ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Wednesday, November 20, 1996 TAG: 9611200022
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-11 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: PETER KORNBLUH
WITH THE visit of CIA Director John M. Deutch to the community of Watts, Calif., last week, the controversy continues to swirl around allegations in the San Jose Mercury News linking CIA-backed Contras to Nicaraguan drug smugglers involved in the proliferation of crack in California. But the premise of those articles - that U.S. officials would actually tolerate the flow of drugs into the cities of America - is fully supported by available evidence.
Using the Freedom of Information Act, the National Security Archive obtained the declassification of thousands of pages of secret White House documents, including e-mail messages sent between various Reagan administration officials and Oliver North's handwritten notes on meetings and phone calls regarding the Contra war.
Those records revealed a sad and shocking truth: U.S. officials - White House, National Security Council and CIA - not only knew about and condoned drug smuggling during the Contra operations, but in some cases collaborated with, protected and even paid known dope traffickers who were deemed important players in the Reagan administration's obsessed covert effort to overthrow the Sandinista government in Nicaragua.
Former Reagan officials have denied this. When the issue came up during North's failed run for a Senate seat from Virginia, he called a news conference. North was joined by Duane Clarridge, the CIA official who ran the Contra operations from 1981 through mid-1984, and by former Attorney General Edwin W. Meese III.
North called it a ``cheap political trick to even suggest that I or anyone in the Reagan administration, in any way, shape or form, ever tolerated the trafficking of illegal substances.''
Clarridge said that it was a ``moral outrage'' to suggest that a Reagan administration official ``would have countenanced'' drug trafficking.
And Meese stated that no ``Reagan administration official would have ever looked the other way at such activity.''
A review of documentation, however, indicates that U.S. officials looked the other way and worse.
North's own diaries and internal memorandums to him from Contra contacts reveal explicit reports of drug trafficking:
* On April 1, 1985, North was informed by his liaison with the Contras, Robert Owen, that two of the commanders chosen by the National Democratic Front (FDN) to run the southern front in Costa Rica were probably, or definitively ``involved with drug running.''
* On July 12, 1985, North was informed that the Contras were considering the purchase of arms from a supplier in Honduras. The $14 million that the supplier had used to finance the guns ``came from drugs.''
* On Aug. 9, 1985, North was informed that one of the resupply planes being used by Maria Calero, the brother of the head of the FDN, the largest Contra group, was ``probably being used for drug runs into the U.S.''
* On Feb. 10, 1986, Owen informed North that a plane being used to run materials to the Contras was previously used to run drugs, and that the CIA had chosen a company whose officials had a criminal record. The company, Vortex Aviation, was run by Michael Palmer, one of the biggest marijuana smugglers in U.S. history, who was under indictment for 10 years of trafficking in Detroit at the same time he was receiving more than $300,000 in U.S. funds from a State Department contract to ferry ``humanitarian'' aid to the Contras.
In not one of these cases is there any record of North passing this important information on to proper law-enforcement officials.
Not passing along intelligence on Contra-related drug smuggling was one way of protecting the personnel needed in the covert war. In other cases, U.S. officials sought to interfere in the process of justice.
The case of Gen. Jose Bueso Rosa demonstrates the lengths to which high White House and CIA officials were willing to go to protect an individual who fit the classic definition of a ``narco-terrorist.''
Bueso was involved in a conspiracy to import 345 kilos of cocaine into Florida - with a street value of $40 million. Part of the proceeds were to be used to finance the assassination of the president of Honduras.
But because this general had been the CIA's and the Pentagon's key liaison in Honduras in the covert war against Nicaragua, North, Clarridge, and others in the Reagan administration sought leniency for him.
As North put it in an e-mail message, U.S. officials would ``cabal quietly to look at options: pardon, clemency, deportation, reduced sentence.''
The objective of our national security managers was to avoid bringing the weight of the law down on the general in order to keep ``Bueso from spilling the beans.''
In the end, the general served less than five years in a white-collar ``Club Fed'' prison in Florida.
It is the documentation on U.S. relations with another Latin American general, Manuel Noriega in Panama, that most clearly demonstrates the shameless attitude of the highest U.S. national security officials toward major drug smuggling into U.S. cities. Noriega is serving 40 years in prison for narcotics trafficking. Lest we forget, his involvement with Colombia's Medellin cartel was so significant that President Bush ordered the U.S. military to invade Panama to arrest him, at the cost of 24 American lives, about 1,000 Panamanian lives and hundreds of millions of dollars in damage.
The 1989 invasion of Panama was code-named Operation Just Cause. But in 1986, when U.S. officials had the same evidence of Noriega's career as the cartel's man in Panama, the Reagan administration appeared to have another kind of ``Just Cause'' with Noriega.
Shortly after The New York Times published a front-page story titled ``Panama Strongman Said to Trade in Drugs, Arms and Illicit Money,'' Noriega contacted North with a quid pro quo proposal: Help him ``clean up his image'' and he would have his covert agents undertake major sabotage operations against economic targets inside Nicaragua.
Instead of telling Noriega that he should rot in jail, North, according to his own notes and e-mail, supported the proposal. Indeed, North even wanted to pay Noriega $1 million in money diverted from the sale of arms to Iran to carry out these sabotage operations.
In one of the most striking, and candid, electronic mail messages ever written inside the White House, North wrote to his superior - national security adviser John Poindexter - and said: ``You will recall that over the years Manuel Noriega and I have developed a fairly good relationship The proposal sounds good to me, and I believe we could make the appropriate arrangements.''
And Poindexter authorized North to fly to London to meet secretly with Noriega and work out the details on U.S. help to ``clean up his image'' and collaboration in the covert war. As Poindexter declared in his electronic response: ``I have nothing against Noriega other than his illegal activities.''
This is but some of the documented evidence of the attitudes and actions of high U.S. officials toward narcotics trafficking and traffickers during the covert war against Nicaragua. While these records do not address the issue of who knew what, when, in the advent of crack cocaine in California, they do demonstrate a shocking pattern of government behavior when it came to protecting American citizens from a real national security threat: the scourge of drugs.
This is a scandal. And it is a scandal that demands a full accounting.
Peter Kornbluh is a senior analyst at the National Security Archive. He wrote this for The Baltimore Sun.
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