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Drugs,
Impunity & the CIA
From The Conspiracy Archives
A seminar sponsored
by the Center for International Policy's Intelligence Reform Project
Dirksen Senate Office
Building, November 26, 1996
Seminar participants
Jack A. Blum , former
chief investigator, Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee investigating
the Central Intelligence Agency-contra-drug connection in 1989; former
chief of staff, Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee headed by Sen. Frank
Church that investigated the CIA in the late 1970s
Jonathan Kwitny ,
former prizewinning Wall Street Journal investigative reporter,
author of Endless Enemies: The Making of an Unfriendly World
(New York: Congdon & Weed, 1984)
Alfred W. McCoy ,
professor of Southeast Asian history at the University of Wisconsin; author
of The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade
(Lawrence Hill, 1991) and The Politics of Heroin in Southeast
Asia (1971).
Discussant
Clarence Page , columnist,
Chicago Tribune
Moderator
Melvin A. Goodman
, director of CIP's Intelligence Reform Project; former chief of Soviet-affairs
division, CIA
Mr. Goodman welcomed the seminar
participants and audience. He noted that it had just been reported that
another former CIA ally faced drug charges. A Miami grand jury had indicted
a former general in Venezuela on charges that he smuggled cocaine into
the United States. Gen. Ramon Guillen headed a special CIA-financed Venezuelan
National Guard antinarcotics unit. This was a sting operation that went
massively awry. The CIA had said that it was regrettable.
It was right of the press
to critically review the San Jose Mercury-News's series, Mr.
Goodman considered. He just wished it had similarly gone after the CIA's
activities in concert with drug dealers globally, particularly in Afghanistan.
I. CIA Complicity in the
Global Drug Trade — A Presentation by Prof. Alfred W. McCoy
Professor McCoy said that
this August, the San Jose Mercury News reported that a syndicate
allied with Nicaragua's CIA- backed Contras delivered tons of cocaine
to Los Angeles gangs during the 1980s. The Mercury concluded,
"The contra- run drug network opened the first conduit between Colombia's
. . . cartels and Los Angeles's black neighborhoods . . . It's impossible
to believe that the Central Intelligence Agency didn't know."
At first, the story attracted
little notice. But by mid-September Internet hits at the Mercury
passed eight hundred thousand daily and black anger was rising.
On talk radio, some commentators—going
far beyond what the Mercury said—accused the CIA of willfully
destroying their communities with crack. The Congressional Black Caucus
demanded an investigation. But CIA director John Deutch shot back that
"the agency neither participated in nor condoned drug trafficking by Contra
forces."
On October 4, the Washington
Post published a front- page "investigation" denying that the rise
of crack in Los Angeles was the work of just one syndicate and charging
the Mercury's exposé merely "echoed decade- old allegations."
Two weeks later, the New York Times and Los Angeles Times
followed with their own investigations, attacking the Mercury's
story and accusing that paper of fanning the flames of racial discord
in America.
Questions: This racially-
charged debate raised four questions about the CIA and drugs—questions
which now demanded answers.
a.) Did the agency ever ally
with drug traffickers?
b.) Did the CIA protect these
allies from prosecution?
c.) Did such alliances and
protection contribute significantly to an expansion of the global drug
trade over the past forty years?
d.) And did the CIA encourage
drug smugglers to target African-American communities?
Answers: For those
of the audience who might have to leave early, the answers were:
a.) Yes. b.) Yes. c.) Maybe.
d.) No.
For the past quarter century,
Professor McCoy said, he had been looking at this question, focusing on
the alliances between the agency and Asian drug lords during the forty
years of the Cold War. He believed that this history could shed considerable
light on the current debate over alleged CIA involvement in the contra
cocaine trade.
Throughout the Cold War the
CIA used gangsters and warlords, many of them drug dealers, to fight communism.
As the Cold War ended, the list of CIA assets who used their alliance
with the agency to deal drugs had grown longer—Marseilles Corsicans, Lao
generals, Thai police, National Chinese irregulars, Afghan rebels, Pakistani
intelligence, Haitian colonels, Mexican police units, and Guatemalan military.
During the forty years of
the Cold War, government intelligence services, the CIA included, forged
covert- action alliances with some of Asia's key opium traffickers, inadvertently
contributing to an initial expansion of opium production. In one of history's
accidents, the Iron Curtain fell along an Asian opium zone that stretched
for five thousand miles from Turkey to Thailand—making these rugged highlands
a key front of Cold War confrontation.
As the CIA and allied agencies
mounted operations in the opium zone during the forty years of the Cold
War it found that ethnic warlords were its most effective covert-action
assets. These leaders exploited the CIA alliance to become drug lords,
expanding opium production and exporting refined heroin. The Agency tolerated
such trafficking and, when necessary, blocked investigations. Since ruthless
drug lords made effective anti- communists and heroin profits amplified
their power, CIA agents did not tamper with the requisites of success
in such delicate operations.
Surveying the steady increase
in America's drug problem, since the end of World War II, Professor McCoy
discerned periodic increases in drug supply that coincided — rather approximately
— with covert operations in the drug zones.
He turned to Southeast Asia,
the site of the earliest CIA alliances with drug lords.
A. Southeast Asia—CIA
Operations
On the eve of World War II,
most Southeast Asian governments sponsored state monopolies that sold
smoking opium to registered addicts and generated substantial tax revenues.
1. Golden Triangle.
Despite extensive opium consumption
during the colonial era, Southeast Asia remained a major opium consumer
but—very importantly for our story—a minor producer. In 1940, Southeast
Asia harvested a total of only 15.5 tons in a region that today produced
over 3,000 tons. Why? Since British India supplied these government monopolies
with limitless low- cost opium, Southeast Asian governments had no reason
to encourage local cultivation.
