the paper a couple of years ago, that said the CIA is actually murdering people, and they admitted it, they don't usually do that.

Gary Webb: It's a new burst of honesty from the new CIA.

Audience Member #7: They'll murder us with kindness. In the Chicago police force, there were about 10 officers who were kicked off the police force for doing drugs or selling drugs, and George Bush or something... I heard that he had a buddy who had a lot of money in drug testing equipment, so that's one reason everybody has to pee in a cup now... [Laughter from the audience.] The other thing I found, there was a meth lab close to here, and somebody who wasn't even involved with it, he was paralyzed... And as you know, we have the "Just Say No to Drugs" deal... What do you think we can do to stop us, the People, from being hypnotized once again from all these shenanigans, doing other people injury in terms of these kinds of messages, at the same time they're selling. Because all this money is being spent for all this...

Gary Webb: I guess the question is, what could you do to keep from being hypnotized by the media message, specifically on the Drug War? Is that what you're talking about?

Audience Member #7: Yeah, or all the funds... like, there's another thing here with the meth lab, they say we'll kind of turn people in...

Gary Webb: Oh yeah, the nation of informers.

Audience Member #7: Yeah.

Gary Webb: That's something I have to laugh about -- up until I think '75 or '76, probably even later than that, you could go to your doctor and get methamphetamine. I mean, there were housewives by the hundreds of thousands across the United States who were taking it every day to lose weight, and now all the sudden it was the worst thing on the face of the earth. That's one thing I got into in the book, was the sort of crack hysteria in 1986 that prompted all these crazy laws that are still on the books today, and the 100:1 sentencing ratio... I don't know how many of you saw, on PBS a couple of nights back, there was a great show on informants called "Snitch." [Murmurs of recognition from the audience.] Yeah, on Frontline. That was very heartening to see, because I don't think ten years ago that it would have stood a chance in hell of getting on the air.

What I'm seeing now is that a lot of people are finally waking up to the idea that this "drug war" has been a fraud since the get-go. My personal opinion is, I think the main purpose of this whole drug war was to sort of erode civil liberties, very slowly and very gradually, and sort of put us down into a police state. [Robust burst of applause from the audience.] And we're pretty close to that. I've got to hand it to them, they've done a good job. We have no Fourth Amendment left anymore, we're all peeing in cups, and we're all doing all sorts of things that our parents probably would have marched in the streets about.

The solution to that is to read something other than the daily newspaper, and turn off the TV news. I mean, I'm sorry, I hate to say that, but that's mind-rot. You've got to find alternative sources of information. [Robust applause.]

Voice From the Audience: How can you say that it was all a chain reaction, that it was not done deliberately, and on the other hand say it has at the same time deliberately eroded our rights?

Gary Webb: Well, the question was, how can I say on one hand it was a chain reaction, and on the other hand say the drug war was set up deliberately to erode our rights. I mean, you're talking about sort of macro versus micro. And I do not give the CIA that much credit, that they could plan these vast conspiracies down through the ages and have them work -- most of them don't.

What I'm saying is, you have police groups, you have police lobbying groups, you have prison guard groups -- they seize opportunities when they come along. The Drug War has given them a lot of opportunities to say, okay, now let's lengthen prison sentences. Why? Well, because if you keep people in jail longer, you need more prison guards. Let's build more prisons. Why? Well, people get jobs, prison guards get jobs. The police stay in business. We need to fund more of them. We need to give bigger budgets to the correctional facilities. This is all very conscious, but I don't think anybody sat in a room in 1974 and said, okay, by 1995, we're going to have X number of Americans locked up or under parole supervision. I don't think they mind -- you know, I think they like that. But I don't think it was a conscious effort. I think it was just one bad idea, after another bad idea, compounded with a stupid idea, compounded with a really stupid idea. And here we are. So I don't know if that answers your question or not...

