Persian Drugs: Oliver North, the DEA and Covert Operations in the Mideast

‘Rug merchants’ was the epithet former White House Chief of Staff Don Regan used to describe the Iranians who negotiated secret arms deals for nearly a year with senior officials of the Reagan Administration, including Oliver North of the National Security Council. Regan’s dismissive characterization hardly did justice to the sales skills of North’s Mideast contacts. ‘It was a brutal, ugly story,’ said the CIA’s chief operations officer, Clair George. ‘People were selling information, selling hostages, selling their rings, selling their clothes, selling letters, trying to make money out of the hostage business.'(1)

They were also selling drugs. At the same time North was profiting Iranian heroin traffickers by negotiating arms-for-hostage deals with them, he was also dispatching US drug agents with wads of cash to pay off anyone – including other drug traffickers – who claimed to know the whereabouts of the American captives in Lebanon.

North’s operation was the disastrous culmination of a long history of ties between federal drug enforcement authorities and various arms of US intelligence, including the CIA. Like the Federal Bureau of Narcotics before it, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) enjoys expertise in undercover operations and special access to foreign informants and government officials. Other US intelligence services have long coveted, and succeeded in recruiting, those resources for purposes unrelated to fighting crime. These have included the testing of mind-altering drugs on unwitting suspects, recruiting assassins and engaging in political espionage abroad under cover of law enforcement.(2)

The story of Oliver North’s similar success in recruiting the DEA bureaucracy throws into sharp relief the hypocrisy of official drug policy in the Reagan years and the potential for presidential abuses of drug enforcement. The use of drug enforcement as a front for intelligence missions raises profound questions about the ability of Congress to control covert operations. No less important, it carries the risk that the perversion of law enforcement institutions abroad could ultimately jeopardize the very legitimacy of law enforcement at home.

Drug Merchants

Lt. Colonel Oliver North, the National Security Council aide, could not afford to be too scrupulous about the agents he employed to carry out covert operations run from the White House. In the face of a congressional ban on American aid he relied on a corrupt Iranian arms merchant (Albert Hakim), a scandal-tainted Pentagon officer (Richard Secord), a shady CIA veteran connected to the drug-linked Nugan Hand Bank (Thomas Clines), a convicted Syrian arms-and-drugs dealer (Manzer al-Kassar), a fugitive wanted for the terrorist bombing of a civilian airline (Luis Posada) and a host of other schemers, profiteers and traffickers.

Manucher Ghorbanifar

The NSC aide hardly thought twice, therefore, when a group of Israeli arms dealers desiring an opening to Tehran in 1985, commended to his attention an Iranian arms dealer so shady he made it on to the CIA’s ‘burn list’. In testimony before Congress, the CIA’s Clair George called him a ‘bum, a ‘looser’, a crook’ and a ‘recruited agent of the Israeli government’. Manucher Ghorbanifar, the first channel employed by the White House to make contact with Tehran, was apparently all these and more. An inveterate deal maker, Ghorbanifar survived by offering his services to any intelligence agency that served his needs. As a pre-revolution informant for the Shah’s secret police, SAVAK, Ghorbanifar enjoyed ‘access to Iranian underworld characters of various illicit hues’, according to a CIA report.(3) A preliminary study of Irangate issued in 1987 by the Senate Intelligence Committee observed that Ghorbanifar had once offered to swap intelligence on Iran for protection of the ‘drug smuggling activities’ of several of his close associates.(4) Although George protested to CIA Director William Casey that he was ‘not going to run this guy’, North liked Ghorbanifar’s ‘neat idea’ of diverting arms profits to the contras via Switzerland. And so the deals continued, supervised by only a handful of NSC, CIA and Pentagon aides.

The Bank of Credit and Commerce International

Ghorbanifar was only a middle man with good Iranian connections, not a financier. Bridge money for several of the arms sales he brokered in this period came from the Saudi arms dealer and entrepreneur Adnan Khashoggi, who enjoyed close connections both with elements of the Saudi royal family and Israeli leaders. Khashoggi in turn raised financing for a key sale to Iran of HAWK missile parts in the spring of 1986 from, among other sources, the Bank of Credit and Commerce International.(5) Khashoggi maintained accounts at the bank and shared its attorney, Clark Clifford.(6)

The ‘Bank of Crooks and Criminals International’, as former CIA Director Robert Gates once called it, BCCI became notorious as a laundromat for drug money after being indicted in 1988 in Tampa, Florida, following a US Customs drug sting operation. In Latin America, its account holders included billionaire Medellin cocaine lord Jose Gonzalo Rodriguez Gacha and Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega; in Asia its clients allegedly included the world’s biggest heroin dealer, Khun Sa, and corrupt Pakistani officials, drug profiteers and the CIA.(7)