The sudden growth of Golden
Triangle opium production in the 1950s appeared, in retrospect, a response
to two stimuli—prohibition and protection.
a.) Prohibition: Responding
to pressures from the United Nations, Southeast Asia's governments abolished
legal opium sales between 1950 and 1961, thereby creating a sudden demand
for illicit opiates in the cities of Southeast Asia.
b.) Protection: An alliance
of three intelligence services—Thai, American and Nationalist Chinese—played
a catalytic role in promoting the production of raw opium on the Shan
Plateau of northern Burma.
During the early 1950s, the
CIA covert operations in northern Burma fostered political alliances that,
inadvertently, linked the poppy fields of Burma with the region's urban
drug markets. After the collapse of the Nationalist Chinese government
in 1949, some of its forces fled across the border into Burma where the
CIA equipped them for several abortive invasions of China.
To retaliate against Communist
China for its intervention in the Korean War, President Truman ordered
the CIA to organize these Nationalist remnants inside Burma for an invasion
of southwestern China. The records remain secret because, Professor McCoy
suspected, it was one of the most foolish operations mounted by any agency
of the U.S. government.
After their invasions of 1950–51
were repulsed with heavy casualties, the Nationalist troops camped along
the Burma border for another decade and turned to opium trading to finance
their operations. Forcing local hill tribes to produce opium, the Nationalist
troops supervised a massive increase of poppy cultivation on the Shan
Plateau. After the Burmese Army evicted them in 1961, the Nationalist
forces established new base camps just across the border in Thailand and
from there dominated the Shan States opium trade until the early 1980s.
By the early 1960s, Burma's
opium production had risen from 15 to 300 tons—thus creating the opium
zone that was now called the Golden Triangle.
2. Indochina
As in Burma, so in Laos distance
would insulate the Agency from the consequences of complicity.
During their Vietnam war,
the French military integrated opium trafficking with covert operations
that the CIA would later inherit. After abolition of the opium monopoly
in 1950, French military intelligence, SDECE, imposed centralized, covert
controls over an illicit drug traffic that linked the Hmong poppy fields
of Laos with the opium dens operating in Saigon—generating profits that
funded French covert operations in their Vietnam war.
When America replaced the
French in Vietnam after 1954, the CIA fell heir to these covert alliances
and their involvement in opium trading. In Laos during the 1960s, the
CIA battled communists with a secret army of thirty thousand Hmong highlanders—a
secret war that implicated the CIA in that country's opium traffic. Although
the Agency did not profit directly from the trade, the combat strength
of its secret army was nonetheless integrated with the Laotian opium trade.
Why? The answer lay in the CIA's doctrine of covert action and its consequent
reliance upon the influence of local military leaders or warlords.
In Laos, a handful of CIA
agents relied on tribal leaders to motivate their troops and Lao generals
to protect their cover. After the fighting in Vietnam spilled over into
Laos in 1965 CIA recruited some thirty thousand Hmong highlanders for
its secret army—making this tribe a critical CIA asset.
Between 1965 and 1970, the
Hmong recovered downed U.S. pilots, battled local Pathet Lao communists,
monitored the Ho Chi Minh trail, and—most importantly—protected the radar
that guided the bombing of North Vietnam. By 1971, according to a U.S.
Air Force study, every Hmong family had lost members.
To fight this secret war,
the CIA sent in American agents on a ratio of one per thousand Hmong guerrillas—numbers
that made the Agency dependent upon tribal leaders who could mobilize
their people for this bloody slaughter.
The CIA gave its chosen client,
Hmong general Vang Pao, control over all air transport into the Hmong
villages scattered across the mountaintops of northern Laos — over both
the shipment of rice, the main subsistence commodity, into the villages,
and the transport of opium, the tribe's main cash crop, out to markets.
With his chokehold over the
household economy of every Hmong family, General Vang Pao was transformed
into a tribal warlord who could extract boy soldiers for slaughter in
an endless war. Since opium trading reinforced the authority of these
Hmong officers, the CIA found it necessary to tolerate the traffic.
Heroin Production
. The CIA's policy of tolerance towards its Laotian allies did not change
even when they began producing heroin to supply U.S. combat forces fighting
in South Vietnam. In 1968–69, CIA assets opened a cluster of heroin laboratories
in the Golden Triangle—the tri- border area where Burma, Thailand, and
Laos converge. When Hmong officers loaded opium on the CIA's Air America
and the Lao Army's commander opened a heroin laboratory to supply U.S.
troops in Vietnam, the Agency was silent. In a secret internal report
compiled in 1972, the CIA's inspector-general said the following to explain
their inaction:
The past involvement of many
of these officers in drugs is well known, yet their goodwill .
. . considerably facilitates the military activities of Agency- supported
irregulars.
All this heroin was smuggled
into South Vietnam where, by 1971, according to a White House survey,
34 percent of U.S. troops were addicted.
Instead of trying to restrain
drug trafficking by its Laotian assets, the Agency engaged in concealment
and cover- up. Professor McCoy recalled that when he went to Laos to investigate
in 1971, the Lao army commander graciously opened his opium accounts but
the U.S. mission stonewalled. In a Hmong village, where he was investigating
opium shipments on Air America, CIA mercenaries ambushed his research
team. A CIA operative threatened to murder his Lao interpreter unless
he quit.
