VETERANS OF THE CIA'S DRUG WARS

The CIA's Dope-Smuggling 'Freedom Fighters':

Profile: Luis Posada Carriles

The belated admission last November by the CIA's Inspector General that in
fact the Agency has always worked hand-in-glove with international
narcotics kingpins caught the mainstream media with their pants down and
butts up in the air. Despite last spring's orgy of coordinated condemnation
of Gary Webb's Dark Alliance series on CIA-connected drugrunning contras in
the 1980s, media prostitutes from the Washington Post to the New York Times
to Face The Press were reduced to purveying the truth for once, after the
CIA copped to it at last. But of course they didn't tell all the truth, not
out loud. A typical NY Times `expose' of one of the Agency's most hallowed
Cuban `freedom fighters,' for example, somehow omitted to mention all the
dope-running he's been involved with over the generations. HIGH TIMES'
faithful chronicler of the CIA's drug wars, JERRY MELDON, fills in the
blanks the Times found unfit for print: First Of An Occasional Series.

After 37 years of disappearing like the Cheshire Cat, and consuming most of
his nine lives, notorious anti-Castro bomber Luis Posada Carriles
reappeared "somewhere in the Caribbean" for a New York Times interview last
summer. The resulting two-part series, published July 14-15, adds
interesting details to Posada's bloodstained bio--notably his patronage by
Jorge Mas Canosa, the late head of the Cuban-American National Foundation,
and a frequent White House guest.

But as is the newspaper of record's wont in covering "intelligence"
matters, narcotics went unreported. Readers unaware of the drug-related
charges that have long adhered to Posada Carriles remain in the dark.

In fact, declassified government files cited by Gary Webb in his Dark
Alliance series reveal that in January of 1974, the CIA turned down a
Posada request to provide one of his associates with a Venezuelan passport,
because the Agency "cannot permit controlled agents to become directly
involved with drug trafficking," they said with a straight face. That same
year, the DEA was told that Posada had been trading weapons for cocaine
with a person "involved with political assassinations." Despite those and
earlier reports, Posada would remain on the CIA payroll until February of
1976.

The CIA's Nursery of Narco-Terrorists

The CIA's nexus with Cuban exiles and narcotics originated, of course, with
the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion attempt on the Cuban mainland, for which the
CIA trained a thousand Cuban exiles, and was assisted by Florida gangsters
eager to retrieve the halcyon days when Havana was an open city under
dictator Fulgencio Batista.

A top-secret element of the invasion plan was "Operation 40," whose
personnel included Posada Carriles, future Watergate burglar Felipe de
Diego, and sundry Mafia hitmen. Its objective was to secure the island by
eliminating both local politicians and members of the invasion force deemed
insufficiently in favor of bringing back Batista as dictator.

Operation 40 remained intact following the Bay of Pigs fiasco, in which 114
brigadistas died, and was deployed later on in sporadic raids on Cuba. An
Operation 40 task force led in 1967 by Carriles' CIA classmate Felix
Rodriguez (later to find immortality as "Max Gomez," running guns to the
dope-trading Contras in Nicaragua and then testifying about it in 1987
before the Senate Iran-Contra investigators) supervised Bolivian police in
the capture and murder of Che Guevara.

Operation 40 had to be officially disbanded in 1970 after one of their
planes crashed in southern California with kilos of heroin and cocaine
aboard. But this did not interfere with business., even though later the
same year, federal narcs busted 150 suspects in "the largest roundup of
major drug traffickers in the history of federal law enforcement."
President Nixon's Attorney General, John Mitchell, celebrated the
destruction of "a nationwide ring of wholesalers handling about 30 percent
of all heroin sales and 70 to 80 percent of all cocaine sales in the United
States." Mitchell did not mention all the Operation 70 heroes who had been
netted in this grand operation.

Prominent among these defendants was Juan Restoy, an Operation 40 alum who
had served as a Cuban congressman under Batista's regime. Restoy's dope
network had grown out of the organized-crime empire of Florida godfather
Santo Trafficante, whose gambling and black-market empire had flourished in
Havana before Castro's takeover ruined it. (Trafficante, needless to say,
patriotically assisted the CIA in numerous attempts to assassinate Castro
over the years.) Although Juan Restoy ultimately broke out of jail and was
slain in a shootout with federal agents, his narcotics network would remain
true to the anti-Castro cause.

Two of Restoy's drugrunners in particular, Ignacio and Guillermo Novo,
belonged to the Cuban Nationalist Movement, a far-Right outfit with cells
in Miami and Union City, NJ. It was Guillermo who fired a bazooka across
the East River at the United Nations building while Che Guevara was
addressing the General Assembly in '64. Then Ignacio did the same thing at
the Cuba pavilion at the Montreal World's Fair in '67.