By 1986, when BCCI financed the HAWK missile deal, US authorities knew the bank to be a far-flung criminal enterprise. Acting CIA director Richard Kerr told Congress that his agency was well aware by the early 1980s that BCCI ‘was involved in illegal activities such as money-laundering, narcotics and terrorism’.(8) Kerr also declared that he provided other federal agencies, including the State Department, FBI, DEA and Treasury, with ‘several hundred reports’ on the bank’s criminal operations, starting no later than 1985.(9) Kerr added, however, that the CIA had no knowledge of BCCI’s ties to Khashoggi or its role in financing the arms-for-hostages deal with Iran. No evidence has yet surfaced to the contrary. But it seems hard to believe that the National Security Agency, whose monitoring of international cable traffic first brought the deals to Defence Secreatary Casper Weinberger’s attention in 1985, picked up no trace of the bank’s activity in this regard.(10)

According to the French daily Liberation, moreover, the CIA itself proposed to Israeli arms dealers and officials that the bank serve as a financial intermediary on weapons sales between Iran and Israel. The bank allegedly set up letters of credit between Tehran and the Israeli arms merchants, the paper reported, ‘without in any way excluding the “parallel operations” of Adnan Khashoggi’.(11)

The bridge money Khashoggi came up with from BCCI and other sources to finance the HAWK missile parts sale in the summer of 1986 carried a stiff price: 20 per cent. To the $15 million Khashoggi provided, Ghorbanifar thus had to tack on another $3 million, before his own profit. The whole deal also had to support a sizeable margin to cover the diversion of funds to the Contras. By the time everyone had their cut, the price had escalated to nearly four times the price charged by the Defense Department to the CIA for the parts.(12) When Iranian officials discovered the discrepancy, they refused to pay the full bill – leaving Ghorbanifar desperate and willing to resort to all manner of shady tactics to save himself from financial ruin.

By the summer of 1986, Ghorbanifar’s self-serving lies and deceptions became too much for the Americans to take. Albert Hakim, retired General Richard Secord’s Iranian business partner, caught Ghorbanifar mistranslating the words of one Iranian official to mislead North’s team. To avoid future double crosses, and to boost their take of the arms trade, Hakim and Secord, with support from some members of the White House, began cultivating a more reliable ‘second channel’ for negotiations with Iran.

Sadegh Tabatabai

The second channel included the son (Ahmed), brother (Mahmoud) and above all nephew (Ali Hasemi Bahramani) of Hahemi Rafsanjani, speaker of the Iranian parliament; the son (Ahmed) of the Ayatollah Khomenei; and a close adviser to Rafsanjani, Sadegh Tabatabai, a former acquaintance of Hakim’s.(13) One of Tabatabai’s relatives helped set up the contact during a trip to the United States. On July 21 1986 North wrote to his boss Admiral Poindexter: ‘George Cave [a retired CIA specialist on Iran] will proceed to Frankfurth [sic] to meet w/Tabatabai, the cousin of the man I met w/here. T is allegedly well connected to Rafsanjani and several others of the so-called “pragmatists”.(14)

Tabatabai was a major arms purchaser for the Tehran regime. In one notorious case, some unscrupulous businessmen defrauded Tabatabai and the Iranian treasury of $43 million in a phony offer of 50 American tanks. Like Ghorbanifar, Tabatabai did not let ideology get in the way of a good deal. He purchased arms from the Israelis for the Ayatollah in 1980 and returned to Israel in 1986 to discuss the hostage situation, despite the Khomenei regime’s vocal antipathy towards the Zionist state.(15) In dealing with Tabatabai North was doing business with another major drug trafficker. The American press had reported Tabatabai’s January 1983 arrest in West Germany for smuggling several pounds of opium. He escaped the clutches of German justice thanks only to the intervention of Foreign Minister Hans Dietrich Genscher, who persuaded a court to accept Tabatabai’s dubious claim of diplomatic immunity. Genscher had known Tabatabai since the 1970s when the Iranian, then living in Germany, helped lead the opposition to the Shah. Perhaps to return the favour, Tabatabai later acted as an intermediary between Bonn and the Lebanese captors of several German hostages.(16)

The day of Tabatabai’s arrest in Germany on drug smuggling charges, a former General Motors executive, George Perry, disappeared from a New York City hotel. Three months later police dredged his weighted body out of a lake upstate, the victim of a professional hit. Perry had been the middle man in a shipment of Brazilian arms to Iran arranged by Tabatabai. Their network sold drugs as well as munitions; the head of the New York subsiduary of the Brazilian arms exporter pleaded guilty to conspiring to sell 13 pounds of cocaine shortly before the chief informer in the case was murdered.(17)

