Protecting Traffickers, Not the Nation:
Washington and the Politics of Drugs, Part 2 or 2

by Peter Dale Scott, Ph.D.

In Columbia, according to authors Andrew and Leslie Cockburn,

"U.S. officials ... knew that millions of dollars of U.S. aid money,
earmarked for the war on drugs, was being used instead to fight leftist
guerrillas and their supporters. When [drug] cartelfinanced paramilitary
forces entered the town of Segovia in November, 1988, the military stood
by and watched. As Colombian professor Alejandro Reyes remembered, 'They
killed fortythree people, just at the center of town. Anybody who was
close to that place was shot. They were defenseless people, common people
of the town ... [I]t was a kind of sanction against the whole town for
their political voice...' Fortythree people had been killed for voting
the wrong way ... In 1989 ... the U.S. shipped $65 million of military
equipment to Colombia. The Colombian chief of police politely pointed out
that the items received were totally unsuitable for a war against the
traffickers. They were, however, suitable for counterinsurgency. U.S.
military equipment turned up in ... Pueto Boyaca. [This was a region
irrelevant to the drug traffic,but where the drug cartels' death squads
were being trained] ... U.S. helicopters were used in
antiguerrilla bombing campaigns, where, unfortunately, many of the
victims were civilians. The State Department knew that too." [31]

This hypocrisy of "antidrug campaigns" dates back to 1974, the year when
Congress cut back U.S. aid programs to repressive Latin American police
forces, and then beefed up socalled antinarcotics aid to the same forces
by about the same amount. [32]

To keep the aid coming, corrupt Latin American politicians helped invent
the spectre of the drugfinanced "narcoguerrilla," a myth discounted by
careful and dispassionate researchers like Rensselaer Lee. [33]

U.S. military officers were equally cynical. Col. James D. Waghelstein,
writing in Military Review, argued that the way to counter "those church
and academic groups that have slavishly supported insurgency in Latin
America" was to put them "on the wrong side of the moral issue," by
creating "a melding in the American public's mind and in Congress" of the
alleged narcoguerrilla connection. [34]

The actual result of such propagandizing is to sanction the role of drug
traffickers and their allies in U.S. counterinsurgency efforts, and thus
further to strengthen the status of the drug cartels in the countries they
terrorize.

Two recent indictments by the U.S. Department of Justice reinforce the
general paradigm of CIAcreated intelligence net works that reinforce
their local power and influence by major involvement in drug trafficking.
In March 1997 MichelJoseph Francois, the CIAbacked police chief in Haiti,
was indicted in Miami for having helped to smuggle 33 tons of Colombian
cocaine and heroin into the United States. The Haitian National
Intelligence Service (SIN), which the CIA helped to create, was also a
target of the Justice Department in vestigation which led to the
indictment. [ 35]

A few months earlier, General Ramon Guillen Davila, chief of a CIAcreated
anti drug unit in Venezuela, was indicted in Miami for smuggling a ton of
cocaine into the United States. According to the New York Times, "The CIA,
over the objections of the Drug Enforcement Administration, approved the
shipment of at least one ton of pure cocaine to Miami International Airport
as a way of gathering information about the Colombian drug cartels." One
official said that the total amount might have been much more than one ton.
[36]

The information about the drug activities of Guillen Davila and Francois
had been published in the U.S. press years before the indictments. It is
possible that, had it not been for the controversy aroused by the
Contracocaine stories in the August 1996 San Jose Mercury, these two men
and their networks might have been as untouchable as Miguel Nassar Haro and
the DFS in Mexico, or Montesinos and the Peruvian SIN in Peru.

The U.S. and Drug Traffickers in Asia: Washington, Afghanistan, and BCCI

The same U.S.rightwingdrug symbiosis has prevailed for decades in Asia.
Former top DEA investigator in the Middle East, Dennis Dayle, told an
antidrug conference that "in my 30year history in the Drug Enforcement
Admini stration and related agencies, the major targets of my investiga
tions almost invariably turned out to be working for the CIA." [37]

The biggest recent CIAdrug story in Asia has centered on the Bank of
Credit and Commerce International, or BCCI. The President, until 1993, of
America's traditional ally Pakistan, Ghulam Ishaq Khan, was the man who as
finance minister granted special tax status for the CIA and druglinked
BCCI, the bank of his close friend Agha Hasan Abedi. Ghulam Ishaq Khan also
served as Chairman of Abedi's BCCI Foundation, an ostensible charity that
in fact fronted for BCCI's concerted efforts to make Pakistan a nuclear
power. [38]