Audience Member #8: To me, the Iran-contra story was one of the most interesting and totally frustrating things. And the more information, the more about it I heard -- we don't know anything about it, I mean, if you look for any official data, they deny everything. And to see Ollie North, the upstanding blue-eyed American, standing there lying through his teeth, and we knew it... [Inaudible comment, "before Congress and the President"?] What galls me is that these people who are guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors are now getting these enormous pensions, and we have to pay for these bums. It sickens me!

Gary Webb: Right.

Audience Member #8: And I actually have a question -- this is my question, by the way, I know you have a thousand other questions [laughter from the audience] -- but the one that stays with me, and has always bothered me, was the Christic Institute, and I thought it was fantastic. And they were hit with this enormous lawsuit, and they had to bail out. This needs to be ["rehired"?] because they knew what they were doing, they had all the right answers, and they were run out of office, so to say, in disgrace, because of this lawsuit.

Gary Webb: The question was about the Christic Institute, and about how the Iran-contra controversy is probably one of the worst scandals. I agree with you, I think the Iran-contra scandal was worse than Watergate, far worse than this nonsense we're doing now. But I'll tell you, I think the press played a very big part in downplaying that scandal. One of the people I interviewed for the book was a woman named Pam Naughton, who was one of the best prosecutors that the Iran-contra committee had. And I asked her, why -- you know, it was also the first scandal that was televised, and I remember watching them at night. I would go to work and I'd set the VCR, and I'd come home at night and I'd watch the hearings. Then I'd pick up the paper the next morning, and it was completely different! And I couldn't figure it out, and this has bothered me all these years.

So when I got Pam Naughton on the phone, I said, what the hell happened to the press corps in Washington during the Iran-contra scandal? And she said, well, I can tell you what I saw. She said, every day, we would come out at the start of this hearings, and we would lay out a stack of documents -- all the exhibits we were going to introduce -- stuff that she thought was extremely incriminating, front page story after front page story, and they'd sit them on a table. And she said, every day the press corps would come in, and they'd say hi, how're you doing, blah blah blah, and they'd go sit down in the front row and start talking about, you know, did you see the ball game last night, and what they saw on Johnny Carson. And she said one or two reporters would go up and get their stack of documents and go back and write about it, and everybody else sat in the front row, and they would sit and say, okay, what's our story today? And they would all agree what the story was, and they'd go back and write it. Most of them never even looked at the exhibits.

And that's why I say it was the press's fault, because there was so much stuff that came out of those hearings. That used to just drive me crazy, you would never see it in the newspaper. And I don't think it's a conspiracy -- if anything, it's a conspiracy of stupidity and laziness. I talked to Bob Parry about this -- when he was working for Newsweek covering Iran-contra, they weren't even letting him go to the hearings. He had to get transcripts messengered to him at his house secretly, so his editors wouldn't find out he was actually reading the transcripts, because he was writing stories that were so different from everybody else's.

Bob Parry tells a story of being at a dinner party with Bobby Inman from the CIA, the editor of Newsweek, and all the muckity-mucks -- this was his big introduction into Washington society. And they were sitting at the dinner table in the midst of the Iran-contra thing, talking about everything but Iran-contra. And Bob said he had the bad taste of bringing up the Iran-contra hearing and mentioning one particularly bad aspect of it. And he said, the editor of Newsweek looked at him and said, "You know, Bob, there are just some things that it's better the country just doesn't know about." And all these admirals and generals sitting around the table all nodded their heads in agreement, and they wanted to talk about something else.

That's the attitude. That's the attitude in Washington. And that's the attitude of the Washington press corps, and nowadays it's even worse than that, because now, if you play the game right, you get a TV show. Now you've got the McLaughlin Group. Now you get your mug on CNN. You know. And that's how they keep them in line. If you're a rabble rouser, and a shit-stirrer, they don't want your type on television. They want the pundits.

