CONTRA-COCAINE: EVIDENCE OF PREMEDITATION

New evidence, now in the public record, strongly suggests that the Reagan
administration's tolerance of drug trafficking by the Nicaraguan contras
and other clients in the 1980s was premeditated.

With almost no notice in the national press, a 1982 letter was introduced
into the Congressional Record revealing how CIA Director William J. Casey
secretly engineered an exemption sparing the CIA from a legal requirement
to report on drug smuggling by agency assets.

The exemption was granted by Attorney General William French Smith on Feb.
11, 1982, only two months after President Reagan authorized covert CIA
support for the Nicaraguan contra army and some eight months before the
first known documentary evidence revealing that the contras had started
collaborating with drug traffickers.

The exemption suggests that the CIA's tolerance of illicit drug smuggling
by its clients during the 1980s was official policy anticipated from the
outset, not just an unintended consequence followed by an ad hoc cover-up.

Before the letter's release, the documentary evidence only supported the
allegation that Ronald Reagan's CIA concealed drug trafficking by the
contras and other intelligence assets in Latin America. The CIA's inspector
general Frederick P. Hitz confirmed that long-held suspicion in an
investigative report issued on Jan. 29, 1998.

Laundry List

But the newly released letter, placed into the Congressional Record by Rep.
Maxine Waters, D-Calif., on May 7, establishes that Casey foresaw the legal
dilemma which the CIA would encounter should federal law require it to
report on illicit narcotics smuggling by its agents. The narcotics
exemption is especially noteworthy in contrast to the laundry list of
crimes which the CIA was required to disclose.

Under Justice Department regulations, "reportable offenses" included
assault, homicide, kidnapping, Neutrality Act violations, communication of
classified data, illegal immigration, bribery, obstruction of justice,
possession of explosives, election contributions, possession of firearms,
illegal wiretapping, visa violations and perjury.

Yet, despite reporting requirements for many less serious offenses, Casey
fought a bureaucratic battle in early 1982 to exempt the CIA from, as Smith
wrote, "the need to add narcotics violations to the list of reportable
non-employee crimes."

In his letter, Smith noted that the law provides that "when requested by
the Attorney General, it shall be the duty of any agency or instrumentality
of the Federal Government to furnish assistance to him for carrying out his
functions under" the Controlled Substances Act.

But Smith agreed that "in view of the fine cooperation the Drug Enforcement
Administration has received from CIA, no formal requirement regarding the
reporting of narcotics violations has been included in these procedures."
[At the time of Smith's letter, Kenneth Starr was a counselor in the
attorney general's office, although it is not clear whether Starr had any
input into the exemption.]

On March 2, 1982, Casey thanked Smith for the exemption. "I am pleased that
these procedures, which I believe strike the proper balance between
enforcement of the law and protection of intelligence sources and methods,
will now be forwarded to other agencies covered by them for signing by the
heads of the agencies," Casey wrote.

In the years that followed, "protection of intelligence sources and
methods" apparently became the catch-all excuse for the CIA's tolerance of
South American cocaine smugglers using the contra war as cover. Though
precise volume estimates are impossible, the contra-connected drug pipeline
clearly pumped tons of cocaine into the United States during the
early-to-mid 1980s.

Contra Umbrella

Some contra defenders have argued that the anti-Sandinista armies in
Honduras and Costa Rica were not the primary beneficiaries of the narcotics
smuggling, that most of the profits probably went to drug lords with few
political interests. Still, over the past 15 years, substantial evidence
has surfaced revealing that many drug smugglers scurried under the contra
umbrella. They presumably understood that the Reagan administration would
be loath to expose its pet covert action to negative publicity and possibly
even to criminal prosecution.

According to the accumulated evidence, Bolivia's "cocaine coup" government
of 1980-82 was the first in line filling the contra drug pipeline. But
other contra-connected drug operations soon followed, including the
Medellin cartel, the Panamanian government, the Honduran military and
Miami-based anti-Castro Cubans. The contra-connected cocaine also moved
through transshipment points in Costa Rica and El Salvador. [For details,
see Robert Parry's Lost History; Cocaine Politics by Peter Dale Scott and
Jonathan Marshall; or Gary Webb's forthcoming book, Dark Alliance.]

