American Conspiracies

by Jesse Ventura

  CHAPTER TEN

  YOUR GOVERNMENT DEALING DRUGS

  THE INCIDENT: The Iran-Contra scandal of 1986-88 involved members of the Reagan administration breaking an arms embargo and selling weapons to Iran, in order to secure the release of six U.S. hostages and to fund the Nicaraguan Contras.

  THE OFFICIAL WORD: Fourteen administration officials were charged with crimes, and eleven were convicted. Reagan eventually admitted “trading arms for hostages.”

  MY TAKE: Congress covered up the fact that illegal drug deals were at the heart of the Iran-Contra story, just as the CIA has been deeply involved in drug trafficking for decades. It’s a situation that continues today in Mexico and Afghanistan, and the reality is that our economy is secretly deeply embedded in the global drug trade.

  “But what’s important in this whole thing is that our policy has always been consistent . . .”

  —Oliver North, interviewed on Frontline: The Drug Wars, PBS

  One of the reasons I’m writing this book is because our country has such a short-term memory. How many of us recall that, as far back as 1972, a report of the National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse recommended that possession of pot for personal use be decriminalized? And that was when Nixon was president! Later on, Jimmy Carter called for getting rid of penalties for small-time possession, but Congress stonewalled him. Since then, we’ve had another president (Clinton) who claimed he didn’t inhale and our latest (Obama) admitting he took some tokes back in the day. Federal law still considers marijuana a dangerous illegal drug, although fourteen states have now enacted laws allowing for some use for medical purposes.

  Let me cite a few statistics that I find mind-boggling. According to NORML, an advocacy group for legalizing marijuana, more than 700,000 of America’s estimated 20 million pot-smokers got arrested in 2008. About half of the 200,000 inmates in our federal prisons are in there for drug-related offenses. Between 1970 and 2007, we saw a 547 percent increase in our prison population, mainly because of our drug policies. Of course, that’s just fine with the new prison-industrial complex, where corporations are now running the show. We as taxpayers shell out $68 billion every year for prisons, and a lot of that ends up going into private contractors’ pockets!1

  Of course, they’re not the only ones getting rich. Well-documented reports by Congress and the Treasury Department lead to the conclusion that American banks are “collectively the world’s largest financial beneficiary of the drug trade.” Not including real estate transfers, there’s an estimated inflow of $250 billion a year coming into the country’s banks—which I suppose is welcomed by some as offsetting our $300-billion trade deficit.2

  We’ll talk more about banks several times in this chapter, but I want to start with some history on our government’s involvement with drug traffic. You want to talk hypocrisy? This sordid saga takes the cake. We started using drug lords like Lucky Luciano to help fight the Communists back during World War II. The OSS, predecessor to the CIA, had the Sicilian Mafia and the Corsican gangsters in Marseilles working with them, which enabled their “key role in the growth of Europe’s post war heroin traffic ... which provided most of the heroin smuggled into the United States over the next two decades.”3

  The heroin epidemic that ravaged our cities during the fifties and sixties basically originated with the CIA out of Southeast Asia. Almost from the moment of their founding in 1947, the CIA was giving covert support to organized drug traffickers in Europe and the Far East, and eventually the Middle East and Latin America. During the Vietnam War—hold onto your hats!—heroin was being smuggled into this country in the bodies of soldiers being flown home, coded ahead of time so they could be identified at various Air Force bases and the drugs removed.4

  Toward the end of American involvement over there in 1975, a former Green Beret named Michael Hand arranged a 500-pound shipment of heroin from Southeast Asia’s “Golden Triangle” to the U.S. by way of Australia. That’s where Hand had set up shop as vice chair of the Nugan Hand Bank, which was linked by the Australian Narcotics Bureau to a drug smuggling network that “exported some $3 billion [Aust.] worth of heroin from Bangkok prior to June 1976.” Several CIA guys who later came up in the Iran-Contra affair (Ted Shackley, Ray Clines, and Edwin Wilson) used the Nugan Hand bank to channel funds for covert operations. By 1979, the bank had 22 branches in 13 countries and $1 billion in annual business. The next year, chairman Frank Nugan was found shot dead in his Mercedes, a hundred miles from Sydney, and the bank soon collapsed.5 Two official investigations by Australia uncovered its financing of major drug dealers and the laundering of their profits, while collecting an impressive list of “ex”-CIA officers.

