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The Kerry investigation lasted two and a half years and heard scores of witnesses; it culminated in a report of some 400 pages with an annex of a further 600 pages of supporting documentation. Its main conclusion was unequivocal: “It is clear that individuals who provided support for the Contras were involved in drug trafficking. The supply network of the Contras was used by drug trafficking organizations, and elements of the Contras themselves received financial and material assistance from drug traffickers.”
Contra members themselves were involved in drug trafficking, the report concluded. Drug traffickers played a key role in Contra supply operations and maintained business relationships with Contra organizations. Drug traffickers gave the Contras money, weapons, planes, pilots and supply services. The US State Department paid over $806,000 to known drug traffickers to carry humanitarian assistance to the Contras. In several cases the payments were made after the drug traffickers had been indicted by US federal prosecutors on drug charges.
The Kerry committee revealed that the Contras’ complicity with drug traffickers went far beyond Eden Pastora’s maverick operation in Costa Rica. Kerry charged that “[t]he largest Contra organization, the FDN, did move Contra funds through a narcotics trafficking enterprise and money-laundering operation.” In addition, the Kerry report said, “The [US] military and intelligence agencies running the Contra war turned a blind eye to the trafficking.” The report noted that investigators were unable to find a single drug case that was made on the basis of a tip or report by an official of a US intelligence agency. This despite an executive order requiring intelligence agencies to report trafficking to law enforcement officials and despite direct testimony that trafficking on the Southern Front was reported by CIA officials.
Kerry’s committee concluded that the CIA and Oliver North’s enterprise knew that drug traffickers had exploited “the clandestine infrastructures established to support the war and that Contras were receiving assistance derived from drug trafficking.” Kerry’s investigation concluded that “US officials involved in Central America failed to address the drug issue for fear of jeopardizing the war effort against Nicaragua.”
These were damning conclusions, so far as the CIA was concerned, but Kerry’s people felt that had it not been for constant government obstruction, they could have gone a great deal further.
Unsurprisingly (though of course illegally), the CIA had tried to sabotage the Kerry probe from the start. Evidence of this is found in the files of Lawrence Walsh, the independent counsel in charge of the Iran/Contra investigation. The information came from an interview with Alan Fiers, head of the CIA’s Central America task force in the mid-1980s. As a memorandum of an interview conducted by one of Walsh’s investigators put it, “Fiers was … getting a dump on the Sen. Kerry investigation about mercenary activity in Central America from the CIA’s legislative affairs people who were monitoring it.” The Reagan administration also trumped up an ethics probe of Kerry for his temerity in smearing the Contras. Reagan, it will be recalled, had once honored these cut-throats as “the moral equivalent of the Founding Fathers.”
Jack Blum has also described how the Reagan administration’s Justice Department tried to undercut the Kerry investigation. The key player here was former Deputy Attorney General William Weld, a longtime political rival of Kerry’s from Massachusetts. “Weld put a very serious lock on any effort we made to get information,” Blum testified before Congress on October 23, 1996, during hearings into CIA/Contra drug ties prompted by Gary Webb’s series. “There were stalls. There were refusals to talk to us, refusals to turn over data.” Blum testified thus about ten days before the senatorial election in Massachusetts, where Weld was locked in combat with Kerry in a race that Weld ultimately lost by a narrow margin.
One of the subjects that Kerry and Blum wanted information on concerned the “Frogman” case in San Francisco, where – readers will recall from an earlier chapter – the CIA prevailed on the Department of Justice to return $36,800 seized in the drug raid on the grounds that the money, found in the bedroom of one of the Meneses gang, had been intended for the Contras. Weld’s office refused to turn over the files.
