Bush with DEA agent Castillo at the Guatemala City embassy reception, January 14, 1986 (Castillo)
Contra Cocaine
Gary Webb, in his seminal Dark Alliance: “The CIA’s secret warriors were not only killing the citizens of Nicaragua, Honduras, and Costa Rica, but ...were using L.A.’s inner city as an addict base from which to draw money to buy their guns. At the same time the Contras was being sold to American citizens as their great, shining hope for freedom and democracy in Latin America, they were providing the demons for the Reagan Administration’s hyperbolic War on Drugs at home. The Contras were largely to blame for the birth of the L.A. crack market. They were part of why the L.A. gangs had gotten so powerful and fearsome. And those developments were part of the reason for the Draconian anti-crack laws that came out of Washington that summer, a product of the Congressional stampede whipped up by all the lurid anti-crack propaganda the media was carrying. It was a self-perpetuating cycle, nice and neat, with obvious benefits for both foreign and domestic policy initiatives.”
Augusto Sandino, 1928; Sandino’s guerrillas, 1927
That is, from the perspective of the ‘liquidators,’ there is no difference between Angelinos and Campesinos. Economic fascism, corporate colonialism, is indeed threatened by prosperous, empowered campesinos because they represent an economic model that could easily spread throughout the third world, quite like Fitts’ bottom-up American model. Nicaragua, ruled by the Somoza family from 1934 to 1979, finally snuffed corporate colonialism in 1979, and was therefore viewed as a serious threat by the corporate colonialists of the Reagan/Bush administration. It could become a model for the entire region.
José de Paredes, Augusto Sandino and Augustín Farabundo Martí, 1929
Immediately on assuming office, Reagan’s CIA Director William Casey, OSS veteran, mob partner and mob lawyer, Nixon’s SEC chairman, went into action against the Sandinistas. He arranged with his Cocaine Coup partners, Argentine President-designate Gen. Roberto Viola and Chief of Staff General Alvaro Martínez, Gen. Suárez Mason’s boss, to use veteran trainers from their dirty war to remold the remnants of Somoza’s National Guard. It was a repeat of the Cuba operation. They called themselves the Nicaraguan Democratic Force, the FDN, but the Sandinistas’ derisive nickname, ‘the Contras,’ was the one that stuck. This effort was begun by CIA cutouts Videla of Argentina and Stroessner of Paraguay immediately on the fall of Somoza, a year before Reagan took office in 1980, during the Carter administration. 2
In 1934, the elder Somoza, at the head of the U.S.-trained National Guard, secured his power by assassinating the dashing Augusto Sandino, a charismatic poet and mystical socialist revolutionary. Sandino had fought the U.S. Marines and the puppet Nicaraguan government to a standstill in a spectacular 7-year guerrilla war. He was assassinated under a flag of truce, while peacefully negotiating a coalition government.
Gen. Smedley Butler, 1881-1940, the legendary Marine sent to track down Sandino’s predecessors, was so disgusted by the cruelty and slave-labor he encountered that he concluded Sandino was right. To say that Butler is a Marine legend is an understatement. He is the Marine legend, one of the few to win the Congressional Medal of Honor twice. He was a frontline hero of every major conflict the U.S. participated in during the first quarter of the 20th century, including the Boxer Rebellion, the Spanish-American War and the Great War.
Butler, 2nd from right, with the unit he commanded in Veracruz, 1914; Major General Butler, far right, with fellow Marine Medal of Honor winners Sergeant Major John Quick, Major General Wendell Neville, Lieutenant General John Lejune; The Capture of Fort Riviere, Haiti, 1915; Major Butler, Sergeant Iams and Private Gross are pictured in the action that won them the Congressional Medal of Honor; by Colonel D.J. Neary, USMCR; Marine Corps Art Collection, Washington, DC
In 1935, after vocally supporting his fellow WW I veterans in their Bonus Army March - to the consternation of his own former high command - Butler reflected, “I spent thirty-three years and four months in active service as a member of our country’s most agile military force-the Marine corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from a second lieutenant to major general. And during the period I spent most of my time being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and, for the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism.”
Butler, left, on maneuvers with his troops, 1924. Only his collar stars distinguish him from a rank-and-file leatherneck; U.S. Marines operating against Sandino, 1929; Butler on his Chinese show-the-flag mission, 1928
“Thus I helped make Mexico...safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank to collect revenues in... I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras ‘right’ for American fruit companies in 1903.”
Butler was disgusted by the stealthy assassination of Sandino, a political democrat. He felt humiliated to have been an indirect part of it. After that, Butler repeatedly insisted that the interests of the corporations weren’t worth the life of a single one of his boys. War is a Racket wrote this marvelous old warrior. “Only a small ‘inside’ group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes…. How many of these war millionaires shouldered a rifle?” His small book then goes on to excoriate, by name, the multinational corporations then running Central American politics for their own advantage. 3
Like Emiliano Zapata and Joe Hill, of course, Augusto Sandino never really died. After they took power in July of 1979, the Sandinista National Liberation Front won an award from the World Health Organization for the radical drop in the infant mortality rate they engineered. Their budget stressed health care and education, and they instituted an effective land reform program which enabled their rural campesinos to become self-sufficient. They modeled themselves on the parliamentary democracy of Jacobo Árbenz.
U.S. Marines display captured Sandinista battle flag, 1931; Sandino signing the truce with Nicaraguan President Sacasa, 1933; Anastasio Somoza with Sandino, 1933, just prior to Somoza’s assassination of Sandino
The Sandinistas turned the huge absentee-owned coffee, cotton and banana plantations, export monocrop slave-labor factories, into diversified family farms or community-owned cooperatives. Women with key roles in rural health and vaccination programs were also encouraged to lead the rural literacy programs. These were often organized around church Bible study groups. 4
It was these programs that President Carter wisely backed with $125 million in aid. Carter’s quid pro quo, which the Sandinistas were perfectly happy to live with, was that they not ship arms to the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front in El Salvador. Of course, when the Reagan administration blocked Carter’s funds and started attacking Nicaraguan campesinos with an army of Somocista murderers, the deal was off.
In 1985, Daniel Ortega, in response to questions put to him by Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa on behalf of Venezuelan President Jaime Lusinchi, repeated what had always been the Sandinista position: “We’re willing to send home the Cubans, the Russians, the rest of the advisers. We’re willing to stop the movement of military aid, or any other kind of aid, through Nicaragua to El Salvador, and we’re willing to accept international verification. In return, we’re asking for only one thing: that they don’t attack us, that the United States stop arming and financing the gangs that kill our people, burn our crops and force us to divert enormous human and economic resources into war when we desperately need them for development.” 5a
But stopping Sandinista development was precisely the point. The Sandinistas weren’t building from a top down, IMF-defined production-for-export model, they were building from the bottom up. It’s the difference between a Nicaragua that is an agricultural giant able to grow all its own food, and a nation of serfs dependent on absentee-owned factories and plantations producing for export. It’s the difference between campesino-owned family farms, and sweatshop slums peopled by ex-campesinos, who must trade their meager wages for cupfuls of imported U.S. grain. This is not a question of capitalism vs. socialism, because independent family farms are capitalist institutions. It’s a question of a “national and independent capitalism vs. feudalism,” as Jacobo Árbenz put it - owners vs. sharecroppers.
Prosperous family farms, of course, generate buying power. But that buying power isn’t consumerist, it’s tribal - spent on local goods and services. In 1983, the Inter-American Development Bank declared that the Sandinistas’ “noteworthy progress in the social sector” was “laying a solid foundation for long-term socioeconomic development.” The World Bank called Nicaragua’s development under the Sandinistas “remarkable.... better than anywhere in the world.” That, of course, was before the massive U.S. warfare and economic sanctions took their toll. 6
Daniel Ortega
If Sandinista economic nationalism spread to neighboring countries, what would become of the absentee landlords? Our grain exports? So the Sandinistas had to be turned into Soviet boogeymen. Senior CIA Soviet analyst Melvin A. Goodman, a respected PhD with top secret clearances who worked in the Directorate of Intelligence at this time under DCIA Casey and DDCIA Gates: “Gates’s memorandum to Casey recommended a bombing campaign against Nicaragua in 1984 to ‘bring down’ the leftist government. I made sure that the memorandum got to the Senate Intelligence Committee in order to declassify it. The document was an example of Gates at his worst, arguing that the Soviet Union was turning Nicaragua into an armed camp that would become a second Cuba. There was no intelligence evidence to support either assumption…. One week before his memorandum, Gates killed my assessment that argued ‘disincentives outweigh the incentives’ regarding any potential Soviet delivery of MiG-21 fighter aircraft to Nicaragua. His rejoinder to the chief of my office coyly concluded that my conclusions were ‘unhelpfully leading with our chin to make a prediction when we really don’t have anything to go on,’ which simply wasn’t true: Intelligence indicated that the Soviets would not supply the Sandinistas with sophisticated military aircraft. Sensitive State Department cables made it clear that the Kremlin had high hopes for reopening arms control talks with the United States, and that providing fighter jets to Nicaragua would be counter-productive. But Gates found these arguments ‘very loose, analytically and editorially.’ I didn’t know at the time that Gates was preparing a memorandum for Director Casey that made the case for ‘bringing down’ the Sandinista government…. the Soviets never sent MiG aircraft to Nicaragua.” 7
Gates joined the CIA in 1966 while at Indiana University, moving to an analyst position in 1970, when Henry Kissinger, another Dulles clone, was Nixon’s National Security Adviser. Gates saw Kissinger as a teacher. In a National Security Council meeting, 6/27/70, contemplating Allende’s overthrow in Chile, Kissinger jokingly asserted that the coup was necessary to “stop a dagger pointed at the heart of Antarctica….I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people.” Henry Kissinger as Groucho Marx, except that Groucho knew he was a clown. 8
The Nixon administration was pushed by its friends and financiers, calling themselves The Council of the Americas. The Council rejected U.S. Ambassador Edward Korry’s middle of the road compromise for Chile, which gave Chile 51% of the copper giants Kennecott and Anaconda, leaving the copper giants in operational control of the business. Copper provided 90% of Chile’s international earning and 15% of its national budget. The deal was acceptable to Chile’s current president, Christian Democrat Eduardo Frei (1964-1970), Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress ally, and successfully defused calls from the more radical socialists in Allende’s coalition for complete nationalization.
The Christian Democrat idea was to find funds for social programs, so as to compete with the ever more popular Socialists. But Nixon, despite Ambassador Korry’s warnings, did all he could to undercut the centrist Christian Democrats in the 1970 elections, in favor of the radical right coalition led by aging former president Jorge Alessandri. The coup planners called this the ‘Anaconda proposal.’ When Nixon cancelled a $20 million loan to Frei’s government which had already been approved, Ambassador Korry cabled Nixon, warning that, “If you are trying to destroy Christian Democracy and to elect Allende – your worst enemy, whose hero is Castro…if you are trying to provoke a reaction by the Christian Democrats against the copper companies for whom we have $500 million in taxpayers’ money on the line [OPIC insurance]…you will have a reaction.” The U.S., through the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC), insured against appropriation to promote Chilean investment. 9
Salvador Allende’s center-left Socialist Party had adopted the Popular Front’s 1940s slogan of “Bread, a Roof and Work!,” but that was simply a call for decent wages and housing, social security and medicare. The center-left in Chile were parliamentary democrats, not radical communists. Allende had been willing to accept Korry’s centrist compromise, but Nixon’s intentional sabotage of Eduardo Frei’s Christian Democrats, now led by Radomiro Tomic, gave Allende’s Socialists the plurality in the three-way race, as Korry had warned.
But The Council of the Americas was in no mood for compromise. The Council was led by Agustín Edwards, owner of Chile’s largest newspaper El Mercurio; Harold Geneen, COO of ITT, which, with its ability to tap any phone in America, Europe or Latin America, was, in effect, an arm of the NSA; John McCone, former CIA Director on ITT’s board; Donald Kendall, CEO of Pepsi-Cola who had retained Nixon as Pepsi’s chief counsel in the 60s; David Rockefeller of Chase Manhattan Bank, Kissinger’s mentor; Jose de Cubas, CEO of Westinghouse International; and Charles Parkinson, Chairman of Anaconda Copper, author of the ‘Anaconda proposal.’ All had vast Chilean holdings.
Allende was elected President of Chile on 9/4/1970, with 36.4% of the vote, to Alessandri’s Conservative Party’s 34.9% and Tomic’s Christian Democrats’ 27.8%. By sabotaging Christian Democrat Tomic, a poor candidate to begin with, Nixon elected Allende, exactly as Ambassador Korry predicted. Benny Holmes, the manager of ITT’s Chilean operation, who knew Allende as a fellow Masonic Lodge brother, insisted that Allende would be a more effective centrist that the Christian Democrats, pointing out that Allende, an experienced middle-aged politician who ran for the presidency in 1952, 1958, and 1964, had always proven to be open to compromise. After losing once again in 1964, Allende joked that his epitaph should be “Here lies the next President of Chile.” But rather than deal with Allende, Nixon ordered, and Kissinger initiated, the coup planning, well-financed by The Council of the Americas.
On 10/22/1970, General René Schneider, the pro-democratic leader of Chile’s military, a major obstacle to a coup, was cut to ribbons by machine gun fire on his way to Army headquarters. The Chilean Congress reacted on 10/24 by angrily certifying Allende’s election by a vote of 153 to 24. And Schneider’s assassination vastly strengthened the radical left in Allende’s coalition, costing Allende unilateral policy control. Amicable corporate buyouts negotiated by Allende’s government with Ambassador Korry failed because the radical left had achieved a policy veto. Allende was forced to accede to Senator Altamirano’s demand for nationalization without compensation, a profoundly stupid course of action. Nixon’s political violence had become a self-fulfilling prophesy.
Nixon, Kissinger, Helms and Co. then concentrated on destabilizing the country. As DCIA Helms wrote in his planning meeting notes, quoting Nixon’s orders, “make economy scream.” Chile descended into civil war, as Allende, under constant attack, descended into what we now call Chavismo, seizing control of all radio stations and newspapers, nationalizing Kennecott and Anaconda Copper and ITT, confiscating all landholdings larger than 80 hectares, and hysterically printing money, driving Chile into hyperinflation. There was no Russian bailout, because the Russians needed the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty. The Chinese also refused a Chilean bailout, in exchange for recognition.
Chile is the world’s leading producer of copper, largely controlled by American-owned Kennecott Copper and Anaconda Copper. By technically attacking the economy, especially by artificially collapsing the price of copper, Allende’s popularity was devastated. The Export-Import Bank and the Agency for International Development cut Chile off from all assistance, and the Inter-American Development Bank blocked all loan proposals and lowered Chile’s credit rating from B to D, as the World Bank also cut Chile off from all financing. Chile’s other structurally important industries, many American owned, also coordinated to strangle the economy with delayed payments, slow deliveries, credit and spare parts denial and office closings. Allende responded with an expedient he had not previously favored, nationalization of all major industries, but even that couldn’t stop the downward economic spiral. The buses ceased to work, food became scarce, the electricity became unreliable.
David Atlee Phillips, who ran the in-country Guatemala ‘Voice of Liberation’ campaign against Árbenz, was put in charge of the Chile Task Force. Phillips worked with Santiago CIA Station Chief Henry Hecksher and Clandestine Operations chief William Broe. Behind them was Tom Karamessines, the CIA’s director of covert operations, and Western Hemisphere chief Ted Shackley. Tom Clines, who ran the Long Tieng heroin distribution operation in Laos for Shackley was put in charge of the CIA’s Chile desk. Clines wanted to use the reliable Cuban assassins he had used when he was running Operation Mongoose out of Miami station JM/WAVE, but was ordered to work through Pinochet.
General Carlos Prats, the military chief and now Minister of the Interior, was, like his assassinated predecessor General René Schneider, a strict constitutionalist who had already blocked one abortive coup against Allende. But Prats lost the military vote of confidence forced by his deputy, the CIA’s General Augusto Pinochet, who organized the coup with Chile’s military high command. On 9/11/1973, Pinochet’s lead unit, using two fighter planes, rockets and artillery, burst into La Moneda Palace, reporting “Moneda taken. President dead.” Chile turned into an American-supported death-squad police state for the next 20 years, a police state practicing archetypal Republican, that is Dulles brothers, fascism.. 10
Today the McGuffin is ‘drugs,’ or ‘terrorism,’ then it was ‘communism,’ but always in service of corporate dominance, and always using drug gangs as both boogeymen and fascist street muscle, institutionalizing the international drug trade through the cooperating secret services, in the name of the antidrug effort of course. In 1969, just as Nixon took office, Kissinger, Nixon’s National Security Adviser, concerned with the growing popularity of the center-left in Italy, issued orders to Licio Gelli, Italy’s capo mafioso, the Italian P-2 chief, to begin a nationwide program of false-flag terrorist operations that could be blamed on the left. On December 12, 1969, in the busy lobby of the Banca Nazionale dell’Agricoltura in Milan’s Piazza Fontana, 17 people were killed and 88 wounded by a bomb, placed solely for political effect by a P-2 death squad. One innocent anarchist arrested for this terrorism, Pietro Valpreda, was exonerated after serving 16 years in prison, the evidence establishing that the bombing had been an Operation Gladio, that is to say Italian secret police, atrocity supported by Nixon’s CIA.
On March 3, 1972, Giovanni Ventura, Franco Freda, and Pino Rauti of the Italian fascist group Ordine Nuovo, a SISMI (Servizio per le Informazioni e la Sicurezza Militare) and CIA proprietary, were arrested and charged with planning the Piazza Fontana attack. The forensic evidence was conclusive, but the men were acquitted. Ventura insisted, on the stand, that he was an agent of the CIA. As proof he pointed to his safe deposit box at Banca Popolare. Within the box were genuine CIA documents, one, dated May 4, 1969, instructing “a possible wave of terror attacks to convince public opinion of the dangers of maintaining the [government's] alliance with the left.”
‘Banca Nazionale dell'Agricoltura’ building, inside of which the terrorist bombing in Piazza Fontana was carried out (Wikimedia Commons)
The Court of Assizes of Catanzaro, February 23, 1979, sentenced General Giandelio Maletti, former head of Italian counterintelligence, to 4 years imprisonment for aiding and abetting the Piazza Fontana bombers. In March of 2001, during the trial of three other Ordine Nuovo operatives for the Piazza Fontana bombing, in sworn testimony, General Maletti told the court, “The CIA, following the directives of its government, wanted to create an Italian nationalism capable of holding what it saw as a slide to the left, and, for this purpose, it may have made use of right-wing terrorism.”
After the 1974 Piazza della Loggia bombing in Brescia, which killed 8 people and wounded a hundred, yet another Ordine Nuovo false flag atrocity, it was revealed that Pino Rauti, the founder of Ordine Nuovo, had been receiving regular paychecks from the U.S. Embassy in Rome. In 1981 General Maletti was invited to join P-2 by his old friend Licio Gelli, the most powerful mafioso in Italy. 11
Christian Democratic Prime Minister Aldo Moro had forced cancellation of the CIA’s 1963 Italy coup run by legendary assassins Bill Harvey and James Angleton by conceding key ministries to the Socialists. Political Italy coalesced around Moro’s center-left coalition, making civil war, that is fascist coup, impossible. By creating a governing coalition, Moro drove Italy to the nationalistic center, like FDR, by addressing Italy’s social and economic problems, such as health care, pensions and banking security, rather than ignoring them. His 1973-1976 ‘historic compromise’ with the Communists committed the Communists to representative democracy.
Ordine Nuovo founders Giorgio Almirante, Pino Rauti and Giovanni Ventura (Wikimedia Commons)
Moro was Italian Prime Minister from 1963 to 1968 and from 1974 to 1976. Moro is widely considered the father of the Italian center-left and one of the greatest leaders in modern Italian history, stabilizing the country and successfully solving practical problems. In reaction, the CIA drove Italy to the right, destroying the ‘historic compromise,’ and Italian stability, with its false-flag assassination of Aldo Moro himself.
Piazza della Loggia in Brescia, May 8, 1974 (Wikimedia Commons)
Hyperion Language School in Paris was used by the CIA to penetrate the Italian Red Brigade, the most sophomoric of Italy’s violent leftwingers, not associated with the Italian Communist Party, who were actual grownups who had signed the compromise with Moro’s Christian Democrats. Hyperion was a CIA setup, opened just before Moro’s kidnaping and closed a few months later. Hyperion was founded by CIA operatives Corrado Simioni, Duccio Berio and Mario Moretti. Corrado Simoni worked for the CIA’s Radio Free Europe. Duccio Berio was a long-time informant for the Servizio Informazioni Difesa, the Italian SID, supplying information on leftist groups. Mario Moretti was accused by the Red Brigade founders, Renato Curcio and Alberto Franceschini, of being a CIA asset. Curcio was arrested in January 1976, two days after Moretti asked for his address, saying he needed a place to stay for a day or two. Franceschini said Curcio had told him in prison that he was “certain that Moretti was a spy.” Moretti was also the patsy, convicted of the Moro kidnapping and murder, and sentenced to six life terms - but for some reason, paroled after 15 years and currently a free man in Milan. The Hyperion Language School had great cover, serving as a meeting place for puerile violent radical left groups worldwide. An Italian police report referred to the Hyperion Language School as “the most important CIA office in Europe.”
Alberto Franceschini, one of the founders of the Red Brigade, after serving 18 years in prison, said this to a 1999 parliamentary commission on terrorism: “From a military point of view, those of you who know the people who were supposed to have carried out the [Moro] operation will be perfectly aware that they were not capable of it.” As Paul L. Williams points out in his excellent book Operation Gladio, Franceschini is almost certainly correct, since (1) the gunmen who mowed down Moro's five experienced bodyguards were highly trained assassins with skills that far exceeded those of known Red Brigade members; (2) the assassins were obliged to wear Alitalia uniforms in order to identify each other, that is, as Franceschini testified, they didn’t know each other, as almost all in the Red Brigade fraternity did; (3) Moro had been held captive in an apartment complex owned by SISMI, Italy’s military secret service; and (4) the bullets that riddled Moro's body were treated with a special preserving paint that matched the ammunition found in many Gladio arms dumps.
The Ultimate False Flag Atrocity, the Murder of Aldo Moro (Wikimedia Commons)
Fr. Felix Morlion, the Belgian priest who engineered the Mafia hit on the Pope, opened a branch of the Hyperion Language School in Rome shortly before the Moro kidnapping and closed it a few months after. As an OSS agent during the war he created Pro Deo, the Catholic intelligence agency affiliated with the Vatican. He remained a pivotal CIA agent thereafter. Investigative journalist Carmine Pecorelli of the Osservatore Politico captured photos of Morlion meeting with prominent Italian military intelligence officials at the time of the kidnapping. Morlion received prominent mention in the secret files of P-2 chief Licio Gelli, which were seized by the Italian police on March 17, 1981 during the Banco Ambrosiano collapse.
Roberto Calvi, chairman of Banco Ambrosiano, was famously found swinging from a noose under London’s Blackfriars Bridge on June 17, 1982. Members of Gelli’s elite fascist masonic lodge P-2 called themselves the Black Friars, and the five bricks found in Calvi’s pockets were, obviously, masonry, symbols of the Masons. The same day, Calvi’s personal secretary, Graziella Corrocher, was thrown out of a fifth floor window of Banco Ambrosiano to her death.
Licio Gelli was sentenced to 18½ years in prison in 1992 for fraud in the 1982 collapse of Banco Ambrosiano, and was also indicted, but not convicted, for ordering the murder of Roberto Calvi. Maverick journalist Mino Pecorelli, who took those incriminating photos of Fr. Morlion, was assassinated on a Rome street in 1979 just a month after reporting that he had obtained a list of 56 terrorists betrayed to the police by Licio Gelli, a real-life Emilio Largo from a real-life SPECTRE.
Giuseppe Della Cha, 54, deputy director at the Banco Amrosiano, also ‘jumped’ to his death from the fifth floor of the bank on 10/1/1982, just as he was preparing to give investigators documentation of the Vatican's ownership of the United Trading Corporation of Panama and the other drug money laundries associated with Banco Ambrosiano.
General Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa, as head of the anti-terrorism unit in Turin, had unraveled the Aldo Moro false-flag assassination operation in 1974. On 4/1/1982, Dalla Chiesa was appointed Prefect for Palermo, at the height of the Second Mafia War. He informed Ralph Jones, the U.S. Consul in Sicily, to alert the FBI that the very powerful Gambino-Inzerillo-Spatola Mafia clans and P-2 were running a billion-dollar a year heroin smuggling operation in Sicily supplying the huge American market. This resulted in the massive ‘pizza connection’ surveillance and ultimate conviction. On 9/3/1982, Dalla Chiesa, his wife and one of his agents were gunned down while driving in Palermo.
On August 2, 1980, at 10:25 in the morning, a very powerful time bomb exploded in the crowded waiting room of the Central Railway Station in Bologna, killing 84 people and wounding more than 200, the worst attack on Italian soil since WWII. The attack was blamed by the P-2 Gladio operatives who did it, of course, on the Red Brigade. But the bomb had been a sophisticated combination of TNT and Composition B, made exclusively for the U.S. military, and was identical to explosives found in a Gladio arms dump in Trieste. And Valerio Fioravanti, leader of the Nuclei Armati Rivoluzionari, NAR, the ‘Armed Revolutionary Nuclei,’ a P-2 fascist group run by Mafia and P-2 chieftain Licio Gelli, was injured at the train station in the blast. On August 26, the Bologna prosecutor issued arrest warrants for twenty-six NAR members, but SISMI, Italy's Military Information and Security Service, intervened and got them all released without charges, despite the fact that the evidence led the local police directly to them.
The Bologna bombing and the funeral ceremony in Bologna (Wikimedia Commons)
The CIA’s Michael Ledeen, Kissinger’s and Casey’s man at SISMI, then did everything he could to lay down a false trail to the German European National Fascists and the PLO, but it didn’t work. This terrible bombing is one of the things that led to the March 7, 1981 raid on Licio Gelli's villa, uncovering a list of 962 P-2 (Proaganda Due) members, including Berlusconi, Calvi, Sindona, Argentina’s Jose Lopez Rega, Stefano Delle Chiaie, and hundreds of other prominent politicians, magistrates, journalists, businessmen, policemen, prelates, the heads of all three of Italy’s secret services, and some 40 senior military commanders. 121 of the names were the most powerful Catholic prelates and laymen in Italy. Archbishop Paul Marcinkus, head of the Vatican Bank, Cardinal Jean Villot, the Vatican secretary of state, and Cardinal Sebastiano Baggio, President of the Pontifical Commission, topped the list. The raid also revealed ongoing operational links to Italy’s right-wing death squads such as Ordine Nuovo and Movimento d'Azione Rivoluzionaria, the CIA, including George H.W. Bush and Ankara CIA Station Chief Paul Henze, and Italy’s SISMI chief Giuseppe Santovito, and his second-in-command, Francesco Pazienza. Christian Democrat PM Arnaldo Forlani’s government fell as a consequence, since three of his ministers were on the P-2 list, as well as the head of his military intelligence and chief finance official. For the first time since Lucky Luciano landed 1947, the Christian Democrats lost power in Italy.