The other question was about the Christic Institute. They had it all figured out. The Christic Institute had this thing figured out. They filed suit in May of 1986, alleging that the Reagan administration, the CIA, this sort of parallel government was going on. Oliver North was involved in it, you had the Bay of Pigs Cubans that were involved in it down in Costa Rica, they had names, they had dates, and they got murdered. And the Reagan administration's line was, they're a bunch of left-wing liberal crazies, this was conspiracy theory. If you want to see what they really thought, go to Oliver North's diaries, which are public -- the National Security Archive has got them -- all he was writing about, after the Christic Institute's suit was filed, was how we've got to shut this thing down, how we have to discredit these witnesses, how we've got to get this guy set up, how we've got to get this guy out of the country... They knew that the Christic Institute was right, and they were deathly afraid that the American public was going to find out about it.

I am convinced that the judge who was hearing the case was part and parcel to the problem. He threw the case out of court and fined the Christic Institute, I think it was $1.3 million, for even bringing the lawsuit. It was deemed "frivolous litigation." And it finally bankrupted them. And they went away.

But that's the problem when you try to take on the government in its own arena, and the federal courts are definitely part of its own arena. They make the rules. And in cases like that, you don't stand a chance in hell, it won't happen.

Voice From the Audience: But if you cannot get the truth in the courts, if you cannot write it in the papers, then what do you do?

Gary Webb: You do it yourself. You do it yourself. You've got to start rebuilding an information system on your own. And that's what's going on. It's very small, but it's happening. People are talking to each other through newsgroups on the Internet. People are doing Internet newsletters.

Voice From the Audience: Do you have a website?

Emcee: Let's use the mike, let's use the mike.

Gary Webb: The question is, do I have a website. No, I don't, but I'm building one.

[Inaudible question from the audience.]

Gary Webb: Well, let's let these people who have been standing in line...

[Commotion, murmuring. Someone calls out, "Please use the mike."]

Audience Member #9: When you mentioned prisons a moment ago, I couldn't help but remember that it is America's fastest-growing industry, the "prison industry" -- which is a hell of a phrase unto itself. But it seems that the CIA had people aligned throughout Central America at one point, and El Salvador, with the contras, and in Honduras and Nicaragua, and in Panama, Manuel Noriega...

Gary Webb: Our "man in Panama," that's right.

Audience Member #9: Yeah. But something went wrong with him, and he got pinched in public. And I'm interested to know what you think about that.

Gary Webb: The question is about Manuel Noriega, who was our "man in Panama" for so many years. What happened to Noriega is that -- I don't think it had anything to do with the fact that he was a drug trafficker, because we knew that for years. What it had to do with was what is going to happen at the end of this year, which is when control of the Panama Canal goes over to the Panamanians. If you read the New York Times story that Seymour Hersh wrote back in June of 1986 that exposed Noriega publicly as a drug trafficker and money launderer, there were some very telling phrases in it. All unsourced, naturally, you know -- unattributed comments from high-ranking government officials -- but they talked about how they were nervous that Noriega had become unreliable. And with control of the Panama Canal reverting to the Panamanian government, they were very nervous at the idea of having somebody as "unstable" as Noriega running the country at that point. And I think that was a well-founded fear. You've got a major drug trafficker controlling a major maritime thoroughway. I can see the CIA being nervous about being cut out of the business. [Laughter from the audience.]

But I think that's what the whole thing with Noriega was about -- they wanted him out of there, because they wanted somebody that they could control a little more closely in power in Panama for when the canal gets reverted back to them.

Audience Member #9: Was there much of a profit difference between Nicaragua and Panama as far as the drugs went?

Gary Webb: Well, what Noriega had done was sort of create an international banking center for drug money. That was his part of it. Nicaragua was nothing ever than just a trans-shipment point. Central America was never anything more than a trans-shipment point. Columbia Peru and Bolivia were the producers, and the planes needed a place to refuel, and that's all that Central America ever was. The banking was all done in Panama.

Audience Member #10: You talk about how they sat on their stories, the newspapers? Why did they suddenly decide to pursue the stories?

Gary Webb: Which stories are these?

Audience Member #10: The stories about the crack dealing and the CIA. Why did they suddenly decide that, well, actually...

Gary Webb: The question was -- correct me if I'm wrong -- the question raised the fact that the other newspapers didn't do anything about this story for a while, and then after I wrote it they came after me. Is that what you're asking?