International Airline Support Group

The Irangate drug connections were not limited to the Iranian side. One of the first shipments to Iran authorized by the Rea-gan White House as part of its hostage bargaining efforts was carried by a plane supplied by a Miami firm listed in US government computers as having ‘been involved in narcotics and contraband smuggling’. This September 1985 shipment of TOW missiles caught the attention of US Customs agents when a US-registered DC-8 left Tabriz, Iran on September 16 and made an ’emergency’ landing at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion airport, where it stayed overight before returning to Spain. The Kuwaiti press agency declared, with essential accuracy, that the flight was part of a secret US operation to run arms to Iran.(18)

This incident attracted widespread foreign press coverage but minimal notice in the United States. ‘The lack of press coverage may possibly be attributed to pressure by the State Department’, one Customs investigator concluded. ‘Officials from State Department/INR and the Aviation Desk of the Economic Bureau have advised both the FAA and US customs personnel to “forget the whole incident.” It appears that the State Department may have been suppressing this information in order to keep a controversial incident from causing the US and Israeli governments major embarrassment.’ In testimony, however, State Department officials professed ignorance about this shipment – perhaps because it had not been authorized by a presidential ‘finding’ and therefore violated the Arms Export Control Act.

The cargo plane was owned by International Air Tours, a CIA proprietary based in Brussels.(19) The CIA has also claimed, almost certainly falsely, that it knew nothing of the September shipment.(20) International Air Tours purchased the plane one month earlier from International Airline Support Group Inc., a Miami-based firm incorporated by Alex Carlson, an attorney who founded and did legal work for CIA proprietaries.(21) It was this latter CIA-linked firm that left computer traces of ‘narcotics and contraband smuggling’, according to a Customs check.(22)

Unleashing the DEA

Where were America’s vice cops while all these drug-related conspiracies were hatching? At least a few were acting as bag men for Oliver North, carrying hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash to pay off assorted rogues in Lebanon who claimed to know something of the hostages’ condition and location.

The affair began in March 1984, with the kidnapping of the CIA’s Beirut station chief and top counterterrorism expert, William Buckley. His revelations to Hezbollah and Syrian interrogators blew the cover of nearly every CIA agent in the Middle East – and, presumably, their operations. 23 In January 1985 the frantic CIA Director William Casey convened an interdepartmental group on terrorism to oversee and coordinate the many schemes underway to save him. The Drug Enforcement Administration joined the group ‘in order to improve coordination and cooperation’, according to long-forgotten testimony in May 1985 by the director of the State Department’s office on terrorism, Robert Oakley.(24) Soon the DEA’s own agents would become involved in covert operations directed by Oliver North not to apprehend drug pushers but to bribe terrorists to free Buckley.

‘It was a matter of routine’, DEA spokesman Con Dougherty has said of his agency’s cooperation. From the start, however, its new mission was handled with extraordinary sensitivity. No written records were kept, and even the DEA’s general counsel, Joseph Davis, was reportedly never informed that drug agents were now acting as cloak-and-dagger operators for the CIA and National Security Council. ‘There was no reporting responsibility to anyone’, said Senator Paul Tribble (Republican-Virginia). ‘There were no controls on how the money was spent or for what purpose.'(25)

The DEA’s active role was initiated by Edward Hickey, then chief of security at the White House and a friend of Buckley’s. In January 1985 Hickey asked his neighbour, DEA agent William Dwyer, whether the drug agency could help locate the kidnapped CIA officer. Dwyer in turn recommended talking to his colleague Frank Tarallo, who had extensive experience in the Middle East. Hickey did so, and, impressed, he went to John Poindexter, assistant to National Security Adviser Robert MacFarlane, and persuaded him to add the DEA to the hostage task force. Soon DEA assigned to it an agent of Lebanese descent, Abraham Azzam, and put Dwyer and Tarallo on the job in the field. Besides the services of its personnel, DEA also came up with $20,000 to cover their expenses and informant payments.(26) Senior DEA officials were proud to put their agency at the service of the hostage rescue operation.(27)