  After the CIA’s involvement with the Southeast Asian drug trade had been partly disclosed in the mid-1970s, and the U.S. left Vietnam to its fate, the Agency started distancing itself from its “assets.” But that only left the door open to go elsewhere. Which the Reagan Administration did big-time, to fund its secret war in Nicaragua. The 1979 Sandinista revolution that overthrew Anastasio Somoza, one of our favorite Latin dictators, was not looked upon fondly by Ronnie and his friends. He called the counterrevolutionary Contras “freedom fighters,” and compared them to America’s founding fathers. In his attempt to get Congress to approve aid for the Contras, Reagan accused the Sandinista government of drug trafficking. Of course, Nancy Reagan had launched her “Just say no” campaign at the time, but I guess she hadn’t given the word to her husband. After his administration tried to mine the Nicaraguan harbors and got a handslap from Congress, it turned to secretly selling missiles to Iran and using the payments—along with profits from running drugs—to keep right on funding the Contras. Fifty thousand lost lives later, the World Court would order the U.S. to “cease and to refrain” from unlawful use of force against Nicaragua and pay reparations.6 (We refused to comply.)

  The fact is, with most of the cocaine that flooded the country in the Eighties, almost every major drug network was using the Contra operation in some fashion. Colombia’s Medellin cartel began quietly collaborating with the Contras soon after Reagan took office. Then, in 1982, CIA Director Casey negotiated a little Memorandum of Understanding with the attorney general, William French Smith. Basically what this did was give the CIA legal clearance to work with known drug traffickers without being required to report it, so long as they weren’t official employees but only “assets.”7 This didn’t come out until 1998, when CIA Inspector General Frederick Hitz issued a report that implicated more than 50 Contra and related entities in the drug trade. And the CIA knew all about it. The trafficking and money laundering tracked right into the National Security Council, where Oliver North was overseeing the Contras’ war.8

  Here’s what was going on behind the scenes: In the mid-1980s, North got together with four companies that were owned and operated by drug dealers, and arranged payments from the State Department for shipping supplies to the Contras. Michael Levine, an undercover agent for the DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration), later said that “running a covert operation in collaboration with a drug cartel ... [is] what I call treason.” The top DEA agent in El Salvador, Celerino Castillo III, said he saw “very large quantities of cocaine and millions of dollars” being run out of hangars at Ilopango air base, which was controlled by North and CIA operative Felix Rodriguez (he’d been placed in El Salvador by Vice President Bush’s office, as a direct overseer of North’s operations). The cocaine was being trans shipped from Costa Rica through El Salvador and on into the U.S. But when Castillo tried to raise this with his superiors, he ran into nothing but obstacles.9

  Early in 1985, two Associated Press reporters started hearing from officials in D.C. about all this. A year later, after a lot of stonewalling by the editors, the AP did run Robert Parry and Brian Barger’s story on an FBI probe into cocaine trafficking by the Contras. This led the Reagan Administration to put out a three-page report admitting that there’d been some such shenanigans when the Contras were “particu
larly hard pressed for financial support” after Congress voted to cut off American aid. There was “evidence of a limited number of incidents.”10 Uh huh. It would be awhile yet before an Oliver North note surfaced from July 12, 1985, about a Contra arms warehouse in Honduras: “Fourteen million to finance came from drugs.”11

  Also in 1986, an FBI informant inside the Medellin cartel, Wanda Palacio, testified that she’d seen the organization run by Jorge Ochoa loading cocaine onto aircraft that belonged to Southern Air Transport, a company that used to be owned by the CIA and was flying supplies to the Contras. There was strong corroboration for her story, but somehow the Justice Department rejected it as inconclusive.12 Senator John Kerry started looking into all this and said at one closed-door committee meeting: “It is clear that there is a network of drug trafficking through the Contras. ... We can produce specific law enforcement officials who will tell you that they have been called off drug trafficking investigations because the CIA is involved or because it would threaten national security.”13

