CIA's Tricks Are For Kids Web Site Tells Children - Don't Take Drugs

I don't usually pay much attention to press announcements from the Central
Intelligence Agency, but when an e-mail arrived with the news that the CIA
had posted a Web site for children, I was curious.

"In adding these pages, the CIA joins other federal agencies in projecting
an antidrug message to America's youth," the press release disclosed. "The
Web site puts drugs in the perspective of the world of intelligence
gathering. Children see what roles the CIA plays in the war on drugs. ..."

I couldn't resist paying a cyber visit to ,the CIA's redoubtable Web
offering for inquiring young minds.

On the agency's home page for kids, you can meet Bogart and six of his
barking buddies in the CIA's canine corps. Or you can play "break the code"
or "try a disguise" or an interactive quiz-game about geography. There's a
lot of stuff to choose from.

I was immediately drawn toward a feathery, winged cartoon character on the
lower left named Harry Recon. He's a CIA aerial reconnaissance pigeon who
chirps, "Fly high on intelligence, not drugs ..."

So I click on little Harry and voila! -- I'm reading a little pep talk for
wanna-be spies. "In order to do our jobs, we have to be in the best mental
shape -- and that includes being drug free."

Another mouse click and I'm "on the trail of illicit drugs" with the CIA's
Crime and Narcotics Center, which never has "a slow day because the war on
drugs and crime goes on around the clock and never takes a holiday." The
moms and dads who work in this dedicated American intelligence unit are said
to "play a key role in helping to destroy many drug and organized crime
organizations."

For a quick diversion, I take a peek at the CIA's online Exhibit Center ,
which features a dozen or so spy artifacts, including "drop dead spikes" and
an Air America baseball cap. That's when I figured I had enough.

I mean, Air America, come on. Is that supposed to be an inside joke or
something?

Drug trafficking has long been a specialty of Air America, the CIA
proprietary airline that transported weapons to anticommunist warlords in
Southeast Asia's Golden Triangle during the Vietnam war, and often returned
with consignments of opium poppies. The role of Air America and other U.S.
intelligence assets in fostering the illicit narcotics trade has been
well-documented in The CIA and the Politics of Heroin by University of
Wisconsin professor Alfred W. McCoy.

New York Times foreign affairs columnist C.L. Sulzberger, no stranger to
intelligence circles, was indignant when Allen Ginsberg, the beat poet,
accused the CIA of trafficking in heroin. But Sulzberger later acknowledged
his mistake in a letter to Ginsberg dated April 1, 1978. "I fear I owe you
an apology," he told Ginsberg. "I have been reading a succession of pieces
about CIA involvement in the dope trade in Southeast Asia, and I remember
when you first suggested I look into this I thought you were full of beans.
Indeed you were right."

The war on drugs has always served a political agenda. During the red scare
in the early 1950s, Senator Joseph McCarthy blamed red China for peddling
heroin to weaken the moral fiber of the United States and the free world.
Ironically, it appears that McCarthy himself developed a nasty little
addiction to morphine while leading the anticommunist crusade. But his dope
wasn't coming from Maoist China. According to Ladies Home Journal, that
bastion of left-wing political correctness, McCarthy was getting his daily
morphine script from Harry Anslinger, longtime head of the U.S. Federal
Bureau of Narcotics.

I searched in vain on the CIA's Web site for any mea culpa regarding the
agency's support for counterinsurgency campaigns waged by various
drug-smuggling "freedom fighters." There was no mention of massive amounts
of still unaccounted-for U.S. aid to Pakistani military officers and Afghan
Mujahadeen rebel leaders, which helped grease a major arms-for-heroin
pipeline in Southwest Asia during the 1980s. Much of the dirty cash was
laundered through institutions such as the scandal-ridden Bank of Credit and
Commerce International, which functioned, not coincidentally, as a conduit
for CIA operations in the region.