When his book was in press,
the CIA's Deputy Director for Plans pressured his publisher to suppress
it and the CIA's general counsel demanded deletions of all references
to Agency complicity. After the book was published unaltered, CIA agents
in Laos pressed his sources to recant and convinced investigators from
the House Foreign Affairs Committee that his allegations were baseless.
Simultaneously, the CIA's
inspector-general conducted a secret internal investigation that confirmed
his allegations. "The war has clearly been our overriding priority in
Southeast Asia and all other issues have taken second place," the inspector-general
said in defense of their inaction on drugs. "It would be foolish to deny
this, and we see no reason to do so."
By 1974, Southeast Asian syndicates
were supplying a quarter of U.S. demand with Golden Triangle heroin. But
Asia was too remote for allegations of CIA complicity to pack any political
punch.
B. CIA in the 1980s—Central
Asia and Central America
CIA operations again played
a role in the revival of the U.S. drug problem in the 1980s. In 1979,
the Soviets invaded Afghanistan and the Sandinistas seized Nicaragua,
prompting two major CIA operations with some revealing similarities.
In 1980–81, heroin production
in Southwest Asia—Afghanistan and Pakistan—suddenly expanded to fill gaps
in the global drug market. Although Pakistan- Afghanistan had zero heroin
production in the mid 1970s, by 1981 Pakistan had become the world's largest
heroin producer.
Reporting from Teheran in
the mid-1970s, U.S. ambassador Richard Helms, the former CIA director,
insisted that there was no heroin production in this region—only a localized
opium trade. This region then supplied zero percent of U.S. heroin supply.
In 1981, however, the U.S.
attorney-general announced that Pakistan was supplying 60 percent
of U.S. demand. And rising from zero heroin addicts in 1979, Pakistan
had five thousand in 1980 and 1.2 million in 1985—the world's highest.
Why was Pakistan able to capture
the world's heroin market so quickly?
After the Soviet Union invaded
Afghanistan in 1979, the White House assigned the CIA to mount a major
operation to support the Afghan resistance. Working through Pakistan's
ISI, the CIA began supplying covert arms and finance to Afghan forces.
As they gained control over
liberated zones inside Afghanistan, the Afghan guerrillas required that
its supporters grow opium to support the resistance. Using CIA and ISI
protection, Pakistan military and Afghan resistance opened heroin labs
on the border. According to the Washington Post of May 1990, among the
leading heroin manufacturers was Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, an Afghan leader
who received half of the $2 billion in covert arms that the United States
shipped to Pakistan.
Although there were many complaints
about Hekmatyar's brutality and drug trafficking within the ranks of the
Afghan resistance, the CIA maintained an uncritical alliance and supported
him without reservation or restraint.
During the decade of this
operation, the substantial DEA contingent in Islamabad brought about no
arrests or seizures—allowing the syndicates a de facto free hand to export
heroin.
Former CIA operatives had
admitted that this operation led to an expansion of the Pakistan- Afghanistan
heroin trade. In 1995, the former CIA director of this Afghan operation,
Charles Cogan, admitted sacrificing the drug war to fight the cold war.
"Our main mission was to do as much damage as possible to the Soviets.
We didn't really have the resources or the time to devote to an investigation
of the drug trade," he told Australian television.
"I don't think that we need
to apologize for this. Every situation has its fallout . . . There was
fallout in term of drugs, yes. But the main objective was accomplished.
The Soviets left Afghanistan."
Again, distance insulated
the CIA from political fallout. Once the heroin left Pakistan, Sicilian
mafia exported it to the United States and local gangs sold it on the
street. Most Americans did not make the equation between Afghan drug lords
and the heroin in their cities.
C. Contra Operation
In Central America, however,
simple proximity has made the fallout from the CIA's operation explosive.
Unlike the CIA's Asian warlords, Nicaragua's contras did not produce drugs
and had to make money by smuggling cocaine into America.
Proximity brought these operations
to the attention of Congress, and in the late 1980s Sen. John Kerry's
subcommittee investigated the contra- cocaine links. His investigators
established that four contra- connected corporations hired by the State
Department to fly "humanitarian relief" goods to Central America were
also involved in cocaine smuggling. His committee heard the pilots give
eyewitness testimony saying that they had seen cocaine loaded on their
aircraft for the return flight to the United States.
The DEA operative assigned
to Honduras, Thomas Zepeda, testified that his office had been closed
in June 1983 since it was generating intelligence that the local military
was involved in cocaine smuggling—thereby threatening the CIA's relationship
with the Honduran military in this key frontline state for the contra
operation. In effect, Agency operations had once again created a de facto
zone of protection closed to investigators from outside agencies.
Read closely, the Kerry committee
established a pattern of CIA complicity in Central America strikingly
similar to the one seen in Laos and Afghanistan—tolerance for drug dealing
by its assets and concealment to protect its larger covert operation.
1. San Jose Mercury-News
story
The Mercury's story
tried to go to the next step—establishing a direct link to the distribution
of drugs in the United States. According to Mercury reporter
Gary Webb, this "dark alliance" began in the early 1980s when the contra
revolt against Nicaragua's leftist Sandinista government was failing for
want of funds. His scenario was:
1.) In 1981, the CIA hired
ex- Nicaraguan army colonel Enrique Bermudez to organize what became main
contra guerrilla army, the FDN.
2.) Bermudez then turned to
two Nicaraguan exiles in the United States to supplement meager agency
support with drug profits. In California Danilo Blandon, the former director
of Nicaragua's farm marketing program, used his formidable business skills
to open a new crack distribution network for the contras.
