THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, October 22, 1994 TAG: 9410220303
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY WARREN FISKE, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 242 lines
For years, Oliver L. North has dismissed allegations that anti-communist Contra insurgents helped support their Nicaraguan war effort by smuggling drugs into the United States.
``Very little in my life has angered me as much as the allegations that I or anyone else involved with the resistance had a drug connection,'' he wrote in his autobiography, ``Under Fire.''
But as the Republican mounts a law-and-order campaign for the U.S. Senate, and mocks Democratic incumbent Charles S. Robb for associating with drug figures a decade ago, evidence suggests that North was aware of drug connections on the part of his own associates in the 1980s.
And just what he did about that is a matter of open debate.
In his distinctive left-handed scrawl, North jotted down a series of notes in the mid-1980s that indicate knowledge of possible drug-running into the United States while directing the White House's covert program to arm the Contras.
On July 9, 1984, North wrote in his notebook that Contra leader Federico Vaughan ``wanted aircraft to go to Bolivia to pick up paste, want aircraft to pick up 1,500 kilos.''
On Aug. 9, 1985, North noted: ``DC-6 which is being used for runs (to supply the Contras) out of New Orleans is probably being used for drug runs into the U.S.''
On July 12, 1985, North wrote: ``$14 million to finance Supermarket came from drugs.'' The Supermarket was a warehouse in Honduras where weapons dealers stored arms that Contras purchased.
Elliot Abrams, assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs in the mid-1980s, says the notes were North's way of keeping track of rumors so that bad apples could be purged from the Contra supply effort.
But Abrams will not go as far as North's blanket statement that drug-running never touched the operation. ``I'm not going to say it never happened, but we made efforts to cut it off,'' Abrams said in a recent interview.
North declined to be interviewed for this story. Rather than answer a series of written questions requested by his campaign, North released a terse statement denouncing any suggestion that he tolerated drug trafficking as a ``moral outrage and a cheap political dirty trick by desperate opponents.''
But North's handwritten notes are not the only evidence that seem to contradict his claim. CIA officials, a bipartisan Senate investigative committee and many Contra leaders have acknowledged that drug-running into the United States was rampant during the rebel supply effort of the mid-1980s.
There is no evidence that North encouraged the smuggling or profited from it. But a number of federal investigators who probed the allegations say they personally concluded that North knew about the drug-running and turned his back on it so as not to undermine the anti-communist war effort in Nicaragua.
``North had to know about it; I'm unshakable about this,'' said Jack Blum, the lead investigator of a late 1980s probe by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. ``He viewed the drug problem as something secondary to his mission. He believed he was on a mission from God to stamp out communism.''
Blum, today a Washington, D.C., lawyer, said he was aghast when he saw a North TV ad last week that asked: ``Why can't Chuck Robb tell the truth about the cocaine parties where Robb said he never saw drugs and then four of his friends went to prison for dealing cocaine?''
The ad refers to parties Robb attended in Virginia Beach when he was governor from 1982 to 1986 at which cocaine reportedly was used. Robb has replied with virtually the same defense North uses - that he was unaware others around him were involved with the narcotic.
``How hypocritical,'' Blum said of North. ``That's why, when I watch that commercial and see the self-righteousness, there has to be a complete disconnect with history.''
Contrary to North's denials, a review of thousands of pages of testimony and documents from congressional panels investigating Iran-Contra and Central American drug trafficking make a strong case that cocaine was, in fact, a staple of support for the Contras.
``I'm not proud of it, but we didn't have any choice,'' Contra leader Octaviano Cesar told the Senate Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics and International Operations in April 1988. ``I mean, the U.S. Congress didn't give us any choice,'' he said, referring to passage of the Boland Amendment in late 1984 that cut off official U.S. funding to the insurgents.
Several convicted drug smugglers told the subcommittee of a ``guns down, drugs up'' operation in which weapons were flown covertly from the United States to Costa Rican airfields. The planes, they said, would then be loaded with cocaine for the return trip to the U.S.