The P-2 link to the Bologna bombing was confirmed in the Rome airport when the suitcase of Licio Gelli's daughter was searched. The two documents found outlined P-2’s coup master-plan for oligarchic domination of Italy, and a top secret U.S. Army document discussing Operation Gladio in detail. Judge Felice Casson and his team of investigators concluded that P-2 had been directly involved in bomb attacks from the 1969 Piazza Fontana attack, to the 1972 Peteano attack, right through to the 1980 Bologna railway attack, and that P-2 was executing Operation Gladio, regularly functioning as a paid agent of the CIA. Judge Felice Casson concluded that P-2 had been taking orders from the CIA, which was still very much Dulles’ CIA, to initiate false-flag terrorist attacks so as to drive Italy to the right, eventually to take the country by fascist coup.
And why would the anti-religious, avowedly atheist Red Brigade choose Fr. Antonio Mennini, a ranking Vatican official serving directly under Archbishop Paul Marcinkus, the head of the Vatican Bank, as intermediary between Moro and his family during his captivity? Both prelates did regular business with P-2’s Berlusconi, Calvi, and Sindona, coordinated by Licio Gelli. The murder of the beloved Aldo Moro was a completely successful false flag operation, to this day attached in the popular mind to the Red Brigade, politically devastating the left in Italy, contributing to decades of corrupt right-wing leadership. 12
Ola Tunander, research professor at the Peace Research Institute Oslo, puts it this way in his essay ‘The Use of Terrorism to Construct World Order:’ “Recent trials in Italy have established that the bombing campaign in Italy in the 1960s and 1970s and probably elsewhere in Europe was run not by various leftwing groups as one believed at the time, but, in accordance with a ‘Strategy of Tension’ … by the US and Italian ‘security state’ after a directive made by General William Westmoreland to stop Communism by all means. Their activists and intelligence assets were recruited from extreme fascist organisations of Ordine Nuovo and Avaguardia Natzionale. They carried out a bombing campaign, while they masqueraded as leftwingers, as anarchists and Maoists, in direct collaboration with the CIA and with factions of the Italian intelligence and security services. Carlo Digilio belonging to the CIA net in Italy, told the court that he collaborated with fascist intelligence assets in Ordine Nuovo and the bombing campaign was linked to a US plan to introduce a state of emergency in Italy in order to exclude the political left from government. The same view was presented by the Italian chief of counter-intelligence, General Gianandelio Maletti, and he confirmed in court that the CIA had provided the extreme fascist group Ordine Nuovo with explosives for the bomb attack in Milano in 1969 [Piazza Fontana]. Digilio reported about upcoming bomb attacks to his American CIA contact Captain David Carret, who told him that the bombing campaign was part of a US plan for a state of emergency to control Italian domestic politics.”
So the Contra operation aimed at Nicaragua in 1980 was of a piece with the rest of the Dulles brothers fascist foreign policy since the CIA fix of Italy’s first postwar national election in 1948, using Mafia death squads to hit the Italian center-left. The Dulles brothers went on to overthrow Iran’s Mohammed Mosaddegh in 1953, and Guatemala’s Jacobo Árbenz in 1954. In 1979, the Contra staging areas, covertly set up despite Carter’s specific disapproval, were in Guatemala and Honduras. Mario Sandoval Alarcón’s MLN played the role of host in Guatemala. In 1978 the President of Guatemala was the unelected General Romeo Lucas García, former president Laugerud’s defense minister. Lucas and Sandoval were particular favorites of Reagan’s constituency. 13
In December of 1979 a delegation from the American Security Council, led by ‘retired’ Generals John Singlaub and Daniel Graham - the one a very high ranking CIA agent and the other, Graham, a former Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency - visited Lucas in Guatemala City. They denounced Carter for calling this mass-murderer a mass-murderer and cutting off military aid. Lucas was promised that Reagan would resume military aid as soon as he took office.
Singlaub and Graham were followed by the Young Americans for Freedom, the Heritage Foundation, the Moral Majority and the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell prayed for “mercy helicopters” for Lucas. The Guatemalan leader of this publicity campaign was none other than Roberto Alejos Arzu, whose finca in Retalhuleu had been the staging area for the Bay of Pigs invasion two decades earlier. The CIA’s very own Vernon Walters, who represented the interests of an oil company in Guatemala, Basic Resources, also made a point of stroking Lucas. 14
Reagan, of course, did resume both overt and covert military aid, from Taiwan, Israel and Argentina, which was immediately put to use by Lucas in a “pacification” plan designed by U.S. military experts. In May of 1982 the Guatemalan Conference of Bishops, a very conservative group, declared that “never in our history have such extremes been reached, with the assassinations now falling into the category of genocide.” These same Church officials estimated that Lucas killed as many as 150,000 Guatemalans. 15 16
Obviously, the guerrillas gained many new adherents as Lucas resorted to burning their highland forests, causing, like Saddam Hussein, massive, irreversible environmental destruction. A destruction, oddly enough, almost never mentioned in the American mass media, which prefers to fixate on celebrity sexuality, plane crashes and wacko loners. 17
On Feb. 11, 1982, three months after President Reagan first formally authorized covert CIA operations against the Sandinistas in National Security Decision Directive 17, Attorney General William French Smith, at DCIA Casey’s request, released the CIA from its legal responsibility to report the narcotics law violations of its own contractors.
Smith’s letter to Casey was published as part of CIA Inspector General Frederick Hitz’ 1/29/98 report to Congress on Contra-CIA drug connections. The letter was read into the Congressional Record on 5/7/98 by L.A.’s enraged Rep. Maxine Waters, despite the CIA’s insistence that the entire report was “classified.” It is interesting that Smith didn’t release the CIA from any of its other responsibilities under federal law - the requirement to report murder, Neutrality Act violations, espionage, arson, etc. - but only the requirement to report narcotics law violations.
Casey; Smith with Reagan (Wikimedia Commons, Ronald Reagan Library)
The set up for Casey’s ability to dictate law enforcement to the Attorney General was Reagan’s Executive Order #12333, also dating to November, 1981, the week he formally sicked the CIA on the Sandinistas. The new rules required the CIA to sign off on the Justice Department’s crimes reporting procedures. Casey’s request for the narcotics reporting exemption, then, was more of a demand.
The AG complied, 2/11/82: “Dear Bill:.... In light of these provisions, and in view of the fine cooperation the Drug Enforcement Administration has received from CIA, no formal requirement regarding the reporting of narcotics violations has been included in these procedures.” 18
This legal exemption was an organic part of the initial administration planning for Contra operations, indicating a premeditated conspiracy to do what the Reagan administration actually did - operate a massive, illegal, international drugs-for-arms network.
May 14, 1982: “National Security Decision Directive 3, Crisis Management, establishes the Special Situation Group (SSG), chaired by the Vice President. The SSG is charged...with formulating plans in anticipation of crises.... [Relevant agencies are to] provide the name of their CPPG [Crisis Pre-Planning Group] representative to Oliver North, NSC staff....’’ The memo was signed “for the President” by Reagan’s national security adviser, William Clark, and declassified during the Iran-Contra hearings.
Later spin-offs of this structure, which cut “non-operational” State Department people out of the loop, included the Vice President’s Task Force on Combatting Terrorism, and the Operations Sub-Group, composed of the same people - Bush, Gregg, Clarridge, North, Poindexter, Allen, Oakley, Koch, Moellering, Revell and others.
Bush at CIA, 1976; North; Clarridge; Poindexter
Their first crisis was not long in coming. After the CIA blew up all the bridges connecting Nicaragua to Honduras, Congress, on December 21, 1982, passed the Boland amendment to the Defense Appropriations Act: “None of the funds provided in this Act may be used by the Central Intelligence Agency or the Department of Defense to furnish military equipment, military training or advice, or other support for military activities, to any group or individual ... for the purpose of overthrowing the government of Nicaragua.’’ Reagan solemnly assured Congress that there was no plan to overthrow the Nicaraguan government. Bush, Casey and all their officers lied through their teeth to the congressional oversight committees. Casey’s Deputy Director, Admiral Bobby Ray Inman, the straight arrow who had disbanded Ed Wilson’s crooked Task Force 157, resigned after 15 months because “I caught him lying to me in a number of cases.” Casey’s deputy, Robert Gates replaced Inman as DDCIA. Gates had no problem with anything sanctioned by Casey. 19
Guatemala was needed as a base for Contra operations, and mass murder in Guatemala. The transparent Lucas was replaced as President in late 1982 by Gen. Efraín Ríos Montt, a graduate of just about every counterinsurgency course offered by the U.S. military. Although Ríos Montt’s ‘Plan Victoria’ was simply a repeat of Lucas’ highland scorched earth policy, his line was smoother. This enabled the January 1984 Kissinger Commission to certify the great human rights improvement wrought by this more subtle lunatic, so massive overt military aid was resumed. In May of 2013 Ríos Montt was convicted of genocide and crimes against humanity by a Guatemalan court.
Ríos Montt’s ascension to power resulted in the Constitution of 1985, which redefined Guatemala as a CIA-KMT militarized state, replete with pacified model villages, into which the survivors of the genocide were herded. They were required to participate in “civil defense” units that were subject to strangely sadistic military discipline. The courts handed down such sentences as “death by pummeling.” Those chosen campesinos who refused to pummel their own neighbors to death were themselves subject to the same punishment. “Development projects” on all levels of government were planned by the military, thereby effectively turning the captive campesinos into military slave labor. 20
At this time Roberto D’Aubuisson was deputy chief of the CIA-created and funded Salvadoran National Security Agency, ANSESAL. Working with Guatemala’s Sandoval, Nicaragua’s Somoza and his Salvadoran allies Cuellar and Santivañez, D’Aubuisson used ANSESAL to form the Armed Forces of National Liberation - War of Extermination, the FALANGE. D’Aubuisson’s FALANGE spawned the White Warriors Union, the Secret Anticommunist Army and other contract death squads. Pursuant to his CIA-KMT training, D’Aubuisson gave his death squads a political base by forming the party of the Army, the Nationalist Republican Alliance, ARENA (Alianza Republicana Nacionalista).
D’Aubuisson reacted to the October 1979 Salvadoran coup engineered by reformist junior officers by activating his death squads. First he killed the attorney general of the new pluralist government, Mario Zamora, brother of FMLN leader Rubén Zamora. Then, in March 1980, D’Aubuisson went after his next most dangerous critic, the Archbishop, who was shot through the heart while giving mass. Archbishop Oscar Romero had insisted that the neighboring Sandinistas were preoccupied with their own development and therefore were no military threat to El Salvador. 21
In a famous letter sent just before his death, the Archbishop begged President Carter not to aid ARENA’s military. He said such aid would be used to “sharpen injustice and repression against the people’s organizations” which were struggling “for respect for their most basic human rights.” Nicaragua’s Sandinistas, said the Archbishop, seemed to be acting more like Christians than Communists. The morality inherent in their economic model reflected the true message of Christ, and therefore was a good economic model for El Salvador. Salvadorans, added the Archbishop, were right to insist on absolute freedom of speech and regular democratic elections.
Oscar Romero; Rubén Zamora; Roberto D’Aubuisson; Anastasio Somoza with Richard Nixon and Alexander Haig, 6/2/1971 (Wikimedia Commons)
“You can be a Communist,” explained Roberto D’Aubuisson, “even if you personally don’t believe you are a Communist.” Ten days after the murder of the Archbishop, Roberto D’Aubuisson explained to his American Republican supporters, in a meeting room of the U.S. House of Representatives, that “In order to define the State Department policy, we could use this axiom: who is a communist? Those who consciously or unconsciously collaborate with the Soviet cause. We can ascertain that present [Carter] State Department policy toward Central America has candidly favored communist infiltration.” That was, word for word, the line peddled at the 1980 Buenos Aires meeting of the CIA’s Confederación Anticomunista Latina, CAL, that D’Aubuisson would attend in September, in celebration of the Bolivian Cocaine Coup that almost killed DEA Agent Michael Levine. That coup entailed the military replacement of the left-leaning democracy led by Lidia Gueiler with General Luis García Meza, financed by cocaine traffickers militarily supported by Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie’s P-2 European death squads. 2223
Also attending the September 1980 CIA/CAL celebration was John Carbaugh, an aide to Republican Senator Jesse Helms. Helms, a rabid red-baiting segregationist in the 1950s, was an enthusiastic supporter of the fascist dope peddlers – in the name of the antidrug effort. As a ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, of course, Helms knew all there was to know about the death squads, but that didn’t stop him from solemnly taking testimony from ARENA’s distinguished killers. Between 1980 and 1992 Helms helped funnel $6 billion into the dope-dealing Salvadoran military. 24
Hobnobbing with Carbaugh at the CAL confab was Stefano Delle Chiaie, Klaus Barbie’s top aide. Carbaugh had extensive personal contact with D’Aubuisson, and was instrumental in packaging the ARENA publicity campaign in Washington. Also attending the 1980 CAL meeting was Margo Carlisle, legislative aide to Senator James McClure (R-ID) and staff director of the Republican Conference of the U.S. Senate. Carbaugh and Carlisle hired Mackenzie-McCheyne to handle ARENA’s advertising, while Paul Weyrich taught ARENA operatives effective campaign tactics.
In 1980 ARENA killed at least 10,000 Salvadorans, including quite a few members of the new progressive junta, which collapsed under the terror. In July of 1980 D’Aubuisson was fêted in Washington by the Heritage Foundation, the Council for Inter-American Security, the American Security Council and the American Legion. ARENA became, under Reagan, the very symbol of democratic liberalism and the recipient of all the military hardware it could absorb. When the going got too tough for the freedom fighters of ARENA, of course, they could always count on American jets to drop high explosives and napalm on El Salvador’s desperate campesinos. The ranks of the FMLN, the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, swelled, as whole villages were incinerated.
The Contras were led by the CIA’s Enrique Bermúdez, who had been Somoza’s military liaison in Washington. Somocista National Guard Maj. Ricardo Lau, Bermúdez’ counterintelligence chief, worked with D’Aubuisson to set up the Contra supply system operating out of Ilopango in El Salvador, headquarters of the U.S. Military Group. Lau was accused by former Salvadoran intelligence chief Col. Roberto Santivañez of accepting $120,000 from D’Aubuisson to use his Contra death squad to assassinate Archbishop Romero. Three days after Romero’s murder, D’Aubuisson travelled to Guatemala to personally give the Contras that amount. Lau’s name and telephone number were on the checks. D’Aubuisson was named by the UN-created Truth Commission for El Salvador as having ordered the assassination of Archbishop Óscar Romero. 25 26
The CIA’s chief of Latin American operations, Dewey Clarridge, oversaw the distribution to Contra troops of the CIA training manual, Psychological Operations in Guerrilla Warfare. The manual suggests “Selective Violence for Propagandistic Effects” and “Implicit and Explicit Terror.” Psychological Operations in Guerilla Warfare was based on the 1968 lesson plans of the Army Special Warfare School at Fort Bragg. It is quite sophisticated and well written, borrowing as much from Ho Chi Minh and Mao Zedong as from the Third Reich. 2728
American counterinsurgency’ or ‘pacification’ doctrine has taught, since Sherman’s Civil War and the brutal turn of the century massacre of tens of thousands of Filipinos, the most ruthless terror in “Indian territory.” As refined by Generals Sherman, Sheridan, Bell, Lansdale and McCaffrey, “benevolence” in the pacified or protected areas has been the traditional carrot to the stick of “free fire zones” and the ostentatious massacre of civilians “for propagandistic effect.”
Contra troops specialized in the blowing up of school buses full of little children, the rape, mutilation and murder of young girls, and the use of children’s heads spitted on stakes as warnings not to attend Nicaraguan government schools. The women rural literacy volunteers were also special targets for rape and mutilation. The regular bayonetting of infants is also well documented. Reagan, in a famous phrase that has come to epitomize his hypocrisy, called the Contras “the moral equal of our Founding Fathers.” Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network raised millions for these moral avatars, most of which ended up in secret bank accounts in the Cayman Islands. 29 30
Dewey Clarridge’s predecessor as head of the CIA’s Latin American Division, Nestor Sanchez, had been moved up to the Pentagon’s Bureau of International Security Affairs, from which he was able to support Clarridge in the field. Sanchez had been the CIA’s deputy chief of station in Guatemala in 1954. Clarridge’s assistant, Vincent Cannistraro, was transferred to the White House National Security Staff office of Oliver North, the Vietnam vet who was the NSC’s counterterrorism director. Even most of the State Department people dealing with Latin America were veterans of Vietnam’s Operation Phoenix and other “rural pacification” programs - many, like Clarridge, unable even to speak Spanish. Commented the Washington Post, 11/28/82, “The Gang That Blew Vietnam Goes Latin.”
That gang had plenty of Latin charter members. Bay of Pigs and Operation Phoenix vet Felix Rodriguez coordinated Contra supply flights out of Ilopango in El Salvador. According to VP Bush aide Donald Gregg, his boss in Vietnam’s mass-murdering Operation Phoenix, Rodriguez was a genius with napalm. He pioneered its use on the campesinos of El Salvador. From 1979 to 1981 these maniacs killed 30,000 Salvadorans, most innocent campesinos, and their children, in SS-style death-squad massacres, their theory being, quite literally, the Nazi theory of rule by terror.
On May, 13, 1980, at the Sumpul River crossing, more than 600 unarmed men, women and children were machine gunned to death by cooperating Salvadoran and Honduran troops on either bank as they tried to flee Salvadoran territory into Honduras. Little children, caught in the middle of the river, were cut to ribbons.
On December 11, 1981, at the villages surrounding El Mozote in El Salvador, more than 800 defenseless people were massacred, according to the Salvadoran Catholic Church. In 1992, Tutela Legal, the legal arm of the Salvadoran Church, hired the distinguished international experts of the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team to conduct excavations at El Mozote. In the ruins of a single-room building attached to the village church, the team found 143 human skeletons, 131 of which were children under the age of 12. They had all been machine-gunned to death by standard U.S. Army issue M-16 ammunition manufactured at the Lake City Plant in Independence, Missouri. That was the ammo used by the Atlacatl Batallion, which had been formed by experts from the U.S. Army School of Special Forces, in March of 1981. 31
El Mozote Massacre, photo Susan Meisalas; Atlacatl, for God & Country; El Mozote Memorial (Archbishop Romero Trust)
Aside from massacre by rifle fire, the Atlacatl Battalion and its clones practiced rape, decapitation and disembowelment on a massive scale. By 1982, 600,000 Salvadorans were left homeless - and terrified enough to stop demanding any political rights at all. 32
The CIA-Contra military plan run by Col. James Steele out of Milgroup at Ilopango in El Salvador was based on the same idea as the Bay of Pigs. The idea was to seize a patch of Nicaraguan territory, 1500 square miles of uninhabited mountains in fact, and force overt U.S. military intervention in support of “Free Nicaragua.” But even the CIA couldn’t sell that one to the Joint Chiefs. They knew that an overt U.S. invasion of Nicaragua would be a bloody nightmare. The Pentagon’s Rand Corporation estimated that the popular Sandinistas could bog down 100,000 U.S. troops almost indefinitely. That, of course, would completely enrage all our Latin friends. Colombia, Mexico, Panama and Venezuela - the Contadora group - were in fact quite sympathetic to the Sandinistas, traded with them extensively, and violently opposed military intervention. 33
The Somocistas, at any rate, had so little popular support they couldn’t hold a mountaintop long enough to dig a deep latrine. They could hit, and they could run. The CIA, and certainly the State Department, did what it could to patch together a centrist coalition of Nicaraguans who weren’t Somocistas, but their coalition had no operational control of “their” military. 46 of the 48 top Contra leaders were CIA Somocistas, that is, former officers of Somoza’s National Guard. The other two, apparently, just liked killing. An August 1985 incident is typical. When the Contras couldn’t hold the town of La Trinidad for more than five hours, the time it took Sandinista troops to reach them, they beheaded quite a few townspeople by way of farewell. 34 35 36
The mountaintop fortress of Ilopango; Choppers returning Contra troops to Ilopango from Nicaragua (Castillo)
The frustrated CIA then hit on the bright idea of blowing up international shipping in Nicaragua’s key Pacific port of Corinto with mines, a transparently illegal act of international terrorism. In fact if Nicaragua had done that to the United States, it would have constituted legal grounds for a declaration of war. Hundreds of mines were placed in January and February of 1984. The small mines, designed to be nonlethal, sank a few fishing boats and punched holes in a few freighters, but had no effect whatever on Nicaragua’s trade. The U.S., however, found itself facing a losing case in the World Court. And the Soviet Union was provided with the pretext it needed to begin delivering Mi-25 Hind helicopter gunships, the “flying tanks” Daniel Ortega was now convinced he needed.
A humiliated Congress, facing the outrage of all our allies, led by the chairman of the Senate Select Intelligence Committee, Barry Goldwater, whose advance consent was supposedly required for such an operation, ended the entire Contra aid program. “The second Boland amendment” banned any further consideration of Contra aid until March of 1985. Contra aid continued unabated, however, since Congress couldn’t find a way to end the illegal cocaine, heroin, pot or arms trade.
The Honduran airline SETCO, according to the Kerry Subcommittee, “was the principal company used by the Contras in Honduras to transport supplies and personnel for the FDN…from 1983 through 1985….SETCO received funds for Contra supply operations from the Contra accounts established by Oliver North.” 37
SETCO was run by Juan Ramón Matta Ballesteros, an agent of the Mexican DFS who had worked with the legendary Mexican-based CIA Cuban Alberto Sicilia Falcón. Falcón said his function with the CIA and with Mexican DFS chief Miguel Nazar Haro was “to set up a network exchanging Mexican heroin and marijuana for weapons,” in support of Latin rightwing death squads. Matta, a Honduran chemist, had helped Sicilia set up his Andean cocaine connections. 38
Matta was hunted as a major drug kingpin by the DEA throughout the 70s. The DEA first arrested him in 1970 at Dulles Airport with 54 pounds of cocaine, but that was in his small-time early days. Matta’s Nixon-era protection was good enough to get him sentenced to a mere 5 years in minimum security at Eglin, Florida and released after only one year. When Sicilia fell in 1976, Matta inherited much of his network, including a heroin franchise from Guadalajara’s great opium grower and heroin manufacturer Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo, and a cocaine distribution franchise from the Medellín cartel. 39
Matta, and his Guadalajara cartel partners, ran the “Mexican trampoline” that bounced cocaine from Colombia into the U.S. They became the business partners of Gen. Policarpo Paz García, and in 1978 financed the Honduran “Cocaine Coup” that brought Paz into power (not to be confused with the Bolivian Cocane coup two years later).
Both worked with Col. Gustavo Álvarez Martínez, head of the Honduran Public Security Forces (FUSEP), the secret police. Both also worked with Norwin Meneses, brother of three of Somoza’s leading officers and the chief contact of the dying Somoza regime with the great cocaine cartels of Bolivia and Colombia. Webb quotes a recently declassified 1986 CIA cable describing Meneses as “the kingpin of narcotics traffickers in Nicaragua prior to the fall of Somoza.” Meneses went on, of course, to finance the Contras the same way, contributing mightily to the smog in L.A as Freeway Ricky Ross’ cocaine supplier. A 1990 DEA report describes Meneses and his key California distributor, SomocistaDanilo Blandón, as heading “a criminal organization that operates internationally from Colombia and Bolivia, through Bahamas, Costa Rica, or Nicaragua to the United States.” 40
Matta and Paz also worked with Álvarez’ CIA-DIA contact, Maj. Gen. Robert Schweitzer, a director of strategy for the Army’s deputy chief of staff for operations. Schweitzer had been engineering the use of Honduras as a Somocista base since early 1980, a year before Reagan took office. Much of the financing for this effort came, either directly or through the likes of Meneses, from Bolivian cocaine baron Roberto Suárez. Since General Schweitzer promised these ballsy entrepreneurs an avalanche of largesse from the U.S. military, they volunteered to help him supply the Contras. Bush/Casey made Schweitzer an adviser to the National Security Council. 41
The CIA’s chief of Latin American operations, Dewey Clarridge, visited Paz, Álvarez and Torres-Arias, chief of Honduran military intelligence, in Honduras in August of 1981. He brought with him Col. Mario Davico, the vice chief of Argentine military intelligence, one of the engineers of the ongoing Argentine dirty war and the recent Bolivian Cocaine Coup, also financed by Bolivian cocaine baron Roberto Suárez, the Medellin Cartel’s major supplier. 42
As soon as new Honduran President Roberto Suazo Córdova took power in January 1982, he elevated Álvarez, who had studied terror in Argentina under Videla and Davico, to total command of the Honduran military. Enrique Bermúdez solidified the Contra position in Honduras in December of 82 by appointing Álvarez’ classmate in Argentina, Somocista Guardia officer Emilio Echaverry, as his chief of staff. Col. Leonidas Torres-Arias, the chief of military intelligence, succeeded Álvarez as head of FUSEP.
Col. Torres-Arias had been running the Mexican trampoline with Matta for years. Álvarez understood that the power this conferred on Torres-Arias could prove to be a threat to his own position, since Torres-Arias, like Álvarez, was functioning from within Honduran military intelligence. That is, for instance, cocaine either seized or imported by Honduran military intelligence was funneled to the likes of Norwin Meneses in California, for distribution there through the likes of Ricky Ross, or to the Florida Cubans, Colombians and Jamaicans, for distribution throughout the Southeast. Meneses was not a competitor of the CIA Cubans, rather a financier and close associate of several members of Brigade 2506. Webb’s detailed documentation of Meneses’ L.A. distribution through Ricky Ross is a microcosm of a multi-billion dollar system that supplied cocaine to urban centers worldwide. These days, L.A. isn’t that different than Berlin. Legalize coca leaf products, and medicalize cocaine, and you automatically destroy the illegal cocaine market. 43
One of the most interesting revelations in Webb’s seminal Dark Alliance is his documentation of the role of drug importer and arms manufacturer Ronald Lister, who contracted with the CIA to set up covert Contra arms factories in El Salvador. Lister worked closely with Roberto D’Aubuisson and the Atlacatl Batallion, perpetrators of the El Mozote massacre, on this project. The L.A.-based Lister was an important Meneses operative, making formal arms presentations to the Contra leadership, selling Meneses’ great L.A. distributor Freeway Ricky Ross’ Crips much of their considerable arsenal, and overseeing the delivery of the occasional boatload of cocaine.
When an LAPD narcotics squad raided Lister’s house in 1986, they seized a ten-page note handwritten by Lister, detailing weapons deals. The list included the names of the CIA-financed Ray Prendes, former head of the Salvadoran Christian Democrats; ARENA assassin Roberto D’Aubuisson; and Bill Nelson, from 1973 to 1976 the CIA’s chief of covert operations. It was Nelson who ran the 1973 Chile operation that overthrew Allende. 44
Lister’s other notes included repeated references to the Contras and the Defense Intelligence Agency, then currently illegally supplying arms to the Contras using contractors dispersed throughout South America. SM-90 machine guns, for instance, were manufactured at two separate Bolivian facilities, and sold not only to the Contras, but to the FARC guerrillas in Colombia as well. This effort, happily supported by the Bolivian high command, reinforced the value of two of Bolivia’s chief exports, arms, and the cocaine used to pay for them.