3.) Sensing the potential
of the Los Angeles ghetto, Blandon allied with the then neophyte, now
legendary black dealer "Freeway Rick" Ross to convert tons of cocaine
into low- cost crack and thus exploit what was still an untapped market
among the city's poor blacks.
4.) During its decade of operation,
this crack network enjoyed a de facto immunity from prosection.
a.) Whenever the DEA, Customs,
or the Los Angeles County sheriffs tried to investigate, the CIA and the
Justice Department denied information on grounds of national security.
b.) In 1986, Los Angeles sheriffs
raided what their warrant called Blandon's "sophisticated cocaine smuggling
and distribution operation," but found every location wiped clean of evidence.
The police were convinced that their investigation "had been compromised
by the CIA."
5.) By the late 1980s, the
operation had lost its contra connection and both dealers were soon arrested
on drug charges. While Freeway Rick started serving a ten- year sentence,
the Justice Department intervened to free the contra- connected Danilo
Blandon.
While the Agency's relations
with Asian opium lords were lost in the mists of faraway mountains, Rep.
Maxine Waters, the Black Caucus leader from Los Angeles, has police documents
to charge the CIA with protecting contra cocaine dealers.
Conclusion
Professor McCoy returned to
the four questions he asked at the outset:
a.) Question No. l: Did
the Agency ever ally with drug traffickers? Yes, beyond any doubt.
Although this question was once controversial, not even the CIA any longer
bothered to deny that it had often allied with major and minor drug dealers.
b.) Question No. 2: Did
the CIA protect these allies from prosecution? Yes, there was a recurring
pattern of protection. During a major CIA operation, the operational zone
became a special "protected area" where everything was subordinated to
the prosecution of the covert operation. For the duration of the operation,
key assets were given a de facto immunity to prosecution. To protect the
integrity of the operation, the CIA blocked all investigation—by the DEA,
Customs, Congress, and the police. Whenever anyone connected with this
effort was arrested outside this protected area, the CIA blocked prosecution
that would compromise its operations.
Lest it be forgotten, there
was only element that any criminal needed to become a powerful entrepreneur
of vice and violence — protection against prosecution.
c.) Question No. 3: Did
such alliances and protections contribute significantly to an expansion
of the global drug trade over the past forty years?
This was a question that was
open to interpretation. If Clio, the muse of history, were to waft in
and place perfect information on two tables for two academics, they would
probably produce two books with two very different answers. Professor
McCoy believed that in Burma, Laos, and Afghanistan, CIA operations provided
critical elements—logistics, arms, and political protection—that facilitated
the rapid growth of opium and heroin production in both areas.
Clearly, the agency alliance
was central to the rise of some major drug dealers and catalytic in the
expansion of production or processing in certain zones. It would not be
unreasonable to conclude, therefore, that such CIA operations led to an
increase the production and processing of illicit drugs in these covert
war zones.
But it was difficult to state
unequivocally that these individual dealers or zones did or did not shape
the long- term trajectory of supply and demand within the vastness and
complexity the global drug traffic.
d.) Question No. 4: Finally,
did the CIA encourage drug smugglers to target African- American communities?
1.) The pattern of CIA complicity
in drugs proceeded from the internal logic of its covert operations, an
inadvertent consequence of indirect intervention abroad.
2.) There was a striking similarity
in the patterns of CIA complicity with drug dealers in Laos, Afghanistan,
and Central America.
3.) Just as Professor McCoy
could find no evidence, nor any logic, to the proposition that the CIA
in Laos wanted one- third of the GIs in South Vietnam to become heroin
addicts, he could see no evidence or logic of any CIA targeting of blacks
in south-central Los Angeles.
4.) During the 1980s, however,
there was every indication that the CIA was aware that its Afghan and
Central American allies contributed to the export of cocaine and heroin
to the United States—and did nothing to slow this drug flow.
Since a substantial portion
of the African- American community already suspected the worst—that the
CIA willfully flooded their communities with drugs—the time had come for
a unflinching search for the answers to these four questions.
As Congress investigated,
Professor McCoy had a good idea what it would find. He doubted there was
evidence that the CIA actually trafficked in drugs or targeted any Americans,
whether GIs in South Vietnam or blacks in South Central.
But investigators would discover
CIA alliances with warlords, colonels, and criminals who used its protection
to deal drugs. Suffering from what Professor McCoy called "mission myopia,"
CIA agents regarded narcotics as mere "fallout." For CIA agents in Laos,
the heroin epidemic among GIs in Vietnam was only fallout. For agents
in Pakistan and Central America, drug shipments to America were just fallout.
For Vietnam veterans and African-
Americans who lived with the pain of this fallout, these findings would
be profoundly disturbing. That the CIA apparently regarded increased drug
shipments to the United States as acceptable fallout from their Afghan
and Central American operations might spark considerable controversy.
But these findings would be better for this nation's political health
than the CIA's blanket denials which could only fan the flames of allegations
that it willfully targeted black communities for drug distribution.
II. Separating Fact from
Fiction in the CIA's Drug Role —A Presentation by Jonathan Kwitny
Mr. Kwitny noted that he had
written a review of Professor McCoy's book in 1971. He had told his editors
that these were not wild charges, unsubstantiated or unverifiable. On
the contrary, Professor McCoy had named every name. His reporting was
factual. In his review, he had called for an official investigation of
Professor McCoy's charges.
Twenty-five years later, Mr.
Kwitny said, he was still waiting for that investigation.
Mr. Kwitny showed the audience
a copy of a refueling slip from the Ilopango airport, the Salvadoran military
facility, in the mid-1980s. They were refueling a C-47 identified as PPCED.