US government lawyers also tried to keep one of Kerry’s star witnesses from testifying. George Morales was a Colombian-born resident of Miami who had been convicted and sentenced to sixteen years in prison for cocaine trafficking. Justice Department lawyers offered Morales a lighter sentence if he would keep his mouth shut about his ties to the Contras. Morales declined the offer and told his story to Kerry and to Leslie Cockburn for her CBS documentary. Morales said that in 1984 the Justice Department had offered to suspend his indictment for drug trafficking if he would contribute $1 million a year to the Contras and furnish planes from his aviation company, based in Opa-Loka airport, Florida. The Contras, Morales explained, were low on funds at that time, and he had been invited to attend a meeting of Contra leaders at the Miami home of Marta Healey. Present were Octaviano César (a CIA asset) and Adolfo “Popo” Chamorro, former husband of Healey and also nephew of Violetta Chamorro, Nicaragua’s future president. Chamorro and César were working to open up a second front in Costa Rica, aiming to take over operations from the uncontrollable Eden Pastora. At the Miami meeting they asked Morales to help them in their quest by providing planes, guns and cash. Both César and Chamorro said subsequently that the CIA had cleared the meeting with Morales. “I called our contact at the CIA, of course I did,” Chamorro said. “The truth is, we were still getting some CIA money under the table. They said [Morales] was fine.” César went on to say that he was told by a CIA agent that it was okay to be involved with Morales “as long as we didn’t deal in the powder.”
Morales recounted to the Kerry committee investigators how, over the next two years, he gave at least $3 million to the Contras in drug money. He described a trip in October 1984 to his bank in the Bahamas: Morales withdrew $400,000 in cash there and gave it to César, who noted the amount on a US Customs document.
Morales’s story is backed up by two of his pilots. Gary Betzner, a former Navy flier from Arkansas, testified to the Kerry investigators that he had got a call from Morales in 1984 asking for Betzner’s help with his indictment. “He [Morales] said that he made a deal with the CIA to supply them [the Contras] with money and with assistance,” Betzner testified before Congress in 1987. “He wanted me to fly some guns and ammunition and stuff like that down to the Contras.” Betzner says he made several flights in 1984 from Fort Lauderdale to airstrips in Costa Rica, one on the ranch of John Hull and the other nearby. None of these flights required any of the normal paperwork associated with an international flight. The plane was packed with M-16s, M-60 machine guns and C-4 explosive. Betzner says he unloaded the weapons and then put on the plane “seventeen duffle bags and five or six two-foot-six-square boxes filled with cocaine.” Betzner recalls that he didn’t worry much about being caught because Morales had told him that his flights were “covered.” “Well, you know, if the Customs or DEA followed me in when I landed the aircraft I wouldn’t have any problem. I mean, they wouldn’t bother.”
Betzner told Congress of two other pilots who flew drug/gun missions for Morales and the Contras: Geraldo Duran and Marcos Aguado, who – Gary Webb reported – had also done some runs for Norwin Meneses. Aguado claimed to be the head of the Contra air force on the Costa Rican front. He would later assert that he had been duped into working with drug traffickers, saying that people like Morales “fooled people. Unfortunately this kind of activity which is for the freeing of a people is quite similar to activities of the drug dealers.” Duran was a Contra pilot from 1982 to 1985. Then, in early 1986, he was arrested in Costa Rica for transporting cocaine into the United States.
There are plenty of other confirmations of the use of Morales by the CIA. Eden Pastora’s chief spokesman, Carol Prado, told Wall Street Journal reporter Jonathan Kwitny that it was his understanding that Octaviano César and Adolfo Chamorro had indeed told Morales that the CI
A would assist him with his legal problems in exchange for his furnishing money and supplies. Furthermore, Oliver North’s man in Central America, Robert Owen, testified during the Iran/Contra hearings that he had advised North of his belief that Prado, Aguado and Duran were all involved in the drug business themselves. They were as deep in the trade as Morales.
But some of the most damning information came from another of Morales’s pilots, Fabio Ernesto Carrasco. On April 6, 1990, Carrasco was called as a government witness for the Justice Department in a drug trial in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The defense began to probe Carrasco’s background and despite the frantic efforts of the federal prosecutor to suppress Carrasco’s responses, the following facts emerged.