According to one informant, these officials ‘paid thousands of dollars to Lebanese hashish dealers and other informants to pinpoint the hostages’ location.'(28) Before long, Dwyer and Tarallo developed a promising Lebanese Druze informant – a West Beirut military commander named ‘Elias’ – who claimed to be in touch with someone who could obtain the hostages release.(29) The informant, meeting with Azzam and the two agents in Geneva and in New Nork, claimed that to swing the deal he needed $50,000 up front and a US guarantee to sell arms to the kidnapers. Soon the terms of trade escalated to $1 million per hostage, up to a maximum of four, plus $50,000 to the informant.(30)

That march, the DEA field agents briefed North.(31) The CIA, also apprised of the situation, showed some skepticism but agreed to pay a first instalment of $50,000 to the informant. It then balked when he demanded another $200,000 for his contact in Lebanon – who now proved to be a narcotics trafficker. Neither Azzam or the CIA minded the contact’s criminal drug record: they questioned whether he could be trusted with further financial advances.(32)

Azzam was also worried that the whole bribery plot would blow up in the DEA’s face through leaks from CIA reports to various legislative oversight committees. As North informed his boss Robert MacFarlane, ‘He is concerned that when the congressional committees are made aware of the $200K that DEA would be tainted by another CIA failure.'(33)

The CIA, for its part, demanded proof that the contact could deliver. Elias came back with evidence that he could: a newspaper on which Buckley had jotted his initials. Only one problem now stood in the way of a deal: the handwriting wasn’t Buckley’s and neither was the middle initial. The CIA now derided the whole project as a ‘scam’ and a ‘bunch of hocus-pocus’. Even Azzam, the DEA’s Task Force representative, thought it ‘stunk’.(34)

But this obvious fraud did not deter North from playing the long odds in Lebanon with the Druze informant. In a June 7, 1985 memorandum to Robert MacFarlane, North advised that rescuing Buckley would cost a cool $2.2 million. The DEA believed that’ this effort will produce two hostages’, North wrote, ‘and that additional hostages will be released for $1 million each’. North regretted that ‘the price cannot be negotiated down given the number of people requiring bribes’. Further money would be needed to rent a safehouse and yachts for the hostage transfers. ‘Travel arrangements and operations costs are currently being financed from funds normally available to the Nicaraguan resistance’, he reported, referring to $90,000 that he would ultimately take from Adolfo Calero’s bank accounts. Another $2 milion would come from an anonymous donor – the Dallas billionaire H. Ross Perot, whose can-do approach to life had born fruit in 1980 with a successful rescue mission on behalf of two employees caught in an Iranian prison. North advised that besides money the operation would require ‘considerable time (contacts inside Lebanon, financial transactions, and rental of yacht/ warehouse)’. North further recommended that two DEA agents be formally assigned to the NSC for the duration of the hostage ransom operation. MacFarlane approved and noted at the bottom of the memo that North himself would follow up the request with the attorney general.(35)

Attorney General Edwin Meese and ultimately President Reagan himself supplied the OK.(36) ‘I did authorize DEA to co-operate with the National Security Council staff in anything that would be helpful to get back the hostages’, Meese told the House Subcommittee on Crime, ‘but ransoming… was never discussed with me.’ Meese said it was ‘not my understanding that they [the agents] were to be used for operations’.(37)

The two agents assigned to North were paid out of the Swiss bank accounts maintained by retired Major General Richard Secord and the Iranian-American arms dealer Albert Hakim, North’s agents on both the Contra supply and Iran arms operation. Secord testified that the agents received half a million dollars for their undercover work through mid-1986. They picked up the money in Europe. ‘I was told that the director of the Drug Enforcement Agency (sic) had agreed to detail some agents to this project from time to time’, Secord testified, ‘but the expenses of these agents would have to borne by outside financing. And so we financed it.’ All payments were made in cash.(38) In some cases Hakim arranged for the agents to pick up the money in Geneva.(39)

The agents had become, to all intents and purposes, North’s gofers. He ordered them in June 1985 to hand over to the Lebanese intermediary $200,000 in bribes supplied by Ross Perot. It vanished from sight with the DEA’s source supplying convenient excuses.(40) The truth was, however, that Buckley was already dead.(41)

North persevered. In August 1985 he assigned his two DEA agents to travel to Geneva to get new travel papers for a Saudi prince who allowed he could help win release of the hostages. (He had already won North over with promises to contribute to the Contra cause.) The US Ambassador in Bern however, refused the agents’ request for a false US or Swiss passport to help smuggle the man into Lebanon.(42) The ‘prince’ turned out to be an Iranian swindler, Mousalreza Ebrahim Zadeh. Of the $370,000 that North and his associates invested in this phony prince, at least $15,000 was used on the DEA/hostage mission.(43)

