Another CIA cocaine connection? | by Jerry Meldon | Published in The Middlesex News, January 12, 1997

 

If you were startled by stories of cocaine trafficking by CIA-linked supporters of the contras during the Reagan administration’s war against Nicaragua, sit down before you read this. A federal grand jury recently indicted Venezuelan general Ramon Guillen Davilla on charges of smuggling cocaine here by the ton between 1987 and 1991, while he headed a unit whose mission was drug interdiction in cooperation with the CIA.

Gen. Guillen, whose case begs for a serious investigation into CIA narcotics activities, allegedly shipped some 22 tons of cocaine. The roughly six tons per year place him in a class with Mexican drug lord and former FBI most wanted, Juan Garcia Abrego, who was convicted in October of smuggling seven tons per year.

What was the CIA doing with a thug like Guillen? The Reagan administration, which revitalized the Agency after it had been stripped down by Jimmy Carter, ordered the CIA to establish a narcotics interception program together with Venezuelan authorities. But drug interdiction is the mission of the Drug Enforcement Administration, and in the late ‘80s there was particularly bad blood between the agencies.

Star DEA agent Enrique Camarena Salazar had been murdered in Guadalajara, Mexico, in February 1985 by application of a Phillips-head screwdriver to his skull. The culprits included drug kingpin Juan Ramon Matta Ballesteros, whose airline was the primary contra supplier, and his partner in heroin smuggling, Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo, a major contra donor, according to the DEA. Among their co-conspirators were Mexican politicians on the drug lords’ payroll, and officials of the Mexican Directorate of Federal Security – a later-disbanded agency that worked closely with the CIA.

But all it took was common sense to persuade the DEA’s Caracas agent-in-charge to nix a December 1989 plan by the CIA and Gen. Guillen’s unit to ship a ton of cocaine to the US – purportedly to snare local dealers.

Undaunted, the CIA went over the special agent’s head. But its agents were again rebuffed, this time at DEA headquarters.

Despite the rejection, and a federal statute forbidding importation of illicit drugs without DEA approval, the shipment went through – with CIA authorization.

The CIA has issued no statement regarding Guillen’s November indictment – which is understandable, for the Agency must weigh its words to a public already astir with tales of the contras and cocaine. Especially since, as the Miami Herald noted, Gen. Guillen was once the CIA’s “most trusted man in Venezuela.”

Indeed, the question in certain officials’ minds must be whether Guillen can be trusted not to talk.

 

 

Kerry’s curious silence | by Jerry Meldon | Published in The Middlesex News, November 1, 1996

 

  As much as I’ve admired him for 25 years, I can’t figure John Kerry out. Is it the disarming politeness? Or is it political acumen that seals his lips on the politically delicate – and currently hot – issue of cocaine trafficking by CIA-connected supporters of the Nicaraguan contras during the Reagan-Bush era? After all:

The subject serendipitously resurfaced in August in a widely publicized series in the San Jose Mercury News, suggesting that the contra-connected cocaine influx during the Republicans’ White House watch, helped fuel – and perhaps ignited – the crack epidemic that has ravaged America’s ghettos.

Landmark hearings held by Kerry’s Senate Intelligence Subcommittee documented the Reagan/Bush team’s indifference to the narcotics-strewn criminal records of major contra suppliers.

At a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing held October 23rd – in response to the public furor that followed August’s news sensation – Kerry’s former top investigator Jack Blum testified that an “absolute stonewall” was erected by the head of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, to keep Kerry’s 1987-89 inquiry from evidence tying the contras to cocaine. The head of that division was Bill Weld.

Sure, the Mercury News’s series has come under attack, especially by the Washington Post. But little in the Post’s 5,000-word critique would assuage CIA critics, least of all the statement that (Nicaraguan cocaine trafficker Jose) “Blandon handled only about five tons of cocaine during a decade-long career.”

Moreover, not only is the CIA/cocaine connection a fact of life – but the Mercury News’ stories resonate with a well-established history of CIA collaboration with and protection of major narcotics traffickers. In postwar France, the newly created Agency recruited thugs from dormant Corsican mafia to terrorize Socialist politicians. The mafiosi, reinvigorated and protected by its new ties to intelligence and the Gaullist party, proceeded to establish the “French Connection” that would ship tons of Southeast Asian heroin to the streets of New York City.

