CABLES PORTRAY EXPANDED REACH OF DRUG AGENCY

WASHINGTON - The Drug Enforcement Administration has been transformed
into a global intelligence organization with a reach that extends far
beyond narcotics, and an eavesdropping operation so expansive it has
to fend off foreign politicians who want to use it against their
political enemies, according to secret diplomatic cables.

In far greater detail than previously seen, the cables, from the
cache obtained by WikiLeaks and made available to some news
organizations, offer glimpses of drug agents balancing diplomacy and
law enforcement in places where it can be hard to tell the
politicians from the traffickers, and where drug rings are themselves
mini-states whose wealth and violence permit them to run roughshod
over struggling governments.

Diplomats recorded unforgettable vignettes from the largely unseen
war on drugs:

. In Panama, an urgent BlackBerry message from the president to the
American ambassador demanded that the D.E.A. go after his political
enemies: "I need help with tapping phones."

. In Sierra Leone, a major cocaine-trafficking prosecution was almost
upended by the attorney general's attempt to solicit $2.5 million in bribes.

. In Guinea, the country's biggest narcotics kingpin turned out to be
the president's son, and diplomats discovered that before the police
destroyed a huge narcotics seizure, the drugs had been replaced by flour.

Leaders of Mexico's beleaguered military issued private pleas for
closer collaboration with the drug agency, confessing that they had
little faith in their own country's police forces.

Cables from Myanmar, the target of strict United States sanctions,
describe the drug agency informants' reporting both on how the
military junta enriches itself with drug money and on the political
activities of the junta's opponents.

Officials of the D.E.A. and the State Department declined to discuss
what they said was information that should never have been made public.

Like many of the cables made public in recent weeks, those describing
the drug war do not offer large disclosures. Rather, it is the
details that add up to a clearer picture of the corrupting influence
of big traffickers, the tricky game of figuring out which foreign
officials are actually controlled by drug lords, and the story of how
an entrepreneurial agency operating in the shadows of the F.B.I. has
become something more than a drug agency. The D.E.A. now has 87
offices in 63 countries and close partnerships with governments that
keep the Central Intelligence Agency at arm's length.

Because of the ubiquity of the drug scourge, today's D.E.A. has
access to foreign governments, including those, like Nicaragua's and
Venezuela's, that have strained diplomatic relations with the United
States. Many are eager to take advantage of the agency's drug
detection and wiretapping technologies.

In some countries, the collaboration appears to work well, with the
drug agency providing intelligence that has helped bring down
traffickers, and even entire cartels. But the victories can come at a
high price, according to the cables, which describe scores of D.E.A.
informants and a handful of agents who have been killed in Mexico and
Afghanistan.

In Venezuela, the local intelligence service turned the tables on the
D.E.A., infiltrating its operations, sabotaging equipment and hiring
a computer hacker to intercept American Embassy e-mails, the cables report.

And as the drug agency has expanded its eavesdropping operations to
keep up with cartels, it has faced repeated pressure to redirect its
counternarcotics surveillance to local concerns, provoking tensions
with some of Washington's closest allies.

Sticky Situations

Cables written in February by American diplomats in Paraguay, for
example, described the D.E.A.'s pushing back against requests from
that country's government to help spy on an insurgent group, known as
the Paraguayan People's Army, or the EPP, the initials of its name in
Spanish. The leftist group, suspected of having ties to the Colombian
rebel group FARC, had conducted several high-profile kidnappings and
was making a small fortune in ransoms.

When American diplomats refused to give Paraguay access to the drug
agency's wiretapping system, Interior Minister Rafael Filizzola
threatened to shut it down, saying: "Counternarcotics are important,
but won't topple our government. The EPP could."

The D.E.A. faced even more intense pressure last year from Panama,
whose right-leaning president, Ricardo Martinelli, demanded that the
agency allow him to use its wiretapping program - known as Matador -
to spy on leftist political enemies he believed were plotting to kill him.

The United States, according to the cables, worried that Mr.
Martinelli, a supermarket magnate, "made no distinction between
legitimate security targets and political enemies," refused, igniting
tensions that went on for months.

Mr. Martinelli, who the cables said possessed a "penchant for
bullying and blackmail," retaliated by proposing a law that would
have ended the D.E.A.'s work with specially vetted police units. Then
he tried to subvert the drug agency's control over the program by
assigning nonvetted officers to the counternarcotics unit.

And when the United States pushed back against those attempts -
moving the Matador system into the offices of the politically
independent attorney general - Mr. Martinelli threatened to expel the
drug agency from the country altogether, saying other countries, like
Israel, would be happy to comply with his intelligence requests.

Eventually, according to the cables, American diplomats began
wondering about Mr. Martinelli's motivations. Did he really want the
D.E.A. to disrupt plots by his adversaries, or was he trying to keep
the agency from learning about corruption among his relatives and friends?

One cable asserted that Mr. Martinelli's cousin helped smuggle tens
of millions of dollars in drug proceeds through Panama's main airport
every month. Another noted, "There is no reason to believe there will
be fewer acts of corruption in this government than in any past government."

As the standoff continued, the cables indicate that the United States
proposed suspending the Matador program, rather than submitting to
Mr. Martinelli's demands. (American officials say the program was
suspended, but the British took over the wiretapping program and have
shared the intelligence with the United States.)