Audience Member #10: Well, yeah, and then eventually the CIA admitted it... and I mean, why are people asking, it sat for a long time, and then suddenly everyone was on it. What was the turning point that made them decide to pursue it?

Gary Webb: The turning point that made them decide to pursue the story was the fact that it had gotten out over the Internet, and people were calling them up saying, why don't you have the story in your newspaper? You know, I don't think the subject matter frightened the major media as much as the fact that a little newspaper in Northern California was able to set the national agenda for once. And people were marching in the streets, people were holding hearings in Washington, they were demanding Congressional hearings, you had John Deutch, the CIA director, go down on that surreal trip down to South Central to convince everyone that everything was okay... [Laughter from the audience.] And all of this was happening without the big media being involved in it at all. And the reason that happened was because we had an outlet -- we had the web. And the people at the Mercury News did a fantastic job on this website.

And so, news was marching on without them. There's a professor at the University of Wisconsin who's done a paper on the whole "Dark Alliance" thing, and her thesis is that this story was shut down more because of how it got out than for what it actually said. That it was an attempt by the major media to regain control of the Internet, and to suggest that unless they're the ones who are putting it out, it's unreliable. Which I think you see in a lot of stories. The mainstream press gladly promotes the idea that you can't believe anything you read on the Internet, it's all kooks, it's all conspiracy theorists... And there are, I mean, I admit, there are a lot of them out there, but it's not all false. But the idea that we're being taught is, unless it's got our name on it, you can't believe it. So they can retain control of the means of communication anyway.

Audience Member #11: You mentioned Iran-contra, which was private foreign policy in defiance of Congress, which means it was a high crime. From there, we get more drugs, we get erosion of civil liberties and the loss of the Fourth Amendment, which you mentioned. And we have to get that back, because without it, we're just commodities to one another. So what I'd like to ask you is, what are you working on now? And do you have your own journalistic chain of reaction? Are you going to be doing something that connects back to this?

Gary Webb: The question is what am I doing now -- believe it or not, I'm working for the government. [Laughter from the audience.] I work for the California legislature, and I do investigations of state agencies. I just wrote a piece for Esquire magazine which should be out in April on another fabulous DEA program that they're running. Actually, part of it's based here in Oregon, called Operation Pipeline. That story is coming out in April, and Esquire told me they want me to write more stuff for them, they want me to do some investigative reporting for them, so I'll be working for them. And I'm putting together another book proposal, and a couple of other things. I'm not going to work for newspapers any more, I learned my lesson.

Audience Member #12: A year ago the editor of your newspaper was here to speak, sponsored by the University of Oregon School of Journalism. Before I got up here, I took a casual look around -- I don't know all of the members of the journalism faculty, but I didn't recognize any. We did have a student here who got up and asked a question. That leads to this question: I'd like, if you don't mind, to ask if there is someone from the University of Oregon journalism faculty here, would they mind being acknowledged and raising their hand?

Gary Webb: All right, there's one back there.

Audience Member #12: There is one. Okay. [Applause from the audience.] I'm pleased to see it. There is that one person. My point is, I think much of what you've said this evening constitutes an indictment -- and a valid indictment -- of the university journalism programs in this country. [Applause.] Most Americans and I believe -- and I'm interested in your reaction -- that it reinforces that indictment when we see, to that person's credit, that she is the only faculty member from our school of journalism to hear you tonight.

Gary Webb: I think the general question was about the state of the journalism schools. The one thing journalism schools don't teach, by and large, is investigative reporting. They teach stenography very well. That's why I consider most of journalism today to be stenography. You go to a press conference, you write down the quotes accurately, you come back, you don't provide any context, you don't provide any perspective, because that gets into analysis, and heavens knows, we don't want any analysis in our newspapers.

But you report things accurately, you report things fairly, and even if it's a lie you put it in the newspaper, and that's considered journalism. I don't consider that journalism, I consider that stenography. And that is the way they teach journalism in school, that's the way I was taught. Unless you go to a very different journalism school from the kinds that most kids go to, that's what you're taught. Now, there are specialized journalism schools, there are master's programs like the Kiplinger Program at Ohio State, that's very good.