Less clear is exactly what the U.S. government knew about the
contra-connected drug trafficking and when. Reagan authorized CIA support
for the contra army in mid-December 1981. But the first publicly known case
of contra cocaine shipments appeared in government files in an Oct. 22,
1982, cable from the CIA's Directorate of Operations.

The cable passed on word that U.S. law enforcement agencies were aware of
"links between (a U.S. religious organization) and two Nicaraguan
counter-revolutionary groups [which] involve an exchange in (the United
States) of narcotics for arms." The material in parentheses was inserted by
the CIA as part of its declassification of the cable. The name of the
religious group remains secret.

Over the next several years, the CIA learned of other suspected links
between the contras and drug trafficking. In 1984, the CIA even intervened
with the Justice Department to block a criminal investigation into a
suspected contra role in a San Francisco-based drug ring, according to
Hitz's report.

In December 1985, Brian Barger and I wrote the first news article
disclosing that virtually every Nicaraguan contra group had links to drug
trafficking. In that Associated Press dispatch, we noted that the CIA knew
of at least one case of cocaine profits filtering into the contra war
effort, but that DEA officials in Washington claimed they had never been
told of any contra tie-in. The Casey exemption explains why that was possible.

After the AP story ran, the Reagan administration attacked it as unfounded
and the article was largely ignored by the rest of the Washington press
corps. But it did help spark an investigation by Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass.,
who over the next two years amassed substantial evidence of cocaine
smuggling in and around the contra war. Still, the Reagan and Bush
administrations continued to disparage Kerry's probe and its many witnesses.

Through the end of the decade, the mainstream Washington media also
denigrated the allegations. In April 1989, when Kerry released a lengthy
report detailing multiple examples of how the contra war supplied cover for
major drug trafficking operations, the nation's most prestigious newspapers
- -- The New York Times, The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times --
published only brief, dismissive accounts.

With the end of the contra war in 1990, the controversy faded further into
the historical recesses. The Clinton administration quietly rescinded
Casey's narcotics exemption in 1995.

Crack Epidemic

The contra-cocaine issue arose again in 1996 with an investigative series
by Gary Webb of the San Jose Mercury-News. Those stories traced how one of
the contra drug conduits helped fuel the crack epidemic in Los Angeles.

In response, the major newspapers again rallied to the CIA's defense. They
denounced the series as overblown, although finally acknowledging that the
allegations raised during the 1980s were true. Webb's series also prompted
a new investigation by the CIA's inspector general.

In the first volume of his investigative report, Hitz admitted the CIA knew
early on about contra drug trafficking and covered it up. The report's
second volume reportedly puts the CIA in even a worse light.

The CIA press office acknowledges that the second volume has been
completed, but adds that there is no timetable for releasing a declassified
version. "They'll only let it out if they're pressured," commented one U.S.
official.

But the CIA apparently is counting on continued disinterest by the national
press as a sign that there is no need to revisit the issue. That assessment
was bolstered on May 7 when Waters introduced the Casey-Smith letters into
the Congressional Record and drew very little media interest in the
damaging admissions.

For her part, Waters stated that the Casey-Smith arrangement "allowed some
of the biggest drug lords in the world to operate without fear that the CIA
would be required to report their activities to the DEA and other law
enforcement agencies. ... These damning memorandums ... are further
evidence of a shocking official policy that allowed the drug cartels to
operate through the CIA-led contra covert operations in Central America."

Though Waters's comments focused on the contra war, Casey's narcotics
exemption could have had other CIA covert operations in mind. In the early
1980s, the CIA-backed Afghan mujahedeen also were implicated as major
heroin traffickers in the Near East.

But whatever the genesis of the drug exemption, the Casey-Smith exchange of
letters stands as important historical evidence bolstering the long-denied
allegations of CIA complicity in drug trafficking. Worse yet, the documents
are evidence of premeditation.

Copyright (c) 1998

Checked-by: Mike Gogulski