Carrasco testified that between 1984 and 1985 he flew more than five drug missions for Morales, carrying between 300 and 400 kilos of cocaine into the United States on each flight. He testified that he also flew on Contra resupply flights with Gary Betzner to Costa Rica, when weapons were offloaded and dope put on the plane for the return to Florida. Carrasco said that he believed the flights were authorized and protected by the CIA, and that the cocaine loaded on the planes was owned by Contra leaders Octaviano César and Mario Calero. Carrasco also testified that George Morales gave “several million dollars to César and Chamorro.” He recalled making thirty to forty deliveries of cash to the Contra leaders in various “hotels, restaurants and George Morales’s house.”
The outlines of the Morales and Betzner stories had been publicly known since 1987, but they were derided by the New York Times and Washington Post as being the testimony of drug felons. Newsweek chided Senator Kerry as being a “randy conspiracy buff” for delving into such material. Walter Pincus and Douglas Farah did do a piece in the Washington Post in 1996, using the Carrasco testimony in Tulsa of six years earlier, even though this did not prompt the Post’s reporters to acknowledge that the earlier investigations by Kerry and by other journalists had been entirely on the mark. Those who doubt the self-serving nature of the journalistic trade as it is often practiced might care to study the tranquil effrontery of the Washington Post reporters, as they wrote on October 31, 1996 that stories of CIA ties to drug runners had “been around for more than a decade,” but that a two-year congressional enquiry by Senator Kerry “caused little stir when its report was released.” The Post, on which Walter Pincus was working when the Kerry report was published in 1989, buried it in a mocking story by Michael Isikoff twenty pages deep into the paper.
The New York Times didn’t bother to cover Kerry’s report at all. While Kerry’s hearings were in progress, the Times’s Keith Schneider wrote a dismissive piece saying that no credence should be attached to the testimony of drug dealers looking to get lighter treatment. It’s hard to grasp his reasoning here. Why would the Reagan-Bush Justice Department go easy on drug felons testifying against the administration to a committee controlled by Democrats? Only when Noriega became a target of the Bush administration did the press – notably the Post – suddenly start taking the testimony of Morales and others seriously.
After his hearings into CIA-Contra-drug ties, no reporters sought out Kerry on this topic until, in the wake of Gary Webb’s series, an ABC News reporter asked Kerry his opinion. “There is no question in my mind,” Kerry answered, “that people connected with the CIA were involved in drug trafficking while in support of the Contras. We had direct evidence that somewhere between $10 million and $15 million was going to the Contras. And I am quite confident that this was the tip of the iceberg. The Contras were desperate for money. So in a sense they took a bridge loan from anyone available and the drug lords were available.”
The Man from the Medellín Cartel
Ramon Milian Rodríguez was the chief accountant for the Medellín cartel, handling $200 million in drug profits a month while shuttling between Panama, Miami and Colombia. He was another Cuban exile who got his start in anti-Castro drug politics working for Manuel Artime, the CIA-backed terrorist. Milian Rodríguez says one of his first major assignments was to deliver $200,000 in cash from Artime to some of the Cubans involved in the Watergate burglary organized by the Nixon White House in 1972. “I started in one scandal and landed in another,” he recalled in a TV interview with Leslie and Andrew Cockburn. Milian Rodríguez says that in the mid-1970s he was asked by the CIA to funnel more than $20 million to the government of Anastasio Somoza to prop up his regime, which was then facing the Sandinista uprising. “If you have people like me in place it’s marvelous. The Agency, quite rightly so, has things they have to do which they can never admit to an oversight committee. The only way they can fund these things is through drug money or other illicit funds that they can get their hands on.”
In 1982 Milian Rodríguez, in his capacity as a money manager for the Medellín cartel, was approached by his old anti-Castro comrade and CIA man Félix Rodríguez to enlist the cartel in the Contra cause. The CIA man, Milian Rodríguez says, asked him to contribute $10 million, which was duly delivered on a “per need basis” from 1982 to 1985. The question arises: did the CIA and the Contras know the source of Milian Rodríguez’s money. “The Contra peasant didn’t know,” Milian Rodríguez told the Cockburns, who were doing a documentary broadcast by the PBS Boston PBS station WGBH. “But the men who made the contact with me did. I was under indictment at the time. But a tremendous patriot like Félix Rodríguez, all of a sudden he finds his troops are running out of money, for food, for medicine, for supplies. I think for Félix it was something he did out of desperation. He was willing to get it from any source to continue his war.”