Contra purchases of Lister’s covert arms were largely financed by the cocaine Meneses bought from, or with, Honduran military intelligence. By removing Torres-Arias as head of the Honduran secret police, Honduran army chief Álvarez became Matta’s new senior partner in the Mexican trampoline. Torres-Arias’ reaction to this betrayal was to spill the beans in Mexico City, in August of 1982, about the Honduran-based Somocista invasion force, the Contras, aimed at Nicaragua and the Honduran death squads Álvarez had set up. But, since Álvarez was also engineering the American-financed modernization of the Honduran military, Torres-Arias’ charges had no effect whatever on Álvarez’ position. In fact the Honduran Congress itself was reduced to an Álvarez-CIA rubber stamp, the ‘USS Honduras’ as they called it. 45
Although this proved to be politically disastrous for Álvarez in the long-term, the only short-term threat was the DEA station chief in Tegucigalpa, Tomás Zepeda, who simply refused to go along. Zepeda went after Álvarez, Torres-Arias, Matta and most of the Contra leadership for drug trafficking. The CIA, which had already asked the DEA to define “the level of drug trafficking permissible for an asset,” proceeded to pull the rug out from under the DEA’s Zepeda. In June of 1983, as the CIA station was doubled in size, the DEA shut down Zepeda’s Honduran office completely, claiming lack of funds, thus giving the big green light to the key cocaine transshipment center in Latin America. The DEA’s Zepeda, in the L.A. Times, 2/13/88, insisted that the CIA intentionally sabotaged his investigation. 46 47
Zepeda, and Cele Castillo, and innumerable other pros in a position to know, suspect that the DEA’s chief of Latin American operations, Ed Heath, based in Mexico City, was CIA. DEA agent Michael Levine: “[Heath was] a man so mistrusted by the street agents working for him in Mexico that they conducted enforcement operations without informing him.” While Reagan starved the DEA for funds, between 1982 and 1987, he pumped $1.2 billion into the hands of the Honduran military. 48
A 1983 Customs Investigative Report stated that “SETCO stands for Servicios Ejecutivos Turistas Commander and is headed by Juan Ramón Matta Ballesteros, a class I DEA violator…. SETCO aviation is a corporation formed by American businessmen who are dealing with Ballesteros and are smuggling narcotics into the United States.”
This note of North reads: "Honduran DC-6 which is being used for runs out of New Orleans is probably being used for drug runs into U.S."
So, armed with this intelligence, Lt. Col. Oliver North, under specific orders from Vice President Bush, proceeded to set up the bank accounts through which SETCO would be paid for services to the U.S. military.The July 9, 1984 entry in North’s diary, obligingly published by Senator Kerry, states, in Ollie’s own hand, “wanted aircraft to go to Bolivia to pick up paste, want aircraft to pick up 1,500 kilos.” The July 12, 1985 entry reads, “$14 million to finance [arms] Supermarket came from drugs.”79 August 9, 1985: “Honduran DC-9 which is being used for runs out of New Orleans is probably being used for drug runs into U.S.” All told, Ollie referred to CIA drug dealing in more than 250 entries. The cover of Time quoted North as insisting that “I was authorized to do everything that I did.” 49
When thinking about the credibility of people like Oliver North, it’s always a good rule to ponder how much human blood they have on their hands. Lotsa blood, little credibility. Killing campesinos requires a deeply ingrained moral dishonesty.
It is interesting that the diagram found in North’s White House safe, outlining the Contra “private aid” network, shows many of the same banks and foundations involved in Reagan’s savings and loan debacle and also indicted as drug money laundries. All were close political allies of North’s commanding officer, Vice-President George Bush. 51
Honduran military chief General Gustavo Adolfo Álvarez’ escalating insistence on starting an overt war with neighboring Nicaragua alarmed Honduran centrists, who realized that virtual direct CIA control of the Honduran military, and the Contra Somocista crazies, had become a clear and present danger to Honduras. President Súazo therefore replaced General Álvarez, on 3/31/1984, at the head of the Honduran military with the more nationalistic Gen. Walter López Reyes, a man closer to the Honduran center.
On November 1, 1984, one of Álvarez’ most important allies, Gen. José Bueso Rosa, and his Cuban and Honduran henchmen, were arrested by the FBI in south Florida with 763 pounds of cocaine, about 10 million dollars-worth, wholesale. Bueso, who was then Honduran military attaché to Pinochet in Chile, had been trying to finance the assassination of President Súazo and the reinstallation of General Álvarez. This was apparently a Pinochet-CIA plot foiled by the FBI. The Justice Department’s called the assassination conspiracy “the most significant case of narco-terrorism yet discovered.” But as the ever-patriotic Oliver North put it, “The problem with the Bueso case is that Bueso was the man whom Negroponte, Gorman, Clarridge and I worked out arrangements [censored].” 52
Ambassador John Negroponte at a Military Camp in Honduras April 1984 (Wikimedia Commons)
Gen. Robert Schweitzer, the National Security Counsel contact of Honduran Cocaine Coup engineers Matta and Paz, begged the court to understand that “General Bueso Rosa has always been a valuable ally to the United States.” The court understood. Despite conviction for conspiring to murder a head of state and arrest for possession of nearly a half-ton of cocaine, Bueso served only three years at the Eglin Air Force Base country club in Florida, keeping his silence throughout. But years later, in 1995, Bueso revealed to the Baltimore Sun some of what he participated in: he described the CIA setup, equipping and training of the Honduran army’s official death squad, Battalion 316, under General Álvarez. Hundreds of innocent left-leaning Hondurans were murdered. The guerrillas repaid General Álvarez on 1/25/1989. 53
Contra rebels marching through Jinotega, Nicaragua in 1985; Contra troops return to San Miguel, El Salvador after a mission in Honduras (Castillo)
One of Bueso’s indicted coconspirators was Jerome Latchinian, Bush operative Felix Rodriguez’ business partner in the CIA’s gunrunning Giro Aviation Group. Latchinian had been Álvarez’ right-hand man during the CIA’s late 1970s buildup of the Honduran military, what became known as the Honduran Cocaine Coup. In his defense, Latchinian insisted that it was CIA coke, from the chief of the Honduran secret police, not private enterprise coke. This was likely true, since the other indicted coconspirators were CIA Cubans. 54
On October 5, 1986, a nineteen year-old Sandinista trooper apparently got lucky with a shoulder-launched SAM-7 ground-to-air missile, bringing down a C-123 loaded with Contra arms. This disaster was immediately reported to the office of Vice President Bush by the flight’s Ilopango coordinator, Felix Rodriguez.
The C-123’s only survivor, cargo-kicker Eugene Hasenfus, obligingly told his Sandinista captors all about the Ilopango operation, naming Felix Rodriguez and Luis Posada as his CIA handlers and flight coordinators. Hasenfus’ notebook contained George Bush’s office telephone number.
Hasenfus’ copilot, one of the three killed in the crash, was Buzz Sawyer. When Wanda Palacios, the wife of a Colombian trafficker, saw Sawyer’s picture on the tube, she rushed to tell Senator Kerry, for whom she was testifying. Sawyer had been one of the Southern Air pilots she saw loading cocaine in Barranquilla, Colombia, in early October 1985. She had ridden to the transfer with legendary coke kingpin Pablo Escobar, and had discussed the Southern Air Transport arrangement with coke kingpin Jorge Ochoa as well. Sawyer’s CIA plane would come in loaded with U.S. arms, and exit loaded with Colombian cocaine.
When the Associated Press sent Robert Parry to Managua to cover the story, he was greeted by Sandinista military intelligence chief Ricardo Wheelock, who showed him Sawyer’s flight logs, recovered from the downed plane. Three entries - for October 2, 4 and 6, 1985 - listed Sawyer flying a Southern Air Transport L382 from Miami to Barranquilla, and Palacios’ passport established that she was in Colombia at the time. The FBI polygraph also indicated that Palacios was telling the truth. 55
Escobar and a gesturing Barry Seal offloading the coke; Vaughn, striped shirt, about to hand a pack of coke to Seal
Hasenfus’ Southern Air Transport C-123K, which saw duty in Laos in the late 60s, was the very plane CIA agent and drug smuggler Barry Seal had used to entrap Federico Vaughan, supposedly a Sandinista operative, loading coke with Pablo Escobar near Managua for the CIA-installed cameras in the plane. “This picture,” intoned the Great Communicator, 3/16/1986. lobbying for his $100 million Contra aid package, “secretly taken at a military airfield outside Managua, shows Federico Vaughan, a top aide to one of the nine commandantes who rule Nicaragua, loading an aircraft with illegal narcotics, bound for the United States. No, there seems to be no crime to which the Sandinistas will not stoop - this is an outlaw regime!”
But the photos were blurred, and Vaughan was actually a CIA operative. In fact, a recently declassified CIA cable identified Vaughan as “an associate of Nicaraguan narcotics trafficker Norwing [sic] Meneses Cantarero,” the Contra cocaine financier.
And that one transparent sting, the one that got Seal shot dead by the Medellín coke dealers he betrayed, was politically uncharacteristic of both Escobar and Seal, who usually financed American military allies. The CIA, in 1984, and the Justice Department, in 1986, officially told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that no evidence of Sandinista drug dealing could be found. The DEA later confirmed this, saying that Seal’s one CIA setup was the only drug flight involving the Sandinistas it was aware of, and that actually involved no Sandinistas. 56
In 1986, the Louisiana attorney general wrote to U.S. attorney general Ed Meese that, between 1981 and 85, Seal “smuggled between $3 billion and $5 billion of drugs into the U.S.” That same year the commander and deputy commander of narcotics for the Louisiana State Police, in a letter to the DEA, insisted that Seal “was being given apparent free rein to import drugs in conjunction with D.E.A. investigations with so little restraint and control on his actions as to allow him the opportunity to import drugs for himself should he have been so disposed.” He was so disposed. He was, in fact, the chief importer of Medellín cocaine into the southeastern U.S., the chief supplier of their cocaine to the New York, Miami and New Orleans distribution hubs. This operation was run out of Mena, Arkansas, using the CIA’s contract fleet of about 30 C-130 transports. 57
Seal’s C-123K, ‘the Fat Lady,’ acquired through insider paper transfers, was sold by Gen. Secord to the CIA’s Southern Air Transport for a nice profit. Eugene Hasenfus then rode this plane to worldwide notoriety, obligingly telling his Sandinista captors, on camera, that he was hired by the CIA to deliver arms to Contra rebels in Nicaragua. These were the usual recipients of Seal’s largesse. 58
Investigative journalists Sally Denton and Roger Morris were able to corroborate Hasenfus’ confession through U.S. Customs sources. They insisted that Seal’s operations at Mena and other bases were involved in the regular export of guns to the Contras, as well as to CIA arms clients in Bolivia, Argentina, Peru, and Brazil. Those exports were financed, they said, by the massive importation of drugs on the return trip.
The cocaine cartel connections of the three Colombians convicted of murdering Seal in Feb. 1986 were widely advertised. What wasn’t so widely advertised was that they were armed by CIA asset José Coutin, whose Miami gun shop was used by Oliver North to arm the Contras.
Sam Dalton was the New Orleans attorney who represented the Colombian hit men in the penalty phase of their trial. After a long legal fight with the CIA and FBI, Dalton gained access to some of the contents of the trunk of the Cadillac Seal was driving on the night he was killed. “Some of the things that had been in it we didn’t get back. But they had missed a few things that indicated just how valuable that trunk was. Because that’s where that phone number was. That’s where we found George Bush’s private phone number. They were regularly talking to each other very seriously over what was probably a secure phone. Barry Seal was in direct contact with George Bush.” 59
In 1986, Lewis Unglesby, at the age of 36, was Barry Seal’s lawyer. Today he’s one of Louisiana’s most famous and powerful attorneys. Unglesby chafed under Seal’s “need-to-know” restrictions. “I sat him down one time,” Unglesby told investigative journalist Daniel Hopsicker, “and said: I cannot represent you effectively unless I know what is going on. Barry smiled, and gave me a number, and told me to call it, and identify myself as him (Seal.) I dialed the number, a little dubiously, and a pleasant female voice answered: ‘Office of the Vice President.’” ‘This is Barry Seal,’ Unglesby said into the phone. ‘Just a moment, sir,’ the secretary replied. ‘Then a man’s voice came on the line, identifying himself as Admiral somebody, and said to me, ‘Barry, where have you been?’” ‘Excuse me, Sir,’ Unglesby replied, ‘but my name is Lewis Unglesby and I’m Barry Seal’s attorney.’ There was a click. The phone went dead. Seal just smiled when I looked over at him in shock, and then went back to treating me on a need-to-know basis.”
Contra Cocaine Smugggler Seal in 1963 with Watergate burglar and suspected JFK assassin Frank Sturgis, CIA agent and Ilopango Cocaine Flight Coordinator Felix Rodriguez, and former CIA Director Porter Goss, who spent the 1960s in the CIA’s Latin America Directorate of Operations
Hopsicker’s most highly-placed intelligence source adds, “Barry’s been a spook since 1971. In fact, Barry goes all the way back to the Bay of Pigs.” Adds Hopsicker, in parenthesis, “(The Admiral in question might well have been Admiral Daniel Murphy, assigned to work in the Office of the Vice President, from which numerous reports state Contra operations were masterminded.)” Murphy’s subordinate, Oliver North, acknowledged his relationship with Seal in his memoirs. 60
North put Seal in touch with Thailand Air America vet Terry Reed, who trained Contra troops in the smuggler’s arts - night landings, precision paradrops - at Nella, ten miles north of Mena, Arkansas in the Ouachita National Forest. Reed claimed, in his fascinating book Compromised, that he assumed the purpose of the training to be the military resupply of Contras operating behind enemy lines in Nicaragua, not the related drug smuggling that financed the operation. But Reed, as he himself proves, was in this far too deeply, and is far too intelligent, for this to be believed. His disingenuous protestations are obviously a legal ploy. “Disinformation to work,” Peter Dale Scott warned me, “has to be 80 percent correct. Single bits of it might be 100 percent correct.” Reed can prove his 80%.
He was indeed a Spanish-speaking machine-tool expert as well as an experienced flight instructor, and did indeed set up a covert arms manufacturing operation for Casey amd North’s Enterprise in northern Mexico, as Ronald Lister had done in El Salvador. Reed claims that his Guadalajara CIA contact, the infamous Felix Rodriguez, was using Reed’s under-construction Guadalajara arms manufacturing facility to import huge amounts of cocaine into the U.S., via, among others, Barry Seal at Mena. Rodriguez used General Secord’s huge Southern Air Transport C-130s operating under CIA flight cover.
I asked professional CIA investigator the late Mike Ruppert, no innocent fan of Reed, what he thought of the following Reed description of the cross-border smuggling system: “From probably fifteen different sources I know that his description of how the air routes were handled and clearances obtained is on-the-money accurate. Whether the CIA, through the military or DEA or Treasury or Coast Guard went through EPIC [El Paso Intelligence Center] and told them to allow planes or whether someone told someone to turn radars off or whether someone gave aircraft secret transponder codes which allowed them to pass, the mechanism is accurate.”
Reed: “Specifically, Cathey [Oliver North] wanted to know, ‘Now are you sure that if one of Southern Air Transport’s planes delivers a load of guns to Terry’s facility that Fierro can fix the international air traffic control system so that there is no permanent record of that flight? Either from its origination as it penetrates Mexican air space or to its destination at Guadalajara?’
“’Señor Fierro said to tell you he has a brother who provides this same service in the Bermuda Triangle,’ Gomez joked. ‘What flies in never flies out, or at least not from ATC point of view.’ That took care of Mexican air space. With everyone still laughing, another problem occurred to Johnson [‘Robert Johnson,’ the CIA agent in charge of the meeting, was the nom de guerre of William Barr, later to become George H.W. Bush’s U.S. Attorney General, and later still to become Trump’s Attorny General. Barr was officially in the CIA from 1973 to 1977. At the time of this meeting his cover was as Reagan’s Deputy Assistant Director for Legal Policy.].”
“’What about our own satellite reconnaissance?’”
“Cathey had the answer to that. ‘The same procedures as we used for Dodger sorties. We will have them blinded just as we did for Seal’s departures and penetrations. The military’s satellite coverage is from the equator north all the way into the U.S.’”
“’But I’m curious,’ Johnson said. ‘I’ve never understood how Seal got back in. Taking care of the defense system is one thing, but what about American ATC [Air Traffic Control]? Don’t these two systems overlap?’”
“’Sea Spray is the coordinator,’ Cathey replied.”
“’For the purpose of my report, remind me what Sea Spray is,’ Johnson requested.”
“Cathey explained the technical details of Sea Spray, itself a black, joint Army-CIA unit that provided ‘cover’ for covert ops flights to enter and exit American air space undetected [confirmed by Seymour Hersh in the NYT in 1987], and added, ‘Terry knows how it works. He went on a Sea Spray flight with Seal down to Panama. Remember, Max?’”
“Gomez[Rodriguez] nodded.”
“’Beautiful,’ Johnson said. ‘The flights just never happen.’”
“Satellites in orbit provide the primary defense network that protects American coastal air space. By ‘blinding’ those satellites, Cathey was referring to the Defense Department’s ability to selectively turn off their detection capability. This had to be done in order to prevent a triggered response from the military, whose mission is to intercept unauthorized incursions into U.S. air space.”
“Southern Air Transport’s aircraft, which would be carrying the weapons to Guadalajara, would be exiting and entering United States air space without flight plans. For such black flights to come and go, avoiding detection and interception by the military, certain select air corridors would momentarily be ‘established,’ allowing penetration without detection.”
“Electronically, a ‘hole’ is temporarily created in the defense network. This is how Barry Seal was able to fly weapons south from Arkansas for so long, seemingly without interference. The same was true for return flights, when Seal and others were hauling drugs.” 61
The overlapping civil ATC system, controlled by the FAA, must also be blinded. We can now understand Col. Fletcher Prouty’s desperate military concern over the loss of civilian control of the FAA.
“Terry began to notice that when he was conducting Boomerang flight training sorties within the [covert] military operation areas (MOAs) and monitoring air traffic control (ATC) communications, he could hear the controllers intentionally divert other air traffic away from the area. He knew that ATC was fully aware of his presence in the area since the transponder lights in the training aircraft gave indications that they were being ‘painted’ or observed. Red Hall, Seal’s Agency avionics expert, made sure their collision avoidance equipment was fully operational and it showed continuous ‘interrogation’ activity by ATC when flying above 4,000 feet MSL [median sea level] within the MOAs. It seemed obvious that the FAA was providing cover for Jade Bridge by attempting to keep unwanted aircraft out of the area. 62
Just as the internal logic of Reed’s description of the air smuggling system holds up, so too does the internal logic of Reed’s analysis of the Air Hasenfus disaster. Reed recounts the analysis of Amiram Nir, the key Mossad operative in Central America who had coordinated the Israeli South American end of most of the Iran-Contra business. Operation Black Eagle was set up by Casey, Noriega and Nir in 1982 along the same lines as the Ilopango operation. The weapons for the Contras came by way of Israel. In exchange for use of Panama’s airfields and banks, Noriega was allowed to use the cargo planes that imported the arms to export tons of Pablo Escobar’s Medellin cocaine. SOP, drugs for arms. But Noriega was never a major drug wholesaler like our friends in Honduras, and he never hesitated to cooperate with U.S. law enforcement in doublecrossing his drug suppliers, which, ultimately, is why Pablo Escobar ended up hunting him. It may have been his betrayal to authorities of Panama’s drug-dealing banks that brought him down as much as his drug dealing, but either way, Noriega became a very convenient way for President George H.W. Bush to get himself an anti-drug merit badge with his 1989 Panama invasion, after the 1989 Sandinista victory rendered Panama operationally irrelevant.
After the Spring 1986 Senate hearings by Jesse Helms’ Subcommittee on Western Hemisphere Affairs looking into Noriega’s drug dealing, and headline stories by Seymour Hersh in The New York Times and Bob Woodward in The Washington Post, the DEA began to investigate. Col. Oliver North called DEA administrator Jack Lawn on behalf of the NSC asking cancellation of the investigation, and Lawn refused. Then Senators Jesse Helms and John Kerry introduced an amendment to the 1986 Intelligence Authorization Act that required the CIA to investigate Noriega’s involvement in drug trafficking. Brick wall that it is, the CIA did no such thing, but the publicity had hit the fan. The Israelis began to fear the political fallout. 63
Reed says that Nir sought him out in an effort to avoid seeing them both go down as the dope-dealing Iran-Contra fall guys. Nir believed the Contra-Cocaine operation was spinning out of control. He told Reed that Ilopango flight director Felix Rodriguez was a double agent who had, for whatever reason, set up Hasenfus’ C-123 Contra supply plane for ‘shootdown’ in concert with Sandinista military intelligence. Nir, a legendary Mossad agent, could indeed see around corners.
“.... Nir expressed his belief that Rodriguez was a double agent.... ‘Number one, you knew Bill Cooper much better than I. I’ve been told he was an excellent flyer. You don’t live to be a 60-year-old pilot by acting reckless! What was he doing flying many miles off his flight plan and directly over a Sandinista stronghold...a military training camp no less?’”
“’Number two, why did the aircraft have unnecessary and classified documents aboard? Documents from prior missions reflecting the dates of the flights, the crew members’ names, the tonnage and descriptions of the munitions and the coordinates of the drop zones.’”
“’Number three, why was the crew not sanitized as the orders always called for? My God, Bill Cooper even had his Southern Air Transport identification card with him. That we cannot accept as an accident. My God, a direct link to the CIA. Cooper knew better!’”
“’Number four, this guy Hasenfus...the dumb-ass survivor...what kind of a story is this? No one was to have a parachute. The intention is to always go down with the craft in case of an incident like this. You know from your training that is the procedure: no one is to live. No loose ends. Instead, this guy claims his brother bought him a parachute in Wisconsin. My God, if it wasn’t so serious, it would be funny.’”
“Number five, how does he know the plane was hit by a surface-to-air missile? If he was blown out of the plane by the explosion, as he claims, he wouldn’t even have seen it coming, let alone recognized the type of weapon.’”
“’No sir, it’s all too convenient. Daniel Ortega ‘accidentally’ captures an American flyer who immediately spills his guts and starts babbling ‘CIA, the White House, guns, Southern Air Transport,’ and then to top it off, he’s put on trial as a war criminal, convicted for his crimes and released as a humanitarian gesture! Shot down in October and home by Christmas. I’ll bet your Vietnam POW flyers would have liked such an opportunity. Just think of it all.’”
“’But I’ve saved the best morsel for last.... We warned Seal back in early 1986. Just before his murder, we warned him that your side had a leak, which could bring about a political thunderclap. And that’s exactly what happened when the C-123 crashed and exposed to the world the deviousness of the Reagan administration.’”
“’.... Oh, Medina [Luis Posada Carriles]. That’s another example of your CIA stooping to use terrorists to do agents’ jobs. What did Medina ever do besides blow up civilians in airliners? These damn Cuban rebels, they’re just not professionals.’”
“’.... An agent of ours in El Salvador reports that Rodriguez boasted that he was responsible for the killing of both Seal and Camp. You know Rodriguez. He must continually brag of his exploits.... My God, it’s just so apparent to us that he is a double-dipper. He must be eliminated one way or the other.’” Nir offered to help Reed physically bust Rodriguez’ CIA drug network, which, given the muscle and money behind the network, was a very dangerous gambit.
Nir, with all his heavyweight credentials and contacts, was about to testify before authorities on Iran-Contra. Nir could demonstrate, for instance, that VP Bush, running for President, who claimed complete ignorance of the whole thing, had in fact met with Nir in Israel and was briefed in detail by him as a witting intelligence officer.
Reed says that this conversation with Amiram Nir took place in July of 1987 in Terry Reed’s airplane while flying over his CIA weapons facility at Michoacán’s Morelia Airport. In November of 1988, at almost exactly the same spot, Nir would plunge to his death in a single engine commuter aircraft. Rodriguez, Bush’s long-time agent, was still operating in the area, and fixing small planes was a Rodriguez specialty. On an Israeli television program in 2014, Nir's son Nimrod stated that after years of investigating his father's death, he concluded that his father’s death was an assassination engineered by Vice President George H.W. Bush, because Nir was about to reveal some of what he knew to Iran-Contra investigators. 64
Senior CIA Soviet analyst Melvin A. Goodman, who was in the Directorate of Intelligence at this time: “In fact, Bush was on hand for numerous high-level meetings to discuss Iran-Contra, including the principals meeting in January 1986, when Shultz and Weinberger forcefully presented their opposition to the operation. Bush was regularly briefed by national security adviser John Poindexter [Oliver North’s immediate superior] on the arms sales and the efforts to free the hostages, bringing the vice president up to date whenever Bush missed one of President Reagan’s daily intelligence briefings. He was also briefed in Israel in July 1986 by Amiram Nir, President Shimon Peres’s adviser on terrorism, at ‘considerable length and in intimate detail’ about the background and status of the Israeli dealings with Iran and the arms-for-hostages deal….Nir was a close confidant of the National Security Council’s Oliver North; they collaborated closely on a series of counterterrorism operations, including the U.S. interception of the Egyptian plane carrying four Palestinian terrorists after the hijacking of the cruise ship Achille Lauro in 1985. Nir played the key Israeli role in creating a conduit to Iran for the delivery of surface-to-air missiles. Bush knew that Israeli Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin had been authorized to sell arms to Iran, including SAM missiles, and that the United States would replenish those weapons.”