BCCI's involvement in drug moneylaundering, drugtraf ficking, and
related arms deals is now common knowledge; but the U.S. Government has yet
to admit and explain why BCCI's owner Abedi met repeatedly, as reported by
Time and NBC, with CIA officials William Casey and Robert Gates. [39]

BCCI became close to the CIA through its deep involvement in the
CIAPakistan operation in Afghanistan. [40]

This in itself was a drug story: by their aid in the 1980s Pakistan and the
CIA built up their pre viously insignificant client, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar,
to a position where he could become, "with the full support of ISI [Paki
stani intelligence] and the tacit tolerance of the CIA ... Afghanistan's
leading drug lord." [41] BCCI was in a position to launder much of the drug
proceeds. [42]

Inside Pakistan in the 1980s, the CIA's man for the Afghan armsanddrugs
sup port operation, banked and even staffed through BCCI, was the
NorthWest Fron tier Provincial Governor, General Fazle el Haq (or Huq),
who continued to run the local drug trade with ISI. [43]

Haq and BCCI President Abedi met regularly with the then President of Paki
stan, General Zia; Zia and Abedi in turn would meet regularly to discuss
Afghani stan with CIA Chief William Casey. [44]

BCCI corruption was not confined to Asia. It extended also to the notorious
CIANoriega alliance in Panama, and in the 1990s to the drugcorrupted
military leaders in Guatemala that the U.S. turned to lead the war on drugs
in that country. [45]

BCCI, along with the United States Government's Overseas Private Investment
Corporation (OPIC), even played a role in the supply of arms and trainers
to the Colombian drug cartels' death squads in Puerto Boyaca, mentioned
above. [46]

It would be wrong to blame this pervasive drug corruption on BCCI alone, or
to expect that the exposure in 1991 of BCCI, which was only achieved after
great opposition and obstruction in Washington, will make the problem go
away. BCCI was just one major player in a complex multinational
intelligence game of drugtrafficking, arms sales, banking, and
corruption. Other CIAlinked and druglinked banks, to which BCCI can be
connected, such as the Castle Bank in the Bahamas, the World Finance
Corporation in Miami, and the Nugan Hand Bank in Australia, have risen and
fallen before BCCI's spec tacular demise, and we should expect more such
scandals in the future. [47]

It is the same with the drug traffic itself. As long as we do not address
the root problem of governmental drug connections that make and break the
kingpins, traditional law enforcement will continue to be ineffective. The
kingpin is dead; long live the kingpin.

Protection for Drug Traffickers in the United States

These gray alliances between law enforcement and crimi nal elements lead
to protection for drugtraffickers, not just abroad, but at home.

Drugtraffickers who are used as covert assets abroad also are likely to be
recruited as informants or other assets in this country. Thus for example,
a syndicate headed by Bay of Pigs veteran Guillermo Tabraue was able to
earn $80 million from marijuana and cocaine trafficking from 1976 to 1987,
while Tabraue simultaneously earned up to $1,400 a week as a DEA informant.

Vastly underreported in the U.S. press are the number of cases where
indicted drugtraffickers, because of their intelli gence connections, are
allowed to escape trial in U.S. courts, or else have their charges or
sentences reduced. Usually the public learns of these cases only by
accident. In one case, a U.S. Attorney in San Diego protested publicly
when he was ordered by the CIA to drop charges against a drugtrafficking
CIA client in Mexico (the head of the corrupt DFS mentioned earlier), who
had been indicted for his role in what was described as Amer ica's largest
stolencar ring. Despite public support for his honesty, the U.S. Attorney
was fired. [48]

After a DEA undercover agent retired and went public, he revealed that in
1980 a top Bolivian trafficker arrested by him was almost immediately
released by the Miami U.S. Attorney 's office, without the case being
presented to the grand jury. This was two weeks before the infamous Cocaine
Coup in Bolivia, financed by the trafficker's family and organization,
which briefly installed the drugtraffickers themselves in charge of law
enforcement in that country. [49]

These anecdotal stories, which are numerous, are tiny when compared to the
U.S. governmental protection and coverup of BCCI's involvement in
drugtrafficking and moneylaundering [50]

To its credit, the CIA knew of BCCI's illegal activities as early as 1979,
and started distributing information to the Justice Department and other
agencies in 1983. After an unrelated investigation in Florida, two of
BCCI's units pleaded guilty to drug moneylaundering in 1990, and five of
its executives went to jail. But a senior Justice Department official took
the unusual step of requesting the Florida Banking Commissioner to allow
BCCI to stay open. [51]