So, I'm not saying that all journalism schools are bad, but they don't teach you to be journalists. They discourage you from doing that, by and large. And I don't think it's the fault of the journalism professors, I just think that's the way things have been taught in this country for so long, that they just do it automatically. I'd be interested in hearing the professor's thoughts about it, but that's sort of the way I look at things. I spent way too many years in journalism school. I kind of got shed of those notions after I got out in the real world.

[End of transcript.]

© ParaScope, Inc. 1999

COMMENTARY:

WHO HAS WHAT TO HIDE ABOUT LUIS POSADA CARRILES?

Luis Posada Carriles as he looks today. Posada was charged in Venezuela in the 1976 Cuban jetliner bombing that killed 73 people. By delaying extradition it looks as if the Bush Administration is desperate to keep right-wing secrets.

But surely a minor "crime" such as a traffic ticket or a failure to report to Homeland Security on entry is not what was contemplated. And even if Posada could somehow convince the Homeland judges of the validity of his spurious residency and asylum claims (that he is a US resident although he has lived abroad for 30 years; that he is entitled to asylum here although he has murdered scores of innocent people), he still should be extradited now to Venezuela because his migration status has nothing to do with extradition for trial for his alleged crime, murdering 73 innocent Cubana flight 455 passengers in 1976.

So why not just send him to the extradition judge and be done with it? What's the reason for keeping him here? Delay for delay's sake? Aggravate the Venezuelan government? Weaken the US claim to be the world leader in its "war against terrorism"? None of these seem very convincing as motives, even for this Administration. According to recently declassified CIA reports ( National Security Archives, Book 153, FBI report 11/2/76 ), in custody after his Oct. 6, 1976 bombing of the Cubana civilian airliner, flight 455, Posada threatened through his co-conspirator Morales Navarette that if forced to talk, the Venezuelan government "would go down the tube" and there would be "another Watergate."

Luis Posada Carriles as he looked in 1976

George Bush Senior, CIA Director at the time of the Cubana bombing, had previously appointed Ted Shackley as his Deputy Director for Special Operations. Since Bay of Pigs, Shackley had been in charge of the JM/Wave Miami CIA station which had been training anti-Castro extremists for possible invasion, then demolitions (Posada ran the school), biological warfare and murderous incursions into Cuba. In 1976 CIA had urged several violent US anti-Castro groups to join together under one umbrella organization called CORU. It was led by Orlando Bosch and took credit for the Letelier murders in Washington, DC in September.

Bush Senior has said he was not with the CIA before being appointed director by President Ford in early 1976. Joseph McBride in an article in The Nation of July 16, 1988 wrote: "A source with close connections to the intelligence community confirmed that Bush started working for the CIA in 1960 or 1961, using his oil business for clandestine activities." There's a memo from FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to the State Department dated Nov. 28, 1963 concerning information developed by the Miami FBI office about groups in Miami seeking to blame the JFK murder on the Cuban government. It says the information was orally furnished on Nov. 23 to "George Bush of the CIA." Bush Senior was in Dallas then. As was another CIA operative, Chauncey Holt (now deceased), who identified Posada as being in Dealey Plaza at the time of the murder.

Other sources, among them CIA agent Marita Lorenz, placed Orlando Bosch and Guillermo Novo there. The question arises whether their presence there can be dismissed as coincidence. After all, Bosch, Posada's accomplice in the Cuban airline bombing, was pardoned by President Bush Senior in 1990 against the strong objection of his own Justice Department, which had implicated him in more than 70 terrorist crimes. And Guillermo Novo and Posada were just last year pardoned on another bombing charge and released by the US-friendly outgoing president of Panama. Yet another anti-Castro extremist, Felix Rodriguez, who killed Ernesto Guevara and worked with Posada in the Iran-Contra supply network, has long been a Bush Senior personal friend.

