Contra-Crack Guide: Reading Between the Lines

Contra-Crack Guide: Reading Between the Lines

Date sent:        Wed, 14 Jan 1998 18:30:37 -0800 (PST)
From:             Tom Burghardt <tburghardt@igc.apc.org>
Subject:          Contra-Crack Guide: Reading Between the Lines

                       * THE CONSORTIUM *
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- Volume 3, No. 1 (Issue 53) - January 5, 1998 -

-----
_________________________________________________________________

CONTRA-CRACK GUIDE: READING BETWEEN THE LINES
_________________________________________________________________

By Jerry Meldon

A year ago, the Big Media cast out the issue of the CIA and
contra crack from the realm of respectable debate. In lengthy
front-page articles, The Washington Post, New York Times and Los
Angeles Times deemed an investigative series by Gary Webb of the
San Jose Mercury News flawed and simplistic. The papers claimed
victory when Webb's editor Jerry Ceppos agreed that the original
series wasn't perfect.

Now, the other shoe is falling. The inspectors general of
the CIA and the Justice Department are completing investigations
that will clear the CIA and the Justice Department of wrongdoing.
The results of those investigations were leaked out in mid-
December, but scheduled releases of the actual reports were
postponed. The delays meant that the supposed findings could get
major media play without any examination of the underlying facts.

According to the Justice Department, Attorney General Janet
Reno requested a delay in that report's release for "law-
enforcement reasons." Department officials would not specify what
those reasons were, but apparently there is fear that the report
contains information that might jeopardize an ongoing federal
criminal case.

A broader CIA investigation into the question of Nicaraguan
contra connections to the drug trade -- outside CIA control --
continues. But it is unclear how much information the spy agency
will divulge, especially given the mainstream media's eagerness
to put the issue to rest.

Those, like Webb, who challenged the official orthodoxy on
the CIA's innocence have paid dearly. Webb was pushed into
resigning his job, a purge made official with an announcement by
the Mercury News on Dec. 12. Reached at his home in California,
Webb said he is working on a book about his experiences.

Still, the new government reports whenever issued seem
likely to pour just one more layer of cover-up on top of an
already thick foundation. Over the past half century, the federal
government -- and the Washington news media -- have never
accepted what appears as obvious fact to many outsiders: that CIA
covert actions and drug trafficking go together like horse and
carriage, like hand and glove, like Tweedle-Dum and Tweedle-Dee.

DRUG TRAILS

You might use this article as a guide for reading between
the lines of whatever official words are uttered in the new
government reports and press stories that follow.

The first test will be whether the new government reports
face up to the seamy history. In particular, look for any
reference to two heroin-stained covert operations: in Indochina
in the 1960s and '70s and in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Both were
well documented by Alfred McCoy in his landmark book, The
Politics of Heroin.

The second point of reference will be how the reports
finesse the overwhelming evidence of Nicaraguan contra-connected
cocaine trafficking. This unsavory reality was documented ad
nauseam in "Drugs, Law Enforcement and Foreign Policy," a 1989
Senate Foreign Relations report based on hearings chaired by Sen.
John Kerry, D-Mass.

The new reports also might have some difficulty explaining
past admissions by frank senior government officials. Gen. Paul
F. Gorman, head of the U.S. Southern Command, acknowledged in
1984 that "substantial evidence links drugs, money and arms
networks in Central America. The fact is, if you want to go into
the subversion business, collect intelligence, and move arms, you
deal with drug movers."

Gorman knew what he was talking about, situated as he was in
Panama City, next door to Gen. Manuel Noriega, who had been
recruited by CIA director William J. Casey and Lt. Col. Oliver L.
North to help the contras. Noriega, of course, is now
incarcerated in federal prison for drug trafficking.