By late 1985 North was pursuing other avenues – most notably arms deals with Iran – for freeing the hostages. But the agents remainded his operatives, on call for numerous unofficial missions. For example, North’s secretary Fawn Hall arranged for the two agents to meet with Michael Ledeen, who had helped set up the Iran arms-for-hostages negotiations in 1985 but who was no longer in government. Now representing Eastern Airlines, Ledeen sought the agents help in stopping the DEA from seizing the company’s planes when cocaine was discovered aboard. The agents complied by putting Ledeen in touch with Miami and New York regional directors of the DEA. In another instance, former CIA officer Glen Robinette, working as a private investigator for Secord and Thomas Clines, sought their advice on his efforts to undermine the Christic Institute’s lawsuit.(44) North may also have used them to neutralize a competitor to Richard Secord in the Central America arms market.(45)

North did revive the agents’ role in the hostage affair in May 1986, however. Using a new source, North hoped to ransom the hostages for a million dollars a head. One of Perot’s employees waited in a yacht near Cyprus with the cash – but the contacts insisted on money up front, which the DEA agents refused to hand over. Perot kept his money and the Lebanese kept the hostages – if they ever had them.(46)

By late May 1986 North and Poindexter were considering a possible rescue raid, like the Son Tay POW camp operation or the abortive 1980 Iran mission. ‘Secord undertook to see what could be done thru one of the earlier DEA developed Druze contacts’, North informed his boss on June 3. North reported that Secord was working with Israel’s top counter-terror official, Amiram Nir, on the planning ‘and now has three people in Beirut and a 40-man Druze force working “for” us.’ They planned to use at least one undercover US Army specialist, a member of the elite unit known as Intelligence Support Activity.(47) But that effort too, came to nought.

A report in the Madrid newspaper El Pais suggests the DEA’s role continued, and perhaps grew, through to the fall of 1986. On October 24 1986 Spanish authorities detained two American DEA agents, James Kible and Victor Oliveira, at Barajas airport before catching a flight to Zurich. They were carrying $5 million between them. The paper cited Spanish government sources as saying they were ‘implicated in Irangate’.(48)

Whether they were working to free the hostages in Lebanon or on some other mission is unclear. In the fall of 1986, for example, North and other members of the top secret ‘Operations Sub Group’ on terrorism met in the White House to plan the kidnapping of Fawaz Younis, a Beirut-based terrorist who hi-jacked a Royal Jordanian jet on 11 June 1985. Working closely with the CIA and under the leadership of FBI executive director Oliver Revell, the DEA worked its informants in the Middle East to compile a profile of Younis and trace his day-to-day movements.

The breakthrough that made possible his capture was the DEA’s recruitment of a former Lebanese criminal who had known Younis since 1981. The informant renewed his contact with Younis offering him a job smuggling drugs, and lured him in September 1987 to Cyprus where US agents tackled him and brought him to the United State.(49)

The DEA and cover operations

Revelations of the DEA’s role in Lebanon provoked shock and dismay from members of Congress. Senator Trible, a member of the Iran-Contra committee, called it ‘another example of a private operation run by government officials without supervision and the checks and balances that make our government work right.'(50) Senator Dale Bumpers (Democat Arkansas), said he was ‘incensed’ to hear of the DEA’s role and declared, ‘Their authority goes to interdicting drugs, not looking for hostages, now matter how laudable a goal.'(51) Congressman Hughes noted that the operation could jeopardize the DEA’s mission abroad ‘if other countries believed that they were engaged in espionage, counterespionage, counterintelligence’ unrelated to drug enforcement.(52) The Iran-Contra committees concluded that the North-DEA operation ‘violated the law’ because Congress was not informed.(53)

Yet members of Congress should not have been so surprised. Although the DEA’s official mission is limited to law enforcement, its agents share a broad range of skills with their counterparts in the CIA: undercover penetration, intelligence gathering, running informants, bribery and disruption of hostile organizations. Given the low level of scrutiny Congress gives the agency and the unquestioning reverence with which legislators view its cause, the DEA is an ideal vehicle for presidents seeking to circumvent congressional supervision of covert operations.(54)

DEA and SAVAK

In the Shah’s Iran, for example, the DEA took over from the CIA the politically sticky job of training SAVAK, the notoriously brutal secret police. The shift exploited a loophole left in law after Congress in 1974 barred the training of foreign police (except against drugs) in the wake of revelations linking the CIA-backed program to torture and state terror. In the guise of narcotics enforcement, US authorities continued regular information exchanges with SAVAK.(55) Ironically, sources cited by the London Observer implicated SAVAK in smuggling heroin to Western Europe on behalf of the Iranian royal family.(56) In 1980, the son of SAVAK’s founder was arrested on drug charges after he made the largest sale of high quality heroin to a DEA undercover operative in the agency’s history. The case produced allegations by a former CIA officer and DEA sources that after the fall of the Shah, the US government dropped all arrests of former SAVAK agents as they sold heroin caches to raise foreign exchange.(57) The drug-linked arms dealer Ghorbanifar was himself a SAVAK agent before the revolution.(58)