The official versions of Watergate and JFK’s murder don't make a lot of sense when one considers motivations of the supposed actors. It's now clear that Nixon ordered the burglary of Democratic National Headquarters in 1972. But what was he looking for at such great risk? In his book on Watergate, Staff Chief H. R. Haldeman wrote that when Nixon was caught on tape talking about the risk that a Watergate probe could "blow the whole Bay of Pigs thing," he was actually referring to the JFK murder, not the invasion of Cuba. As Vice President in 1960 (a political protégé of Senator Prescott Bush), Nixon had supervised the preparation of the invasion. It seems odd he would confuse these events if they were unrelated. Moreover, what could be "blown" about the Bay of Pigs that was not already known?

And why did Lee Harvey Oswald kill JFK? The Warren Commission and the subsequent Congressional committees could not come up with a motive. In an effort at the time of the murder to blame the Cuban government, a photo of Oswald was spread across US newspapers showing him on a New Orleans street holding a "Fair Play for Cuba Committee" sign. But why were there no other members of the New Orleans committee? Why did Oswald give the address of the committee as 544 Camp St., which was the side entrance for the offices of Sergio Arcacha Smith and Guy Banister, both rabid anti-Castro extremists? Why were anti-Castro Cubans often seen there? Why did Oswald spend much of his time there? Why was Allen Dulles, the CIA Director who planned the Bay of Pigs and was subsequently fired by JFK, put on the Warren Commission? Why did CIA misinform the Commission on so many key evidentiary matters? The official answers to these questions seem to be "blowin' in the wind." It's like a jigsaw puzzle with half the pieces missing.

In the fall of 1963, JFK was not relying much on CIA intelligence or opinions regarding Cuba. Negotiations (supposedly secret) were about to start between US and Cuba to possibly normalize relations. JFK's conditions were that Cuba distance itself from the Soviet Union and stop aiding revolutionary movements in Latin America, to which Castro seemed amenable.

A key part of Allen Dulles's Bay of Pigs plan was "Operation 40." They were 40 CIA agents, mostly gunmen, whose job was to kill the leading members of Cuba's government. Some, like Posada, had previously worked in enforcement for the Batista regime. Prior to the invasion they were waiting in Dominican Republic. Their boat took off for Cuba but turned around when informed the invasion was failing. They returned to the US, and, unbeknownst to JFK, Operation 40 continued on. For years and decades, with some changes in names and personnel.

Many of the original names kept appearing in connection with subsequent covert, violent CIA projects, such as Operation Mongoose, Operation Phoenix, the JFK murder, the regime changes in Chile, El Salvador, Nicaragua, the Watergate burglary, the bombing of Cubana flight 455, the Iran-Contra war, and Operation Condor which exterminated many South American progressives. Names like Luis Posada, Orlando Bosch, Felix Rodriguez, E. Howard Hunt, Frank Sturgis, Antonio Veciana, Guillermo Novo, Eugenio Martinez, Ricardo Morales, David Sanchez Morales, David Phillips, all members of the 40.

In an oligarchy where the important decisions are made in secret by a power elite, where the mainstream media is used to manipulate rather than inform, it's often difficult for the public to distinguish actual from virtual reality. It's apparent that Posada could supply many of the missing pieces of the puzzles of the last 45 years. He has friends in Miami and they have brought him here to resurface after 30 years. If he needed money or a place to hide comfortably, they could easily have provided him with such in another country. What we now know about his past is enough to say that he and his friends could be going public with his knowledge of CIA operations as a threat or extortion chip, perhaps to affect future US policy toward Cuba. This would explain why his legally required extradition is being delayed.