“Not only was Bush present at several key meetings that discussed Iran-Contra, his national security adviser was Donald Gregg, a CIA operational veteran. Gregg met regularly with Colonel Oliver North, Felix Rodriguez, and others who were closely involved with the weapons transfers and exchanges of intelligence that violated the Boland Amendment, which prohibited providing military support for the purpose of overthrowing the Nicaraguan government. It was reasonable to assume that Gregg regularly briefed the vice president, who was once director of the CIA, on these activities. Finally, Bush attended the so-called ‘bridging meeting’ of the National Security Council on May 16, 1986, which arranged soliciting financial support from various Arab countries, particularly Saudi Arabia, to support the Contras… In fact, there were three meetings between the president, Secretary of State Shultz, and Secretary of Defense Weinberger in which the cabinet officers discussed their opposition to the sale of arms to Iran. Vice President Bush attended two of these meetings, including the first one in early August 1985, when national security deputy adviser Robert McFarlane first proposed the sales and on January 7, 1986, when President Reagan authorized the continuation of sales directly from the United States. Therefore, Bush was dissembling when he said he was ‘out of the loop,’ and he never mentioned that he had been briefed regularly by national security adviser John Poindexter on the arms sales and the efforts to free the hostages.” 65
Nir insisted that the autopsy performed by the Nicaraguans, the results of which had been forwarded to the CIA, proved that Cooper and Sawyer, the C-123 pilot and copilot, were dead before the plane took off. Israeli agents confirmed on the ground that the plane had exploded outward, from an internal explosion. Hasenfus, the talkative survivor, was perfectly able to fly the airplane by himself. And the third dead crew member also didn’t die from the crash - his throat had been slit! The plane was personally sent on its way from Ilopango by none other than Felix Rodriguez and Luis Posada, the CORU terrorist convicted of blowing up the Cubana airliner, known, for years, as Nir indicated, as ‘The Bomber.’ 66
Felix Rodriguez’ boss, Gen. Richard Secord, ran Southern Air Transport for Bush, Casey, Murphy and Gregg. He was the original 1960s Laotian Air Opium employer of most of the operatives Barry Seal worked with. When Leslie and Andrew Cockburn were sued by Secord for defamation of character for the revelations contained in their indispensable 1987 Out of Control, the court found the Cockburns not guilty because their allegations of Secord’s complicity in the drug trade were true. 67
Here is the table of contents of the 1989 Senate Committee Report on Drugs, Law Enforcement and Foreign Policy, chaired by Senator John F. Kerry:
I. INTRODUCTION
II. THE EXECUTIVE BRANCH RESPONSE TO CONTRA/DRUG CHARGES
III. THE GUNS AND DRUG SMUGGLING INFRASTRUCTURE DEVELOPS
IV. DRUG TRAFFICKING AND THE COVERT WAR
V. THE PILOTS
VI. U.S. GOVERNMENT FUNDS AND COMPANIES WITH DRUG CONNECTIONS
A. SETCO/HONDU CARIB
B. FRIGORIFICOS DE PUNTARENAS
C. DIACSA: “DIACSA’s president, Alfredo Caballero, was under DEA investigation for cocaine trafficking and money laundering when the State Department chose the company to be an NHAO [Nicaraguan Humanitarian Assistance Organization] supplier. Caballero was at that time a business associate of Floyd Carlton - the pilot who flew cocaine for Panama’s General Noriega….The indictments of Carlton, Caballero and five other defendants, including Alfredo Caballero’s son Luis, were handed down on January 23, 1985. The indictment charged the defendants with bringing into the United States on or about September 23, 1985, 900 pounds of cocaine. In addition, the indictment charged the defendants with laundering $2.6 million between March 25, 1985 and January 13, 1986. Despite the indictments, the State Department made payments…to DIACSA to provide services to the Contras.”
D. VORTEX
“In each case, prior to the time that the State Department entered into contracts with the company, federal law enforcement had received information that the individuals controlling these companies were involved in narcotics.”
VII. THE CASE OF GEORGE MORALES AND FRS/ARDE
VIII. JOHN HULL
IX. THE SAN FRANCISCO FROGMAN CASE, UND-FARN AND PCNE
X. THE CUBAN-AMERICAN CONNECTION
XI. RAMÓN MILIAN RODRIGUEZ AND FELIX RODRIGUEZ
FOOTNOTES
In 1987 U.S agents confiscated two loads of Honduran cocaine totalling 6.7 tons, “the largest such seizure ever made in the United States.” The chief counsel for the House Subcommittee on Crime, Hayden Gregory, concluded that the coke went “right to the doorstep of the Honduran military.” It was Colombian coke, purchased directly by CIA ‘asset’ Juan Ramón Matta Ballesteros, owner of SETCO. When Gregory flew to Honduras to investigate, the U.S. Embassy wouldn’t let him. 68 69
Ex-DEA agent Michael Levine: “The DEA documented fifty tons of Contra coke that was being routed to the U.S. by a Honduran connection. An agent bought two kilos in Lubbock, Texas, and made the arrest. The CIA comes quickly to the rescue. A closed hearing is held. Case dismissed.” The rescued trafficker was Eugenio Molina Osorio, brother of Matta’s partner in SETCO. 70
Luis Posada, who worked with Rodriguez at Ilopango under orders from North; Contra leader Adolfo Calero with North and Reagan in the Oval Office (Ronald Reagan Library)
When the DEA nailed a drug-carrying DC-4 in March, 1987, the owner, pilot Frank Moss, wasn’t arrested because he was contracting with the CIA to supply coke to the Contras. His partner in the company that owned the plane, Hondu Carib, was Mario Calero, chief supply officer of the Contras. Mario was the brother of the Contra political front Adolfo Calero. Moss’ notes, found on the plane, contained the names and numbers of two CIA agents and Col. North’s Contra liaison, Robert Owen. 71
By 1987 Honduras accounted for at least a third (Levine says half) of all the cocaine smuggled into the U.S. By 1988 the U.S. embassy in Honduras had grown to more than 300 people, one of the largest in the world. The whole thing, from start to finish, was a CIA operation. 72
Joe Fernandez, CIA Costa Rican station chief, told the Tower Commission that Ambassador Lewis Tambs told him, in his first organizational meeting in 1985, that “he had really only one mission in Costa Rica, and that was to form a Nicaraguan resistance southern front.” Tambs, a Helms operative who had just come from a stint in Colombia, was taking orders directly from Bush operative Oliver North. Both Tambs and Fernandez worked closely with the CIA’s John Hull, whose 30-mile long Costa Rican ranch, bordering Nicaragua, supported six airstrips, arms depots and the Radio Free America broadcasting tower. 73
What Tambs actually meant was that he was to help Hull wrest control of the southern front from the recalcitrant Eden Pastora, the former Sandinista hero who refused to place his ARDE troops under the command of the Somocista FDN. This reduced itself to a cocaine turf war and included a famous attempt to blow Pastora to kingdom come. Coincidentally, on the same day the bomb at Pastora’s border camp at La Penca went off, May 30, 1984, U.S. aid to ARDE was cut off. 74
John Hull (Kerry Report 12/88); Reagan with Tambs (Wikimedia Commons)
Kerry went after a Brigade 2506 outfit called Ocean Hunter/Frigorificos de Puntarenas, which used shrimp boats to trade U.S. Navy arms from Florida for Colombian coke via Hull’s ranch. Ocean Hunter was created by convicted Medellín cartel drug-money launderer and CIA bagman Cuban American Ramón Milian-Rodriguez. The “humanitarian” bank accounts were controlled by one of Ocean Hunter’s owners, a CIA Cuban named Luis Rodriguez. According to Massachusetts law enforcement, Rodriguez ran the largest marijuana smuggling ring in the history of the state. Rodriguez was indicted on drug trafficking charges by the federal government on September 30, 1987, and on tax evasion in connection with the laundering of drug money through Ocean Hunter on April 5, 1988.
The Ocean Hunter “humanitarian” accounts were managed by Oliver North’s senior field liaison, Robert Owen. Ocean Hunter financed the purchase and delivery of weapons, according to an Owen memo to North. All its officers, Moises Nuñez, Francisco Chanes, Carlos Soto and Ubaldo Fernandez, were not only known or convicted drug traffickers, but partners of CIA contractor Frank Castro, cofounder with Luis Posada Carriles of CORU (The Coordination of United Revolutionary Organizations) and himself a legendary drug dealer. CORU assassinated Chilean human-rights activist Orlando Letelier in Washington, D.C. in 1976, and blew Cubana Flight 455 out of the sky in 1976, killing 73 people.
Moises Nuñez, Frigorificos Costa Rican manager, was, according to Brian Barger, UPI, 2/12/88, “identified as an Agency [CIA] officer by two senior Costa Rican government officials, a U.S. intelligence source, and American law enforcement authorities..” In January, 1986, the DEA took 414 pounds of cocaine off a Frigorificos shipment of yucca to Miami. 75
The FBI identified Frank Castro as a regular associate of Hull. John Hull himself was identified by a very experienced military intelligence operative, Robert Hayes, in a sworn affidavit in Florida, 1/8/88, as a CIA black ops specialist with whom he had worked throughout the 70s:
“.... I eventually returned to Lakeland in 1981 and buried the Brazilian incident and my other intelligence activities in my past. But Michaels returned to haunt me late last year when I read a November 16, 1987 Time magazine article titled ‘The Misadventures of El Patron.’ The article detailed the activities of John Hull, an American expatriate operating a farm on Costa Rica’s northern border with Nicaragua. Hull was identified in the article...as a CIA agent whose farm was used to transship weapons and other supplies to the Contra rebels opposing the Sandinista government in Nicaragua.”
“.... The article was accompanied by a color photograph of Hull, which I immediately identified as John Joseph Michaels. After subsequent research and further examination of the photograph, I remain convinced that John Joseph Michaels and John Hull are the same individual, and that Michaels’ activities in Brazil are part of a continuing pattern of operations that led to the plot to bomb the U.S. embassy in Costa Rica, as he had asked me to bomb the U.S. consulate in Sao Paulo.”
Also working in John Hull’s Costa Rica operation were Rene Corvo, Ramón Sanchez, Frank Castro and other CIA Cubans suspected in innumerable bank robberies, drug deals and terrorist acts, as FBI Agent Kevin Currier pointed out to the Iran-Contra Committee. Frank Castro was indicted twice on drug charges in the early 80s, in Operation Tick-Talks and Operation Grouper, but both prosecutions were sabotaged by the CIA. Grouper, a Vice-President Bush Task Force on Drugs operation, was sabotaged from the inside, by a Bush operative who himself was indicted for smuggling, and promptly vanished. 76
According to the U.S. Customs Service 1987 investigation, the owners of Ocean Hunter/Frigorificos included Danny Vasquez, another Brigade 2506 vet, who also just happened to own Florida Air Transport, which regularly traded multiton loads of arms for cocaine on Hull’s airstrips. Five qualified witnesses confirmed that to Senator Kerry.
Vice President George Bush explains the Ilopango Anti-Drug Mission at the Guatemalan Embassy, January 14, 1986. Cuban-American operative Ambassador Piedra looks admiringly on; Castillo
As Senator Kerry’s report puts it: “Yet another guns for drugs flight was made two weeks later. On this trip, Betzner said he flew a Panther to an airstrip called ‘Los Llanos,’ about ten miles from Hull’s properties and not far from the Voice of America transmitter in northern Costa Rica. Betzner testified that Hull met him again and the two watched while the weapons were unloaded and approximately 500 kilos of cocaine in 17 duffel bags were loaded for the return flight to Florida.”
That is, as a CIA covert ops flight, Gary Betzner’s plane wasn’t subject to customs inspection. The coke was literally offloaded for Syndicate distribution at a CIA-controlled U.S. military base. Another Betzner trip traded mines picked up from the U.S. Milgroup at Ilopango in El Salvador for three tons of Colombian pot. 77
One mutual associate of Tambs, North and Hull, former Sandinista fighter turned Contra leader Blackie Chamorro, was intercepted by Costa Rican police with 421 pounds of pure cocaine. In 1990, Hull himself was charged with drug trafficking by Costa Rica. 78 79
In July of 1989, Costa Rica officially declared that Lewis Tambs, Joe Fernandez, Oliver North, Richard Secord and John Poindexter were barred from the country because they were part of “an organization made up of Panamanians, Colombians, Costa Ricans and citizens of other nationalities who dedicated themselves to international cocaine trafficking...” All took orders from George Bush. 80
Felix Rodriguez’ deputy at the U.S. Milgroup in Ilopango, CORU assassin Luis Posada Carriles, was the terminal chief that sent Eugene Hasenfus off on his ill-fated October 1986 flight. Gustavo Villoldo, who was with Rodriguez at the Bay of Pigs and hunting Ché in Bolivia, functioned as a “combat adviser” to the Contras under written orders from Bush aide Gregg. He helped Rodriguez and Posada turn Ilopango into a major drug port, according to Celerino Castillo, the DEA’s Lead Agent in Guatemala and El Salvador from 1985 to 1990. It was Castillo who had developed much of the DEA evidence used by Senator Kerry. Castillo has since done everything he could to advertise the results of his very dangerous five year investigation in-country, including giving most of his evidentiary photos and notes to me for publication here, and permission to quote from his book, Powderburns. 81
Castillo in Vietnam
Castillo was a heavily decorated Vietnam combat veteran who had recently commanded DEA operations in New York, Peru and Guatemala. In New York, in the early 80s, the bilingual street wise Tex-Mex demonstrated the nerve and talent to go after major dealers, producing bust after major bust. Castillo’s biggest bust, of an extensive Sicilian heroin importing and distribution operation, actually depended on his ability to translate the Spanish pig Latin of the ring’s warehouse manager. 82
This caused Castillo to find himself, in 1984, as the only Spanish-speaking DEA agent in Peru. That, of course, is an indication of the suicidal racism endemic in law enforcement culture, as Castillo was painfully aware. His continuing record of major busts found Castillo in tactical charge of Operation Condor, coordinating DEA, CIA and Peruvian military elements. He made the largest coke bust in Peruvian history, a cocaine manufacturing and distribution compound that housed more than 600 people.
Castillo with former President Carter in Peru, 1984; On Patrol in Peru; With Peruvian Army Generals
“The South American newspapers published multi-page articles on the raid, repeating the numbers: Four tons of coca paste seized from a lab capable of churning out 500 kilos of pure cocaine every day. The Peruvian government estimated the compound’s value at $500 million. It was the biggest cocaine lab capture in South American history.... We later discovered that the lab belonged to Arcesio and Omar Ricco, members of the Cali cartel.”
The undiplomatic Castillo insisted on pointing the finger directly at the covert elements within the Peruvian command structure responsible for protecting this and other jungle refineries. “When I wandered into the Lima office a week after the raid, I picked up a local paper left on my desk and almost choked on my coffee. My photo, snapped by a Reuters photographer with a telephoto lens, took up a quarter of the page.” Peter Rieff, Castillo’s station chief, using Castillo’s blown cover as the excuse, decided that the war on drugs would be better prosecuted with Castillo in Guatemala.
Castillo, Guatemala, 1986; Bush with Castillo at the Guatemala City embassy reception, January 14, 1986 (Castillo)
“In 1986, I placed an informant (Mario Murga) at the Ilopango airport in El Salvador. He was initiated and wrote the flight plans for most Contra pilots. After their names were submitted into NADDIS [Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs Information System], it was revealed that most pilots had already been documented in DEA files as traffickers. (See DEA memo by me date 2-14-89.)”
Castillo proceeded to develop hard evidence of “hundreds of flights carrying cash, drugs, and weapons through Ilopango. All of which was sanctioned by the US government….Early part of 1986, I received a telex/cable from DEA Costa Rica. SA Sandy Gonzales requested for me to investigate hangers 4 and 5 at Ilopango. DEA Costa Rica had received reliable intelligence that the Contras were flying cocaine into the hangars. Both hangars were owned and operated by the CIA and the National Security Agency. Operators of those two hangars were, Lt. Col. Oliver North and CIA contract agent, Felix Rodriguez, ‘a.k.a.’ Max Gomez.”
Sandinista police were able to prove that Felix Rodriguez was running Salvadoran air force officer Marcos Aguado out of Ilopango. Former Somoza intelligence officer Enrique Miranda, the chief contact of Somosista cocaine financier Norwin Meneses to the Colombian cocaine cartel, testified in Nicaragua in 1992 that Rodriguez and Meneses sent Aguado to Colombia to pick up cocaine, which was then traded for U.S. arms on U.S. air force bases in Texas. Felix Rodriguez oversaw the distribution of those Texas arms on their arrival at Ilopango. Meneses, who made the mistake of trying to resume his life in Nicaragua after the 1988 end of the Contra war, was sentenced to thirty years in prison.7
The cocaine-for-arms operation run by CIA agent Felix Rodriguez was massive, as Cele Castillo, from within the belly of the beast, began to demonstrate:
“Feb. 05, 1986, I had seized $800,000.00 in cash, 35 kilos of cocaine, and an airplane at Ilopango. DEA # TG-86-0001;... March 24, 1986, I wrote a DEA report on the Contra operation. (GFTG-86-4003, Frigorificos de Puntarenas, S.A), US registration aircraft N-68435 (Cessna 402).”
“April of 1986, The Consul General of the U.S Embassy in El Salvador (Robert J. Chavez), warned me that CIA agent George Witters was requesting a U.S visa for a Nicaraguan drug trafficker and Contra pilot by the name of Carlos Alberto Amador. (mentioned in 6 DEA files).” Castillo asked Chavez to block the visa request.
“May 26, 1986, Mario Rodolfo Martinez-Murga became an official DEA informant (STG-86-0006). Before that, he had been a sub-source for Ramiro Guerra and Robert Chavez. Under Chavez, Murga’s intelligence resulted in the seizure of several hundred kilos of cocaine, (from Ilopango to Florida) making Murga a reliable source of information.”
“May 14, 1986, I spoke to Jack O’Conner DEA HQS Re: Matta-Ballesteros. (NOTE: Juan Ramón Matta-Ballesteros was perhaps the single largest drug trafficker in the region. Operating from Honduras he owned several companies which were openly sponsored and subsidized by CIA)” (all parentheses Castillo’s)
“June 18, 1986, Salvadoran Contra pilot, Francisco “Chico” Guirola-Beeche (DEA NADDIS # 1585334 and 1744448) had been documented as a drug trafficker. On this date, at 7:30 a.m., he departed Ilopango to the Bahamas to air drop monies. On his return trip (June 21) Guirola arrived with his passengers Alejandro Urbizu & Patricia Bernal. In 1988 Urbizu was arrested in the US in a cocaine conspiracy case. In 1985 Guirola was arrested in South Texas (Kleberg County) with 5 and 1/2 million dollars cash, which he had picked up in Los Angeles, California. (U.S. Customs in Dallas/ Ft. Worth had case on him.)”
At the time of his Texas arrest, Guirola was carrying Salvadoran diplomatic credentials signed by his boss, Roberto D’Aubuisson. So well-known was Guirola to the CIA, that he accompanied D’Aubuisson to his May 1984 meeting with former CIA deputy director Vernon Walters. The $5.9 million in small bills seized in Texas was probably LA street drug profits, since the flight originated in Orange County, California. The Justice Department, despite the largest cash seizure in Texas history and ties to major drug dealers, let Guirola off with simple forfeiture of the cash, and no prison time. A year later, Castillo watched in amazement as this documented perpetrator, flashing Salvadoran Air Force credentials, hauled cocaine and cash in and out of Ilopango by the planeload.
“In Aug. 1986, The Kerry Committee requested information on the Contra pilots from the DEA. The Department of Justice flatly refused to give up any information.”
By now Castillo had been barred from direct access to the remote air base by none other than Edwin Corr, U.S. Ambassador to El Salvador, who had arranged Castillo’s exclusion by his own DEA command. So he concentrated on related off-base operations.
“On September 01, 1986, Walter Graslheim (a civilian) residence in El Salvador was searched by the DEA Task Force. Found at the residence was an arsenal of US military munitions, (allegedly for a Contra military shipment). Found were cases of C-4 explosives, grenades, ammunition, sniper rifles, M-16’s, helicopter helmets and knives. Also found were files of payment to Salvadoran Military Officials (trips to New York City). Found at his residence were radios and license plates belonging to the US Embassy. We also found an M16 weapon belonging to the US Mil-Group Commander, Col. Steele. Prior to the search, I went to every department of the U.S. Embassy and asked if this individual worked in any way shape or form with the embassy. Every head of the departments denied that he worked for them.”
“The CIA had already briefed the ambassador about the raid. I briefed him again, studying his face when I came to the part about embassy license plates gracing Graslheim’s Jeeps. Corr stared at me, the muscles in his jaw flexing.”
“’You just hit the Contra operation,’ he said flatly.”
“’I told you I was going to hit Graslheim,’’ I shot back. ‘Explain to me what the hell a U.S. civilian in El Salvador is doing with this stuff. I told you this guy’s a documented trafficker. He could be arrested as a terrorist.’”
“Corr paused. The jaw flexed again.”
“’Cele, it’s a covert operation,’ he said, holding his palms out.”7
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Nulla euismod condimentum felis vitae efficitur. Sed vel dictum quam, at blandit leo.
“Celerino Castillo, mexicano, agente especial de la DEA y el general G.C. Walter Andrade, jefe de la Policíe de Drogas”
“The real reason my boss wanted me out of the country, I thought, was my relationship with the Guardia and UMOPAR. Instead of consulting with Rieff, the generals and colonels came straight to me for advice about anti-narcotics tactics. They knew I spent most of my time in coca country. They trusted my instincts. Rieff resented that.” That, and Castillo’s consequent ability to put himself between the DEA and Peru’s dope-dealing high command, using Peru’s own reformist military officers. Despite the most spectacular record of any DEA agent who ever served in Peru, Castillo was transferred to Guatemala without the promotion, and the consequent authority, he had earned. 83
“In October of 1985, upon my arrival in Guatemala, I was forewarned by Guatemala DEA, Country Attaché, Robert J. Stia and the CIA’s Chief of Station, Jack McCavett, that the DEA had received intelligence that the Contras out of Salvador, were involved in drug trafficking. For the first time, I had come face to face with the contradictions of my assignment. The reason that I had been forewarned was because I would be DEA’s Lead Agent in El Salvador.”
Col. James Steele, commander of the U. S. Military Group at Ilopango, arranged for Castillo to co-train elite drug squads for Salvadoran military intelligence. Their Salvadoran Fire Arms Instructor was Dr. Hector Antonio Regalado, D’Aubuisson’s top aide. “Regalado’s prestige among the right wing stemmed from his ability to extract teeth - and information - without anesthesia. I wanted no part of El Doctor. I asked [U.S. Lt. Col. Alberto] Adame if the embassy had approved Regalado as an adviser. He said Col. James Steele, the U.S. Military Group commander in El Salvador,
gave Regalado his blessing. The military obviously wanted this man aboard, human rights abuses and all. Regalado was hired, and we began spending a lot of time together.” Regalado combined his training at the School of the Americas in Ft. Benning with his expertise as a dentist to inflict excruciating pain during “interrogation.” It was these Nazi skills that he taught to Castillo’s “drug” squads. 84
“August 03, 1986, Ramiro Guerra, Lt. Col. A. Adame, Dr. Hector Regalado (Dr. Death, who claimed to have shot Archbishop Romero) and myself went out on patrol in El Salvador.”
The situation was the same in neighboring Guatemala: “I participated in numerous joint operations with the CIA and Guatemalan security forces, principally the G-2 (Guatemalan military intelligence...).... The level of CIA and DEA involvement in operations that included torture and murder in Guatemala is much higher than the [6/28/96 Intelligence Oversight Board] report indicates. With US anti-narcotics funding still being funneled to the Guatemalan Military, this situation continues.”
“The CIA, with knowledge of ambassadors and the State Department and National Security Council officials, as well as Congress, continued this aid after the termination of overt military assistance in 1990.... Several contract pilots for the DEA and CIA worked out of [the Guatemala] Piper [Company in Guatemala City] and most were documented narcotic traffickers.” 85
Castillo realized that he couldn’t control the situation at all. He was simply being used for his logistical clout. The Salvadoran and Guatemalan militaries controlled the actual busts, which were politicized, and from which the coke almost always found its way into the hands of military intelligence, which resold it, by the ton. These butchers were, in fact, the dealers. Castillo’s stomach turned.
“I realized how hopelessly tangled DEA, the CIA, and every other U.S. entity had become with the criminals..... I began running the names of [Guatemalan President] Cerezo’s top lieutenants through our computer, and almost every name came back with a black mark. The list read like a flowchart of the Guatemalan power structure. Among the Guatemalan high command documented as traffickers were the president’s brother, Milton Cerezo-García; Claudia Arenas, a top aide; and two members of the Guatemalan congress: former interior minister Alfonso Cabrera-Hidalgo and Carlos Ramiro García de Paz.”
“I leaned back in my chair, trying to absorb the enormity of what I stumbled upon. Our government had leaned on the Guatemalan military for elections and trumpeted the birth of a government whose top officials were involved in narcotrafficking.... Winning our narcotics war in Guatemala would mean taking down a good portion of their government, and that would never fly in Washington.”
“On January 14, Vice President George Bush visited Guatemala City to put the U.S. stamp of approval on Cerezo’s inauguration. I met Bush at the obligatory cocktail party at the ambassador’s residence.... As he shook my hand, someone snapped a photo. I told him I was a DEA agent assigned to Guatemala. He said, ‘Well, what do you do?’ .... I just blurted it out ‘There’s some funny things going on with the Contras in El Salvador.’ Bush didn’t reply. He simply smiled and walked away, seeking another hand to shake. After that exchange, I knew that he knew.” 86
Some of Graslheim’s high explosives and communications gear; Castillo
Fiers/North operative Graslheim was the Salvadoran sales rep for the Litton Corp and other U.S. arms makers. He was also a sanctioned CIA adviser to the Salvadoran military. He was also documented in seven DEA files as a major drug smuggler, as Castillo demonstrated to any official who would listen. Graslheim was running the safe house used by Rodriguez, Posada, Villoldo and other Contra pilots and ground operatives, but Castillo had been barred by his own command from direct access to these perpetrators. Frustrated, he started talking to Senator Kerry and Joel Brinkley of The New York Times, open cases or no open cases.
Castillo with his fellow aents
What this nervy detective had to say proved profoundly discomfiting to the Reagan administration. The Salvadoran phone records of the Graslheim safe house revealed regular daily and weekly calls to Oliver North’s and George Bush’s offices in the White House. The Bush office had to confirm, since it couldn’t hide, that Rodriguez had been a frequent visitor of both Gregg and Bush at the White House for high-level confabs with Steele, North and others. Castillo’s prostitute informants at the safe house described many all-nighters “doing cocaine, having sex, and shooting rifles” with Contra pilots, government officials - and Oliver North. 88 89
Tim Ross, the BBC’s correspondent in Colombia for twenty years, revealed that “In late 84, early 85, North brought five Afghani military advisers to Colombia on a speaking tour, three left, two stayed. The two that stayed were chemists who introduced heroin manufacturing to Colombia. He also brought in an Israeli agronomist who helped to cultivate opium poppies.” Ross was summoned to the US Embassy in Bogotá and told, “You’re going to lay off this story or you are going to die” by an “ex-marine, the type of guy who used to cut Vietcong throats with his thumbnail.” Ross, who knew he had BBC clout, ran the story anyway.
“October 23, 1986, HK-1960P Honduras. 1,000 kilos of cocaine. DEA-6 was written on this case.”
“April 01, 1987, Bob Stia, Walter (pilot) Morales and myself flew to El Salvador. Met with two CIA agents who advised us that we could no longer utilize Murga because he was now working with them.”
“Sept. 27, 1987, Central American CIA agent Randy Capister, the Guatemalan military (G-2) and myself, seized over 2,404 kilos of cocaine from a Guatemalan Congressman, Carlos Ramiro García de Paz and the Medellin cartel (biggest cocaine seizure in Central America and top five ever). However, several individuals were murdered and raped on said operation. CIA agent and myself saw individual being interrogated. The Congressman was never arrested or charged.” Castillo later found that much of the cocaine had been resold by Guatemalan G-2. This apparently necessitated the elimination of all the witnesses.