  All this, remember, while we’re spending millions supposedly fighting the “war on drugs,” a phrase first coined by Nixon in 1969. If you want the ultimate double standard, here’s what was happening simultaneously in ’86. After Len Bias, a basketball star at the University of Maryland, died of a supposed cocaine overdose (even though the coroner found no link between his sniffing some coke and the heart failure), Congress proceeded to pass the Anti-Drug Abuse Act. Up until this time, through the entire history of America, there had been only 56 mandatory minimum sentences established. Now, overnight, there were 29 more. Even for minor possession cases, you couldn’t get parole. They established a 100-to-1 sentencing ratio for cheap crack cocaine (used more by African-Americans) over the powder variety (favored by Hollywood types).14 This was at the same time we were knowingly allowing crack to be run into this country as part of financing the Contras—but we’ll get to that in a moment.

  What became known as the Iran-Contra affair came to light in November 1986. We were selling arms to Iran, breaking an arms embargo, in order to fund the contras. Fourteen Reagan Administration officials got charged with crimes and eleven were convicted, including Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger. Of course, Poppa Bush pardoned them all after he got elected president. And do you think a word about drug-running came up in the televised House committee hearings that made Ollie North a household name? Fuhgedaboutit.

  The thousand-page report issued by Senator Kerry about his committee’s findings did discuss how the State Department had paid more than $800,000 to known traffickers to take “humanitarian assistance” to the Contras.15 The New York Times then set out to trash Kerry in a three-part series, including belittling him for relying on the testimony of imprisoned (drug-running) pilots.16 The Washington Post published a short article heavy on criticisms against Kerry by the Republicans. Newsweek called him “a randy conspiracy buff.” (Wonder what they were snorting.)

  But are we surprised? In 1987, the House Narcotics Committee had concluded there should be more investigation into the Contra-drug allegations. What was the Washington Post’s headline?: “Hill Panel Finds No Evidence Linking Contras to Drug Smuggling.” The paper wouldn’t even run Chairman Charles Rangel’s letter of correction! That same year, a Time correspondent had an article on this subject blocked and a senior editor privately tell him: “Time is institutionally behind the Contras. If this story were about the Sandinistas and drugs, you’d have no trouble getting it in the magazine.”17

  The list of government skullduggery goes on, and it’s mind-boggling. Remember when Poppa Bush ordered our military to invade Panama back in 1990? The stated reason was that its leader, Colonel Manuel Noriega, had been violating our laws by permitting drugs to be run through his country. In fact, Noriega had been “one of ours” for a long time. After Noriega was brought to the U.S. and convicted by a federal jury in Miami and sentenced to 40 years, filmmaker Oliver Stone went to see him in prison. There Noriega talked freely about having spied on Castro for the U.S., giving covert aid to the Contras, and visiting with Oliver North.18 Noriega and Bush Sr. went way back, to when Bush headed the CIA in 1976. The brief prepared by Noriega’s defense team was heavily censored, but it did reveal significant contact with Bush over a 15-year period. In fact, Bush had headed up a special anti-drug effort as vice president called the South Florida Task Force, which happened to coincide with when quite a few cargoes of cocaine and marijuana came through Florida as part of the Contra-support network. So why did we finally go after Noriega? Some said it’s because he knew too much and was demanding too big a cut for his role in the Agency’s drug-dealing.19

  I can’t exempt Bill Clinton from possible knowledge about some of this. A little airport in Mena, Arkansas, happened to have been a center for international drug smuggling between 1981 and 1985. That’s when Clinton was governor of the state. Barry Seal, who had ties to the CIA and was an undercover informant for the DEA, kept his plane at Mena and “smuggled between $3 billion and $5 billion of drugs into the U.S.”20 Seal was also part of the Reagan administration’s effort to implicate the Sandinistas in the drug traffic, though he was actually smuggling weapons to the Contras. He ended up brutally murdered by his former employers with Colombia’s Medellin cartel, in Baton Rouge, on February 19, 1986. Among the articles found in Seal’s car were then-Vice President Bush’s private phone number.