For more information contact: Tamara Feinstein (202) 994-7219 / tfeins7i@gwu.edu

State Department Human Rights Reports on Peru 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999

The documents posted today were obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests made by journalist Jeremy Bigwood, who earlier this year donated them to the Archive. These documents shed some light on Montesinos’ involvement in human rights violations and corruption scandals, but also demonstrate the amount of information being currently withheld on this subject by the U.S. government. According to Peter Kornbluh, who analyzes Latin America at the Archive, the Clinton Administration "could, and should, make a major contribution to the truth of Montesinos’s career, as well as to the future of Peruvian democracy, by expeditiously declassifying the U.S. holdings on Montesinos." Kornbluh said that U.S. agencies have vast amounts of secret documentation that would serve as essential evidence in any proceedings against Montesinos for human rights abuses and graft. The Archive, which has led campaigns to declassify secret U.S. documents on Guatemala, Chile, El Salvador and elsewhere in Latin America, said it would press for full disclosure of hundreds of U.S. records on Montesinos, including CIA documents on covert relations with President Fujimori's disgraced intelligence chieftain. The Archive is set to file dozens of Freedom of Information Act requests on Montesinos and his ties to the United States.

An independent non-governmental research institute and library located at the George Washington University, the Archive collects and publishes declassified documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. The Archive won the 1999 George Polk Award, one of U.S. journalism’s top prizes, for – in the words of the citation – “piercing the self-serving veils of government secrecy, guiding journalists in search for the truth and informing us all.” The Archive’s recent campaigns on Guatemala and Chile have led to the declassification of tens of thousands of documents. In the case of Guatemala, these document were used to support the work of the human rights investigations of the U.N. Historical Clarification Commission (CEH).

(There are more documents in the Peru collection available at our offices. For further information, please contact Tamara Feinstein, Research Associate for the Peru Project, at (202) 994-7219 or tfeins7i@gwu.edu.)

__________________________________________________________________________

This document written at the beginning of President Fujimori’s administration, already implies that Vladimiro Montesinos is controlling the government. It reports that Montesinos first ingratiated himself to Fujimori by defending Mrs. Fujimori in a court case revolving around shady real estate deals and that he provided advice to Fujimori on how to conduct his presidential campaign. According to the document, a group of retired military officers have already come forward to highlight the dangers of Montesinos’ influence. These generals insist that, “the Peruvian CIA cannot dominate the Peruvian state,” and imply the army might “intervene and ‘decapitate’ the intelligence structure at some point.”

While Fujimori insists Montesinos is merely his personal legal advisor, Montesinos is clearly more than that. This document suggests that Montesinos has influenced high presidential appointments in the civilian and military sectors of the government. In addition, this report notes that Peruvian General Luis Palomino Rodriguez warned the U.S. defense attaché that Montesinos had intentions to frustrate U.S-Peruvian counter-drug efforts.

The Department of Defense’s Joint Intelligence Command released this document on April 5, 2001 in response to a FOIA request made by Jeremy Bigwood. This document focuses on the aftermath of the failed November 1992 coup attempt made by the military against President Fujimori. The document reveals growing discontent within the military over the treatment of the coup plotters. The Peruvian Army appears “rife” with rumors that several coup plotters have been tortured and have been transferred to the civilian prison “Canto Grande”, due to fears that armed forces sympathizers would help them escape if they were placed in military prison. Vladimiro Montesinos reportedly supervised torture sessions attempting to force coup plotters to name opposition politicians as co-conspirators, and he is accused of delivering some of the blows himself. The document notes that while the Army has officially denied torture allegations, “the use of torture is plausible.”

General Rodolfo Robles Espinoza, once the third most powerful man in the Peruvian army, based part of his claims that General Commander of the Army Nicolás de Bari Hermoza Rios and Montesinos were involved in the creation and operation of a death squad on alleged conversations with one time head of the Army Intelligence Directorate, General Willy Chirinos. According to Robles, during his brief tenure at army intelligence, Chirinos learned of the existence of a death squad under the direction of Vladimiro Montesinos. This death squad was responsible for the massacres at La Cantuta and Barrios Altos. Fearing that the existence of a death squad would inevitably embarrass the army, Chirinos urged that it be disbanded. Montesinos, however, ordered that it remain intact. Robles goes on to claim that Chirinos was dismissed as head of army intelligence after making this recommendation. Chirinos, in statements published in Lima newspapers denies that he spoke to Robles about La Cantuta, or the existence of a death squad connected with Montesinos. The large section excised at the end of this document might possibly reveal embassy commentary on the validity of these claims.