The CIA and Drugs
One of the biggest stories in the six months since the last Lobster has been the CIA-deals-crack story. The Web site at has an enormous amount of information, including an important piece by Robert Parry, ‘Lost History: Contras, Dirty Money and the CIA.’ Another important background piece is Jack Blum’s testimony to the Senate Select Intelligence Committee last year, which is reproduced in Covert Action Quarterly no. 59. However, in my opinion the two best pieces on the CIA-drugs issue which appeared since the last Lobster are Daniel Brandt and Steve Badrich’s below, and first, the affidavit issued by Peter Dale Scott. – RR
Peter Dale Scott, Ph.D
My name is Peter Dale Scott. I am an author with a doctorate in Political Science from McGill University. After four years as a diplomat in the Canadian Foreign Service I taught for thirty-three years at the University of California, Berkeley. Four of my books have dealt with the problem of drug-traffickers who owe their prominence and protection to their involvement with CIA-backed covert operations. The most relevant of these books is Cocaine Politics, co-authored with Jonathan Marshall and published in 1991 by the University of California Press. (Four of the chapters dealt with the subject of Contras and drug-trafficking, including the California network of Norwin Meneses.)(1)
At various times I have taken leave from teaching to conduct full-time research into covert politics. In 1970 I was a Guggenheim Fellow for a year. In 1973 I took leave again for six months, for part of which I was a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for International Studies at M.I.T.. In 1987 I served in Washington for six months as a Senior Fellow at, and drug consultant to, the Center for International Development Policy, gathering information in support of the investigation into Drugs and Foreign Policy conducted at that time by Senator John Kerry. In that capacity I consulted with a number of experts in Washington inside and outside government. I was also a personal eyewitness to the falsity of a story published in the Washington Post (and subsequently retracted) which exonerated the Contras from involvement in drug-trafficking.(2)
My researches into U.S. government involvement with drug-traffickers date back to 1970 when I wrote a book, The War Conspiracy, about the origins of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. I returned to this topic yet again in 1986, when I noticed that certain Cuban exiles I had already written about, some of them indicted or convicted drug-traffickers, were involved in the Contra support movement in Costa Rica.(3)
After twenty-five years of research, I have come to believe, as I wrote in 1992, that ‘governments themselves, and the links they develop with major traffickers, are the key both to the drug-trafficking problem and to its solution.'(4)
The United States government is by no means the only example of such involvement, but it is the one with the most deleterious impact on its citizens. One can see this impact in the efforts in the 1980s by the CIA, and later Oliver North, to arrange extra-governmental support for the Contras. These arrangements led to documented U.S. government involvement with, and even support to, top-level drug-traffickers in Mexico, Honduras, El Salvador, Costa Rica, and Panama, as well as with domestic traffickers in the states of Florida, Arkansas, Louisiana, Kentucky, Michigan, and California. This recurring pattern of involvement with those who dominated the drug traffic cannot be dismissed as accidental or coincidental aberration.
In a few cases, Contras and their supporters became traffickers after their contact with CIA officers. This was the case with Ricky Ross’s supplier, Danilo Blandon Reyes. The CIA might argue in its defense that Blandon, and others like him, were not traffickers at the time contact was made. But one hears recurring reports that such recruits were given to understand that funds should be raised for the Contras by any means, which was taken to include drug-trafficking. Blandon has testified that he heard this from a leading U.S. protégé in the Contras, Enrique Bermudez. Other, more senior, Contra officials are said to have heard the same indirect guidance from at least one high-ranked CIA officer.
It is a matter of record that the CIA has also established contacts with those already known to the U.S. government as major narcotics traffickers. This was the case with Blandon’s supplier, Norwin Meneses, a highly publicized Contra supporter who had been listed as a trafficker in DEA records since the 1970s. Officials in at least four law enforcement agencies have confirmed that Meneses was untouchable in this country in the era of Contra support. A key illustration of this was the so-called Frogman case in 1983, at that time the largest cocaine seizure ever made on the U.S. West coast.
Although 150 agents and police rounded up members of Meneses’ network, and over thirty of them were ultimately convicted, Meneses himself (so I have been personally told by one of his contacts, a fellow Contra supporter), was warned by law enforcement officials to leave town to escape arrest. Other sources in law enforcement have complained that Meneses was protected for reasons of ‘national security’.(5) The protection given to Meneses was given to other traffickers as well. Jorge Morales in Miami testified under oath that he agreed to fly arms-for-drugs flights for the Contras after he was promised legal protection for them by two Nicaraguans, Marcos Aguado and Octaviano Cesar, who represented themselves as CIA agents.(6)
Leslie Cockburn subsequently corroborated Cesar’s CIA status from no less than eight sources, including high-level administration officials in Washington.(7) Marcos Aguado was close to two other CIA-linked Contra supporters later indicted in Central America for drug-trafficking: John Hull in Costa Rica and Norwin Meneses in California.(8) (Neither Hull nor Meneses was ever prosecuted in the United States.) It remains to be established whether the cocaine introduced into Florida by Morales found its way to his friend and future drug-trafficking partner Norwin Meneses in California.