When Milian Rodríguez was finally arrested in 1985, the FBI seized his financial papers, including a spreadsheet of 1982 expenditures. The spreadsheet included a column titled “CIA,” and recorded $3.69 million in payouts. One vehicle used by Milian Rodríguez to funnel money to the Contras was an outfit already encountered in this chapter, the frozen shrimp company Ocean Hunter, based in Miami and wholly owned by the Costa Rican–based firm Frigorificos de Puntarenas, which enjoyed a State Department contract to provide humanitarian aid to the FDN.
The cocaine accountant says that he was moving about $200,000 a month through Ocean Hunter during this period. Milian Rodríguez says the motives of Medellín cartel leaders were simple enough. The Colombian drug lords would supply the money and in return get protection from the DEA and also safe passage for their cocaine into the burgeoning US market, including the Meneses/Blandón operations in San Francisco and Los Angeles.
The deal with the Medellín cartel, Milian says, was approved by the CIA and certainly proved to be a profitable one for the Colombians. They saw repeated DEA investigations squashed. The amount of cocaine flooding into the US surged. Between 1982 and 1985, according to the DEA, US cocaine imports increased by 50 percen,t and cocaine became the most profitable illicit drug on the US market. The DEA estimated that the overall profits from these imports amounted to $30 billion. The Medellín cartel alone racked up $10 billion a year in sales, prompting Forbes magazine to put two of its leaders – Pablo Escobar and Jorgé Ochoa – on its list of the world’s richest men in 1988. At the other end of the line from this affluence were the crackheads of South Central and other inner cities.
During the height of the Contra war, Time magazine agreed to send its reporter Lawrence Zuckerman to Central America to investigate the drug stories, and Zuckerman returned laden with documented accounts of Contra drug running. Time killed them all, and Zuckerman recalled being told by his editor, “Time is institutionally behind the Contras. If this story was about the Sandinistas and drugs you’d have no trouble getting it in the magazine.”
Sources
With the trail now more than a decade cold, it’s unlikely that Leslie Cockburn’s book Out of Control will be surpassed as a work of original investigation into Contra drug running. The hearing record from the Kerry committee is brimming with unsavory details about CIA complicity in the Contra drug trade and was an important source for this chapter. Jonathan Mars
hall and Peter Dale Scott’s Cocaine Politics is a richly documented overview of the relationship between drug traffickers and intelligence organizations throughout Latin America and was a book that we turned to often. Former DEA agent Celerino Castillo’s book, Powderburns, is a courageous and informative work. The section of this chapter on Castillo is based on that account and interviews with him.
The best history of Manuel Noriega’s tenure as the drug general of Panama is Kevin Buckley’s Panama: The Whole Story. Michael Isikoff’s reporting from Noriega’s trial is also a useful record, though one his former paper, the Washington Post, seems to have forgotten. Noriega’s own book is amusing and instructive. The treatment of Brian Barger and Robert Parry by their editors at the Associated Press is told in Mark Hertsgaard’s On Bended Knee. In a series of books, Peter Kornbluh and Tom Blanton of the National Security Archive have produced the best record of the US war on Nicaragua and have also done much to force into the open the secret history of that war, including Oliver North’s notebooks and incriminating e-mail traffic from Reagan’s National Security Council. Robert Parry also continues to uncover the darker aspects of the Reagan/Bush policy toward Central America in his newsletter The Consortium. Lawrence Walsh’s book Firewall is a riveting account of how difficult it was – even with a team of FBI agents, federal prosecutors and the power of subpoena – to get at the truth of the crimes committed during the Iran/Contra affair.
Adams, Lorraine. “North Didn’t Relay Drug Tips; DEA Says It Finds No Evidence Reagan Aide Talked to Agency.” Washington Post, Oct. 22, 1994.
Albert, Steve. The Case Against the General. Scribners, 1993.
Andreas, Peter. “Drug War Zone.” Nation, Dec. 11, 1989.