The murdered witnesses, Jairo Gfraldo, José Ramón Iniguez and Maria Leticia Olivier
“In one case (DEA file #TG-86-0005) several Colombians and Mexicans were raped, tortured and murdered by CIA and DEA assets, with the approval of the CIA. Among those victims identified was José Ramón Parra-Iniguez, Mexican passport A-GUC-043 and his two daughters Maria and Leticia Olivier-Dominguez, Mexican passport A-GM-8381. Also included among the dead were several Colombian nationals: Adolfo Leon Morales-Arcilia “a.k.a.” Adolfo Morales-Orestes, Carlos Alberto Ramirez, and Jairo Gilardo-Ocampo. Both a DEA and a CIA agent were present, when these individuals were being interrogated (tortured).” The CIA agent, Randy Capister, Castillo tells me, was accompanied by none other than the documented drug trafficker El Negro Alvarado.
“The main target of that case was a Guatemalan Congressman, (Carlos Ramiro García de Paz) who took delivery of 2,404 kilos of cocaine in Guatemala just before the interrogation. This case directly implicated the Guatemalan Government in drug trafficking (The Guatemalan Congressman still has his US visa and continues to travel at his pleasure into the US). To add salt to the wound, in 1989 these murders were investigated by the U.S Department of Justice, Office of Professional Responsibility. DEA S/I Tony Recevuto determined that the Guatemalan Military Intelligence, G-2 (the worst human rights violators in the Western Hemisphere) was responsible for these murders. Yet, the U.S. government continued to order U.S. agents to work hand-in-hand with the Guatemalan Military. This information was never turned over to the I.O.B. investigation.” (all parentheses Castillo’s)
“October 22, 1987, I received a call from DEA HQS Everett Johnson, not to close Contra files because some committee was requesting file. If you have an open file, you do not have access to the files under Freedom of Information Act.”
“Dec. 03, 1988, DEA seized 356 kilos of cocaine in Tiquisate, Guatemala (DEA #TG-89-0002; Hector Sanchez). Several Colombians were murdered on said operation and condoned by the DEA and CIA. I have pictures of individuals that were murdered in said case. The target was on Gregorio Valdez (CIA asset) of the Guatemalan Piper Co. At that time, all air operations for the CIA and DEA flew out of Piper.”
“With every killing, G2 took stacks of cash and bags of cocaine. In a faint nod to the law, they usually turned over a portion of the confiscated dope to beef up the country’s drug war numbers. They sold the rest, or saved it to frame future victims.”
Castillo’s photos and notes on the murdered pilots; One of the dead pilots, lower right, was drowned in a bucket of water
Castillo stepped up the pressure on the Company, filing detailed reports with DEA Station Chief Bob Stia in Guatemala. DEA internal affairs, the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility, reacted by stepping up the pressure on Castillo and Stia. By 1990 Castillo was not only in bureaucratic but physical danger.
“Aug. 24, 1989, Because of my information, the U.S. Embassy canceled Guatemalan Military, Lt. Col. Hugo Francisco Moran-Carranza, (Head of Interpol and Corruption) U.S. visa. He was documented as a drug trafficker and as a corrupt Guatemalan Official. He was on his way to a U.S. War College for one year, invited by the CIA.”
“In a Sept. 20-26, 1989, series of debriefings and in subsequent debriefing on Feb. 13, 1990, by DEA agents in Los Angeles, Lawrence Victor Harrison, an American-born electronics specialist who had worked in Mexico and had been involved with the leading figures in the Mexican drug cartel, was interviewed. He testified that he had been present when two of the partners of Matta-Ballesteros and Rafael Caro-Quintero, met with American pilots working out of Ilopango air base in El Salvador, providing arms to the Contras. The purpose of the meeting was to work out drug deals.”
“Feb. 21, 1990, I sent a telex-cable to DEA HQS Re: Moran’s plan to assassinate me. Between Aug. 1989 and March 06, 1990, Col. Moran had initiated the plan to assassinate me in El Salvador and blame it on the guerrillas. On March 06, 1990, I traveled to Houston to deliver an undercover audio tape on my assassination. The Houston DEA S.A Mark Murtha (DEA File M3-90-0053) had an informant into Lt. Col. Moran.”
The informant gave Castillo a tape of his meeting with Col. Moran of Guatemalan military intelligence: “Instead of talking about the bust the informant was setting up, Colonel Moran kept going on about how he was going to blame the rebels for my assassination. A hit squad was going to wait in the bushes and ambush me when I drove past on Highway 8 in El Salvador.”
Castillo played the tape for his DEA supervisors in Guatemala City, pointing out that Col. Moran was making huge deposits at the Panama City branch of the Iran-Contra bank, the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI). Castillo’s supervisors reacted by finding a pretext to order him to drive down Highway 8 in El Salvador. “I felt as if someone had painted a bullseye on the back of my head.”
That’s when Castillo turned to DEA HQ for protection. HQ wasn’t all that quick to react: “March 15, 1990, After 6 months knowing about the assassination plan, DEA transferred me out to San Diego, California for 6 months.”
“April 05, 1990, an illegal search was conducted at my residence in Guatemala by Guatemala DEA agents Tuffy Von Briesen, Larry Hollifield and Guatemalan Foreign Service National, Marco Gonzales (No search warrant). DEA HQS agreed that it had been an illegal search requested by OPR [Office of Professional Responsibility] S/I Tony Recevuto. (OPR file PR-TG-90-0068) On Sept. 16, 1991, a questionaire was faxed to me in regards to the illegal search.”
Castillo’s evidence photo and note; DEA agents Von Briesen and Castillo with a machine gun toting Guatemalan G-2 agent in the background; Castillo’s note
“May 10, 1990, DEA HQS OPR S/I Tony Recevuto returned to Guatemala and requested from the U.S. ambassador, to please grant Lt. Col. Hugo Moran-Carranza a US Visa, so that he could testify before the BCCI investigation in Miami. The ambassador could not understand why anyone, for any reason, would request a US Visa for an individual who had planned the assassination of a US drug agent.”
Although Iran-Contra Special Prosecutor Lawrence Walsh’s FBI investigator Mike Foster interviewed Castillo extensively, not one word of his verifiable, professional testimony, backed up by DEA case file and NADDIS numbers, could be found in Walsh’s voluminous 1993 Final Report of the Independent Counsel for Iran/Contra Matters. Walsh had no choice - Castillo’s testimony had been “classified.”
Explained Walsh, “In addition to the unclassified Volumes I and II of this report, a brief classified report, Volume III, has been filed with the Special Division. The classified report contains references to material gathered in the investigation of Iran/contra that could not be declassified and could not be concealed by some substitute form of discussion.” 90
Senator Kerry, whose seminal 1986-9 investigation sparked Walsh’s, also couldn’t break the bureaucratic barrier. Despite the fact that much of his investigation was based on Castillo’s hard-earned evidence, he either couldn’t or wouldn’t call on Castillo himself or any other active regional DEA agent. Referring to dope-dealing CIA Costa Rica station chief Joe Fernandez, who shared tactical control of the Contra air supply operation with Col. Steele, Walsh, in his final report, complained that “We’ve created a class of intelligence officer who cannot be prosecuted.”
Castillo: “I have obtained a letter, dated May 28, 1996, from the DEA administrator, to U.S. Congressman Lloyd Doggett (D), Texas. In this letter, the administrator flatly lies, stating that DEA agents ‘have never engaged in any joint narcotics programs with the Guatemalan Military.’ I was there. I was the leading Agent in Guatemala. 99.9% of DEA operations were conducted with the Guatemalan military.” 91
“The CIA and Guatemalan army also label as communist sympathizers anyone who opposes the traditional oppressive role of the Guatemalan military. Therefore, they label as communists or communist sympathizers, priests and nuns who work to elevate the position of the poor in society, union organizers...indigenous leaders (the Indians are kept down so that they can be used as cheap laborers by the rich, who are supported by the military) and student activists.... The CIA supports the intimidation, kidnapping and torture, surveillance and murder of these people.” 92
Although Castillo could shed professional DEA light on CIA complicity in the drug dealing of its fascist ally, Guatemalan G-2, Walsh couldn’t ‘declassify’ Castillo’s testimony, or save his career. The Office of Professional Responsibility actually used false testimony from Castillo’s would-be Guatemalan assassin, Col. Moran, to force Castillo’s premature retirement. Ilopango dispatcher Felix Rodriguez, on the other hand, was full of medals from Salvadoran generals and Col. James Steele. 93
Ilopango base commander Col. James Steele; CIA Costa Rica station chief Joe Fernandez
U.S. Department of State, Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs; 2016 International Narcotics Control Strategy Report (INCSR): “Guatemala remains a major transit country for illegal drugs. Transnational criminal organizations continue to take advantage of Guatemala’s porous borders with Honduras, El Salvador, and Mexico and underfunded and underequipped law-enforcement institutions to smuggle narcotics, migrants, and other illicit goods through the country’s land and sea territories. Guatemala continues to cultivate opium poppy and marijuana in the Western Highlands and Petén Department, respectively, but the level of opium cultivation decreased during the course of 2015….Although Guatemala’s efforts against drug trafficking in 2015 remained on par with past years, the antinarcotics fight (and government initiatives generally) was overshadowed and distracted by a series of ongoing government corruption investigations that ultimately led to the arrest of the President [and] Vice President…. The United States assists the Government of Guatemala through training and mentoring select personnel, donating essential equipment, and providing adequate operational support where appropriate. This assistance is channeled through four program areas: police professionalization and reform; justice sector capacity building; enhancing citizen security and reducing the threat of gangs; and counternarcotics.”
Word for word the same counternarcotics boilerplate in 2016 as in the Contra years, with, by the State Department’s own admission, no strategic effect whatever, just the same ongoing ‘antidrug’ excuse to continue funding the drug dealing Guatemalan military.
AP News: ‘Secret report: Honduras’ new top cop helped cartel move coke,’ by Christopher Sherman, Martha Mendoza And Garance Burke, 1/26, 2018: “MEXICO CITY (AP) — When Jose David Aguilar Moran took over as Honduras’ new national police chief last week, he promised to continue reforming a law enforcement agency stained by corruption and complicity with drug cartels. But a confidential Honduran government security report obtained by the Associated Press says Aguilar himself helped a cartel leader pull off the delivery of nearly a ton of cocaine in 2013.” But the State Department continues to promise that victory in the Drug War is just around the corner, as long as we continue to fund the drug dealers in Honduras and Guatemala.
Privateers
It is the spending that is driving the policy, not the policy driving the spending. As agents Castillo and Levine have proven, the Drug War is a cash cow that no agency running it wants to end. The 2018 Defense Budget, signed into law on 12/12/2017, authorizes just under $700 billion in defense spending, more than all other nations on earth combined, including $80.1 billion for overtly labeled intelligence spending. 70% of the $80 billion that the government publicly admits is spent on intelligence annually is now outsourced to private contractors, whose motive is profit, not policy. But we have put these privateers in top analysis and policy-making positions. Billions more, defined as combat support, not intelligence, are marked ‘classified’ in various DOD line items.
We have more than 700 military bases in a world where most countries have none. We boast eleven aircraft carrier groups in a world where Italy has two and only seven other countries have one. We spend tens of billions annually on a vast, completely useless and unusable nuclear arsenal, as if we were on Cold War autopilot. Scott Amey, the general counsel for the DC-based public interest group Project on Government Oversight, points out that “The problem is the lack of transparency. We have billions of dollars in spending going out that has little or no oversight.”
As one of the former leading CIA Soviet analysts in the Directorate of Intelligence, Melvin A. Goodman, puts it, “The intelligence community’s hostile attitude toward whistleblowers reflects the militarization and authoritarianism that has taken hold over the past 20 years. Since the appointment of an undersecretary of defense for intelligence in 2004, the Pentagon has become the chief operating officer of the $70 billion intelligence industry….The Pentagon controls more than 85 percent of the intelligence budget and personnel, and deference within the intelligence community for the ‘warfighter’ has meant that tactical military demands have outpaced strategic requirements.” 1
That is, the diplomatic option, whether suggested by the intelligence or not, since it doesn’t militate in favor of increased defense spending, is almost never the option chosen, despite the fact that it is almost always the best, and cheapest. Militarism is no solution to structural poverty. There isn’t an intelligence analyst worth his or her salt who would tell you that bankrupting the State Department in favor of yet another redundant hundred billion dollar weapons system is a good idea.
The intelligence spending comprises all the funding for the 16 agencies of the U. S. Intelligence Community. The two components of that are the National Intelligence Program (NIP), $57.7 billion, and the Military Intelligence Program (MIP), $20.7 billion. Since ‘classified,’ much of the overtly labeled intelligence spending is an estimate, not necessarily the actual figure. Much of the remaining Army, Navy, Marine, Air Force and Defense-wide spending is also classified and of intelligence origin. That, in the absence of effective oversight, makes our military intelligence agencies policy-making institutions, and the drug war, for which the ‘war on terrorism’ is a synonym, their primary propaganda.
There are no terrorist gangs that are not also drug gangs, most tied to the military intelligence agencies of their countries of origin, like Pakistan, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Turkey, Italy, Bulgaria, Mexico, Guatemala, the United States and on and on. These countries have institutionalized the multi-billion dollar global drug business, and most of those countries are financed by the U.S. in the name of the anti-drug and anti-terrorism effort. Al Qaeda and the Taliban are run by Pakistan’s ISI, and the major business of the ISI, Al Qaeda and the Taliban is the huge international heroin business, for which they are the premier purveyors on earth. That is, we finance and arm Pakistan’s ISI in the name of the antidrug effort, despite the fact that it is the premier purveyor of heroin on the planet. And when we are not financing the ISI directly we are selling them weaponry. The heroin business, thanks only to the artificial value our Prohibition gives it, is worth tens of billions annually to Pakistan, providing it with the wherewithal to buy weapons. And the ISI is the major business partner of the Taliban, the major opium wholesalers on earth. We have the same relationship with Mexico, Guatemala, Turkey, El Salvador and on an on.
Rather than eliminate drug gangs like al Qaeda and the Taliban by bankrupting them, by collapsing the value of drugs with legalization of the herbs and medicalization of the artificial concentrates, as recommended by most law enforcement field generals and macroeconomic leaders, we finance the secret services running the drug gangs, so as to justify more ‘anti-terrorism’ and ‘anti-drug’ military spending. That we are artificially creating endless war is profitable only for those in the warfare business. Erudite Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid, writing in 2008, contemplating the suicidal idiocy of replacing culturally sophisticated diplomacy with militarism in Afghanistan: “Foreign policy became the prerogative of the Department of Defense, which was unaccountable to the U.S. Congress or the public, rather than the domain of the State Department.” 2
As I mentioned in Vol. I, the term ‘privateer’ came into the language to describe the piratical likes of Raleigh, Drake and Morgan, who were licensed to use their privately owned warships to steal from the Crown’s enemies. Today, warships have morphed into corporations, and the license to steal has extended to the government itself. The Dulles brothers at Sullivan and Cromwell were seminal pioneers of this process in the first half of the 20th century. It was not just the great military intelligence hero Col. Fletcher Prouty, serving under DCIA Dulles in the Eisenhower administration, who saw this coming from within the belly of the beast, but rebel sociologist C. Wright Mills, who put it this way in his 1956 classic, The Power Elite: “For the first time in American history, men in authority are talking about an 'emergency' without a foreseeable end...Such men as these are crackpot realists: in the name of realism they have constructed a paranoid reality all their own…. What the main drift of the twentieth century has revealed is that the economy has become concentrated and incorporated in the great hierarchies, the military has become enlarged and decisive to the shape of the entire economic structure; and moreover the economic and the military have become structurally and deeply interrelated, as the economy has become a seemingly permanent war economy; and military men and policies have increasingly penetrated the corporate economy.” Five years later, Dwight Eisenhower said the exact same thing to the nation on television in his farewell address, warning us of the clear and present danger of the “military-industrial complex,” a phrase Eisenhower invented. This great field general was talking about war and peace – he needs to be taken seriously. 3
Cliinton’s post-Soviet ‘Peace Dividend’ did see a drop in defense spending, but an even stronger emphasis on the privatization of government than had yet been seen under the Republicans. Privatization, “reinventing government” as Clinton put it, was seen as an efficiency and an economy, as Vice President Gore put it, to make government “work better and cost less.” Privatization was seen as a way to fill in for lack of capacity in a given area in the wake of Clinton’s considerable cuts in weaponry and overseas CIA stations. The real problem was that the peace dividend wasn’t accompanied by basic policy change. Wrote the 9/11 Commission in 2002, “As the number of officers declined and overseas facilities were closed, the DCIA and his managers responded to developing crises in the Balkans or in Africa by ‘surging,’ or taking officers from across the service to use on the immediate problem.” Given that contracting work pays two to three times the governmental rate, the assertion that it’s an economy is open to question. So, under Clinton, military privatization, and drug prohibition policy, escalated apace. 4
Gone were the likes of Dr. Peter Bourne, Carter’s head of drug policy, someone who used actual addiction science to reduce drug deaths to the lowest rate in 30 years. Instead, under Clinton, we got General Barry McCaffrey, with no addiction science credentials at all, who actually armed the drug dealers, like the Mexican and Peruvian military, and revived the old reefer-madness boilerplate. Explained McCaffrey, he was arming Fujimori and Montesinos in Peru, at the time among the greatest cocaine dealers on the planet, in the name of the anti-drug effort, “for the children.” More like for DynCorp, as McCaffrey helped Fujimori and Montesinos steal Indian land to grow more coca for their industrial cocaine manufacture and distribution operation, using DynCorp to spray herbicide on coca fields still controlled by the campesinos. Poison the land with herbicide, buy it for pennies on the dollar, and then grow more coca to buy more weapons and steal more land.
Under the second Bush administration, 2001-2009, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and Vice President Cheney, as well as President Bush himself and their Republican Party, were financially supported by the Koch brothers and their subcontractors, like the Prince family, the single largest ‘soft money’ donor to the Republicans. Erik Prince was the sole owner of private military contractor Blackwater (now Academi), which profited very heavily from deployment to Iraq and Afghanistan.
Halliburton, the largest oil and gas services company in the world, was headed by Dick Cheney, just before he became Vice President in 2001. Halliburton became the biggest private contractor to American forces in Iraq, earning billions in a war literally started by its former CEO. Other private contractors, such as KBR, Inc. (formerly Kellogg Brown & Root), a former subsidiary of Halliburton; Diligence LLC; Barbour, Griffiths & Rogers (BGR); New Bridge Strategies; Kissinger McLarty Associates; Bechtel Engineering; Booz Allen Hamilton and defense contractor holding company The Carlyle Group, all have rotating CIA and defense establishment ownership, including the first President Bush (First International Bancshares, Carlyle Group, Halliburton, Bechtel, United Fruit).
Carlyle Group investors and directors also included former Secretary of State James Baker, former Secretrary of Defense Frank Carlucci, construction giant the Saudi Binladin Group and key Saudi banker Khalid bin Mahfouz, who couldn’t even enter the U.S. in the early 1990s because of indictment in the BCCI Iran-Contra scandal. By becoming stakeholders in the Carlyle Group, the Saudis actually profited from their own very considerable defense spending with Carlyle-owned defense contractors. Carlyle bought United Defense as a joint venture with Saudi Arabia in 1997.
United Defense, now BAE Systems Land & Armaments, manufactures the Bradley Fighting Vehicle, the central mobile weapons platform of the U.S. Army, basically a high-tech tank. These armaments manufacture deals with the Saudis proliferate by the dozens. With that much leverage in the U.S. defense industry, it comes as no surprise that the Bush White House demanded the removal of 28 pages relating to the Saudis before it would release the joint House and Senate Intelligence Committee report on 9/11 in 2003. Craig Unger: “With the exception of the bin Laden family, who extricated themselves from Carlyle not long after 9/11, Carlyle declined to disclose who the investors were. But other sources say that Prince Bandar, several other Saudi royals, and Abdulrahman and Sultan bin Mahfouz were prominent investors and that it was an explicit policy of the House of Saud to encourage Saudi investment in Carlyle.”
Former CIA agent Robert Baer: “As the world’s largest consumer of U.S.-made armaments, Saudi Arabia virtually makes the secondary market for American fighter planes, missiles, tanks, armored vehicles, and other weaponry and supporting services. Saudi Arabia was also the second largest consumer, after the U.S. military, of the Bradley Fighting Vehicle, which was for many years the mainstay of United Defense’s product line…. In addition to serving as a professional home for James Baker and Frank Carlucci, Carlyle also employs Arthur Levitt, former head of the Securities and Exchange Commission; William Kennard, who chaired the Federal Communications Commission during the second Clinton administration; Afsaneh Beschloss, former treasurer and chief investment officer of the World Bank…; and Richard Darman, who ran the U.S. Office of Management and Budget under the first president Bush and, during the Reagan administration, served as assistant to the president and the Treasury deputy secretary. Just to prove that Carlyle is truly an international conglomerate, former British prime minister John Major serves as chairman of Carlyle Europe. No one in Washington has better contacts or has worked them more effectively than Frank Carlucci…. A decade later, when Bush II was governor of Texas, the state teachers’ pension fund invested $100 million with the Carlyle Group. Carlyle’s most famous adviser is George Herbert Walker Bush, the forty-first president of the United States…. When Frank Carlucci resigned as chairman in November 2002, former IBM CEO Lou Gerstner stepped into his slot.” These privateers ran the government, to their own advantage. 5
Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), between 2003 and 2016 netted 280 major contracts worth $29.5 billion. About half of SAIC’s 42,000 employees hold high level security clearance. SAIC counts, as present or previous directors or employees, former secretary of defence Robert Gates, former CIA director John Deutch, former CIA director Rear Admiral William Raborn, former CIA and DIA deputy director Rear Admiral Bobby Inman, and retired Major General John D. Thomas.
But, as Col. Prouty warned, contracting intelligence out to privateers who stand to profit might not be the best way to generate military intelligence. Soldiers will end up dying for corporate profit, not considered policy, as happened in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq. SAIC intelligence was largely responsible for the official illusion that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, and SAIC personnel staffed the commission set up to analyze how we got it so wrong. Technological coordination is SAIC’s strong suit, basic policy and strategic conclusions, not so much. Militaryindustrialcomplex.com, totalling contracts over $6.5 million awarded to SAIC between 2003 and 2016, with a hot link to each contract, got more than $28 billion. The Pentagon does not publicly list contracts under $6.5 million, which leaves out a lot of transparency.
The Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Admiral Lowell ‘Jake’ Jacoby, and the DIA’s Chief of Staff and Chief Operating Officer, former special forces commander Louis Andre, moved, in 2006 and 2007, from running the DIA to running CACI, originally known as Consolidated Analysis Center, Incorporated. These were Rumsfeld and Cheney loyalists who engineered, per Rumsfeld’s orders, the DIA assessment that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction, Condoleezza’s biological weapons and “mushroom cloud” argument. It was Jacoby who helped Rumsfeld establish the Joint Intelligence Task Force—Combating Terrorism (JITF-CT), a new interagency unit enabling tighter top-down control of the politicized intelligence.
That is, the contractors were now allocating funds and making policy to be executed by themselves. They didn’t call it Teapot Dome, they called it “a public-private partnership.” Having helped to engineer the Pentagon’s strategic plans, the two former DIA leaders, Admiral Lowell Jacoby and COO Louis Andre, helped CACI snare key Pentagon contracts worth hundreds of millions generated by those plans. One 2007 CACI contract with the U.S. Army Communications-Electronics Command was worth $450 million. 6
CIA analyst Melvin A. Goodman: “Meanwhile, the director of national intelligence has built a bloated bureaucracy with no fewer than 19 assistant deputy directors with a management staff coming largely from the CIA and the State Department, thus weakening two key institutions. Important positions and functions are in the hands of contractors with extravagant salaries and insufficient accountability…. A major reason for creating the CIA was to end the Pentagon’s monopoly on intelligence and its resort to worst-case analysis of international issues….With the increased militarization of intelligence over the past two decades and particularly the creation of the Director of National Intelligence, the so-called intelligence tsar, the delivery of intelligence to the White House and the Congress has been in the hands of retired generals and admirals. Thus, there has been a return to worst-case analysis. The best example of the worst-case point of view has been the briefings and testimony of the current intelligence tsar, General James Clapper. In February 2014, the general made his way to the Hill to deliver the annual worldwide threat assessment, which used to be delivered by the CIA director, relying on the analytic work of the CIA’s Directorate of Intelligence. I contributed to many of these briefings over my 24 years at the Agency, and there was a serious effort to get the briefing right and to avoid worst-case views. Conversely, Clapper’s threat assessment was designed to fill the committee room with dread. ‘Looking back over my more than half a century in intelligence,’ Clapper intoned, ‘I have not experienced a time when we have been beset by more crises and threats around the globe.’”
“Very scary stuff, but bogus…. The fact is that the United States has never been in a more secure strategic environment than the one it currently faces, and, since the collapse of the Soviet Empire and the Soviet Union 25 years ago, the United States has been particularly safe. With oceans east and west, and friendly neighbors north and south, there is no threat to American territorial integrity, let alone survival. Terrorism will remain a concern, but it doesn’t represent an existential threat. It is fear-mongering that is truly dangerous. General Clapper’s alarmist tone refers to the ‘scourge and diversification of terrorism’ of the global jihadist and homegrown variety, but this is an example of worst-case analysis that finds the actual threat no match for the rhetoric…. The current CIA is a paramilitary agency where worst-case intelligence, designed to exaggerate the threat, is back in vogue…. The Pentagon feared any intelligence assessment that might encourage Congress to cut defense spending.”
Booz Allen Hamilton, with 80 offices worldwide, numbers more than 1,200 former intelligence officers among its 22,000 employees, almost half of whom have Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmentalized Information security clearance. Booz Allen’s 2008 spin-off is Booz and Company, focusing on international and commercial work. Booz Allen was majority owned by the Carlyle Group. From 1992 to 1996, Vice Admiral Mike McConnell served as Director of the National Security Agency (NSA). McConnell then went to Booz Allen to upgrade its intelligence analytics and cyber-security as executive vice president, then, from 2005 to 2007, headed up the Intelligence and National Security Alliance, a trade group coordinating contractors with the NSA and CIA. In February 2007 McConnell rejoined government as the Bush administration’s Director of National Intelligence, the intelligence czar. In 2009 he went back to Booz Allen as Senior Vice President. Obviously McConnell had an inside track on intelligence ‘analysis’ and government contracts. Tenet’s Director of Community Management at CIA, Joan Dempsey, is now a Booz Allen vice president, as is former CIA Director James Woolsey. 8
Former NSC Counterterrorism Coordinator Richard Clarke: “John Brennan, former acting Director of the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) and currently President and CEO of TAC, says that more than half of the 200 analysts at the NCTC were from the private sector while he was there…the vast majority of Booz Allen’s intelligence work is not classic management consulting, but simply providing ‘butts in seats’ to the intelligence community.’ One colleague of mine being given a tour of the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) expressed surprise at the number of people working there and was told that ‘most of them are contractors.’” Listing the government contracts over $6.5 million awarded to Booz Allen Hamilton between 2007 and 2016, militaryindustrialcomplex.com got a total of more than $15 billion. 9
The various Lockheed Martin companies show 2,280 large contracts between 1994 and 2016, totaling a spectacular $312.6 billion. At its best, this concentration of capital and brains has led to fantastic technological and economic breakthroughs. The internet itself was created by the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and it was defense contractors that created the desktop computer, GPS, the laser, the optical disk drive, the laser printer, barcode scanners, DNA sequencing instruments, fiber-optic and free-space optical communication, laser surgery and all that followed. The financial and cultural benefits of this industrial creativity are incalculable.