In 1980, Representative Les Aspin (Democrat, Wisconsin), had an inkling of such possibilities when he warned that oversight of the CIA was subject to fatal loopholes. ‘One is that covert operations could as assigned to intelligence agencies other than the CIA – and there are lots of them,’ he noted. ‘How many people are aware that the Drug Enforcement Administration has intelligence agents all over the world?'(59)

‘Narco-terrorism’

The Reagan administration laid the groundwork for its use – or misuse – of the DEA on clandestine political missions when it began trumpeting the national security threat of ‘narco-terrorism’, a variant on ‘Soviet-sponsored international terrorism’ that originally justified its giant increases in the CIA budget. Secretary of State George Schultz put the case most succinctly: ‘Money from drug smuggling supports terrorism,’ he said in September 1984. ‘Terrorists provide assistance to drug traffickers.’ Michael Ledeen, the State Department and NSC consultant who initiated the arms-for-hostages talks, fleshed out the alleged connection. “Drugs go to the bourgeois countries where they corrupt and where they kill, while the arms go to pro-Communist terror groups in the Third World.’ The DEA’s own deputy administrator, David Westrate, framed the ideological rationale for expanding his agency’s de facto jurisdiction when he told Congress in 1985, ‘The terrorist-insurgent link to drug trafficking and the increasing use of terrorist tactics by drug trafficking organizations are matters of serious concern to the Drug Enforcement Administration …we aggressively pursue drug-related terrorist information… The expanded use of drug trafficking for political purposes has already had an effect on and could have far-reaching implications for drug law enforcement worldwide and US foreign policy.'(60)

As this line took hold in the Reagan years, the division of authority between agencies involved in law enforcement and foreign covert operations was nearly erased. Just as the DEA took on new anti-terrorism duties, so agencies traditionally concerned with terrorism joined the anti-drug fight. On April 8, 1986, according to the Los Angeles Times, President Reagan ‘issued a top secret national security decision directive that enabled the government to use military surveillance and intelligence capabilities in its drug fight. The directive…. for the first time said that the international drug trade is a national security concern, because of its ability to destabilize democratic allies through the corruption of police and judicial institutions.'(61) A secret follow-on directive, signed by President Bush in the summer of 1989, calls for stepped-up involvement by the Pentagon and intelligence agencies in the anti-drug effort, including increased deployment of Special Forces troops in war zones in Latin America to assist the DEA.(62)

One result of this definition of the drug problem, aside from the Lebanon interlude, has been growing cooperation between the DEA and US counterinsurgency forces in the Third World, justified by the claim that drug enforcement and suppression of guerillas amount to the same job.(63) The integration of DEA and military forces in the field has grown quickly under the Bush directive.

The DEA has also supplied equipment to at least one military special operation, the Army’s Intelligence Support Activity. Secord used that unit, as we have seen, for a failed hostage rescue operation in Beirut in 1986. Created in 1980 for deep cover operations in foreign trouble spots, particularly Iran and Central America, it was nearly disbanded in 1982 by Defense Secretary Weinberger because of lax oversight of its missions and finances.(64) Resurrected from scandal, it was used by North for missions too sensitive even for the CIA.(65) One of those was support of cross-border operations into Laos to investigate the fate of missing American POWs. The mission reportedly had the support of Richard Childress, an Army colonel in North’s office at the NSC. The DEA finally baulked, but only after the group asked for help in obtaining guns and field radios.(66)

Help has flowed in the other direction as well. When the DEA needed aircraft and pilots to track smugglers in Florida, it turned to a top-secret American-CIA aviation unit called Seaspray. Created in 1981, it provided covert transportation of men and material for CIA and military operations.(67) Among those who worked directly for or with Seaspray were Richard Secord, who oversaw the Contra supply operation for North; Richard Gadd, who organized the airlift in the field; and Wallace Sawyer Jr., who piloted one of the supply planes.(68)

Such anecdotes only scratch the surface, but they suggest the extent to which the White House subordinated its noisy ‘war on drugs’ to other, quieter political ends. In choosing its allies and causes, The Reagan administration ignored or even favored certain drug traffickers, while turning the DEA into a front for covert operations. The Reagan administration was not the first to make drug control a hypocritical exercise in political posturing. It will not be the last if Congress and the public continue to ignore this hidden connection to the secret policies of presidents.