It was signed by Marcus Agualdo, a contra, close to John Hull, the American
who had a munitions base in Costa Rica. The plane was owned by Jorge Morales.
He was then indicted for cocaine dealing in the United States and was
serving sixteen years in a Florida jail.
He showed another refueling
slip signed by Geraldo Duran, identified by the Department of Justice
as a major drug dealer.
He showed a bill of sale for
a Cessna 404 sold by Adolfo Calero to a front organization. The agent
handling the sale was Sam Vieres of Memphis and the receiver was Dennis
Martin. It was sold for $264,000 in small bills brought by Jorge Morales.
The importation of cocaine
by CIA people and the use of dollars to buy equipment for the contras
was a fact, Mr. Kwitny said. It had been known for nine years. At that
time, he recalled that he had accumulated documents on it. No one was
interested. The only one they were interested in prosecuting was Barry
Seale because that would implicate Sandinista leaders. But they never
had evidence that Sandinista leaders were involved in the drug trade.
They only had an allegation against a minor official. The information
was totally unreliable, which didn't keep it from being used in a U.S.
president's speeches. These false charges got far more attention than
the substantiated charges against the contras.
At the time, Mr. Kwitny recalled,
he couldn't get the Wall Street Journal to run articles on the
importance of cocaine-running by the contras. The Journal did
run gutsy articles on a number of other issues.
So he was surprised that the
San Jose Mercury-News's series sparked this major controversy.
He noted, too, that the denials of the series' charges always lumped several
quite distinct statements together. They accused the series of saying
that the CIA intended to channel cocaine into the black community and
was responsible for the epidemic of drugs in the community.
In fact, the San Jose
Mercury-News articles were detailed and impressive on this point:
that the CIA must have had knowledge of the contras' drug-running. Added
to that were a couple of charges the reporters perhaps should not have
made:
1. What the contras did
with the money. Mr. Kwitny doubted that they used much of it for
the war.
2. Implications about the
attitude of the CIA. The series made no false statements but it made
suggestions that should have been presented skeptically. There was no
evidence that the CIA did it deliberately to target the black community.
In 1985, Robert Owen wrote
a letter to Oliver North saying that a contra group they were allied with
had a questionable past, including potential involvement in drug-running.
The letter writers were disturbed that the contras were running drugs,
and wished they could stop or minimize it. But the war was much more important
to them. Drug-running on the side was inherent to the sort of war they
were promoting.
In 1948, the CIA mounted an
operation to remove socialists from the leadership of a Marseilles union
and put in Corsican drug dealers in their place. The United States dealt
with Noriega for many years, and knew that he was dealing in drugs. Lebanese
working for the CIA in the early 1970s were engaged in it. The DEA found
that they were responsible for an enormous volume of shipments. Its investigation
was stopped by the CIA.
The Miami World Finance Corporation,
involved with drugs, was set up with the involvement of CIA Cubans. An
FBI and DEA taskforce investigated the corporation in the 1970s. The investigation
was stopped. Mr. Kwitny recalled being told by a senior investigator that
the CIA stopped the investigation because more than half of the people
on the suspect list were CIA.
When investigating the Nugan
Hand Bank, founded by CIA and DOD veterans, all DEA agents were told to
back off. There were heavy drug deals by the bank.
Mr. Kwitny recalled that the
Senate Intelligence Committee used questions that he had drafted in questioning
CIA witnesses in the 1980s. The answers were classified.
Overall, when the government
secretly used people who were pledged to secrecy, those lured to the operation
would include people who wanted secrecy for criminal activity. Of these
activities, drugs were the most lucrative. This was a necessary tradeoff
of covert operations. At the height of the Cold War, a case could be made
for it. But now, Mr. Kwitny asked, was the threat so serious as to justify
it?
III. Investigating the
CIA-Drugs Connection—A Presentation by Jack A. Blum
Mr. Blum said that if one
made a list of covert operations involving drugs, there were many including
the Vesco operation and many others. It would include Burma, Afghanistan,
and Thailand. Covert action and criminality went together. Watergate was
only the most reprehensible case of blowback.
The most important failure,
however, was the failure to discuss a future policy to end this problem.
Intelligence had a legitimate role to assess the real threats to the United
States, and to equip the country's leaders with this knowledge.
But when intelligence agencies
engaged in covert operations, this was something else altogether. Then
the intelligence service became more interested in its daily operations
than in gathering information about genuine threats. The massive inflow
of drugs into the country was such a threat, Mr. Blum considered.
There were exposes of drug-running
operations in the Bahamas — the Carlos Leder and Robert Vesco operations,
which flew in drugs to the United States. But the U.S. ambassador to the
Bahamas, Lev Dobriansky, said to leave Prime Minister Pindling alone.
Pindling even hired a public-relations firm that put out the line that
the root of the problem was demand. This was the origin of the Just Say
No campaign. The firm also ran Paula Hawkins's campaign. Not only did
they enter into the U.S. political process, they developed it into a wedge
issue in U.S. politics. In so doing, they made the victims into the perpetrators.
How could the nation keep
intelligence honest enough to focus on the real threat? The intelligence
community had never learned that the Cold War was over.
This might be generic to intelligence
services, Mr. Blum considered. Ten days after the wall came down, Stasi
agents were arrested in Bonn. They were still doing their espionage work,
even though they had no government to work for.
The intelligence agencies
operated on the notion that a corrupt general was better to work with
than an honest politician who might have some differences with U.S. policy.
For example, in Panama and Chile. Why did they consider the general better?
