PLANNING THE CIA’S NEXT SECRET WAR

After years of scandal and disgrace, the Central Intelligence Agency is
planning its political resurrection courtesy of a new evil empire:
international drug cartels. The new enemy has no nuclear weapons and no
plan for world revolution. But U.S. intelligence agencies claim to see a
threat to national security that justifies new relationships with regimes
that otherwise merit nothing but condemnation. If the past is any guide,
this is a recipe for trouble.

AS AMERICANS CURSED the annoying workdays between Christmas and New Year’s
on Monday, a right-wing death squad kidnapped and killed a family of six in
southwest Colombia. The victims were members of a single peasant family and
were targeted, Colombian officials theorized, because they were suspected
of sympathizing with leftist rebels.

In the other parts of the country, leftist guerrillas were blamed for
killing a town councilor and an off-duty soldier.

Sadly, unlike in Mexico, massacres of this sort are no longer unusual in
Colombia, Latin America’s current version of Algeria. And, as in Algeria,
there are no easily identified heroes and villains.

BALANCE OF TERROR

On one side sits a corrupt government, commanding an increasingly restless
military which, in turn, has encouraged the growth of a shadowy and
murderous collection of “paramilitary” death squads. On the other side are
the Cali, Medellin and other drug cartels and their hired help: at least
two left-wing guerrilla movements — possibly numbering 50,000 armed
insurgents — allied with sympathetic peasant and Indian groups concentrated
primarily in the country’s southern border provinces. And, of course, stuck
in the middle are millions of poor human beings who wish only to be left
alone.

Out of this cauldron of political, ethnic and ideological hatreds, the CIA
and its military counterpart, the Defense Intelligence Agency, believe they
can choose sides to fight the good war against drugs. As the Washington
Post reported this weekend, the Clinton administration has cut a deal with
Colombia that will send about $37 million in military aid to specific units
of the Colombian armed forces — but only those not implicated in the
country’s death-squad atrocities.

This concept — sold to the Post as a unique policy approach — actually
differs little from past American doctrine. Whether exploiting factions in
El Salvador’s military junta, Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party or South
Vietnam’s dictatorship, American officials always claim to know the good
guys from the bad guys and channel money to them with abandon. In every
case, U.S. officials exaggerate both what they know about their proteges,
and their ability to understand their motives.

MORE THAN MEETS THE EYE

The United States officially has held Colombia at arms length ever since
the 1994 election of President Ernesto Samper, whose campaign is believed
to have been financed by drug money. President Bill Clinton and his “drug
czar” Barry McCaffrey made a show of “decertifying” Colombia as an
upstanding drug-fighting partner in 1996 and again last March. But
intelligence “cooperation” didn’t miss a beat.

In fact, the policy shift the Post revealed is only the officially scripted
part of an increasing U.S. military and intelligence role in Colombia,
Peru, Bolivia, Venezuela and, increasingly, in Mexico. This growth of these
new spy markets has suited the intelligence community just fine as it seeks
desperately to replace the old Soviet enemy. Economic espionage hasn’t
panned out. Neither Islam nor the Chinese, for now at least, seem like the
bogeyman that CIA-friendly intellectuals tried to manufacture earlier in
the decade. Latin America — familiar spook territory and an easy sell to a
xenophobic, immigrant-fearing Congress — is the perfect fallback position.

The U.S. military is less enthusiastic since they already feel
overstretched in the post-Cold War world. Beginning with the Reagan
administration, which first dragged the military services kicking and
screaming into the “drug war,” U.S. forces have been increasingly involved
in efforts to train, equip and, on occasion, lead local units against the
drug cartels and their allies.

POLITICIZING LATIN MILITARIES

Regardless of the military’s reservations, project “Underlord,” as one
Pentagon wit dubbed it, is well under way. Outwardly, at least, U.S.
efforts in the region are aimed at increasing the effectiveness of Latin
American military counternarcotics and counterinsurgency units, and so far
results are mixed. However, many associated with these contacts believe
there has been a dangerous side effect: politicizing military officers who
in some cases only recently returned to their barracks after decades
running these countries as dictatorships.

The American experience in Colombia should be a warning signal. Despite a
decade of deep involvement, there is little evidence to suggest the U.S.
efforts are paying dividends. On the contrary, Colombia has been sinking
deeper and deeper into anarchy. Certainly, this is partly caused by the
corrupting influence of Colombian drug cartels and partly by longstanding
political rivalries. But wrongheaded U.S. measures have played a horrible
part.

In 1991, according to classified Colombian military documents obtained by
the group Human Rights Watch and confirmed by former Colombian officials,
U.S. Defense Department and CIA teams advised the Colombian military to
create paramilitary groups who could root out peasant leaders sympathetic
with leftist guerrillas without implicating the military directly in human
rights abuses. The U.S. embassy in Colombia has denied that report.

‘A SPOOK’S DREAM’

A retired U.S. military officer until recently involved in Latin American
training efforts told me that Colombia, Peru, Venezuela and Mexico are all
part of a concerted effort by U.S. intelligence agencies to “grab hold” of
events in Latin America before governments succumb to guerrillas, cartels
or some alliance of both groups.

“There’s a lot going on right now that goes beyond training and arming the
militaries down there,” said the officer, requesting anonymity. “It’s a
major push to hold together some pretty unpleasant governments, especially
in Colombia. Basically, it’s a spook’s dream.”

From Washington’s perspective, far-off Colombia, relegated to bit-player
status by the rise of Mexico’s drug cartels in the past few years, is a
relatively safe place for this “dream” to be playing itself out.

But the massacre of 45 Mexican peasants just before Christmas — and the
arrest of a ruling party member in connection with the atrocity — is a
reminder that Colombia isn’t the only country in the grips of a pincer-like
increase in right-wing paramilitary and left-wing guerrilla trouble.

Here, too, the CIA has left its footprints — again allying itself with
questionable elements within a foreign country’s military. In the 1980s,
after pressure to step up drug cooperation by the Reagan administration,
Mexico agreed to allow the CIA helped train a unit in Mexico’s military
with anti-insurgency tactics similar to those used earlier in the decade
against leftists in Nicaragua, Guatemala and El Salvador. The targets this
time, however, were nascent drug-trafficking gangs along the U.S.-Mexican
border. After the deaths of four Mexicans, the unit was scrapped. But the
idea lived on and drew Mexico’s army into the war on drugs.

Alone in Latin America, Mexico’s military had steered clear of politics for
the better part of this century. Whatever other faults Mexico’s revolution
produced, military dictatorship was not one of them.

But, in the eyes of many U.S. and Mexican officials, the U.S. intelligence
effort to mobilize Mexico’s army against drugs has backfired badly. An army
once held in high esteem has been brought low by the arrest earlier this
year of Gen. Jesus Gutierrez Rebollo, chief of Mexico’s drug-enforcement
effort, on charges of taking bribes from drug cartels.

Now, suddenly, Mexicans find themselves confronting a mass grave filled
with women and children, allegedly put there by right-wing paramilitaries.
Sound familiar? It will be interesting to see what the State Department’s
human rights report has to say when it’s released in January.