Lighting Up The Skies

The anti-Castro hard core met in June 1976 in the Dominican Republic and
combined forces to become the Commando of United Revolutionary
Organizations, known by its Spanish acronym as CORU. Numerous dope-linked
terrorists were in attendance--Luis Posada Carriles, Guillermo Novo, and so
on--who would later assist the Reagan White House in running its contra
re-supply operations in Central America. There was also Frank Castro, the
Bay of Pigs vet running the militant Cuban National Liberation Front.
Castro would be indicted in 1983 for smuggling over 500 tons of marijuana,
and then have the charges magically dropped after setting up a contra
training camp in the Florida Everglades.

At this June 1976 convention in Santo Domingo, the CORU mob laid out a plan
for major bloodshed, and that fall its myrmidons carried out two of the
most sensational terrorist acts ever witnessed in the Western hemisphere.
On September 21, 1976, a car-bomb exploded in broad daylight in Washington,
DC, killing Orlando Letelier--formerly foreign minister of Chile, before
the CIA helped Gen. Augosto Pinochet topple the government there and
initiate a generation of mass murder and torture. Pinochet's secret police
paid CORU thugs to plant the car-bomb and detonate it in Washington, where
it also killed human-rights pioneer Ronnie Moffett.

Two of the CORU thugs on Pinochet's terror budget turned out to be the Novo
brothers. Though then-CIA director George Bush stonewalled the
investigation to the best of his patriotic ability, Guillermo was
eventually busted in Miami with a pound of coke; he was ultimately found
guilty of the Letelier-Moffitt terror homicides, but the conviction was
overturned on appeal when his confession was thrown out. Ignacio's
conviction for perjury in the same case was likewise voided on appeal.

Then on October 6, 1976, barely a fortnight after the Washington, DC
car-blast, a Cubana Airlines flight out of Miami blew up in the sky over
Barbados, killing all 73 on board. The authors of the bombing were busted
in Venezuela: former pediatrician Orlando "Dr. Death" Bosch and Luis Posada
Carriles.

Posada had nominally remained a CIA agent only from 1965 to '67, at which
point he became the assistant director of DISP, the CIA's sister spook-shop
in Venezuela, and later on became director. After a 1974 run-in with the
President there, though, Posada was canned and replaced with a CIA
classmate, Cuban exile Ricardo Morales--who claimed to have been an FBI
informant when he attended that June '96 CORU session in Santo Domingo.

Salvation In El Salvador

Upon leaving the DISP, Posada opened a private-detective agency in Caracas.
But then after two of his associates were nabbed for planting the bomb on
that Air Cubana flight in October '76, Posada also wound up in jail there.
He stayed in jail there, despite Cuban extradition requests, until bribing
his way out in 1985. The CIA's contra-resupply operation was in full swing
then, and Posada promptly found employment at the notorious Salvadoran
air-force base at Ilopango--where DEA agent Celerino Castillo painstakingly
traced contra shipments of cocaine out to the States, and watched his
reports being suppressed by his political masters in Washington.

It was Posada Carriles who managed those contra-resupply flights under the
direction of his old comrade-in-arms Felix "Max Gomez" Rodriguez, until
October 1986, when an old dope plane from the fleet of CIA freedom-fighter
Barry Seal was blown out the sky over Nicaragua, exposing the Reagan White
House and its whole Iran-Contra operation.

Not coincidentally, the $26,000 with which Posada had bribed himself out of
that Venezuelan prison had arrived courtesy of the Cuban-American National
Foundation. It was not until his Times interview last July that Posada
acknowledged his gratitude to CANF founder Jorge Mas Canosa for this bribe
money.

Mas Canosa, Posada's lifelong CIA compatriot, was a remarkably successful
entrepreneur who built a $100 million empire somehow. But his hiring
policies at CANF, which had been set up in 1981 by the Reagan
administration to channel support for its Central-American policies, left
something to be desired. After helping defray the Novo brothers' legal fees
in the matter of the Letelier murders, Mas Canosa hired them as CANF
public-relations flacks.

Mas Canosa similarly underwrote the defense costs of Jose Dionisio Suarez,
a codefendant with the Novo bazooka brothers. Suarez pled guilty to killing
Letelier, but jumped bail and continued with what he knew best, blowing up
a TWA airliner and firebombing Moscow's UN mission, before becoming the
contras' instructor in sabotage and demolition techniques. At last report,
Suarez was a hit man for Colombian dope cartels.

Last fall, as Mas Canosa lay on his deathbed from cancer at 58 (still
successfully lobbying for the Helms-Burton bill that intensified the US
trade embargo on Cuba), his longtime beneficiary Luis Posada Carriles was
still going strong after three and a half decades in the shadows. A
Salvadoran arrested in Havana for a string of 1997 Havana hotel bombings
designed to stifle Cuba's tourist trade told authorities there that Posada
Carriles had been his benefactor.

Pretty impressive loyalty for someone who, according to a CIA report, was
investigated by them in 1967 for supplying explosives, silencers and
grenades to Santo Trafficante's organized-crime hoods. And not bad
considering that the Agency six years later supposedly warned that "Posada
may be involved in smuggling cocaine from Colombia through Venezuela to
Miami."

But that's one of the advantages of having an employer like the CIA, always
ready to overlook such indiscretions--and of talking to a newspaper of
record like the New York Times.