The corrupt general appeared to make a more reliable ally. This was a
dilemma that went back to Thucydides, who wrote about how democratic city-states
were reluctant to ally with generals.
The U.S. constitution gave
Congress control of the purse and established a budget process. The U.S.
black budget was growing bigger and bigger.
General Noriega got $200,000
a year from the CIA. This was only small change for him. But the serious
money came from drug trafficking. It would be impossible for the CIA to
directly pay a corrupt foreign leader enough money to make him a loyal
agent. A hard-pressed intelligence agency kept them in line by giving
them the opportunity to steal.
The nation couldn't stop the
machinery of stealing in Mexico, Mr. Blum said. It could only protest
it from afar. However, if the country didn't stop it now, it would get
a more aggressive variant of the lawlessness of the 1980s.
Adolfo Calero was working
for the United States, as a man who could lobby Congress. He influenced
U.S. public opinion. That was out of the nation's tax dollars. That was
about as dangerous to the constitution as it could get. If it was okay
for the CIA to silence domestic criticism, the country was endangering
its freedoms.
The agency picked its own
leadership. If anyone who wanted genuine reform were nominated, that person
wouldn't be confirmed. The agency vetoed Ted Sorenson after President
Carter publicly chose him. After that, candidates were quietly "cleared."
If the nation cherished the
constitution and wanted to protect its freedoms, it must take action now.
IV. Comment by Clarence
Page
Mr. Page said that in his
effort to make the black community take some responsibility for the problem,
he had said that it must reduce demand. He was struck by what Mr. Blum
had said about the demand argument being planted by the drug dealers themselves.
He still wrote in his columns
that the community was a co-conspirator by consenting to use it. At the
same time, the government should not be giving aid and comfort to the
enemy — the international drug shippers.
He agreed with Professor McCoy
that the black community had not been deliberately targeted. That was
clear from the available evidence and argument. However, Mr. Blum had
pinpointed the problem of the intelligence agencies allowing the drugs
to come in.
Mr. Page said that if he were
to write a book on the pathologies of the press, he would include:
1. If one could not recover
the other guy's scoop, knock it down . This happened with the
San Jose Mercury-News stories. As a variant of this, when the Kerry
committee report came out, the press stories were full of the government's
denials. But if one read further in the New York Times, Washington
Post , and Los Angeles Times stories on the Mercury
series, they said that the basic question was whether the CIA knew.
The Los Angeles Times story even brought forward additional information
on the connection to Blandon's nephew.
2. The old news syndrome.
The editors said that this story was déjà vu . They said
that they had heard all this before.
3. The other-than-beat-reporter
syndrome. The story was done by a regional newspaper. Major newspapers
found it hard to admit they were scooped.
4. Healthy skepticism could
cross the line into cynicism . This accounted for the fact that the
story was dismissed too rapidly.
In the African-American community,
after the COINTELPRO revelations, the Tuskegee experiment, and the Black
Panther ambushes, this episode reinforced paranoid notions that the community's
problems were attributable to an external enemy. But Mr. Page recalled
that Henry Kissinger had once said, "Paranoids have enemies, too."
All were in agreement that
there was a degree of hype in the San Jose Mercury-News story,
Mr. Page continued. But all editors had also admitted that one could not
pursue the story this far without upsetting the black community.
One could not criticize the
Mercury News for starting the debate, Mr. Page considered. Maybe
it got too excited, but it started the debate.
But although the story about
the conspiracy to commit genocide had not been published, it did not die.
It was not a conspiracy, but
Louis Farrakhan made a good point when he said that there was an element
of government criminal liability in letting the drugs in. It was the same
as with tobacco. There was government liability there. Mr. Page asked
why this argument should be left to Mr. Farrakhan to make.
Mr. Page said that he did
not compare this scandal to COINTELPRO, where J. Edgar Hoover had thought
that the Black Panthers were the number-one enemy of America.
V. Question-and-answer
session
David MacMichael, Association
of National Security Alumni
He referred to Mr. Blum's
comment that it was the primary task of intelligence to identify and analyze
the threat to the United States, not to engage in covert action. Mr. MacMichael
questioned whether it was the job of the intelligence service to define
the threat. He asked whether that was not the job of the elected leadership.
Mr. MacMichael recalled that
the speakers had said that the drug-running was not used to fund the contras.
He noted, however, that Mr. Casey had looked at that possibility.
He asked why the district
attorney of Dade County, after all the evidence of drug-trafficking in
his district, had not indicted anyone.
Mr. MacMichael noted that
the seminar participants had said that the black community had not been
targeted. However, he noted that the Mafia had very specifically targeted
the black community.
Mr. MacMichael recalled that
when he was in the government, he had laid out in a memo the links between
the Colombian government and the MAS drug-trafficking group. The station
chief in Colombia flew up and vetoed any mention of this in the paper.
One of the panelists, before
commenting on Mr. MacMichael's questions, recalled an earlier remark that
countries should be permitted to make their own mistakes; e.g., Chile
should be allowed to elect a government that the U.S. government might
not like. He recalled that he had met with an anti-Sandinista Nicaraguan
businessman in 1985. This businessman acknowledged that the Sandinistas
had brought honest government to Nicaragua. Nevertheless, he said that
the ruin that was befalling Nicaragua was due to the fact that the United
States would not permit the Sandinistas to rule. So, in the end it was
the Sandinistas' fault.
Response by Clarence Page
Mr. Page addressed the question
of targeting of the black community brought up by Mr. MacMichael. He noted
that the country's racial misunderstanding could revolve around particular
words. He asked whether it was targeting blacks, or merely poor people,
when a cheap drug was invented that cost only ten dollars a hit. The biggest
gangs in America were in Los Angeles. They constituted a ready-made network.