  Clinton said he learned about Mena after that, in April 1988, even though the state police had been investigating the goings-on there for several years. In September 1991, he spoke publicly about “all kinds of questions about whether he [Seal] had any links to the C.I.A ... and if that backed into the Iran-Contra deal.” But Seal’s contraband in Mena generated hundreds of millions that needed to be money-laundered, and his papers show that he dealt with at least one big Little Rock bank. Several inquiries into Mena were stifled, and IRS agent Bill Duncan told Congress in 1992—during the Clinton presidential campaign—that his superiors directed him to “withhold information from Congress and perjure myself.”21 Looks like Clinton may have been tainted by the Iran-Contra madness himself.

  Okay, the Reagan-Bush gang is gone, and Clinton is now president. It’s 1996 when the San Jose Mercury News comes out with a remarkable 20,000-word series by reporter Gary Webb that he’d been researching for more than a year. It described a pipeline between Colombian cartels, middlemen, and street gangs in South Central L.A. that involved tons of crack cocaine. Webb’s article featured Oscar Danilo Blandón, a drug importer and informant who’d testified in federal court that “whatever we were running in L.A., the profit was going to the Contra revolution.” Blandón also said that Colonel Enrique Bermudez, the CIA asset leading the Contra army against the Sandinista government, was aware that these funds came from drug running. Except the CIA had squelched a federal investigation into Blandón in the name of “national security.” The crack was being funneled to a young new-millionaire named “Freeway” Ricky Donnell Ross, who supplied it to the Crips and Bloods and beyond. When Ross got nailed and went to trial in 1996, the prosecutors obtained a court order to prevent the defense from questioning Blandón about his CIA connections. All of which raised a huge question: how involved was the CIA in the crack epidemic then raging across our country?22

  Well, you’d think Gary Webb should have gotten a Pulitzer. Instead, he got torn apart by the big media. In page-one articles, the Washington Post, New York Times, and L.A. Times insisted that Contra-cocaine smuggling was minor, and that Webb was blowing it all out of proportion. They made it look like Webb was targeting the poor CIA, when he’d never said that the CIA, per se, was arranging the drug deals, only that it was protecting the Contra dealers.

  In 2009, a new book came out that makes my blood boil. It’s called This Is Your Country on Drugs, and among other revelations, it tells of how the Washington Post “had facts at its disposal demonstrating that the [Webb] story was accurate,” except they ended up on the editing-room floor. Th
at’s because National Security correspondent Walter Pincus made sure they would. Pincus, it turns out, had “flirted with joining the CIA and is routinely accused of having been an undercover asset in the ’50s,” a charge the journalist once called “overblown.”23

  Here’s another example of the media’s role in the cover-up: the L.A. Times, two years earlier, had profiled “Freeway” Ricky as South Central’s first millionaire crack dealer. But, two months after Webb’s series tied Ross into the Contra network, the Times turned to a whole new slant. Ross, the paper said, was but one of a number of “interchangeable characters.”24

  So Gary Webb was basically drummed out of journalism by his “brethren” at the larger papers. Who gives our media these mandates to arbitrarily destroy someone’s credibility, blackball them because they’ve written something controversial? I guess people forget the simplicity of the First Amendment—it’s there to protect unpopular speech. Because popular speech doesn’t need protecting.

  In 2004, Gary Webb’s body was found and it was ruled a suicide. I call this a tragedy that should weigh heavily on the consciences of those who intentionally destroyed his reputation. Or maybe it was actually murder: Webb was shot twice in the head with a vintage revolver—meaning he would have had to have cocked the hammer of the revolver back after being shot in the head at point-blank range with a .38.