
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, May 23, 1994                   TAG: 9405240011
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-4   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

NORTH'S PAST STILL RAISES QUESTIONS

OLIVER NORTH is understandably uncomfortable with questions about his role in aiding Nicaraguan rebels during the mid-'80s in violation of a congressional ban on such aid. That's the past, he says. His campaign for the U.S. Senate is today.

But were it not for his notoriety arising from the Iran-Contra scandal, would he be a statewide candidate today? Were it not for North's violations of the law, his boasting about them - and government efforts to hold him accountable for them - would most Virginians even know his name?

Iran-Contra is an appropriate issue in the Senate campaign for a host of reasons, not the least of which is the emergence of new questions since North's 1987 Senate testimony brought him such fame and opportunity.

Here are a couple of questions:

No. 1: Why did a U.S. drug agent say last year that the North-coordinated covert operation, which supplied arms to the Contras, also smuggled narcotics into the United States to help finance the war against the Nicaraguan government?

Celerino Castillo, a former Drug Enforcement Administration agent who was based in Central America, stated on the record that an investigation he conducted during the 1980s revealed that North and the CIA operated two hangars from an Air Force Base in El Salvador. He said airplanes operating from those hangars delivered drugs to the United States and carried cash back to finance the supply efforts for the Contras.

Castillo recalls that when he reported this activity, he met with silence and resistance from the CIA and other federal officials. After years of frustration and alleged harassment, the former Vietnam infantry sergeant and head of DEA operations in Guatemala and El Salvador retired from government service in 1992.

In an interview published last year, Castillo recounted the following conversation with Edwin Corr, then the U.S. ambassador to El Salvador: ``I reported it to the ambassador: `There's Contras running dope.' Corr said it's a White House operation, I should stay out of it.''

The news story quoted a senior U.S. customs agent, Richard Rivera, who helped in Castillo's DEA investigation. ``I believe,'' said Rivera, ``that there [were] airplanes going in ... loaded with cocaine, headed to the U.S. and the Bahamas, and there [were] airplanes coming back loaded with money."

Question No. 2: What did North know about John Hull's activities during the 1980s?

Hull was a shadowy character who worked closely with North as part of the National Security Council staffer's Contra supply operation. In those years, Hull owned 5,000 acres in Costa Rica along the Nicaraguan border where, according to congressional testimony, he operated six airstrips. (The American pilot Eugene Hasenfuss took off from one of these airstrips before his Contra-supply plane was shot down over Nicaragua.)

In 1989, two years after North's grandstanding appearance before the Senate, Hull was indicted by Costa Rica for cocaine trafficking. North himself was not indicted, but he was named in the indictment. U.S. authorities subsequently ignored Costa Rica's 1991 request for extradition of Hull for ``hostile acts, international trafficking of narcotics, premeditated murder and attempted premeditated murder.'' Does North know anything about this?

Allegations that North may have worked with drug traffickers to help supply the Contras have come from serious sources, but they remain unproven - to say the least. They're also old news. Even so, delegates to the upcoming GOP convention and other Virginians deserve to know that such questions still swirl around the man who would represent us in the U.S. Senate.

Keywords:
POLITICS

by CNB