He asked Professor McCoy whether
he believed the black community had been targeted.
Response by Alfred McCoy
Professor McCoy said that
there was not a scintilla of evidence that the CIA had deliberately targeted
the black community. Nor was there logic. What occurred was that the CIA
made an operational compromise for the sake of the success of its covert
action. It essentially said, "You mobilize for us and we'll look the other
way."
In its operational zone, Professor
McCoy said, the CIA kept the DEA away. Outside the zone, if anyone investigated
or arrested its operatives, the CIA intervened to get the charges taken
off. These were the tradeoffs it made to insure that the operation succeeded.
The CIA did not concern itself with nor control the downstream trafficking.
Inside the operational zone the CIA controlled, outside not.
Response by Jonathan Kwitny
Mr. Kwitny said that the word
targeting implied will, intention. There was no evidence that the CIA
so intended. The only possibility was that it favored it for its Laotian
clients so that they could have a healthy economy. But he did not have
evidence for that.
Response by Jack Blum
Mr. Blum said that it was
necessary to separate the concept of targeting from the distribution network
and recipients. An addict with money was not seen as a problem by society.
The problem came when the addict had no money. Some of the top users had
been NBC stars. The real money in drug-running was made there. The country
focused on the inner city because there was a distribution network of
talented risk-takers, people who were willing to take risks to make a
hundred dollars overnight.
Commenting on the definition
of the threat, Mr. Blum agreed with Mr. MacMichael that it was not the
job of the CIA to define the threat. But it was the job of the intelligence
community to advise of the threats. The objective reality was that the
intelligence community was not telling the truth about the real threats
to the nation, but was advancing the careers of its members by providing
what the policy-makers wanted ideologically.
Question by Ambassador
William DePree
Ambassador DePree asked about
the CIA's blocking of prosecution to protect its operatives from drug
charges. He wanted to know how much was on the public record of the CIA's
actually blocking prosecution.
Professor McCoy said that
there were two phases to the CIA's protection of its assets. First, when
the CIA had an operational zone, it was closed to investigation by other
agencies. The DEA and other agencies had elaborate investigatory capabilities.
In the CIA's zone, however, assets made heroin with absolute impunity.
For example, the DEA had seventeen agents in Islamabad. It had an elaborate
network. Yet it was a detective from Oslo, using basic investigatory techniques,
who first tracked the heroin back to Islamabad, even though the DEA had
seventeen agents there.
The DEA set up an office in
Honduras in 1981, but it was closed during 1983–86 during the period of
clandestine CIA support of the contras. Then when the Boland amendment
was rescinded in 1986, and the contras fully funded by Congress, the office
was reopened.
Second, outside the zone,
this raised the question whether Blandon's operation was protected. That
needed further investigation but it would be unusual, because the protecting
was usually in the zone, not downstream.
Mr. Kwitny said, in response
to Ambassador DePree's question about whether the CIA's blocking of investigations
was on the public record, that he had printed it.
Mr. Blum said that the protection
was similar to the way in which the United States had handled Salvadoran
human rights abuses — it had covered them up to advance the anti-guerrilla
war.
He noted that it was policy
that CIA agents would sit in in meetings with U.S. criminial prosecutors,
when their assets were involved.
Question by William Root
Mr. Root asked whether the
CIA was a rogue agency that was not disciplined, or whether there was
discipline, and it was part of the country's foreign policy to contain
Communism.
He also said that he found
it troubling that presidents would operate in an unaccountable way.
Mr. Blum considered that the
CIA was not a rogue agency at all. In Iran-contra, the record was clear
that Admiral Poindexter and the others were all pushing for it.
He addressed Mr. Root's second
question about how the public could hold the political leadership accountable.
The country's political leaders had found it desirable to operate in secrecy.
Governments liked to operate in secret.
As for the future, the question
before the country was whether it would try to reinstall constitutional
governance. For example, legally treaties were the law of the land. He
asked how the CIA could legally intervene in another country in violation
of a treaty. He noted that their response to this argument was laughter.
What the nation ended up with was not a government of laws.
Question about militarization
of the CIA
A member of the audience noted
that there was a tendency in the CIA to militarize. The covert operations
were military. The intelligence community involved the army and the other
military services. And the CIA budget came under the Pentagon's. He asked
how this problem should be handled.
Mr. Blum said that to have
military people in intelligence was equivalent to their escaping the chain
of command. It was a situation dangerous to constitutional government.
Mr. Kwitny said that when
Senator Church made his famous remark about the rogue elephant, all the
things he was investigating — the murder of Patrice Lumumba, for example
— had come right out of the Oval Office. This included the contras. It
was not a rogue agency at all.
Mr. Kwitny also saw a conflict
of interest between the military and the CIA. There was a financial incentive
for the military: the Pentagon budget was influenced by what the CIA had
to say about the degree of threat.
Mr. Goodman said that CIA
director Deutch was moving the CIA closer to the Pentagon than any other
director. The national intelligence estimates had been downgraded. Most
dangerous of all, the National Imagery and Mapping Agency had been put
in the Pentagon. That meant that a policy-making organization was interpreting
satellite data important to its budget. The CIA was supposed to be the
honest broker.
Question by Robert H.
Johnson, former National Security Council official
Mr. Johnson asked what the
country could learn from the intelligence operations of other countries.
How did they deal with the criminalization of clandestine operations?
Were they more cynical, or more effective in handling the problem?