Notes

  1. San Francisco Chronicle, 27 August 1987
  2. This history, going back to World War II, is briefly described, with citations to further literature, in Jonathan Marshall, Drug Wars: Corruption, Counter- insurgency and Covert Operations in the Third World (Forestville, Cohan and Cohen, 1991)
  3. CIA memo 25 July 1984, in Iran-Contra Affair, Appendix A, pp. 934-6; CIA memo 17 March 1984, ibid., p. 945.
  4. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Report on Preliminary Inquiry, January 19 1977, p. 8.
  5. Khashoggi’s former employee Emmanuel Floor testified that profits from a joint venture of Khashoggi and two Canadian investors to finance the arms deal would be split with BCCI (Iran-Contra Affair, Appendix B, X, p. 509). BCCI may have been the ‘Arab investor’ who allegedly contributed $5 million towards the deal and was the first to be reimbursed, with profit, when Iran made partial payment for the Arms. (William Casey memo to John Poindexter, 24 October 1986, Cave Exhibit 12-A, Iran-Contra Affair, Appendix B, III, pp. 1062-4; Roy Furmark testimony, Iran-Contra Affair, Appendix B, XI, p. 112)
  6. Los Angeles Times, 2 September 1976
  7. San Francisco Examiner, 2 April 1991; Congressional Quarterly, 3 August 1991; Washington Post, 19 August 1991.
  8. Wall Street Journal, 24 October 1991.
  9. Wall Street Journal, 28 October 1991.
  10. National Journal 7 September 1991.
  11. Quoted in Reuters, July 19 1991
  12. Casey memo, op. cit; Theodore Draper, A Very Line: The Iran Contra Affair, (Hill and Wang, New York, 1991), pp. 375-378.
  13. Los Angeles Times, 19 November 1987; US News and World Report, 30 1987; Draper, op. cit. pp. 398-400; interviews.
  14. The Tower Commission Report (New York, Bantam Books, 1987) pp. 371-2. Hereafter the Tower Report.
  15. Sunday Times (London), 4 July 1982; San Jose Mercury, 4 May 1983;San Francisco Chronicle, 15 November 1986; ABC-TV, 21 November 1986.
  16. The Times (London), 26 February 1983; San Jose Mercury, 23 February and 10 March 1983; San Francisco Chronicle, 1 December 1986.
  17. Newsweek, 9 May 1983; New York Times, 12 June 1983 and 2 December 1986.
  18. Memorandum from George D. Heavey, Director, Office of Intelligence, US Customs, to Acting Asssistant Commissioner, Office of Enforcement, 20 September 1985.
  19. New York Times, 26 November 1986.
  20. Jack Anderson, San Francisco Chronicle, 21 September 1989
  21. State Secrets, no. 1, 3 July 1989 (syndicated column)
  22. Memo from Acting Assistant Commissioner, Office of Enforcement, to Commissioner of Customs, 30 October 1985.
  23. Mark Perry, The Secret Life of an American Spy’, Regardie’s, February 1989
  24. Testimony of Ambassador Oakley, Senate Committee on Foreign Relations and Committee on Judiciary, hearings, International Terrorism, Insurgency and Drug Trafficking, May 13-15 1985, p. 290.
  25. New York Times, 31 May 1987
  26. Ben Bradlee Jnr., Guts and Glory: The Rise and Fall of Oliver North, (Donald Fine Inc., New York, 1988), pp. 394-400; David C. Martin and John Walcott, Best Laid Plans: The Inside Story of America’s War Against Terrorism, (Harper and Row, New York, 1988), pp. 217-219; Iran-Contra Report, p. 361.
  27. Testimony of William Dwyer, Iran-Contra Affair, Appendix B, VIII, pp. 324 and 332.
  28. New York Post, 23 December 1986. One former marijuana dealer who worked as a DEA informant in Lebanon, Steven John Donaheu, was himself kidnapped, but finally released after 11 months when his family paid a $400,00 ransom. See Los Angeles Times, 3 July 1986.
  29. US News and World Report, 29 June 1987
  30. Iran-Contra Report, pp. 362-3.
  31. A DEA deputy director who monitored the agents involved in the hostage mission noted that his agency was reluctant to deal with North because of the bad blood’ created in 1984 when North allegedly publicized – and thus prematurely terminated – a DEA ‘sting’ operation in Nicaragua. See 30 April 1985 memorandum, National Security Archive number 1087.
  32. Iran-Contra Report p. 363
  33. North memorandum to McFarlane, 24 May 1985, National Security Archives document 01167.
  34. Clair George testimony, 5 and 6 August 1987; Iran-Contra Report, p. 363.