The subcommittee - headed by Sen. John F. Kerry, D-Mass. - concluded in December 1988: ``It is clear that individuals who provided the support for the Contras were involved in drug trafficking, the supply network of the Contras was used by drug trafficking connections, and elements of the Contras themselves knowingly received financial and material assistance from drug traffickers.''
The chief of the CIA Central American Task Force drew a similar conclusion in 1987 testimony to Congress: ``With respect to (drug trafficking by) the resistance . . . it is not a couple of people,'' he said. ``It is a lot of people.''
The State Department, in a 1986 report to Congress, also gave credence to allegations of Contra drug running, although it suggested that the effort was not widespread. ``The available evidence points to involvement with drug traffickers by a limited number of persons having various kinds of affiliations with, or political sympathies for, the resistance groups.''
None of the reports assessed whether North was aware of the operations or took steps to stop them.
Celerino Castillo III, a former federal Drug Enforcement Administration agent who was stationed in Central America in the mid-1980s and recently wrote a book recounting his experiences, does not hesitate to point the finger at North.
``He's going to have to be held responsible for what's going on in the streets of America today because a lot of cocaine was flown in,'' Castillo said in an interview. ``He can't look me in the eye and say people didn't die because of activities he turned his back to.''
A DEA agent from 1979 to 1992, Castillo said he submitted several reports to his superiors questioning North's operation. But the DEA, in a formal statement, said that ``no evidence has been found to support the allegations'' made by Castillo.
North's possible knowledge of drug activities has never been investigated by Congress. And Lawrence Walsh, the special prosecutor in the Iran-Contra affair, asserts that his probe was limited to abuse of governmental power and that allegations of drug activity were outside the scope of his authority. This despite persistent claims by North that if there were any drug connections Walsh would have found them.
But members of the congressional Iran-Contra committee did question North about the cryptic entries in his notebook during a closed-door session held July 9, 1987. According to a since-declassified transcript of the session, North testified that he had no knowledge of drug money being used for the Contras.
Explaining his notebook references, North said he was merely jotting down ``allegations'' he had heard and, in most cases, turned the information over to the DEA or the CIA.
Asked if DEA files contain information from North about possible Contra drug running, agency spokesman John Hughes recently said: ``Not to my knowledge.''
Abrams, the former assistant secretary of state, said North routinely passed rumors of drug trafficking to the CIA and the State Department and that most were deemed to be groundless.
``If we heard rumors that someone was involved in drugs, we cut them out, sometimes unfairly, because we knew what damage it would do'' to efforts to win public support for the resistance, Abrams said.
For example, he said, the U.S. refused to funnel covert arms shipments to the $14 million Honduran Supermarket mentioned in North's notes ``because of rumors they were involved in drugs.''
``When you're trying to do what we were trying to, have a guerrilla war, you run into a lot of strange people,'' Abrams added. Some are gunrunners, some are soldiers of fortune, some are drug smugglers and some are patriots. It's very hard to keep the good guys in and the bad guys out. . . . Ollie did his best.''
Records indicate that in at least one instance, however, North actively promoted the use of drug money to arm the Contras. And as a result, he may have exposed and destroyed a promising U.S. sting operation against the late Pablo Escobar, the longtime leader of the Colombian drug cartel, according to the testimony of two DEA officials before the House Judiciary Committee on Crime in 1988.
The officials said that in 1984 they briefed North, a member of the National Security Council, on preliminary evidence the DEA had linking the drug cartel with Nicaragua's Sandinista government.
DEA officials Dave Westrate and Ron Caffrey told the subcommittee that North asked if he could release the information to newspapers. North, they said, noted that a key Contra aid vote was pending in the House of Representatives and that information linking the Sandinistas with drugs might sway sentiment in favor of the Contra rebels.