Morales made a point of letting CIA personnel know of his Contra-related drug-trafficking, to ensure his protection. Government behaviour for two years confirmed that he was protected. Despite a previous indictment, and DEA objections, a court order permitted him to enter and leave the country on his drug business.(9)
He was directed to land his drug planes at two government controlled airports, Ilopango Air Force Base in El Salvador and Fort Lauderdale Executive Airport in Florida; and thereafter for two years arms and drugs were loaded and unloaded at Fort Lauderdale in broad daylight without any problems. Morales heard from one of his own informants that Florida law enforcement knew of at least one of his 1985 drug flights but did not act on it.(10) (Morales was ultimately indicted and arrested in 1986, after the Contra-drug story had been broken by AP.)(11)
In a 1990 drug case against Jose Abello in Oklahoma, one of Morales’ pilots, Fabio Carrasco, testififed under oath that he had delivered millions of dollars of cocaine earnings to Octa-vino Cesar and another Contra leader. He said that he had personally supervised flights of arms to Costa Rica which had returned [to Fort Lauderdale] with cocaine. He added that he believed this to have been done with CIA knowledge and approval. In this trial Carrasco was a federal prosecution witness.(12)
CIA knowledge of drug-trafficking in support of the Contras was possibly admitted by Alan Fiers, in the mid-1980s the Chief of the CIA’s Central American Task Force. In a sworn deposition to the Congressional Iran-Contra Committees, the Task Force Chief said:
‘We knew that everybody around [Contra leader Eden] Pastora was involved in cocaine. His staff and friends [redacted] they were drug smugglers or involved in drug smuggling.'(13)
Whether or not they were named in the redaction to his deposition, we know that Octavino Cesar and Marcos Aguado were top aides to Pastora, Aguado being the chief of his Air Force. Inasmuch as drug-trafficking in Costa Rica (where Pastora was based) was conducted almost exclusively by airplane, Fiers’ statement corroborates the claims of others that the CIA had knowledge of Aguado’s activities. Major international drug traffickers who supported the Contras enjoyed the same kind of protection. A flagrant case in 1983-87 was that of the top drug trafficker or kingpin of Honduras, Juan Ramon Matta Ballesteros. Matta was an integral part of the Contra support apparatus in that country. As Senator Kerry’s drug investigation revealed, Matta’s airline SETCO received supply contracts not just from the CIA-funded Contras, but from Oliver North and the U.S. State Department.(14)
Newsweek (15 June 1985) cited official estimates that Matta was responsible for perhaps one third of the cocaine reaching the United States. Yet the DEA station in Honduras was closed in 1983, as it was moving in on Matta. Matta himself remained untouchable until 1988, after Congressional support for the Contras was terminated altogether.(15)
By this time Matta Ballesteros was sought by the DEA for the murder in Mexico of DEA agent Enrique Camarena. Two of his associates and co-defendants in that murder case, Rafael Caro Quintero and Miguel Felix Gallardo of the then dominant Mexican Guadalajara cartel, have been identified in U.S. government records as major drug-traffickers who were also Contra supporters. A DEA Debriefing Report of their top informant Lawrence Harrison, introduced into a U.S. Federal Court in Los Angeles, reported how CIA-sponsored training of Contra guerillas was conducted at a drug ranch owned by Rafael Caro Quintero near Veracruz. This training activity had been reported by two Mexican journalists in 1984, after which both journalists were murdered within a day of each other.(16) Though a CIA spokesman at the time dismissed these charges as ‘nonsense’ they are corroborated from other sources.(17)
According to the DEA debriefings of Harrison and Werner Lotz, another pilot for the Guadalajara cartel, Caro’s drug-trafficking partner, Miguel Felix Gallardo, was also a ‘big supporter’ of the Contras; and advanced Lotz $150,000 to pass on to the Contras.(18)
These co-ordinated drug-trafficking and Contra-supporting activities of Matta, Caro and Felix Gallardo, all members of the Guadalajara cartel, were mirrored by the Contra-supporting drug-trafficking originating in Colombia and protected in Panama by Manuel Noriega. A witness in the Noriega trial testified that the Medellin cartel gave $10 million to the Contras.(19)
The first drug case for which Noriega was indicted in Miami in 1988 involved flights of a Miami-based air company, DIASCA, owned by two convicted drug-traffickers, Floyd Carlton and Alfredo Caballero (the latter a veteran of the CIA’s Bay of Pigs). These drug flights, which eventually led to the conviction of all three men, were simultaneously Contra support flights. This no doubt explains why in 1986 the State Department chose to contract for ‘humanitarian assistance’ to the Contras with the drug airline DIASCA, at the same time it allotted a similar contract to the Matta-owned drug airline SETCO.(20)