The CIA’s in-house, not for profit venture capital firm is called In-Q-Tel. It provided the seed money (subsidy) for Keyhole, Inc., which became the amazing Google Earth, one of the most popular and powerful tools on the internet. Obviously the Goodle Earth online is not the classified version. Many other equally amazing tools, seeded by In-Q-Tel, represent great leaps forward in internet security, digital and image recognition, program interoperability, systems integration and networking. This allowed the development of net-centric warfare tools providing interagency communication and systems interoperability. Attensity software, a Booz Allen tool, is used by the CIA and NSA to scan millions of documents, fitting the results into accessible databases. It takes less than ten seconds to scan and diagram War and Peace, so it’s useful not just to high-tech security operations but to libraries and data systems worldwide. The program can also pick out word-use patterns that might indicate coded messaging.
Most of In-Q-Tel’s investments are secret, but the In-Q-Tel Wikipedia page has an awesome representative list of about 170 powerhouse new companies that are not secret, new leaders in the fields of Software, Biotech, Electricity Generation, Electronics, Video, Hardware, Sensor Networks, Data Centers and Security Testing. One can extrapolate to the secure systems, such as satellites that can’t be detected, the imaging system used to drive a Predator drone, or the satellite imaging system that can see a dime from space. That is, the technical side of warfare has become very big business, spawning hundreds of companies and dozens of trade groups. 10
So ‘the threat,’ ‘the enemy,’ ‘the target,’ ‘the mission’ has become a commercial archetype, something to design an expensive high-tech system around, something required to sell the system. ‘Crowd control’ systems require crowds to control. The town of Ferguson, Missouri had just acquired an expensive surplus oversized ‘crowd control’ armored vehicle from the Pentagon, so when confronted by its own citizens peacefully protesting chronic racist law enforcement and the police murder, on August 9, 2014, of Michael Brown, the peaceful protest was redefined by the Ferguson police as a ‘crowd’ in need of ‘control,’ thus injecting military violence into the situation, and confirming precisely what was being protested. The ‘crowd control’ armored vehicle was deployed with, as we all saw on TV, a sniper on the roof and police in riot gear confronting the unarmed peaceful protesters. The protesters were repeatedly tear-gassed and pepper sprayed, despite the fact that they were attacking no one. The Department of Justice, in March of 2015, confirmed the racist police “pattern or practice of unlawful conduct,” including the regular use of unnecessary violence and the heavy use of ticketing for minor offenses like ‘jaywalking’ to finance the Ferguson police department. The DOJ diplomatically recommended that the Ferguson police “prohibit the use of ticketing and arrest quotas, whether formal or informal.”
The police sniper atop the ‘crowd control’ armored vehicle in Ferguson, 8/13/2014 (Jamelle Bouie/Wikimedia Commons)
As numerous stellar examples throughout the country have long-since proven, police training shouldn’t be 85% weapons, 15% community relations, it should be the other way around. Says Yonkers, NY Mayor Mike Spano of more than 100 different reforms since he took office six years ago, which get very high reviews from Yonkers citizens, “It’s going to the community and building trust. If you build trust in the community, you can reduce conflict. If you reduce conflict, you have better policing.” 11
Boy Scout Barry
General Barry McCaffrey is President of BR McCaffrey Associates, LLC, which scored huge government contracts for Defense Solutions’ armored vehicles in Iraq and Afghanistan. Veritas Capital Management, a private defense-contractor holding company that boasts General McCaffrey on its board, paid General McCaffrey at least $500,000 for his help in obtaining government contracts for its firms. Also on the Veritas payroll were Adm. Joseph W. Prueher, ex-commander-in-chief of the U.S. Pacific Command and former U.S. ambassador to China; Admiral Leighton W. Smith, former commander-in-chief of Allied Forces in Southern Europe; Gen. Anthony C. Zinni, former commander-in-chief of the U.S. Central Command; and Gen. Richard E. Hawley, former commander of Air Combat Command at Langley Air Force Base, Va. General McCaffrey also owns a large block of preferred stock in, and sits on the board of major defense contractor DynCorp, owned by Veritas Capital holding company. McCaffrey is also a board member of Raytheon Aerospace and Integrated Defense Technologies. General McCaffrey is also the Chairman of HNTB Federal Services, an engineering and construction management company that contracts with the government.
Here is General Barry McCaffrey’s Executive Profile on Bloomberg.com, as of 1/31/2018: Board of Directors, DrugAbuse Sciences, Inc.; Director, Phoenix House Foundation, Inc.; Chairman, HNTB Federal Services Corp.; Director, DynCorp International LLC; 2001-Present, Director, L-3 Communications Vertex Aerospace LLC; 2002-Present, Director and Member of Clinical Advisery Board, CRC Health Corporation; 2004-Present, Director, Baxters North America; 2004-Present, Director, TWC Holding LLC; 2005-Present, Director; AECOM National Security Programs, Inc.; 2008-Present, Chairman of HNTB Federal Services Corp, HNTB Corporation; 2013-Present, Director, Prospira PainCare, Inc.; 2014-Present, Director, Excelitas Technologies Corp. His list of ‘other affiliations’ includes 28 more defense contractors. Obviously, the motivation here is not to end war, but endless war.
As head of the U.S. Southern Command, 1994-1996, General McCaffrey was, in effect, the lead CIA agent for South America. In late 1990, CIA agent Mark McFarlin, who had worked with Col. Steele against El Salvador’s populist guerrillas, the FMLN, and Gen. Ramón Guillén Davila of the Venezuelan National Guard, arranged a multi-ton shipment of cocaine to Florida. Guillén was Venezuela’s former antidrug chief. This shipment was intercepted by the U.S. Customs Service at Miami’s International Airport. After a delay of 6 years, Guillén was charged by the U.S. Justice Department, 11/22/96, with organizing the importation of more than 22 tons of Colombian cocaine into the U.S.
These charges came down just after General McCaffrey’s 1994-1996 stint as head of the U.S. Southern Command, and while Gen. McCaffrey was Clinton’s drug czar. Speaking from his safe haven in Caracas, Venezuela, Guillén insisted that the 1990 operation was a joint CIA-Venezuelan operation aimed at the Cali cartel. Given that Guillén was a longtime CIA employee, and that the drugs were stored in a Venezuelan warehouse owned by the CIA, the ‘joint’ part of Guillén’s statement is almost certainly true, although the ‘aimed at’ part is almost certainly false. How do you hurt drug exporters by repeatedly buying and exporting their drugs?
The DEA officially concluded that the CIA intentionally withheld “vital information” on the Cali cartel, its business partner in this extended operation, from onsite DEA investigators. The Cali cartel, it should be noted, was financing CIA and Venezuelan-supported elements of Colombian military intelligence while the Colombian military was being armed through General McCaffrey’s U.S. Southern Command. On 2/15/96 Colombia’s legislature indicted serving President Ernesto Samper, who the CIA was financing, for running his 1994 electoral campaign with Cali cartel money, which is like indicting Colonel Sanders for eating fried chicken. 1
The CIA was forced to officially admit its cocaine partnership with Venezuela’s Guillén after it was told that 60 Minutes was planning to broadcast the results of its own investigation on CBS on 11/21/93. Attempting to control the damage, the CIA admitted, 11/19/93, that it had shipped one ton of pure cocaine from Venezuela in what it called “a most regrettable incident.” The CIA’s revelations came out in The New York Times on 11/20. The spin the CIA gave the Times was that it was trying to sting Haiti’s National Intelligence Service (SIN) - which the CIA itself had created.
The New York Times, 11/14/93: “1980s CIA Unit in Haiti Tied to Drug Trade - Political Terrorism committed against Aristide supporters: The Central Intelligence Agency created an intelligence service in Haiti in the mid-1980s to fight the cocaine trade, but the unit evolved into an instrument of political terror whose officers sometimes engaged in drug trafficking, American and Haitian officials say. Senior members of the CIA unit committed acts of political terror against Aristide supporters, including interrogations and torture, and in 1992 threatened to kill the local chief of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. According to one American official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, ‘it was an organization that distributed drugs in Haiti and never produced drug intelligence.’”
How shocking to the innocents at CIA, who certainly had expected the remnants of ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier’s secret police to be above venality. The Haitian secret police were derisively called Tonton Macoutes, after the folk boogeyman used to scare children, ‘Uncle Gunnysack.’ They were formally called the Volunteers of the National Security (VSN). In the wake of Duvalier, the VSN changed its name to the National Security Intelligence (SIN). That is, the SIN dealers, led by Brig. Gen. Raoul Cedras and Michel Francois, who overthrew the legally elected populist Jean-Bertrand Aristide in September of 1991, were armed and trained by Reagan’s and Bush’s CIA. Bush, of course, prior to his stint as Reagan’s veep, had been the Director of the CIA, and was chief of all intelligence operations of the Reagan administration. Support for Cedras was Bush’s policy. In fact, Bush’s CIA Director, Casey’s assistant Robert Gates, was actually stupid enough to call Cedras one of the most promising “Haitian leaders to emerge since the Duvalier family dictatorship was overthrown in 1986.” 2
When the DEA’s Tony Greco tried to stop a massive cocaine shipment from Haiti in May, 1991, four months before the coup overthrowing Aristide, Greco’s family received death threats on their private number from “the boss of the man arrested.” The only people in Haiti who had that number were the coup leaders, army commander Raoul Cedras and his partner, Port-au-Prince police chief Michel Francois, “the boss of the man arrested.”
A 1993 U.S. GAO report insisted that Cedras and Francois were running one of the largest cocaine export rings in the world. In 1994, after this PR disaster, the U.S. militarily, under U.N. mandate, reinstalled Aristide by force in Operation Uphold Democracy, using 20,000 troops and costing a billion dollars. Cedras and company were not stupid enough to resist the U.S. military, and so allowed a peaceful transition back to civilian rule. This was done on Clinton’s condition that Aristide relinquish power almost as soon as he got it, that is, that Aristide’s three years in exile be counted as part of his 5-year term. Clinton also insisted that the liberation theology Catholic priest Aristide nationalize nothing and privatize everything.
The only American officer tried for ‘insubordination’ during the Aristide reinstallation process was the one who insisted on looking into Cedras’ prisons. New York Times, 5/15/1995: “Fort Drum, N.Y., May 14 -— An Army officer who had undertaken an unauthorized inspection of a Haitian prison in search of human rights abuses was sentenced by a court-martial today to a discharge from the service, but he escaped a prison sentence…. In his own defense, Captain Rockwood had accused his superiors of ignoring reports of mistreatment of prisoners held by the Haitian military regime. He said it had been his duty to act because further delay might have cost lives.” Within 4 months of Aristide’s 1994 reinstallation, U.S. troops turned Haiti’s police functions back to Cedras, the U.S.-trained National Police, recruited from Cedras’ SIN security structure, Tonton Macoutes in uniform.
Human Rights Watch/Americas reports that the National Police regularly murdered political activists as well as rival drug dealers. After the January, 1995 parliamentary elections, Senator Turneb Delpe, head of Aristide’s former coalition, the National Front for Change and Democracy, complained that “People may have voted freely, but then our political party observers were chased away, and ballot boxes confiscated. Is this democratic? 3
President Aristide’s 1996 replacement, his pre-coup prime minister René Préval, proved so powerless as to be unable to keep his own prime minister much of the time. The April 1997 parliamentary election was perceived as so corrupt that only 5% of the population voted. Los Angeles Times, 3/8/97: “Lt. Col. Michel Francois, one of the CIA’s reported Haitian agents, a former Army officer and a key leader in the military regime that ran Haiti between 1991 and 1994, was indicted in Miami for smuggling 33 tons of cocaine into the USA.” Added the livid Rep. Maxine Waters, who quoted this story on the floor of the House, 3/18/97, “Members of this House literally had wrapped their arms around drug dealers. Members of this House not only swore by them and protected them, while they were protecting them, Francois was building an airstrip where he could receive the drugs...” 4
The U.S. government continued to refuse to return 160,000 pages of documents seized in 1994 from the Haitian military and its paramilitary arm, the Front pour l’Avancement et Progrés d’Haïti, FRAPH. Founded with CIA assistance, FRAPH was Cedras’ death squad. The U.S. admitted its involvement, saying that it will return the documents only after it has finished excising the names of U.S. agents involved with the FRAPH.
U.S. Department of State, Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, 2016 International Narcotics Control Strategy Report: “Haiti remains a transit point for cocaine originating in South America and marijuana originating in Jamaica, traversing the country’s porous borders en route to the United States and other markets.”
In August 1997, the State Department once again prevented the deportation of FRAPH death squad leader Emmanuel Constant, who had received regular CIA payments throughout his tenure under Cedras. Both Cedras and Francois are graduates of the U.S. Army’s School of the Americas. Both got their training during the Contra years in Haiti’s CIA-founded National Intelligence Service (SIN) structure led by Noriega allies Lt.Cols. Jean Paul and Prosper Avril, both indicted dopers.
Like Noriega, they helped Maj. Generals John Singlaub and Richard Secord finance the Contras, by dealing cocaine and arms with the CIA. It is here, at the highest structural levels of U.S. military intelligence, at the level that is able to consciously subvert the political will of the State Department, that ‘Contra’ turns into ‘Iran-Contra.’ With CIA control of much of the DEA, and possessed of DEA statutory authority to overrule medical experts, coca leaf remains illegal, and legally equated with cocaine, which is like legally equating kitchen matches with grenades. The criminalization of coca leaf, of course, popularizes cocaine, and makes it artificially valuable enough to trade for weapons. Hence the Contra Cocaine operation, revealed by my friend, the heroic DEA agent Cele Castillo, who gave me his evidence photos and official DEA reports to use in my Contra Cocaine chapter. This reporting cost Castillo his job, and almost his life.
In 1987, the Far Eastern Economic Review reported serious allegations that $700 million of the $1.09 billion appropriated by Congress between 1980 and 1986 to the CIA Directorate of Operations for the mujahideen never reached them, much of it redirected to the Contras. Wrote an apoplectic Secretary of State George Shultz, “The CIA and the NSC staff, with the apparent support from the ...Vice President [George H.W. Bush], were still proceeding as though nothing had happened. Congress was being misled now, a month and a half after the revelation [of Air Hasenfus] first appeared. What was worse, [Deputy Secretary of State] John Whitehead said, ‘the CIA has told the Iranians that the State Department is just a temporary impediment, and that after it calms down, [ranking CIA agents] Cave and Secord will be back in action.’ The president is being ripped to pieces, and the CIA is reassuring the Iranians!” 56
Funny how the conservative Reaganaut Shultz ended up with the same analysis of CIA/State relations as the liberal Schlesinger. When Shultz replaced Alexander Haig as Reagan’s Secretary of State in 1982, he found that DCIA Casey, on his own, with no authorization, was preparing to launch an invasion of Suriname in NE South America with 175 Korean commandos backed by the CIA. Fortuntely Shultz had the brains and the clout to kill the idea. “It was a hare-brained idea, crazy. I was shaken to find such a wild plan put forward…. the CIA and Bill Casey were as independent as a hog on ice and could be as confident as they were wrong.” On another occasion, Shultz said “The CIA’s intelligence was in many cases simply Bill Casey’s ideology.” Casey chased independent analysts out of the service. When the CIA’s best analysts insisted that the Contras had no chance in Nicaragua, Casey buried their reports and stovepiped their section, building his own rubber-stamp ‘war room.’ In charge of Casey’s Latin America war room was Dewey Clarridge, who didn’t even speak Spanish. 7
Shultz was one of the few Republicans who had the guts to call for drug legalization, so as to simply bankrupt the drug gangs, permanently, since legal prohibition is the only reason these commodities are worth so much. On June 8, 1998, Shultz added his signature to the Lindesmith Center’s open letter to Secretary General Kofi Annan on the first day of the U.N. General Assembly’s three-day Special Session on drug policy. Signatories included Paul Volcker, George Papandreou, Richard Branson, Isabel Allende, Ariel Dorfman, Belisario Betancur, Oscar Arias, Gunter Grass, George Papandreou, Javier Perez de Cuellar, Alan Cranston, Milton Friedman, Stephen Jay Gould, Lester Grinspoon, Nicholas Katzenbach, George Soros and hundreds of the world’s most astute scientists, businesspeople, writers and political leaders, asserting, in The New York Times, that "We believe the global war on drugs is now causing more harm than drug abuse itself."
Joe Trento, in the Wilmington News-Journal, 1/10/81: “Califano and Haig worked hand in hand in keeping the nationalists from the Cuban Brigade happy. They even checked out potential members for the hit teams with older members of the Cuban Brigade.” This was confirmed by both Ricardo Canette, a leading member of the hit teams, and a top official of the Defense Intelligence Agency who was Haig’s Marine liaison in 1963-64.
As Special Assistant to the Secretary of the Army in 1962, Califano reported directly to Secretary of Defense Cyrus Vance. The “older members of the Cuban Brigade” Califano and Haig were so concerned to keep happy included the hard core of Santos Trafficante’s Batistiano assassins, the former leaders of Batista’s secret police who led the Bay of Pigs invasion. When the Cuba operation was discontinued, military intelligence sent Joe Califano to the White House as Johnson’s Defense Department liaison and then, on 1/26/1965, Special Assistant, to help Johnson run the Vietnam War the way the DOD wanted. Califano went on to become Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare and the founder and chairman of The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University. 8
Califano is a key to understanding the drug propaganda not only by virtue of an analysis of his intentional sophistry (see Vol. 1), but by virtue of his covert relationships. Is it a coincidence that a high-level CIA agent who coordinated National Security Council operations with Santos Trafficante’s dope-dealing assassins became the country’s leading antidrug propagandist? I don’t think so. The centers of power responsible for dealing the drugs are the same centers of power disseminating the artificial hysteria necessary for their continued criminalization. That keeps the retail price a hundred times higher than the natural value and the trade exclusively in the hands of the muscle. Another name for the muscle is military intelligence. The symbiosis works both ways – the hoods get their price support and political protection, and the military privateers get their McGuffin, their lucrative endless war.
In Mexico, in July of 1995, conservative PANista businessman Ricardo Cordero Ontiveros was named head of the intelligence division in the Tijuana office of the Attorney General’s National Institute for Combating Drugs, the INCD, their DEA. By November 1995, Cordero was not only forced from his job, but had to leave under heavy military escort, for fear of assassination. The threat came not from the Tijuana pistoleros, but from the Federal Judicial Police. Cordero had outraged the federales by calling them a bunch of drunken slobs whose only work was the collection of graft from the Tijuana cartel. Since he could prove what he was saying, he had to leave Tijuana in a hurry. 9
Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) director General Barry McCaffrey was therefore relieved in December of 1996 at the appointment of a career army officer, Gen. José de Jesús Gutiérrez Rebollo, rather than another corrupt politician, to head the INCD. Gen. Gutiérrez, said General McCaffrey, “has a reputation of impeccable integrity, and he is known as an extremely forceful and focused commander.” 10
That’s almost exactly what CIA agent Joe Califano said about McCaffrey’s appointment as U.S. drug czar. General McCaffrey was transitioning from the U.S. Southern Command to the ONDCP. The marijuana-as-stepping stone advocate, with no training in addiction science or pharmacology, insisted that we haven’t been tough enough, and that he could use his counterterrorism experience to end the drug war in 10 years: “This isn't a tough problem like AIDS or racism or poverty. We know where the drugs are grown, we know where they’re moved, we know how the international money-laundering system works. We know the names of a lot of people that are involved, and we’re after them. This is a 10-year struggle to protect our children.” 11
“We know where the drugs are grown” - you mean like the whole world? We know how the international money-laundering system works, but have never successfully disrupted it? He’s going to protect our children by interdicting 1%, thus maintaining the drug price support? He’s going to end the drug war in 10 years? Isn’t that like Vietnam’s “victory is just around the corner”? I know he’s not that stupid, which leaves only one other option.
On February 19, 1997, after less than three months on the job, Gen. Gutiérrez was relieved of his INCD command and formally charged with being on the payroll of Amado Carrillo Fuentes, Mexico’s “Lord of the Skies.’’ Carrillo, a relative of the Medellín cartel‘s Jorge Ochoa, had pioneered the use of low-flying jetliners to transport multiton loads of cocaine from his Colombian partners to Mexico. A power for years under Salinas, Carrillo did this from his position within Mexican military intelligence. He carried Mexican Federal Judicial Police Group Chief credentials for special investigations and an officer’s gold card.
Lucindo Carrillo, cousin of Amado, was also un Jefe de Grupo de PJF, in Agua Prieta, Sonora, bordering Arizona, near the Baja California coast. The PJF Commandant in Agua Prieta, Luis Manuel Palofax-Juarez, was also a documented associate of Amado Carrillo. Gen. Gutiérrez, one of the most powerful men in Mexican military intelligence, and his two top military aides, were also formally charged with stacking the INCD with Carrillo’s agents.
Before he was relieved of command, Gen. Gutiérrez had been given repeated top-secret briefings on all Mexican-American antismuggling efforts and intelligence, including definitive lists of the INCD/DEA’s paid Mexican informants, many of whom ended up dead. “The Lord of the Skies” might as well have been personally briefed by General Barry McCaffrey himself. The head of the DEA, Thomas Constantine, said Gen. Gutiérrez probably would prove more damaging to the DEA than Aldrich Ames had been to the CIA.
“Aw shucks,” said Boy Scout Barry, “I didn’t know.” DEA spokesman James McGivney backed McCaffrey up: “It’s not our job to vet these people. We don’t go around spooking military and government officials; we’ve got enough to do with the crooks.” Pollyanna is running the DEA? Am I supposed to believe that the premier counterinsurgency expert of the vast U.S. Southern Command naval, air, radar and information system “just ain’t too good at this intelligence stuff”? Or should we rather assume that Mexico’s military, like the Pakistani military, buys U.S. arms with its drug profits, and that’s the reason Mexico’s cartel-financed political leadership consistently refuses to destroy the artificial value of Mexico’s drug crops by legalizing them? Privateer McCaffrey now profits from those arms sales directly, effectively laundering, on a massive scale, the Mexican military’s drug money. 13
San Quentin psychologist Dr. Richard Blum went on an intelligence mission for BNDD (just before it was renamed the DEA) chief John Ingersoll in 1972, staying with the Federal Judicial Police in northern Mexico. He described how the federales seized 14 trucks full of pot, killled all 14 drivers, and then sold the pot themselves. 14
On November 7th, 1991, 100 Mexican soldiers, helping to unload a planeload - tons - of Colombian cocaine near Veracruz for the Lord of the Skies, were interrupted by Mexican drug agents. Seven of the drug agents were shot through the head, execution style. The DEA plane that videotaped the incident was strafed. The Colombian delivery plane escaped, the soldiers who executed the agents and offloaded the cocaine went unnamed and unpunished, and the coke was distributed.
It is this army that McCaffrey, as head of the U.S. Southern Command, 1994-96, armed and trained in the name of the antidrug effort. McCaffrey’s ‘Hueys’ and ‘Rapid Reaction Units,’ of course, were invariably aimed by the Mexican military at poor campesinos trying to maintain control of their own land, rather than be turned into drug sharecroppers working for the military. As Subcommander Marcos put it, in the Lacandona Jungle Declaration of August 1992 that announced the Zapatista rebellion: “Fifty-four percent of the population of Chiapas suffer from malnutrition, and in the highlands and forest this percentage increases to 80%. A campesino’s average diet consists of coffee, corn, tortillas, and beans. One million Indigenous people live in these lands and share a disorienting nightmare with mestizos and ladinos: their only option, 500 years after the ‘Meeting of Two Worlds,’ is to die of poverty or repression.”
On New Year’s Day, 1994, the day NAFTA went into effect, the Zapatistas took San Cristóbal de las Casas, the old colonial capital of Chiapas, and five surrounding towns. Dozens of federal police were killed before the Zapatistas retreated into the rugged Cañadas. Many other Chiapas towns then kicked out the PRI and told its caciques what to do with their demands for a majority share of their crop. The Zapatista ‘International Encounter’ statement of August, 1996 insisted that the drug war “has converted narcotrafficking into one of the most successful clandestine means of obtaining extraordinary profits” and called for “channelling the resources destined for combatting narcotrafficking into programs of development and social welfare.”
Emiliano Zapata in Cuernavaca in 1911 (Wikimedia Commons)
Shortly after the January 1994 onset of the Zapatista rebellion, in late April, Defense Secretary William Perry huddled with his Mexican counterpart, Gen. Enrique Cervantes Aguirre, Gen. Gutiérrez’ direct commanding officer, to “explore ways in which our militaries could cooperate better.” In May, along with the first dozen of the 50 promised Hueys, combat helicopters, went General Barry McCaffrey to oversee the formation of GAT, the Anti-Terrorist Group. GAT coordinated Mexico’s secret service death squads with those of Guatemala, Spain and Argentina to prevent freelance campesino agricultural competition with the sanctioned cartels. This was an extrapolation of the CIA’s 1978 Confederación Anticomunista Latina, CAL, ‘Banzer Plan,’ which coordinated death-squad tracking of liberation theology priests and nuns throughout Latin America, part of the CIA’s ‘anti-drug’ Operation Condor.
Gen. Cervantes’ direct commanding officer, Mexican President Salinas, served from December 1, 1988 to November 30, 1994, and retired a billionaire. Juan García Abrego, head of the Gulf cartel, was a close lifelong friend of the Salinas family. The 1988 election was stolen for Salinas by PRI Interior Minister Manuel Bartlett Diaz. Seeing that the left-of-center National Democratic Front, led by Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas Solórzano, was headed for victory, Bartlett crashed the electoral computer, forcing a hand-count. Ten days later Salinas was declared victorious with 52% of the vote. An independent analysis revealed Cárdenas over Salinas 42% to 36%. The Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), leading the National Democratic Front, reported that between the beginning of the 1988 electoral campaign and 2/1/94, 263 of its people had been assassinated by military-cartel death squads. 15
Carlos Salinas’ brother Raul, during the last year of the Salinas administration, 1994, transferred more than $120 million to Swiss banks. During this time, Deputy Attorney General Mario Ruiz-Massieu, Carlos Salinas’ bother-in-law, controlled Mexico’s Federal Judicial Police and its entire counternarcotics program, including the INCD. On March 3, 1995, U.S. officials stopped Mario Ruiz-Massieu at Newark International Airport with a ticket to Madrid, $40,000 in cash, and $9 million more in the Houston Commerce Bank.