  35. North to McFarlane, 7 June 1985 in The Tower Report, p. 125.
  36. San Francisco Chronicle, 11 September 1987.
  37. House Judiciary Committee, Subcommittee on Crime, Hearing, March 5, 1987.
  38. Secord testimony before Iran-Contra committee, May 5 1987. Hakim testified on 4 June 1987 that he had ‘frequent dealings with government officials in the…..DEA…’
  39. Secord testimony 6 May 1987.
  40. Iran-Contra Report, p. 364. The DEA agents believed the hijacking of a TWA jet in Beirut that June by Shiite terrorists disrupted whatever deals the source may have been been arranging. See deposition of DEA Agent 1 [William Dwyer], Iran-Contra Affair, Appendix B, VIII, p. 546; deposition of DEA Agent 2 [Frank Tarallo], ibid. p. 733.
  41. The Observer (London), 21 April 1987
  42. San Francisco Examiner, 7 May 1987
  43. Bradlee, Guts and Glory pp. 229-31. North’s embarrassment must have been acute when he learned that the FBI was investigating the same individual for bank fraud in Philadelphia. See New York Times, 1 May 1987; Iran-Contra Report, pp. 110-111.
  44. Iran-Contra Report p. 371, note 84; deposition of DEA Agent 1 [Dwyer], Iran-Contra Affair, Appendix B, VIII, pp. 588, 591 and 600; deposition of DEA Agent 2, ibid. p. 861.
  45. Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall, Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies and the CIA in Central America, (University of California Press, Berkeley, 1991), chapter 3.
  46. Iran-Contra Report, p. 365. On May 15 1986, Albion Values Corporatiion, one of the financial fronts used by Secord and Hakim, transferred $54,000 for use by North on the DEA/hostage operation. See National Archives document 02826. This stage of the plot involved the former CIA agent and Contra arms supplier Thomas Clines, who put a tramp steamer, the Erria, at North’s service. See deposition of DEA agent 1 (Dwyer), Iran-Contra Affair, Appendix B, VIII, pp. 566, 572-575. Clines introduced the agents to Glen Robinette. See ibid. p. 586.
  47. Tower Report p. 352
  48. El Pais, 16 November 1986, 28 November 1986, 9 May 1987; San Fran-cisco Examiner, 10 May 1987; Nation, 5 September 1987.
  49. US News and World Report, 12 September 1988
  50. New York Times, 31 May 1987.
  51. Washington Post, 7 May 1987.
  52. House Judiciary Committee, Subcommittee on Crime, hearing 5 March 1987.
  53. Iran-Contra Report
  54. See note 2 above., p. 416.
  55. New York Times, 9 July 1978.
  56. The Observer (London), 30 March 1980. One author claims that after the Shah fled Iran, authorities discovered 1,400 kilos of heroin in his St. Moritz villa. See Hans-Georg Behr, La Droga, Potencia Mondial, (Editorial Planeta, Barcelona, 1981), p. 188.
  57. Wilmington News Journal, 30 March, 4 April and 3 May 1980.
  58. Theodore Shackley memorandum, ‘American Hostages in Lebanon’ 22 November 1984, in Iran-Contra Affair, Appendix A, p. 956.
  59. Washington Post, 24 February 1980
  60. Christian Science Monitor, 22 May 1985 [Schultz]; US News and World Report, 4 May 1987 [Ledeen]; Senate Committee on Foreign Relations and Committee on Judiciary, hearings, International Terrorism, Insurgency and Drug Trafficking, 13-15 May 1985, pp. 139-41 [Westrate].
  61. Los Angeles Times, 20 November 1986. One outgrowth of that directive in the Bush years is the creation within the CIA of a Counter Narcotics Centre ‘modelled after a CIA counterterrorism unit begun several years ago’. Aside from coordinating intelligence, according to a CIA spokesman, it will lend ‘operational support to the effort against international narcotics trafficking’, a mission that some analysts think might include assassination. See Washington Post, 28 May 1989.
  62. Washington Post Weekly, 24 September 24 1989
  63. Marshall, Drug Wars, chapter 2.
  64. Steven Emerson, Secret Warriors, (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, 1988), p. 81
  65. San Jose Mercury, 26 July 1987
  66. San Francisco Chronicle, 16 March 1987; Washington Post, 6 May 1987
  67. Emerson, Secret Warriors, pp. 45 and 47
  68. Ibid. pp. 144-147

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