While Noriega helped the contras from the south, the
Honduran military and other drug-connected friends pitched in
from the north. One was Juan Ramon Matta Ballesteros, whose rap
sheet dates back at least to 1970 when he was arrested at Dulles
Airport on drug-related charges and was sentenced to five years
in prison. Matta escaped before spending a year behind bars.

By 1975, Matta had linked Mexican and Colombian traffickers,
giving a major boost to the fledgling cocaine industry. Three
years later, Matta financed a coup d'etat by the military in his
native Honduras, a putsch that transformed the banana republic
into a transit point for northbound white powder.

By 1983, Matta had been identified in a U.S. Customs report
as a Class I DEA violator. He also was linked by the DEA to an
airline with the acronym, SETCO, that was run by "American
businessmen dealing with Matta [and] smuggling narcotics into the
United States."

Despite such lineage, SETCO was hired as "the principal
company used by the contras in Honduras to transport supplies and
personnel ... from 1983 to 1985," according to the Senate Foreign
Relations report. Then, despite Matta's tie to the 1985 murder of
star DEA agent Enrique Camarena in Guadalajara, Mexico, the State
Department in 1986 renewed SETCO's contract to supply the
contras.

Matta is now serving dual life sentences for murder and
narcotics trafficking. You might look his name up in the indexes
to the new government contra-cocaine reports. [For more details
from a non-government source, see Cocaine Politics by Peter Dale
Scott and Jonathan Marshall.]

NARCO-TERRORISTS

Another name worth checking out is that of Syrian-born
Manzer Al-Kassar, who boasts a similar drug resume -- and a
relationship with the U.S. government.

Reader's Digest reported in 1986 that Al-Kassar had supplied
arms and explosives "for terrorist operations in France, Spain
and Holland" and sold "silencer-equipped assassination pistols,
rockets and other weapons" to Libya, Iran, South Yemen and
Lebanon." The article also linked Al-Kassar to heroin deals
involving up to 100 kilos (220 pounds). Two years earlier, the
DEA had classified Al-Kassar as a major drug trafficker.

Yet, when the Reagan administration's Iran-contra operations
were exposed in 1986, the ledgers of Oliver North's "Enterprise"
revealed that it had paid $1.5 million for contra arms shipments
to the same Manzer Al-Kassar. See how that is explained.

Then, there's the more recent case of former Venezuelan Gen.
Ramon Guillen Davila. A year ago, Guillen was indicted on charges
of shipping up to 22 tons of cocaine to the United States between
1987 and 1991. According to the Miami Herald, Guillen was the
CIA's most trusted man in Venezuela and the senior official
collaborating with the CIA on narcotics control.

Guillen claims the CIA knew all along what he was doing. To
date he has successfully resisted extradition, but an accomplice,
Adolfo Romero Gomez, was convicted in Miami last October on
cocaine trafficking charges. A key witness testified that he
overheard Romero and Guillen discussing deals with the Cali
cartel.

You might check, too, to see how the new reports deal with
DEA agents who tried to blow the whistle during the 1980s. Just
as the contra-connected drug trade was heating up, the Reagan
administration closed the DEA office in Honduras. But from
Guatemala City, DEA agent Celerino Castillo III began
investigating reports of illegal drug activity at the Ilopango
air base in El Salvador, the home of North's contra resupply
operation.

As Castillo describes in his autobiography, Powder Burns,
his reports on the drug trafficking of contra suppliers were
initially ignored. Later, they were criticized for grammatical
errors. Then, he was told to stay away from El Salvador and
threatened with charges of improper conduct. Finally, after
receiving threats against his family, he quit.

Another curiosity -- given the CIA's 50 years of covert
activities, often side by side with drug traffickers -- is the
absence of a single publicly known criminal charge against a CIA
officer for succumbing to the temptation to accept a bribe or to
abuse the job's secrecy by aiding and abetting a drug shipment.

Perhaps, the new government reports -- whenever the American
citizenry is allowed to peruse them -- will explain how the CIA
found and recruited individuals of such exemplary character.

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