At the same time in Central America, Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North and
high-level CIA personnel aided and abetted big-time cocaine smugglers who
ferried weapons to the Nicaraguan Contras fighting the Sandinista
government. North and three other U.S. officials were banned for life from
Costa Rica after that country's government came up with hard proof of the
Reagan administration's role in secretly facilitating the flow of narcotics
- -- all this while U.S. officials were preaching about the war on drugs.

A glutton for hypocrisy, I abandoned the realm of kiddie propaganda and went
straight to the CIA's home page for adults. I clicked on "frequently asked
questions," where the sordid history of CIA-tolerated cocaine smuggling is
summarily dismissed: "The CIA Inspector General found no evidence to
substantiate charges that the CIA or its employees conspired with or
assisted Contra-related organizations or individuals in drug trafficking to
raise funds for the Contras or for any other purpose."

In fact, the fine print of the October 1998 inspector general's report tells
a very different story, as journalist Robert Parry points out in his
trenchant coverage of the Contra-cocaine connection. "CIA Inspector General
Frederick Hitz confirmed long-standing allegations of cocaine trafficking by
Contra forces," Parry says. "Hitz identified more than 50 Contras and
Contra-related entities implicated in the drug trade."

Parry notes that the Hitz report detailed how the Reagan administration
"protected these drug operations and frustrated federal investigations which
threatened to expose these crimes in the mid 1980s." Acknowledging that the
CIA "withheld evidence of Contra crimes from the Justice Department, the
Congress, and even the CIA's own analytical division," the inspector general
emphasized that the Contra war took precedence over law enforcement.

If recent events in Latin America are any indication, conniving with drug
traffickers is a difficult habit for the CIA to kick. Consider, for example,
the case of Vladimiro Montesinos, a shadowy figure rarely seen in public,
who for many years was the CIA's principal point man in Peru and a lynchpin
in the U.S. government's $17.7 billion war on drugs. Trained as a cadet at
the School of the Americas, a notorious breeding ground for assassins,
Montesinos became head of the Peruvian intelligence service, SIN, in the
early 1990s.

During the decade that his leadership of Peru's spy agency won U.S. praise
and support, Montesinos built a billion-dollar criminal empire based on drug
trafficking, arms dealing, and judicial and political corruption, according
to Peruvian parliamentary investigators. Several recently captured cocaine
barons claimed they had been paying Montesinos a monthly fee to let them
operate. "The groups that reached an agreement with Montesinos's men could
be sure that their competitors would be eliminated," explained Roger
Rumrill, an expert on the Peruvian drug trade.

What's more, according to Peruvian prosecutors, Montesinos used drug profits
to finance death squads, which were responsible for torture, extra-judicial
executions, and the disappearance of 4,000 government opponents. By choosing
Montesinos as its main ally in Peru, the CIA turned a blind eye to human
rights abuses as well as his involvement in the drug trade.

Eventually, his CIA handlers wised up and realized that Montesinos had been
taking them for a ride. They cut him loose in August 2000 after disclosures
that the Peruvian spymaster had betrayed his patrons in Langley, Virginia,
by selling arms to leftist guerrillas in neighboring Colombia.

Montesinos is currently a fugitive from justice, and the so-called war on
drugs continues to provide a thinly veiled cover for U.S.-backed
counterinsurgency in Colombia. Washington's fraudulent anti-narcotics agenda
is underscored by the CIA's unwillingness to target far right paramilitary
groups responsible for antiguerrilla attacks and civilian massacres, even
though these same paramilitary groups are directly involved in cocaine
production and trafficking.

If the Montesinos affair and the Colombia fiasco tell us anything, it's that
U.S. intelligence officials will dutifully ignore evidence of dope smuggling
when they deem it expeditious to do so. Harry Recon, the spy pigeon, may
twitter about flying high on intelligence, not on drugs, but there's no
escaping the grim fact that large amounts of cocaine entering the United
States are collateral damage generated by CIA activities in Latin America.

"Drugs and covert operations go together like fleas on a dog," explained
David MacMichael, a former CIA analyst. Scratch the surface of the narcotics
trade and once again it seems that certain drug pushers are OK by the CIA as
long as they keep snorting the anticommunist line.