These State Department contracts are but one reminder that the U.S. Goverment assistance and protection for the Contra-supporting drug traffickers was not confined to the CIA. Perhaps the most flagrant and undeniable case of such official assistance and protection was the opening to traffickers of the Ilopango Air Force Base in El Salvador. Cocaine for the Meneses connection came from Ilopango Air Force base in El Salvador, a closed base totally under government control, and virtually under the control of the U.S. Department of Defense. In 1985 this control was exercised by Col. James Steele, who was Chief of the U.S. Military Advisory Group in El Salvador, and in that capacity oversaw the Contra supply operation in Ilopango at first hand. (Oliver North’s notebooks record a meeting on September 10 1985 with Colonel Steele and former CIA officer Donald Gregg of vice-President Bush’s staff, to discuss logistic support for the Contras.)(21) This was at a time when Celerino Castillo, the Drug Enforcement Agent in Charge of Honduras, El Salvador and Costa Rica, was reporting to DEA HQ about a huge drug and gun smuggling operation that was run out of the Ilopango military airport by the ‘North Network’ and the CIA. According to Castillo’s later book,
‘my reports contained not only the names of traffickers, but their destinations, flight paths, tail numbers, and the date and time of each flight. Hundreds of flights each week delivered cocaine to the buyers and returned with money headed for the great isthmus laundering machine in Panama.'(22)
According to Castillo, the entire program was run out of Ilopango’s Hangars 4 and 5:
‘The CIA owned one hangar and the National Security Council ran the other.'(23)
Castillo also reported that the CIA in El Salvador requested a U.S. visa for one Contra pilot listed by the DEA as a trafficker, while his attempt to arrest another was forestalled by intervention from Washington.(24) Like other whistle-blowers inside the DEA, Castillo was eventually reprimanded and threatened with suspension.
These are only some of the documented links between the U.S. Government and Contra-supporting drug traffickers. I hope they are enough to demonstrate a systematic pattern of U.S. Government assistance and protection, involving the CIA but by no means limited to it.
Notes
- Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall, Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies and the CIA in Central America (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991); Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991); Jonathan Marshall, Peter Dale Scott and Jane Hunter, The Iran-Contra Connection (Boston, South End Press, 1987); Peter Dale Scott, The War Conspiracy
- Cocaine Politics pp. 179-81
- The Iran-Contra Connection pp. 42-49
- Peter Dale Scott, ‘Honduras, the Contra Support Networks, and Cocaine: How the U.S. Government Has Augmented America’s Drug Crisis’ in War on Drugs: Studies in the Failure of U.S. Narcotic Policy, edited by Alfred W. McKoy and Alan. A. Block (Boulder, Westview Press, 1992) p. 126
- Cocaine Politics pp. 106-09
- Kerry Hearings, 1, pp. 54-55; 3, pp. 278-80; Cocaine Politics pp. 112-4
- Leslie Cockburn, Out Of Control (Atlantic Monthly Press, New York, 1987) p. 170.
- Cocaine Politics p. 113 (Hull); San Jose Mercury, 18 August 1996 (Meneses).
- Cocaine Politics pp. 115, 231; Paul Eddy, The Cocaine Wars (Century, London, 1988) p. 332: ‘To the chagrin of the DEA, Morales was allowed bond…and he was given extraordinary freedom by the court to travel abroad.’
- Kerry Hearings, 3, pp. 300-303, 361-368; Cocaine Politics p. 117
- Kerry Report p. 53; Cocaine Politics p. 117
- Tulsa World 7 April 1990; Cocaine Politics pp. 115-6
- Iran-Contra Committees, Appendix B, Volume 3, pp. 1121,1230, reprinted in Kerry Report p. 38; Cocaine Politics pp.8-9
- Kerry Report pp. 44-45; Cocaine Politics pp. 56-58
- Christian Science Monitor 7 March 1988; Cocaine Politics pp. 66-64
- DEA debriefing of Lawrence Harrison 13 February 1990; Los Angeles Times 5 July 1990 and 8 July 1990; Cocaine Politics p. 41
- Washington Post 6 July 1990 (‘nonsense’). A later written denial from the CIA asserted that the CIA ‘never used Mexico as a training site for the Nicaraguan contras or for Guatemalan guerillas, not did it use Mexican drug traffick ers or territory as a conduit for support of any type to the contras.’ (Washington Post 18 July 1990) Note that this lawyerly language evades the charge made by defense attorneys who introduced the Harrison debrief: namely, that the CIA knew of the drug and training activities and tolerated them, in exchange for the drug lords’ support of the Contras. Cf Cocaine Politics p.41
- DEA debriefing of Werner Lotz 20 November 1987, introduced into Federal Court in August 1988; Cocaine Politics p. 41
- New York Times 26 November 1991
- Kerry Report pp. 47-48; Cocaine Politics pp. 11, 70, 110, 116.
- Peter Dale Scott in War On Drugs (see note 4 above). Cf Cocaine Politics p. 120
- Celerino Castillo III and Dave Harmon, Powder Burns: Cocaine, Contras and the Drug War (Mosaic Press, Oakville, Ontario, 1994) p. 138.
- Ibid
- Castillo and Harmon pp. 144, 155-77.