In a statement on Saturday, the government of Panama said that it
regretted "the bad interpretation by United States authorities of a
request for help made to directly confront crime and drug
trafficking." It said that Panama would continue its efforts to stop
organized crime and emphasized that Panama continued to have
"excellent relations with the United States."

Meanwhile in Paraguay, according to the cables, the United States
acquiesced, agreeing to allow the authorities there to use D.E.A.
wiretaps for antikidnapping investigations, as long as they were
approved by Paraguay's Supreme Court.

"We have carefully navigated this very sensitive and politically
sticky situation," one cable said. "It appears that we have no other
viable choice."

A Larger Mandate

Created in 1973, the D.E.A. has steadily built its international
turf, an expansion primarily driven by the multinational nature of
the drug trade, but also by forces within the agency seeking a larger
mandate. Since the 2001 terrorist attacks, the agency's leaders have
cited what they describe as an expanding nexus between drugs and
terrorism in further building its overseas presence.

In Afghanistan, for example, "DEA officials have become convinced
that 'no daylight' exists between drug traffickers at the highest
level and Taliban insurgents," Karen Tandy, then the agency's
administrator, told European Union officials in a 2007 briefing,
according to a cable from Brussels.

Ms. Tandy described an agency informant's recording of a meeting in
Nangarhar Province between 9 Taliban members and 11 drug traffickers
to coordinate their financial support for the insurgency, and she
said the agency was trying to put a "security belt" around
Afghanistan to block the import of chemicals for heroin processing.
The agency was embedding its officers in military units around
Afghanistan, she said. In 2007 alone, the D.E.A. opened new bureaus
in Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Dubai, United Arab Emirates, as well as
in three Mexican cities.

Cables describe lengthy negotiations over the extradition to the
United States of the two notorious arms dealers wanted by the D.E.A.
as it reached beyond pure counternarcotics cases: Monzer al-Kassar, a
Syrian arrested in Spain, and Viktor Bout, a Russian arrested in
Thailand. Both men were charged with agreeing to illegal arms sales
to informants posing as weapons buyers for Colombian rebels. Notably,
neither man was charged with violating narcotics laws.

Late last year in a D.E.A. case, three men from Mali accused of
plotting to transport tons of cocaine across northwest Africa were
charged under a narco-terrorism statute added to the law in 2006, and
they were linked to both Al Qaeda and its North African affiliate,
called Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.

The men themselves had claimed the terrorism link, according to the
D.E.A., though officials told The New York Times that they had no
independent corroboration of the Qaeda connections. Experts on the
desert regions of North Africa, long a route for smuggling between
Africa and Europe, are divided about whether Al Qaeda operatives play
a significant role in the drug trade, and some skeptics note that
adding "terrorism" to any case can draw additional investigative
resources and impress a jury.

New Routes for Graft

Most times, however, the agency's expansion seems driven more by
external forces than internal ones, with traffickers opening new
routes to accommodate new markets. As Mexican cartels take control of
drug shipments from South America to the United States, Colombian
cartels have begun moving cocaine through West Africa to Europe.

The cables offer a portrait of the staggering effect on Mali, whose
deserts have been littered with abandoned airplanes - including at
least one Boeing 727 - and Ghana, where traffickers easily smuggle
drugs through an airport's "VVIP (Very Very Important Person) lounge."

Top-to-bottom corruption in many West African countries made it hard
for diplomats to know whom to trust. In one 2008 case in Sierra
Leone, President Ernest Bai Koroma moved to prosecute and extradite
three South American traffickers seized with about 1,500 pounds of
cocaine, while his attorney general was accused of offering to
release them for $2.5 million in bribes.

In Nigeria, the D.E.A. reported a couple of years earlier that
diplomats at the Liberian Embassy were using official vehicles to
transport drugs across the border because they were not getting paid
by their war-torn government and "had to fend for themselves."

A May 2008 cable from Guinea described a kind of heart-to-heart
conversation about the drug trade between the American ambassador,
Phillip Carter III, and Guinea's prime minister, Lansana Kouyate. At
one point, the cable said, Mr. Kouyate "visibly slumped in his chair"
and acknowledged that Guinea's most powerful drug trafficker was
Ousmane Conte, the son of Lansana Conte, then the president. (After
the death of his father, Mr. Conte went to prison.)

A few days later, diplomats reported evidence that the corruption ran
much deeper inside the Guinean government than the president's son.
In a colorfully written cable - with chapters titled "Excuses,
Excuses, Excuses" and "Theatrical Production" - diplomats described
attending what was billed as a drug bonfire that had been staged by
the Guinean government to demonstrate its commitment to combating the
drug trade.

Senior Guinean officials, including the country's drug czar, the
chief of police and the justice minister, watched as officers set
fire to what the government claimed was about 350 pounds of marijuana
and 860 pounds of cocaine, valued at $6.5 million.

In reality, American diplomats wrote, the whole incineration was a
sham. Informants had previously told the embassy that Guinean
authorities replaced the cocaine with manioc flour, proving, the
diplomats wrote, "that narco-corruption has contaminated" the
government of Guinea "at the highest levels."

And it did not take the D.E.A.'s sophisticated intelligence
techniques to figure out the truth. The cable reported that even the
ambassador's driver sniffed out a hoax.

"I know the smell of burning marijuana," the driver said. "And I
didn't smell anything."