The forfeiture proceeding filed by the Houston Division of the U.S. District Court alleged the systematic collusion of the Salinas administration with the country’s top drug dealers. It specifically named the entire Salinas family - father Raul, his son Carlos, the president, and Carlos’ brother and sister, Raul and Adriana. It then goes on to detail specific instances of cooperation with every major drug trafficker in Mexico, including Juan García Abrego, Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo, the four Arellano Felix brothers, and Amado Carrillo, the ‘lord of the skies.’
Boy Scout Barry McCaffrey; Amado Carrillo; DEA Director Thomas Constantine
Customs discovered Ruiz-Massieu’s Texas bank accounts during their investigation of his role in the theft of over eight tons of cocaine from a jet seized in Sombrerete in August of 1994. While stuffing millions from García’s Gulf cartel into the bank, Mario Ruiz-Massieu, the CEO of Salinas’ War on Drugs, using America’s ‘antidrug’ largesse, provided directly to his agency by the DEA and Barry McCaffrey’s U.S. Southern Command, bought protection for the Gulf cartel’s massive drug smuggling into the U.S.. Perfect.
Associates of Gen. Gutiérrez and Gen. Cervantes were well-covered in the DEA’s NADDIS database long before McCaffrey hailed Gen. Gutiérrez as Mexico’s salvation at the head of the INCD. On February 18, 1997, Mexican Defense Secretary Cervantes, feigning ignorance of his own high command, like McCaffrey, announced that Gutiérrez had systematically supported the Carrillo cartel for 7 years. As head of the U.S. Southern Command, 1994-1996, McCaffrey worked directly with Gen. Gutiérrez for some of those years. Given his resources, and his brains, it is impossible that this professional military intelligence officer didn’t know precisely what he was doing. It is interesting that while the DEA pegged Gutiérrez correctly, the CIA profile was solid McCaffrese. 17
To call this ‘corruption’ or ‘narcocracy’ is, in a sense, to miss the point. It’s just economics. Thanks only to the artificial Prohibition-created value of drugs, Mexican drug gangs rake in $20-$30 billion a year in profits, according to a University of Guadalajara study. That gives them billions to dedicate to buying key officials and police units. There simply is no other power in Mexico that can compete. The great drug gangs actually conduct turf wars in Mexico using whole police forces as proxies. McCaffrey, supplying these police forces through the U.S. Southern Command, consistently portrayed the Mexican military as beleaguered boy scouts, like his spokesman, Pollyanna, from the DEA. 19
The DFS/DGSN, of course, was the enforcement arm of the PRI, Mexico’s ruling party. PRI stands for ‘Institutional Revolutionary Party’ - how’s that for an oxymoron? It had ruled Mexico uninterruptedly since 1921, using and discarding ‘kingpins’ as needed. What remains is the DFS/DGSN - the Federal Security Directorate/General Directorate of Investigations and National Security; the IPS - the Bureau of Social and Political Investigations; and the PJF - the Federal Judicial Police. The Mexican government has been running the drug trade on an ‘institutional’ level since the 1920s. Not only was all of this public knowledge, the DFS/DGSN Interior Ministry was, in fact, the CIA’s main base in Mexico.
In May of 1994 Eduardo Valle Espinosa quit as Federal Deputy Attorney General. Valle, who had been waging frontline war against Juan García Abrego’s Gulf cartel, insisted that “Nobody can outline a political project in which the heads of drug trafficking and their financiers are not included. Because if you do, you die.” Before he became Mexico’s top nark, Gen. Gutiérrez was in charge of the coastline port state of Jalisco, the capital of which is Guadalajara. Gutiérrez earned his reputation as a nark by helping the Guadalajara cartel deal with its competition, most notably with the June 1995 arrest of Hector “Whitey” Palma, a leader of the rival Sinaloa crew.
Since three-quarters of South America’s cocaine must pass through Mexico on its way to the U.S., we are talking about a very high stakes power game - tens of billions in regular trade - $30 billion annually according to the U.S. Justice Department. That’s fully 10% of Mexico’s GDP. Mexican military intelligence is not about to let that kind of power slide. That’s why General Gutiérrez’ two top military aides were also indicted - they were under orders. That kind of money buys armaments, the sale of which is General McCaffrey’s current occupation. That’s what his lavish praise of Gen. Gutiérrez was all about – arms sales.
Any video of a McCaffrey think tank speech – the one I’m watching on C-Span is from 2/13/2009 - will show McCaffrey hyping the “crisis,” insisting that “it’s worth fighting over drugs” because “drug abuse in Mexico is skyrocketing, going up, not down.” “The potential profits are so enormous that corruption is threatening the rule of law and democracy,” so we need to help the Mexican military build “a federal police that is disciplined, high integrity, technically capable.” The fact that no one has ever done that doesn’t faze Boy Scout Barry. McCaffrey is, in fact, insisting on continuing the drug price support. Milton Friedman, the Nobel laureate in economics, insisted that enforcement was nothing but a price support 40 years ago. McCaffrey has used the same sales pitch for the past 30 years – hell, McCaffrey said the same thing about the Vietnamese government, and about Fujimori and Montesinos in Peru when he was arming them in the mid-1990s. Fluent in buraucratese, the guy is a great armaments salesman. He never once mentions that the “enormous profits” are due exclusively to our arbitrary Prohibition, and that his legal equation of whole herbs with refined concentrates is the main reason the concentrates are popular. It’s all military science with this guy, never addiction science, about which, he has proven, he knows nothing. 20
Gen. Gutiérrez blew his cover to both press and police when he moved into a posh Mexico City apartment owned by one of Amado Carrillo’s top lieutenants, with whom he was repeatedly seen. He was also sloppy enough to allow himself to be recorded talking money with Carrillo himself on the phone. The General, whose INCD was directly financed by McCaffrey’s Southern Command and the DEA, must have felt very comfortable to have behaved so stupidly.
Gutiérrez was defended in court by Tomás Arturo Gonzalez Velazquez, a very tough 43 year-old former military colleague of Gutiérrez. Gonzalez repeatedly insisted that the general’s arrest was part of a power struggle within Mexican military intelligence. Gonzalez got very specific about the collaboration of top commanders, including defense minister Cervantes, with the chief smuggling organizations. He even asserted that new President Zedillo’s brother-in-law had ties to a major methamphetamine trafficker. In a classified report given to Attorney General Reno in February of 1998, DEA officials confirmed many of Gonzalez’ accusations. Tomás Gonzalez was shot dead on April 21, 1998. 20
The New York Times, 23 years after General McCaffrey informed us that “This is a 10-year struggle to protect our children.” “Former Mexican President Peña Nieto Took $100 Million Bribe, Witness at El Chapo Trial Says, By Alan Feuer, 1/15/2019:
“The former president of Mexico, Enrique Peña Nieto, took a $100 million bribe from Joaquín Guzmán Loera, the infamous crime lord known as El Chapo, according to a witness at Mr. Guzman’s trial.”
“The stunning testimony was delivered Tuesday in a New York courtroom by Alex Cifuentes Villa, a Colombian drug lord who worked closely with Mr. Guzmán from 2007 to 2013, when the kingpin was hiding from the law at a series of remote ranches in the Sierra Madre mountains.”
“According to Mr. Cifuentes, Mr. Peña Nieto first reached out to Mr. Guzmán about the time he was elected president in late 2012, asking the drug lord for $250 million in exchange for calling off a nationwide manhunt for him.”
“But Mr. Guzmán made a counteroffer, Mr. Cifuentes added, saying he would give Mr. Peña Nieto only $100 million.”
“While other witnesses at Mr. Guzmán’s trial in Federal District Court in Brooklyn have testified about huge payoffs from traffickers to the Mexican police and public officials, the testimony about Mr. Peña Nieto was the most egregious allegation yet. If true, it suggests that corruption by drug cartels had reached into the highest level of Mexico’s political establishment.”
On 12/22/97, 45 unarmed Tzotzil campesinos, including 15 children, were slaughtered in their highland Chiapas village of Acteal. “This is a situation that defies understanding, where there has been no official will to get the violence under control,” protested Bishop Samuel Ruiz, the senior Catholic prelate in the Chiapas highlands. Ruiz insisted that PRI death squads were behind the massacre, because the Tzotzils had been peacefully supporting Zapatista political demands. Enraged Tzotzil youngsters who march off into the highlands to join the guerrillas, after burying their little sisters, will then be accused of preferring bullets to ballots - and of being comunistas y narcotraficantes. 21
In fact, Gen. Gomez, commander of the Chiapas military district, immediately accused Bishop Ruiz of San Cristobal de las Casas himself of being a guerrilla operative, as if that somehow mitigated the horror of the massacre. Gomez was apparently referring to the Bishop’s protest against the NAFTA-engineered collapse of the price of Chiapas produce. The flood of cheap agricultural imports, which forced campesinos further into the slave-labor cash economy, was the major reason the Zapatistas rebelled in the first place.
Responding to repeated reports of vicious human rights abuses by his alumni, one of which is Gen. Gomez, General McCaffrey insisted that “It should not be my business how foreign countries organize for their counter-narcotics strategy.” That’s a very odd attitude for a financier to take toward the activity he is financing. McCaffrey did make it his business to enroll more Mexican officers in the Airmobile Special Forces school at Ft. Bragg, and to deliver another 50 Hueys. Is McCaffrey saying, once again, that he doesn’t give a damn how many gooks we kill?
Despite the fact that not one single major narcotraficante had been extradited to the U.S. since the signing of a mutual extradition treaty in 1980, drug czar McCaffrey, on 2/26/98, called Mexican drug cooperation “absolutely superlative.” He went on to trumpet the creation of new police units and more additions to the Mexican military’s alphabet soup. I assume McCaffrey means that the volume of Mexico’s purchases of our military equipment is “absolutely superlative.”
That same day, Thomas Constantine, the head of the DEA, in formal testimony before the Senate, adamantly disagreed with McCaffrey: “None of these changes have produced significant results.... None have resulted in the arrest of the leadership or the dismantlement of any of the well-known organized criminal groups operating out of Mexico.... Unfortunately, virtually every investigation DEA conducts against major traffickers in Mexico uncovers significant corruption of law-enforcement [military] officials.” 22
On October 2, 1996, drug czar Barry McCaffrey met personally with Vladimiro Montesinos in Peru. Montesinos was the head of Peru’s CIA, the National Intelligence Service, SIN. It was to the SIN subdivision, the Narcotics Intelligence Division, DIN, also unilaterally controlled by Montesinos, that the CIA directed at least $10 million in cash payments from 1990 until September 2000. These payments were acknowledged by U.S. officials to the Center for Public Integrity’s International Consortium of Investigative Journalists in 2001.
The ostensible reason for McCaffrey’s 1996 visit was to help Montesinos and Fujimori defeat the Native American Shining Path guerrillas, who objected to the confiscation of their land by Fujimori and Montesinos so they could produce more cocaine. Fujimori’s racist rationale for his land theft was the demonization of the traditional tribal sacrament, coca leaves, which are, among other things, basic medicine for children. Although the countryside was racked by epidemic cholera, the government put nothing at all into medical care, sanitation or structural economic projects. Millions of people had virtually no access to medical care, and no political hope of ever getting any. If your 3-year-old daughter died of an easily preventable disease, and she was the last of your four children to die, would you pick up a gun?
Brazil’s Prof. Anthony Richard Henman, 1990: “...coca [is used] not only as an excellent physical stimulant, but also as a major element of traditional healing practices, and—through the support and stimulus given to myth recitation—the prime means of activating the collective memory. Thus, to attack coca chewing in the Amazon amounts to more than a minor act of behavioral retraining, on a par with making Indians cover their private parts. It involves a fundamental assault on the cohesion of a culture which has existed for millennia.”
A family ritual using Coca in Quillabamba. Coca is as sacred in Incan culture as Passover Wine in Jewish culture (Catherine J. Allen)
Coca leaf tea is basic baby medicine – it is as harmless as orange pecoe tea. It takes 2000 pounds of highland coca leaf to make 20 pounds of cocaine. To legally equate coca leaf with cocaine, as McCaffrey does, is as insane as legally equating kitchen matches with grenades. 2000 pounds of Idaho potato skins produce a few pounds of natural insecticides, glycoalkaloids and phenols, that are lethal if consumed, even in miniscule quantities, yet it’s perfectly safe and healthful to eat an Idaho potato. The equation of whole herbs with their refined concentrates is a racist snooker, enabling land theft and conquest.
Quillabamba, peopled mostly by the highland Aymara of southern Peru, a Sendero Luminoso stronghold, is the ancient Incan capital of the department of Cuzco on the eastern Amazonian slopes of the Central Andes. It’s a popular tourist stop on the way to the ancient 15th-century Inca citadel of Machu Picchu.
“By the mid-1960s, a process of land reform was under way, which has led in turn to the emergence of a strong peasant federation in the area—the Federación de Productores Campesinos de La Convención y Lares (FEPCACYL). Understandably, FEPCACYL is a strong and highly articulate defender of the legal market in coca leaves. Probably for this reason, La Convención is the only major coca producing region in South America never to have suffered the effects of forcible eradication. With Sendero Luminoso guerrillas poised on the very hilltops surrounding Quillabamba, any attempt at armed intimidation of coca growers could only lead to widespread bloodshed.” 23
Highland coca is very ecologically specific – it can only be grown in misty mountainous areas like Quillabamba or the Upper Huallaga Valley. Montesinos and Fujimori, among the most powerful cocaine dealers in the world, wanted ownership of this rich coca-growing region, and so responded to Sendero Luminoso with paramilitary forces of their own, known as rondas or “blackheads.” The rondas operated as irregulars for the Peruvian Army. Operation Aries, April, 1994, challenged Sendero Luminoso for control of the Upper Huallaga Valley, located, like Quillabamba, in ‘the higher jungle.’ According to Peru’s National Coordinator of Human Rights, the Peruvian Army’s tactics consisted entirely of machine-gunning the mountain hamlets from the air, then landing in force to gang-rape, murder and loot. The Army didn’t engage the guerrillas once. It hit their families. When the International Committee of the Red Cross came to investigate, it was denied access to the entire region. As Peruvian Gen. Luis Cisneros explained, “It is necessary to kill ten peasants to kill one guerrilla.” On October 2, 1996, Gen. McCaffrey was visiting Montesinos and Fujimori to arrange American arms shipments to Gen. Cisneros.
Alberto Fujimori, a grey academic aiming at a Senate seat, was elected president of Peru in an election rigged by the National Intelligence Service, SIN. Without the fraud, Peru’s 1990 President would have been the great writer Mario Vargas Llosa. SIN’s 1990 election liaison to Fujimori was long-time CIA agent Vladimiro Montesinos. The Madrid daily La Vanguardia called him “the second most powerful man in Peru, after the president.” That was an understatement. 24
During the 1980s, Montesinos built a reputation as the top drug lawyer in Peru. “Within a few years, Montesinos became a sought-after legal and administrative strategist for drug traffickers, providing services that went far beyond the practice of law. He rented homes for Colombian traffickers, advised accessories of traffickers when to go into hiding, managed the disappearance of files of fugitive Colombian traffickers to prevent extradition requests, and in at least one case, produced falsified documents to buttress his defense of a cocaine dealer…. For the drug mafia…Montesinos’ handle on the system made him almost indispensable.” 25
According to Peru’s most famous journalist, Gustavo Gorriti, quoted above, Montesinos had been investigated by the DEA for “his connection to the most important Peruvian drug cartel in the 1980s, the Rodriguez-Lopez organization, and also links to some Colombian traffickers.” In 1986, when Reynaldo Rodriguez-Lopez went on trial for running the largest cocaine smuggling organization in Peru, Vladimiro Montesinos ran his legal team. 26
Montesinos also represented the more important police generals indicted for being on Rodriguez-Lopez’ payroll. In a brilliant series of covert moves among his police and military contacts, Montesinos used the case to take control of the Peruvian Attorney General’s office, arranging the military replacement of the original prosecutor with his own puppet.
Immediately upon election in 1990, Fujimori chose to live and work in the Military Circle, an exclusive Army officer’s club. This kept him unavailable to the press between the election and his inauguration. Montesinos remained Fujimori’s SIN handler. His title was ‘National Security Adviser.’ According to Human Rights Watch/Americas, “A death squad composed of members of the SIN and military agents and organized under Montesinos’ direction has been responsible for some of the most serious rights violations attributed to the armed forces under Fujimori’s administration, including disappearances, torture and illegal executions.” 27
On the night of November 3, 1991, a death squad armed with the army’s assassination weapon of choice, silencer-equipped H&K submachine guns, burst into a Lima barrio chicken barbecue. The pro-Sendero sentiments of the locals had proven obnoxious, since Barrios Altos was less than 30 meters from the police intelligence directorate’s headquarters and 50 meters from another police precinct.
Despite the presence of a troop transport filled with soldiers, or perhaps because of it, 16 people, including children, were left riddled with machine-gun bullets. A horrified witness jotted down the license plate numbers on the death-squad vehicles. One was assigned to the office of Santiago Fujimori, the president’s brother, and the other to the office of David Mejía, the vice-minister of the interior.
The outraged Congress appointed a commission of inquiry, which revealed that the murders were the work of the officially-sanctioned death squad of the Army Intelligence Service, the ‘Colina Group.’ The Colina was led by Gen. Julio Salazar, a subordinate of Vladimiro Montesinos. Just as prosecutor Pablo Livia was preparing to do ballistic tests on weapons belonging to army intelligence, he was taken off the case. To prevent the Congress from taking corrective action, Montesinos’ Army suspended it, the constitution, civil liberties, the vice-presidency and the supreme court - at gunpoint, April 5, 1992.
According to Gorriti, in one of the first actions taken after the April coup, “army intelligence officers had ransacked archives in the judiciary and in the prosecutor’s offices mainly to get hold of all the cases in which Vladimiro Montesinos, Fujimori’s closest adviser, was involved as a lawyer for drug traffickers and perhaps other documents that Fujimori does not want the public to know.”
Gorriti says that “in late 1990, Montesinos also began expanded cooperation with the CIA, and in 1991 the National Intelligence Service he controlled began to organize a secret antidrug outfit with funding, training and equipment provided by the CIA.” 28
This move enraged the DEA in Lima, because President Bush’s CIA switched Peruvian antidrug operations from DEA to CIA control. According to a 1991 DEA internal report quoted in the Miami Herald, “Montesinos has gained the president’s unconditional confidence, and using that position, he arranges the appointment of ministers and advisers as well as transfers of Army officers . . . always with the aim of supporting narcotics trafficking.” Remember, that’s DEA intelligence experts talking.
But, adds Gorriti, “As far as I know, the secret intelligence unit never carried out antidrug operations. It was used for other things, such as my arrest.” Gorriti, as the Peruvian correspondent for Spain’s prestigious El País, had the juice to survive his arrest, but he had to leave the country immediately. The contents of his computer did not survive.
Former Vice President San Román declared that since the coup “the number of airplanes carrying drugs has been increasing steadily.” Immediately after the 1992 coup the U.S. announced it was dismantling its antidrug night radars in northern Peru, without giving an explanation. According to San Román, this was done to facilitate the drug trade, which he says was now directly organized by Montesinos’ National Intelligence Service. “The CIA trains the SIN’s intelligence units in everything from vetting witnesses to polygraph testing; it has even donated jeeps.” Just as with Cedras in Haiti, George H.W. Bush’s CIA was the chief financier and trainer of the coup engineers. 29 30
In late 1992, Fujimori’s erstwhile Vice President, Máximo San Román, who had been proclaimed Peruvian President by the dissolved Congress, arranged the publication of loyalist intelligence reports on the Barrios Altos massacre. Sí magazine broke the story, identifying the SIN killers and tracing the chain of command all the way to Montesinos. Fujimori’s reaction to the story was to specifically promote all the named killers.
“I fear that my country will fall into the hands of the Mafia,” moaned San Román. Mario Vargas Llosa said the same thing, as did Peruvian-born economist Hernando de Soto, who negotiated the pact under which the Peruvian government was enlisted in Washington’s war on drugs. All these critics fled the country, fearing execution by Montesinos’ secret police. But Peru, Clinton told all, as he used McCaffrey to shovel weapons at Montesinos, is a democracy. 31
U.S. Undersecretary of State for Latin American Affairs Bernard Aronson was present in Lima the day of the April 5, 1992 coup. A few weeks earlier Aronson had urged all possible aid to Fujimori “to avoid a holocaust comparable to Hitler’s gas chambers or Pol Pot’s death camps.” That is, the U.S. knew the coup was coming and publicly sold and supported it. When it happened, President Bush not only prevented the OAS from taking any action, but sent Vietnam vets to teach Alberto and Vladimiro all about “strategic hamlets,” which now dotted the Peruvian countryside.
This was done in contravention of the post-coup U.S. Congressional ban on military aid to Peru - as an antidrug operation, the one exception to the ban. Peru’s main naval base in Puccallpa, in the department of Ucayali, was turned into the main U.S. base for regional antinarcotics operations. The entire department of Ucayali was then put under the martial law of the Peruvian Navy, as a combined U.S.-Peruvian antinarcotics operation. Peru’s Navy was armed to the teeth during its ‘aid suspension.’
This enabled the well-funded Navy to do double duty as the Peruvian Cocaine Transport Service. On July 3, 1996, police in Vancouver took 120 kilos of cocaine off a Peruvian Navy ship. On July 11, 62 kilos of coke were removed from the Peruvian Navy warship Ilo. This has been the uninterrupted pattern for years.
On July 18, 1992, nine students and a professor were abducted from Lima’s La Cantuta University, then under military control. On April 3, 1993, a group of active-duty army officers, calling themselves the Sleeping Lions, sent the new post-coup Congress an affidavit asserting that the ‘La Cantuta disappeared’ had been killed not by Sendero Luminoso, as Montesinos claimed, but by Montesinos’ Colina death squad, under the leadership of Gen. Julio Salazar. The Sleeping Lions named all the officers involved, proving their case with internal Army documents. The massive publicity put the CCD’s Human Rights Commission into action. The CCD was the post-coup Democratic Constituent Congress, put together by Fujimori, 11/92. The two major opposition parties boycotted the polls in protest of the coup, so the Congress was elected with only 18% of the eligible electorate. But the CCD’s Human Rights Commission report, publicizing the information from the Sleeping Lions, put Montesinos and General Hermoza, who had ordered the hit, on the trail of the Sleeping Lions.
When the new Congress’ Human Rights Commission threatened to indict virtually the entire Army high command, including Montesinos and Hermoza, Gen. Hermoza drove up to its gates with 50 tanks. This encouraged passage of the La Cantuta Amnesty law, which placed such cases in secret military courts. The law was made retroactive. Since Fujimori had suspended the Tribunal of Constitutional Guarantees, the La Cantuta Amnesty law was, by definition, constitutional. The Amnesty Law was repealed on the fall of the Fujimori government in 2001. On April 8, 2008, Julio Salazar was sentenced to 35 years for the La Cantuta Massacre, carried out by Montesinos’ Grupo Colina. In April, 2009, a Peruvian court condemned Fujimori to 25 years for the Barrios Altos and Cantuta massacres and other “crimes against humanity.” In September 2006, Montesinos was sentenced to 20 years for his direct role in providing 10,000 assault rifles to his business partners in FARC, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia.
Fearing for his family’s safety, the leader of the Sleeping Lions, Gen. Rodolfo Robles, third in command of the Peruvian Army, asked for asylum at the American embassy on May 6, 1993. The respected commander of the Peruvian Army’s academic centers denounced “the systematic violation of the human rights of the Peruvian population on the part of a group of thugs who, under the orders of the ex-army captain Vladimiro Montesinos Montesinos [sic] and the servile approval of EP General Nicolas de Bari Hermoza Rios, the unworthy commanding general of the EP [Peruvian Army], are committing crimes that are unjustly smearing all of the glorious Peruvian army.... an unscrupulous pair... in charge of a band of uniformed thugs,...[running] machinery for coercion, blackmail, and annihilation.”
In a statement read by his wife and brother, General Robles then went on to catalog the many death-squad murders of pro-democracy Peruvians, including the Barrios Altos and La Cantuta massacres. “The crime of La Cantuta in which a professor and nine students were victimized, was committed by a ‘Special Intelligence Detachment’ that operates under the direct orders of presidential adviser and virtual chief of SIN Vladimiro Montesinos.”
General Robles also catalogued dozens of Army field massacres and gang-rapes, all confirmed by Amnesty International and Peru’s Coordinadora Nacional de Derechos Humanos. Gen. Robles’ 1996 book is called Crime and Impunity: The ‘Grupo Colina’ and Power. The bodies of the La Cantuta ten were found in July of 1993. The forensic evidence confirmed everything that General Robles said. 32
Three months later Fujimori announced that he was going to turn Peru’s jungles into a “Little Vietnam.” Thanks to all that “anti-narcotics” military equipment from General Barry McCaffrey’s U.S. Southern Command, he did. When the OAS came to investigate the mass-murder, Fujimori refused to allow it. That was the first time in its history that a member state refused to meet with an OAS human rights commission. By the end of 1995, the war had claimed more than 30,000 lives, caused $25 billion in damages, and forced 600,000 refugees to flee the countryside.
Warfare, of course, is big business. According to the Mexican paper La Reforma, the Fujimori cartel went into the business of buying black market Soviet heavy arms for resale to the Peruvian military. This is financed by 15 dummy corporations - Wotan International, Colinsa, Crousillat Brothers, Mobetek, Vifebrina, Debrett, Benavides, etc. - washing drug money.
A hint as to how this money was earned was provided by the May 10, 1996 discovery of 169 kilos of pure cocaine in Fujimori’s own DC-8 heading to Paris. The pilot was Air Commander Alfredo Escarcena Ichikawa, Fujimori’s military attaché and an old crony. The owners of the laundromat corporations were presidential brother Santiago Fujimori, nephew Isidro Kagami Fujimori, and cronies Augusto and Manuel Miyagusuku. Their surplus Nicaraguan Russian helicopter gunships were used to contest control of Peru’s coca basket, the Upper Huallaga Valley.
The goals of the Peoples Army of Liberation, Sendero Luminoso, the ‘Shining Path’ of the Communist Party of Peru (PCP), in its own angry words, were “to serve the people’s…rights to education, culture, arts, science, philosophy, health care, adequate housing and recreation areas, and dignifying employment, with the proletarian application and development of technology to increase industrial production, thus reducing the required working hours and the number of working days; in synthesis, freedom from working one’s skin off for greedy capitalists and landlords; which necessarily implies a society without exploitation nor repression.” 33
Utopian, yes, but certainly not maniacal. These people were caricatured as maniacal only because when shot at, they shot back. The PCP defined Peru’s number one political problem as “feudalism,” that is, the absentee ownership and sharecropping forced on the Native campesinos by the conquistador elite.