When Caffrey warned that a leak might destroy the Escobar sting operation, North came up with another idea. According to testimony, North pointed out that an undercover informant for the DEA was scheduled to fly into Nicaragua to deliver $1.5 million in drug profits to cartel kingpins. North proposed that instead, the money be turned over to the Contras - a move the DEA rejected.
On July 17, 1984, shortly before the House Contra vote, the Washington Times ran a front-page story about the DEA sting operation that was attributed to unidentified government officials. The leak destroyed the operation. North denied being the source of the story. But Frank Monastero, former DEA chief of operations, told the subcommittee: ``I don't accept that statement'' because it is ``a standard way to cover your tracks.''
There was one other casualty: Barry Seal, a one-time drug smuggler who helped agents set up the sting, refused to enter the federal witness program and was murdered in 1986 by a three-man hit squad in New Orleans.
Records also show that North intervened on behalf of Jose Bueso Rosa, a Honduran general and key Contra supporter denounced by the State Department as ``an international terrorist.'' Bueso Rosa pleaded guilty in 1986 to two felony counts for his involvement in a plot to smuggle millions of dollars of cocaine into the U.S. to finance the assassination of the leftist president of Honduras.
In a Sept. 17, 1986, memorandum to national security adviser John Poindexter, North said that if the administration did not win leniency for the general, Bueso Rosa might ``break his longstanding silence on the Nic(araguan) resistance and other sensitive operations.''
North's notebooks also record frequent conversations with John Hull, an Evansville, Ind., farmer who had an ownership interest in a vast ranch in Costa Rica. Hull, a diehard anti-communist, approached North in 1983 to ask how he could help the Contra movement.
Hull developed at least six airfields on his ranch. Five convicted drug smugglers testified in 1988 before the Kerry subcommittee on terrorism and narcotics that they used the airstrips in the 1980s to unload arms for the Contras and pick up bundles of cocaine for their return trips to the United States.
One of the smugglers, a pilot named Gary Betzner, testified that in July 1984 he delivered a load of guns to Hull's ranch and watched with Hull as 17 duffel bags packed with cocaine were loaded onto the plane. Betzner said he then flew the plane to Florida.
Hull, who has never faced drug-related charges, has denied the allegations. Reached by phone at his home in Indiana, he recently declined an interview. ``That's all past tense,'' he said.
Of North, he said, ``I wish the guy the best of luck in the Senate campaign. It's my personal feeling that he's honest and sincere.'' MEMO: CONTRA FLIGHTS OF GUNS - AND COCAINE?
North has described running an elaborate Contra rebel supply
operation in the mid-1980s. But records and investigators suggest vast
quantities of cocaine were loaded onto the empty delivery planes and
flown for sale in the U.S.
NORTH'S OWN WORDS
In handwritten notes, North describes a Contra leader who "wanted
aircraft to go to Bolivia to pick up paste, want aircraft to pick up
1,500 kilos" and how a plane "out of New Orleans is probably being used
for drug runs into the U.S."
A FEDERAL INVESTIGATION
A 1988 report by the U.S. Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics and
International Operations said that John Hull, a key North contact in the
Contra operation, was known by five witnesses to be "involved in cocaine
trafficking."
THE DEA AGENT'S STORY
Celerino Castillo, a former federal Drug Enforcement Administration
operative who looked into the North Connection to drug flights, now
says: "He's going to have to be held repsonsible for what's going on in
the streets of American today, because a lot of cocaine was flown in.
He can't look me in the eye and say people didn't die because of
activities he turned his back to."
ILLUSTRATION: Color photo
Oliver L. North
Associated Press file photos
In the mid-1980s, Contra rebels in Nicaragua received supplies from
a network organized by North, who then worked in the White House.
Former DEA operative Celerino Castillo, left, and then-Vice
President George Bush in January 1986.
KEYWORDS: SENATE RACE CANDIDATE CAMPAIGN by CNB