Mr. Blum considered that the
other countries were more cynical. Britain had no constitution, and the
French were totally cynical. There was no foreign model for the United
States to follow. To the extent that there was a model, it was the Russians.
The United States patterned itself after them.
Question by Louis Wolf
Mr. Wolf raised the issue
of CIA proprietary companies and the huge sums they made.
Mr. Blum said that the intelligence
game may have had to be played. But he asked whether this was necessary
at all times.
Returning to Mr. Johnson's
question about foreign models, Mr. Goodman acknowledged that Britain operated
without a written constitution. But it at least clearly separated intelligence
from policy agencies.
Comment by Kit Gage, National
Committee Against Repressive Legislation
Ms. Gage noted that the FBI
was expanding rapidly internationally, using some CIA assets.
Mr. Blum said that there did
not exist an international civil society, even though reality had negated
borders.
Question by Sean Cairncross,
American University
First, he asked the panel
whether it agreed that some secrecy was still necessary. He asked how
much publicity could be allowed without destroying intelligence capabilities.
Second, what reforms did the
panel propose?
Mr. Blum considered that these
would be good questions for the Senate Intelligence Committee.
On the question of reforms,
a member of the audience recalled that when he was at the CIA and a question
of criminal activity arose, he had said that he wanted to call the FBI.
He was shut down for saying that. He asked what the statutory chart was
of the CIA's authority.
Mr. Blum agreed that that
was essential.
On the question of the statutory
chart, Mr. Goodman recalled that the National Security Act of 1947 creating
the CIA said nothing about covert operations.
Question by Ambassador
Robert E. White
Ambassador White said that
as he listened to Professor McCoy and Mr. Kwitny, they were talking about
paramilitary operations, not covert action. With the end of the Cold War,
the paramilitary operations would diminish. Would the CIA link with drugs
therefore also diminish?
Professor McCoy said he believed
it would. The complicity of the CIA in the global drug trade arose from
a series of alliances of the Cold War. That was less likely now. The whole
debate about drug-running and CIA complicity was about history. The question
was nevertheless a sensitive one for the war against drugs.
If it turned out, from an
examination of that history, that a substantial amount of drug imports
were encouraged by these operations, that raised big questions of money
liability. It raised the question of whether there should not be an amnesty
for all those caught using narcotics on the ground of entrapment.
Question by Ralph McGehee
Mr. McGehee said, commenting
on Ambassador White's question, that there was no evidence of a diminution
of paramilitary operations. They were going on in Iraq and Sudan, for
example.
Mr. Goodman said that he also
did not share Professor McCoy's optimism regarding the abatement of the
problem with the end of the Cold War. The director of the CIA thought
that covert action was a unique tool. The budget of the CIA was increasing.
The agency was looking for a justification.
Question by Robert Dreyfuss
Mr. Dreyfuss referred to the
record of the CIA's involvement in drug operations. There was operation
in Marseilles in the 1940s. Earlier, there had been an operation in Sicily.
He noted that much of the
convervative press in the 1980s referred to the Cuban government as engaged
in drug-trafficking. Was there any evidence of that? Or was that a CIA
covert operation itself? A general was executed by the Cuban government.
Mr. Blum considered that the
parallels between what happened with Cuban and U.S. intelligence operations
were striking. The Cubans wanted to get around the U.S. blockade. That
sent them to Panama and soon got them into the drug trade.
Question by James Morrell,
Center for International Policy
Mr. Morrell said that the
rebuttals of the San Jose Mercury's story that appeared
in the New York Times and Washington Post stressed that
the Meneses-Blandon drug activities were only a drop in the bucket in
the total U.S. drug market, whereas the story said that Blandon started
the whole crack epidemic. In some other respects, the Times and
Post reviews corroborated the Mercury series, but that
on the question of volume the two newspapers found great fault with the
story. That appeared to be their major objection to it. He asked the panelists
to comment.
Mr. Blum said that Blandon
and Meneses were not the principal movers. Ballasteros in Mexico was much
bigger. There were many others involved, including the Haitian generals.
Professor McCoy said that
the San Jose Mercury had overemphasized the "Johnny Appleseed"
angle, maintaining that Blandon had spread the crack epidemic to Los Angeles,
and that sparked the national debate over the question. In that respect,
the rebuttal that appeared in the other newspapers was important and valid.
But if one stepped back and
asks, Did CIA assets supply significant amounts of drugs to the black
community, the answer was yes.
Mr. Page noted that the
San Jose Mercury had been contrite.
A member of the audience,
formerly a CIA and State Department official, said that the nation certainly
needed a CIA. It could be called something else, but an intelligence capability
was needed. It did not need a Murder, Inc. It did not need involvement
with druggies. It needed a government agency that worked on the basis
of a charter.
Although the Washington
Post had been critical of the Mercury's articles, the
Post's ombudsman, Geneva Overholser, had written ten days ago that
the Mercury series provoked a debate and applied an important
corrective.
Mr. Page noted that the First
Amendment was sometimes messy, but it got results.
Mr. Blum said that as a result
of the Mercury series, there was a constituency in the United
States that saw that what went on overseas affected them. That might help
undo the immunity of foreign policy from domestic criticism.
Index of participants
Blum 1, 13, 14, 17- 22
DePree 17
Dreyfuss 21
Gage 20
Goodman 1, 14, 19- 21
Johnson 19
Kwitny 1, 11- 13, 17- 20
MacMichael 16, 17
McCoy 1, 11, 14, 17, 18, 20,
21
Morrell 21
Page 1, 2, 14- 16, 22
Root 13, 18
White 5, 6, 20
Wolf 19
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