The Ashaninkas of lowland Amazonian Peru joined Sendero Luminoso en masse. The PCP gave them a way to interrupt the systematic “rape, land theft, unpaid labor, and robbery through unequal trade.” Socialist ideology is attractive to these people because tribal lands, and social responsibilities, are traditionally held in common. They associate “capitalist” with “conquistador,” and “communist” with “tribal.” Communal ownership of land provides a way to claw back what was stolen. Sendero Luminoso advocated land redistribution. This was to be combined with replacement of the ubiquitous coca leaf with diversified food crops. This would localize and diversify an internationalized monocrop economy. It would also remove the Army’s excuse, and motive, for stealing campesino land. You can’t buy weapons with corn.
Crop replacement was to be done not with coercion, but with economic incentive, by collapsing the price of coca leaf through controlled legalization. That is hardly the position of narcotraficantes. Any photo of Sendero troops simply shows the local young women and men of fighting age. Decree 22095 of 1978 specifically criminalized highland culture by prohibiting the possession and sale of coca leaves at altitudes below 1500 meters. It became illegal to be an Inca. Prohibiting coca to Aymaras is like prohibiting wine to Italians. It can’t be done, and if you try, you get an impolite response.
Sendero dreams of peace notwithstanding, in the absence of international legalization and agricultural infrastructure, the regional economy was dependent on Syndicate coca dealers. Since Fujimori’s secret police were running the Syndicate, Fujimori’s government had absolutely no intention of replacing the monocrop coca economy, rather the Fujimori government concentrated on stealing Aymara land. He did this with the help of Gen. Barry McCaffrey, leading the U.S. Southern Command.
Fujimori, legally, ran the national coca monopoly he inherited from the Spanish, Empresa Nacional de la Coca, ENACO. ENACO legally converts some 5,000 metric tons of coca leaves into most of the world’s medical cocaine. Surgically effective local anesthesia was invented with cocaine. In 1884, Freud’s colleague in Vienna, Karl Koller, the ‘father of ophthalmology,’ used cocaine hydrochloride to make eye surgery possible for the first time, because it was effective enough to suppress the blink reflex. Spinal block anesthesia, a very major surgical breakthrough, was invented the next year using cocaine.
Coca leaf, as Freud demonstrated in 1884, increases the efficiency with which the muscles use oxygen, and is therefore an essential remedy for altitude sickness in the high Andes. That is a major reason coca leaf is basic to Incan culture. Coca cultivation was the only way many campesinos could feed their families. Coca legalization, of course, would collapse ENACO’s monopoly. There is no reason there shouldn’t be a massive legal trade in coca products, as there was in the turn of the century days of Vin Mariani. Fujimori wanted a nation of sharecroppers. The sharecroppers wanted title to their land, a free market in coca, and Fujimori dead. Both the Huallaga River Valley of the Incas and the Ene River Basin of the Ashaninkas became Fujimori free-fire zones. The typical Army tactic in the Ene River Basin was to massacre undefended campesino villages, and then publicize the murders as the work of “the Maoists.”
Per their CIA training, military death squads and rondas dressed up like Senderistas dropped in on defenseless Indians who don’t know them. The shocked survivors swear the guerrillas did it. The establishment media, peopled by reporters who have bravely ridden to the front in government helicopters, swallowed this more often than not.
On November 26, 1996, the leader of the Sleeping Lions, the forcibly retired Gen. Rodolfo Robles, supposedly free on amnesty, was arrested by Montesinos. Robles had just revealed that the October 17 “Maoist” bombing of the television station in Puno was a Colina Group COINTELPRO. Robles was joined in military prison by Gen. Enrique Delgado, the commander who arrested the three army intelligence agents who planted the Puno bomb.
Labor leaders, who were potential PCP political allies, were also regularly assassinated in government COINTELPROS, which also framed the PCP. It’s also easy to set off a “Maoist” car bomb. The PCP had the highest ratio of frontline women commanders of any revolutionary group in the world. Incan culture is basically matriarchal. When the heroic young Edith Logos was murdered by the army in 1982, 20,000 people came to her funeral in Ayacucho, a town with a population of 70,000, despite the political danger.
The Peruvian Army regularly strafed and bombed campesino villages with the help of the U.S. Southern Command. As head of the U.S. Southern Command, and then as drug czar, Gen. McCaffrey coordinated the air forces of Peru, Colombia and Venezuela via Operation Laser Strike, August 1996 – June 1997, the PR for which had it “intercepting suspected drug-smuggling aircraft.” This was done by incinerating campesino villages from the air, and then landing troops to machine-gun the survivors. Sendero Luminoso, of course, had no aircraft. The hatred this genocide engendered made the badly outgunned Sendero Luminoso politically invulnerable throughout much of rural Peru, although not militarily so.
Explained The Seattle Times, 4/22/98, in its best Dudley-Do-Right McCaffrese: “A key reason the United States is willing to share drug intelligence with the Peruvian navy and air force, when it largely declines to do so in other countries, such as Colombia and Mexico, is the lack of corruption, U.S. officials said.”
From 1990 to 1996, more than 300 Peruvian military personnel were investigated on charges of drug dealing. The consistent allegation had been that regional commanders overseeing clandestine airstrips received a $10,000 kickback per planeload of cocaine. So much for lack of corruption.
In 1991, one of the most powerful Huallaga Valley drug lords was Demetrio Chavez Peñaherrera, known as El Vaticano, “The Soothsayer.” When Montesinos demanded that El Vaticano double his $50,000-a-month protection payment to $100,000, Chavez went over to the Shining Path. This, of course, caused SIN to dub Chavez a narcotraficante and track him down in Colombia.
At his August 1996 trial, for subversion, Chavez insisted that his business relationship with Montesinos had included unhampered use of a clandestine military airstrip to export drugs to Colombia, and radio warnings of counternarcotics operations scheduled for the Huallaga Valley. Chavez’s airstrip was just a few miles from a major U.S.-Peruvian counterinsurgency base overseen by Barry McCaffrey’s Southern Command.
In testimony before the Peruvian Congress, following Chavez’ trial, Capt. Gilmar Valdivieso Rejas, a Sleeping Lion, asserted that the army commander of the Huallaga region, Gen. Eduardo Bellido, and his predecessor, provided cover for El Vaticano and other cocaine exporters. Valdivieso testified that in 1992, Lt. Col. Luis Aparicio Manrique had the engineers of the Upper Huallaga Special Project build a clandestine landing strip in Canuto, regularly used by Peruvian army helicopters to transport drugs. 34
On January 12, 1995, the largest shipment of cocaine in Peruvian history was intercepted. A diary belonging to one of the 38 arrestees, José Luís Mendiola, detailed meetings with Gen. Manuel Ortiz Lucero, a member of the ruling Armed Forces Internal Command Front. Ortiz was the Vice Minister of the Interior and commander of the National Police. Also named was Police Maj. Edwin Burgos, who worked in the Central Operations Department.
Evidence previously gathered, that led to the bust, linked the traffickers to the brother of army commander Gen. Nicolas de Bari Hermoza Rios, who took orders from Montesinos. Also named was Montesinos’ law partner, Edgar Solis. When Judge Carmen Rojas, on January 10, 1996, issued a warrant for the arrest of Ortiz and Solis, he was summarily dismissed by Montesinos.
Of 200 clandestine airstrips identified by DEA in 1995, SIN’s Anti-Drug Police destroyed 3, which were immediately rebuilt. Of 650 tons of cocaine produced in Peru, SIN seized 7, which was later resold to wholesalers. SIN’s “antidrug” operation was simply selective commercial extortion. He who got busted was either outside the loop or forgot to pay his taxes. Any small grower who complained was a “narcoterrorist.” Any DEA agent who got too close was either killed or transferred, set up by the SIN-CIA agents in his own command structure. 35
When Drug Czar Barry McCaffrey met personally with Vladimiro Montesinos in Peru on October 2, 1996, McCaffrey told the press that Montesinos was “an honest adviser…and…an outstanding and knowledgeable strategist.” Same BS as with General Gutiérrez. Given the public record, which included McCaffrey’s personal military role in helping Montesinos organize his genocidal war to deal drugs, it is impossible that ranking CIA agent McCaffrey didn’t know the drug-dealing assassin he was arming, just as he certainly knew what General Gutiérrez was up to with the ‘Lord of the Skies.’ He was just peddling his weapons systems to his military customers. 36
That was also the conclusion of Senators Patrick Leahy and Christopher Dodd. In a public letter that immediately followed McCaffrey’s meeting with Montesinos, to CIA Director John Deutch, these Senators demanded that the Agency cut its ties with Montesinos, because “We are aware of the links of Montesinos with violations of human rights, including massacres, torture, disappearances, and his links with drug cartels in Peru, whom he served before becoming an adviser to Fujimori.” Who’s the liar, Gen. McCaffrey, or Senators Leahy and Dodd? 37
Bureau Of International Narcotics And Law Enforcement Affairs, 2018: “According to the latest U.S. government figures, Peru is the second largest producer of cocaine and cultivator of coca in the world, with an estimated 49,800 hectares (ha) of coca under cultivation in 2017. The majority of cocaine produced in Peru is transported to South American countries for domestic consumption, or for onward shipment to Europe, the United States, East Asia, and Mexico. Peruvians view security and corruption as the country’s most pressing problems and often list the Judiciary, Congress, and the Peruvian National Police (PNP) as the country’s most corrupt institutions. Corruption scandals have ensnarled many of Peru’s political figures, including former Presidents, members of Congress, regional governors, ministry officials, and judges.” The Report then goes on to tout the establishment of more police stations in Peru. Word for word McCaffrese doubletalk.
For fiscal 1998 Clinton and McCaffrey announced a billion-dollar ONDCP/Ad Council blitz: “There is every reason to believe that this absolutely will turn around drug abuse by youngsters.” The ‘youngsters’ again – he’s arming Vladimiro Montesinos and Mexican General Cervantes for the ‘youngsters.’ Montesinos also used McCaffrey’s military largesse to heavily arm the coke-dealing FARC guerrillas in Colombia, who recently achieved legal liberation for their coke dealers as well.
Montesinos is currently serving a 15 year term at a maximum security prison in Peru. He was sentenced to another 20 year term in 2006, and faces another 8 trials for arms smuggling, drug dealing and mass murder. Clearly an “honest adviser.” What McCaffrey was actually doing, by selling ‘anti-drug’ arms to Peru, was laundering Vladimiro Montesinos’ drug money, and arming the FARC. McCaffrey is, first and foremost, a privateer who respects nothing so much as profitable endless warfare. And he is as good a mom-and-apple-pie BS artist as Maxwell Taylor himself – handsome too. The TV presenters can’t wait to kiss his brass.
Said McCaffrey, on his March 1996 installation as Clinton’s Drug Czar: “The new problems are obvious - they’re counterterrorism, they’re counterdrugs, they’re illegal movements of peoples, they’re arms smuggling, they’re transnational Marxist movements that have now become international criminal conspiracies, narco-guerrilla forces.” That is, in this masterpiece of neofascist double-speak, the new problems are the old problems. Daddy Dulles would be proud. ‘Drugs’ are just like ‘Commies,’ an ‘international criminal conspiracy’ putting us under attack, a reason to support fascism. 38
In 2019, 23 years after drug czar McCaffrey was going to end the drug war in ten years by helping the dope dealers deal dope and slaughter campesinos, Trump, who played from Nixon’s drug war playbook, had his apparatchik Uttam Dhillon leading the DEA. Dhillon was another drug abuse expert with absolutely no training in addiction science or pharmacology, just another DEA prosecuting attorney. “We’ve lost too many lives to the opioid epidemic…” said Dhillon A new DEA hobbyhorse, now that the old ‘reefer madness’ has been irrevocably lost. Uttam never mentions the dozens of countries, like Holland, that don’t have an “opioid epidemic.” He never publicly asks why that is. Is there something about policy we could learn from the Dutch? Does he want victory, or endless warfare?
Lying through his teeth, drug czar Barry McCaffrey insisted, over and over again in every interview, 1996-2001, that “not a shred of scientific evidence” exists to support medical marijuana and that no major national medical organization had endorsed marijuana for medical use. McCaffrey apparently missed the medical endorsement of the American College of Physicians, the American Academy of Family Physicians, the American Nurses Association, the American Public Health Association, the Physicians Association for AIDS Care, the Lymphoma Foundation and the many other reputable groups and experts. I have actually heard both McCaffrey and Trump’s 2019 DEA parrot Dhillon, behind their legal power, and with no medical credentials at all between them, say that they are qualified to dictate medical practice to the American College of Physicians.
Ex-DEA Agent Michael Levine: “The drug war under President Clinton is bigger and healthier than ever. It seems like every department in the federal government has a part in it - DEA, FBI, CIA, NSA, IRS, DIA, ATF, State Department, Pentagon, Customs, Coast Guard, Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines - and each one is fighting for more turf and a bigger chunk of the drug war budget. When I started out in 1965 there were two federal agencies enforcing the drug laws, and the budget was less than $10 million. Today [1993] there are 54 agencies involved and the budget is $13 billion. Orchestrating the whole mess is a Drug Czar who is generally a political appointment with no special qualifications for the job.” In 1991, the RAND Corp. estimated the total outlay of public funds at $30 billion. Today, 2019, given that the drug war is indistinguishable from the ‘war on terror,’ the total cost is in the hundreds of billions. 39 40
A thousand times more international effort goes into preventing poor people from medicating themselves than into getting medicine to poor people. The Pentagon spends more in one afternoon than the Peace Corps spends in a year. The thing that made Kennedy so politically charismatic, at the dawn of the 60s, was his vision of an equation of those ratios. How do you stop communism? “Stop fascism,” replied Kennedy. When the World Health Organization, in 1996, insisted that coca leaves, central South America’s most important medicine, and low-level cocaine products were safe medicine, America threatened to withdraw WHO funding unless the position were reversed.
Drug czar McCaffrey, with no medical training whatever, insisted that the physicians running the World Health Organization, the most prestigious and functionally important medical organization on the planet, didn’t know what they were talking about. Of course, with the inquisitorial drug prohibition laws put in place in America, 1906-1918, legally refreshed by Nixon in 1970, the cops in the DEA, although not medically qualified, do have the legal authority to overrule the physicians.
Poor little Bangladesh can’t even approach its economic problems with objective sanity. Because cheap marijuana seeds grow almost anywhere and put down a one-foot taproot in 30 days, they break up compacted, dry soil and also help to bind wet soil subject to periodic flooding. They are therefore one of the best reforestation crops known, especially since they’re not only ecologically but industrially valuable. Their use in “Bangladesh,” however, would cost the “cannabis-land-people” their diplomatic legitimacy and all their foreign aid. (Google the etymology of ‘bhang.’)
The Nixon-engineered Controlled Substances Act of 1970 that Trump’s Uttam Dhillon administered is part of the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act. To decide which drugs to keep as Schedule I drugs, defined as having no currently accepted medical use, Congress created a commission to make recommendations. To head the commission, President Nixon appointed a tough-on-crime former prosecutor, Pennsylvania Republican Governor Raymond Shafer. To Nixon’s surprise, the Shafer Commission recommended the decriminalization of marijuana.
Dr. Lester Grinspoon, associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, began to write Marihuana Reconsidered after his 14 year-old boy started receiving chemotherapy for acute lymphoblastic leukemia. “Vomiting for 8 hours a day was so demoralizing for this beautiful child.” Grinspoon found that marijuana was the only thing that could control the violent nausea. “When I began to study marijuana in 1967, I had no doubt that it was a very harmful drug....as I reviewed the scientific, medical and lay literature....I came to understand that I, like so many other people in this country, had been brainwashed.” 41 42
“The greatest advantage of cannabis as a medicine is its unusual safety. The ratio of lethal dose to effective dose is estimated on the basis of extrapolation from animal data to be about 20,000:1 (compared to 350:1 for secobarbital and 4-10:1 for alcohol). Huge doses have been given to dogs without causing death, and there is no reliable evidence of death caused by cannabis in a human being. Cannabis also has the advantage of not disturbing any physiological functions or damaging any body organ when used in therapeutic doses. It produces little physical dependence or tolerance; there is no evidence that medical use of cannabis has ever led to its habitual use as an intoxicant.” Professor Grinspoon has been a significant factor in the legalization of medical marijuana in 33 states – growing fast to all 50 states, as, in 2018, industrial hemp was re-legalized. 43
“The undertreatment of pain in hospitals is absolutely medieval,” according to Dr. Russell Portnoy of the Pain Service of Sloan Kettering Memorial Hospital. The famous Libby Zion case, which saw the meperidine-induced 1984 death of a healthy 18 year old, is a study in pharmacological politicization. Libby showed up at New York Hospital’s emergency room suffering from flu-like symptoms, complicated by her prescription for the monoamine oxidase inhibitor (MAOI) phenelzine sulfate, another “antidepressant” concocted from industrial solvents (phenethyl chloride and hydrazine hydrate). This contributed, as the Physicians’ Desk Reference clearly warns, to a “hypertensive crisis.” To calm her, the inexperienced young intern prescribed ”Demerol,” meperidine, the morphine-substitute she had been taught to use. Demerol, unfortunately, is a political substitute, not a pharmacological substitute. As the PDR stresses, “circulatory collapse, coma, and death have been reported in patients receiving MAOI therapy who have been given a single dose of meperidine.” Libby Zion got her shot of meperidine and went into circulatory collapse, literally poisoned to death. 44 45
A New York jury found three of the four doctors involved negligent for prescribing the contraindicated Demerol. Rather than relaxing her with a traditional mood elevator, such as a small dose of morphine, a botanically-derived safe euphoriant that is also produced by the human body itself (’endorphin’ is short for ‘endogenous morphine’), which would have sent her off to a blissful nap, she was given a patented synthetic that actually increased her anxiety. How utterly incompetent, how unloving. The dangerous teenage neurosis anorexia nervosa is sometimes treated with chlorpromazine, which is synthesized from diphenylamine, used in dyes and explosives, and sulphur, used in explosives, insecticides, fungicides, metallurgy and gas refining. Although most current medical books stress that there is no “official” treatment for anorexia, the popular 1989 AMA Encyclopedia of Medicine calls chlorpromazine a useful “antipsychotic” in such cases, which is like calling calomel, the poisonous combination of mercury and chlorine popular in the 19th century, a “purgative,” since the “untoward effects” include “drowsiness, lethargy, ...orthostatic hypotension, tachycardia... dizziness... edema, constipation, anuria, convulsions, nervousness, syncope, insomnia, nasal congestion, skin rash....dermatitis, parkinsonism, confusion or jaundice...erythema, localized nodular lesions, acneform lesions with stomatitis...pruritis.” 46
The actual list of poisonous effects of chlorpromazine takes up an entire page in the U.S. Dispensatory, leaving the poor patient, already emotionally exhausted, near suicide, which would, of course, be attributed to the anorexia. Any half-competent herbalist could do better prescribing relaxation, euphoria and a heavy case of the pot-induced munchies, but ‘euphoria’ is a form of ‘turpitude,’ and the patient might be needed on the assembly line any minute, so we wouldn’t want to let her get too relaxed.
Of course, unlike synthetic concoctions, whole herbs can’t be patented. Conventional “behavior modification” psychotherapy is rooted in legal commercialism. The FDA’s job is to protect drug patents, but whole herbs can’t be patented, and so are therefore not ‘safe.’ Conventional psychotherapy is to ancient psychotherapy as chlorpromazine is to marijuana. I’ve actually had my 95 year old father, in very frail health and considerable pain, and suffering from glaucoma, told that he could have neither pot nor morphine, because the doctor was worried about “habit formation.” God forbid the old man should acquire a “habit” in the last few years of his life. The doctor was just reading from the DEA’s privateer canon.
All over the country cops are presented in high schools and town councils as empirical experts while the most distinguished physicians, psychopharmacologists, psychiatrists, ethnobotanists, anthropologists, archeologists, sociologists and economists are ignored. “I am reminded of Soviet party-line criticism of science which led to the phenomenon known as Lysenkoism,” notes Prof. Grinspoon. 47
Sanctioned frauds like Heath, Nahas, Kleber, Califano, and McCaffrey, engineers of today’s disaster, are given far more political credence than the likes of Dr. Lester Grinspoon, Dr. Solomon Snyder, Dr. Marie Nyswander, Dr. Vincent Dole, Dr. John Morgan, Dr. Alfred Lindesmith, Dr. Richard Evans Schultes, Dr. Michael Harner, Dr. Peter Furst, Dr. Andrew Weil, Dr. Michael Taussig, Dr. Timothy Plowman, Dr. Anthony Richard Henman, Dr. Marija Gimbutas, Dr. Thomas Szasz, Dr. Arnold Trebach, Dr. Charles Snyder, Dr. Jerome Miller and Dr. Milton Friedman. You can ignore Eisenhower, MacArthur, Mountbatten, Ridgway, Shoup and Giap on Vietnam politically, but you can’t ignore them in Vietnam militarily.
In 1988, after two years of detailed testimony, the DEA’s own chief administrative law judge, Francis Young, concluded that “marijuana is one of the safest therapeutic substances known to man….capable of relieving the distress of great numbers of very ill people….It would be unreasonable, arbitrary and capricious for the DEA to continue to stand between those sufferers and the benefits of this substance in light of the evidence.” 48
DEA Administrator John Lawn, that great physician, rejected this judicial recommendation, using the “no-license” catch-22: marijuana wasn’t “widely prescribed” in the medical community, because illegal, therefore it had “no currently accepted medical use.” Since the evidence is inadmissible, there’s no way the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) or anyone else can force a binding jury trial of the evidence. Legally, all the administrative law judge can do is make recommendations, which the DEA is free to ignore. Because of the rebellion of the states, the DEA has recently allowed a cannabis extract into prescribale Schedule 5, but still criminalizes the THC-rich leaf. That is changing thanks to the many state referenda that have legalized recreational pot use.
This is the “purposeful ambiguity,” as Teddy Roosevelt put it, first written into Wiley’s 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act. A dangerous drug is any drug the FDA says is dangerous. The U.S. Court of Appeals told NORML in 1994 that there is no higher court on drug matters than the DEA, which alone has the legal right to “schedule” drugs – a bunch of cops. No binding jury trial of the evidence is available. Of course, since 95% of all illegal drug use in the U.S. is marijuana use, without illegal pot, the legalization of which is now being forced by the states, this country’s police structures fear severe budget cuts, so the ‘opioid epidemic’ and the ‘crack epidemic’ PR campaigns were launched to come to the budgetary rescue.
Fascism, the militarization of culture, relies on the artificial production of stress and violence: simply criminalize the NORML. One wonders how long the federal DEA will be able to peddle its stepping-stone BS in the face of pot legalization, and how long the FDA will continue to reject the traditional stress-reducing whole herbs of the human race like coca leaf and opium sap, with which medicine was invented. Whole herbs can’t be patented, and the FDA’s real job is the protection of big pharma. Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act of 1970 is a list of the traditional shamanic herbs of preindustrial humanity, and their isolates, and all have profound medical utility, despite the legal assertion in Nixon’s Controlled Substances Act that they don’t.
As so many states have now reiterated, marijuana, official from 1850 to 1942 in the U.S. Pharmacopeia, is helpful for glaucoma, high blood pressure, migraine, anorexia, depression, sleep disorders, multiple sclerosis, spasticity disorders, chronic pain, AIDS wasting syndrome, asthma, motion sickness, depression, mood disorders, pruritis, menstrual cramps, the effects of cancer chemotherapy and epilepsy. This list, by the way, comes mostly from the official position paper of The American Public Health Association, written exclusively by experienced physicians. Much of it, in 1999, was legally adopted by The Netherlands. The Dutch have proven, and officially assert, as did the official New York City LaGuardia Report in 1944, that the criminalization of this mild herbal ecstatic and painkiller causes widespread use of the potent concentrates. The same thing is true of coca leaf and opium sap, every bit as safe as pot, but the DEA will just analogize them with their refined concentrates and continue to peddle the same ‘stepping stone’ BS. We are no more under attack by “drugs” than we were under attack by the Viet Minh. That phony war was just a Dulles brothers colonialist overreach for ownership of Vietnam’s vast natural wealth. The Dulles brothers’ original colonialist intention was to do precisely what the French could not. 49
By following Califano’s and McCaffrey’s unempirical lead, overriding its own administrative law judge with the stepping stone mantra, the DEA, in 2019, is able to continue exactly the same ‘counterterrorism’ tactics in Peru, Mexico, Guatemala and El Salvador in 2019, that McCaffrey used in 1996, thereby continuing to sell arms to the drug dealing militaries all over the world, in the name of the antidrug effort, and covertly trade weapons for the artificially valuable refined concentrates, like cocaine. Naturally this has zero strategic effect on the flow of drugs. The legal equation of whole herbs with their refined concentrates just popularizes the dangerous refined concentrates, thus insuring an unending flow of military, DEA, prison and ‘treatment’ appropriations. This lying also strengthens global fascism worldwide, thereby creating yet more ‘narcoterrorists’ and client states in need of our weaponry. And to this day, in 2019, 50% of all drug busts globally are still for marijuana, certainly the human race’s most popular herb. The fascists will not relinquish the economic whip hand willingly.
McCaffrey’s ‘ten-year’ list of red herrings to the contrary, the occasional red-herring bust of a shipment or ‘kingpin’ just maintains the illusion of progress in the ‘war.’ If it’s a ‘war,’ how come there’s no strategy for victory? Isn’t the definition of insanity doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result? The purpose of this stepping stone BS, the purpose of refusing to distinguish whole herbs from refined concentrates, is unending war.
The drug war quagmire, precisely because it is a quagmire, continues to be worth hundreds of billions to the privateers running it, in direct and indirect defense, prison, police and ‘treatment’ appropriations, and in the artificial value of drug crops. With global legalization, the price of marijuana leaf, coca leaf and opium sap collapses to normal agricultural commodity levels, making covert funding of fascist death squads with the refined concentrates, and the arbitrary criminalization of native peoples for using their traditional herbs, much more difficult. The purpose of pretending in law that coca leaf is the same thing as cocaine is the colonialist criminalization and subjugation of Incan culture, begun long before the 1860 isolation of cocaine.
As one disgusted DEA agent put it, none other than Dennis Dayle, 1978-82 chief of the DEA’s Centac units, their highly effective international Central Tactical strike forces: “In my 30-year history in the Drug Enforcement Administration and related agencies, the major targets of my investigations almost invariably turned out to be working for the CIA.” Dayle turned to novelist and reporter James Mills to advertise this. The result was The Underground Empire: Where Crime and Governments Embrace. While comprising only 3% of all DEA agents, Centac accounted for 12% of arrests of major violators. Dayle is known as the single most effective agent in DEA history. Dayle’s effectiveness was a major reason the Reagan administration underfunded the DEA and put it under FBI control. Dayle was busting the CIA’s most powerful assets. Dayle’s peer, former DEA Chief of Enforcement John Evans, called the CIA “the biggest drug trafficker in the world.” 50 That is the colonialist pattern put in place by Sullivan and Cromwell's Dulles brothers.
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