For over three years between 1988 and 1991, the Justice Department
"repeatedly requested delays or halts to action by the Senate concerning
BCCI, refused to provide assistance to the [Kerry] Subcommittee concerning
BCCI, and, on occasion, made misleading statements to the Subcommittee
concerning the status of investigative efforts concerning BCCI." [52]

New York District Attorney Robert Morgenthau in this pe riod was also
openly critical of the pointed lack of cooperation from the Justice
Department. [53]

BCCI's drugrelated crimes cannot be separated from its other illegal
activities, notably armstrafficking and the corrup tion of public
officials. For years the CIA has used corruption of foreign officials to
further its aims; and this has fostered a climate of corruption by other
entities, such as BCCI. The size of the BCCI scandal and coverup raises
questions as to whether (with or without CIA connivance) BCCI, having
corrupted senior public figures in such countries as Argentina, Brazil, the
Congo, Guatemala, Nigeria, Pakistan, Panama, and Peru (to name only a few),
may not have also managed to corrupt major figures in this country as well.

As noted by many observers, BCCI and its American allies have prospered
through strong financial and other connections to Presidents Carter,
Reagan, Bush, and Clinton. Many of these were orchestrated for BCCI by the
Arkansas investment banker Jackson Stephens, a backer in turn of Presidents
Carter, Bush and Clinton. [54]

The CIA's worldwide penchant for political influence may help explain why
it "seems to have protected BCCI and its backers for well over a decade."
[55]

Since the demise of BCCI, such influential connections to Clinton have been
continued by Stephens and his close invest ment allies Mochtar and James
Riady. In addition the Riadys' Lippo Bank in Hong Kong was at one point
scheduled to buy out the bankrupt BCCI branch in Hong Kong, where the Burma
drug lord Khun Sa was rumored to have deposited hundreds of millions of
dollars. The deal went sour, and the BCCI brand was bought instead by the
Australian Alan Bond. After Bond in turn went bankrupt, the Lippo Bank
bought from him the old Hong Kong BCCI bank building, which it now
occupies. [56]

The root problem however is the U.S. decision to play Realpolitik in
regions where the reality of rightwing power is its grounding in the
resources of the drug traffic. Alternatives to this easy route of drug
traffic symbiosis and codependency are not easy, but they must be turned
to. The government strategy of global Realpolitik has helped to expand the
global drug traffic to the point where the strategy itself, strengthening
the flow of drugs from one CIAprotected network to another around the
world, has become a more genuine threat to the real security of the
domestic United States, than the enemies it allegedly opposes.

The United States certainly does not control these dangerous allies it has
strengthened and in some cases invented. The problem of disengagement from
such worldwide alliances is complex, and disengagement by itself will not
bring an end to the traffic which U.S. policies have fostered. But it is
clearly time, with a new Administration and a new postCold War global
environment, for a decisive repudiation to drug alliances and a move
towards new global strategies.

What Can Be Done?

What can be done to stop this governmental protection of drugtraffickers?
In the short run we need an ex plicit repudiation of former druglinked
strategies and an admission that they have been counterproductive. This,
might take the form of an explicit directive from the new Clinton
Administration, that old strategies to shore up corrupt right wing
governments abroad, like Peru's, must be clearly subordi nated to the new
domestic priority of reducing this nation's drug problems.

More specifically, the misnamed "War on Drugs," a perni cious and
misleading military metaphor, should be replaced by a medically and
scientifically oriented campaign towards healing this country's drug
sickness. The billions that have been wasted in military antidrug
campaigns, efforts which have ranged from the futile to the
counterproductive, should be rechanneled into a public health paradigm,
emphasizing prevention, maintenance, and rehabilitation programs. The
experiments in controlled decriminalization which have been initiated in
Europe should be closely studied and emulated here. [57]

The root cause of the governmental drug problem in this country is the
National Security Act of 1947, and subsequent orders based on it. These in
effect have exempted intelligence agencies and their personnel from the
rule of law, an exemption which in the course of time has been extended
from the agencies themselves to their drugtrafficking clients. This must
cease. Either the President or Congress must proclaim that national
security cannot be invoked to protect theses drugtraffickers. This must be
accomplished by clarifying orders or legislation, discouraging the
conscious collaboration with, or protection of, criminal drugtraffickers,
by making clear that such acts will themselves normally constitute grounds
for prosecution.

Clearly, a campaign to restore sanity to our prevailing drug policies will
remain utopian, if it does not contemplate a struggle to realign the power
priorities of our political system. Such a struggle will be difficult and
painful. For those who believe in an open and decent America, the results
will also be rewarding.