Several years later the CIA assembled a small army of anti-Castro Cuban exiles for the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion. Like the Corsicans before them, veterans of the abortive invasion would use Agency ties to skirt the law and avoid jail – at least till the end of the decade. On June 21, 1970, the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs collared 150 suspects in what the BNDD termed the largest roundup of major drug traffickers in the history of federal law enforcement.” [sic] According to then attorney general John Mitchell, the Justice Department had broken up a “nationwide ring of wholesalers handling about 30 percent of all heroin sales and 75 to 80 percent of all cocaine sales in the United States.” Two-thirds of those arrested were Bay of Pigs veterans.

In the ‘60s and ‘70s in Indochina, CIA-supported guerilla [sic] armies in Laos – and Washington-backed South Vietnamese dictators – profited directly from trafficking in Southeast Asian heroin, with U.S. east coast-based Sicilian mafiosi now in cahoots with the Corsicans.

Then in the ‘80s, while the Agency was orchestrating the contras’ war of terror against Nicaragua’s Sandinista government, the Reagan/Bush White House would pump $2 billion into another army of “freedom fighters” waging guerrilla war in Afghanistan against Russian soldiers. The CIA’s top guerilla warlord, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, would later be exposed as a major heroin trafficker – and trainer of anti-American, Islamic fundamentalist terrorists.

Over this long and sordid history, the most serious and fruitful Congressional inquiry into CIA aiding and abetting of narcotics traffickers has been Senator John Kerry’s. So it’s a mystery why Kerry refuses to make political hay of it.

When Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis opposed Vice President George Bush in the 1988 presidential race, Dukakis seemed incapable of uttering the phrase “contra drug trafficking” – despite the ammunition Kerry’s inquiry was providing.

Now Kerry himself has steered clear of the subject – despite its freshness in voters’ minds, the tightness of his senatorial race, and the allegation, according to Jack Blum, that (Deputy Attorney General) “Weld put a very serious block on any effort we made to get information.” Why, John?

 

 

Hekmatyar: From terrorist to drug trafficker to prime minister | by Jerry Meldon | Published in The Middlesex News, August 18, 1996

 

The “expert” community that has been speculating on terrorist links to the crash of TWA Flight 800 didn’t perk up a few weeks earlier when Islamic extremist Guibuddin [sic] Hekmatyar – the CIA’s favorite Afghan guerrilla in the ‘80s – was sworn in as Prime Minister of Afghanistan. But heroin overdose and terror bombing victims must have turned over in their graves.

For Hekmatyar’s is a textbook example of a CIA operation providing cover for drug trafficking and spawning grounds for terrorists – in this case three who have been decapitated for the November bombing in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia that claimed five American lives.

Only now, after tragedies in the Middle East and off Long Island, are former US officials taking responsibility for having tutored a legion of future terrorists in Afghanistan – while denying that they knew what they were doing.

The fateful CIA/Hekmatyar marriage of convenience can be traced to Jimmy Carter’s reaction to the December 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Wrestling with fallout from the February 1979 overthrow of the Shah in next-door Iran, including the taking of 55 American hostages – and the murder that same month of his ambassador to Afghanistan – Carter boosted assistance to the Afghan mujaheddin (holy warriors).

The mujaheddin were already waging guerrilla war on a government in Kabul, Afghanistan they deemed the embodiment of atheistic modernism. And their patrons in Pakistan’s Inter-Service Intelligence directorate (ISI) had already introduced the CIA’s Islamabad station chief to guerrilla leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Hekmatyar’s path to Peshawar in northwest Pakistan would not recommend him as a “freedom fighter” as most Americans relate to the expression on the Fourth of July.

In the ‘60s he founded the Muslim Brotherhood in Kabul. In the early ‘70s, according to a New York Times report, Hekmatyar “dispatched followers to throw vials of acid into the faces of women students who refused to wear veils.” The king imprisoned him in connection with the 1972 murder of a Maoist student. But he was released when the prime minister overthrew his cousin, the king.

Hekmatyar then fled to Pakistan, joined an Islamic fundamentalist group with adherents in the military, and became a Pakistani intelligence asset. International politics on a grander scale would unfold to his advantage.

The Reagan team hit the White House in January 1981 itching to roll back communism. Like Carter’s national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, they looked at Afghanistan and saw a Russian Vietnam. If American politicians had learned nothing else in Indochina, they learned not to shed American blood. So, despite the opportunity to sight Russians between cross-hairs, the White House chose intervention by proxy, a.k.a. the Reagan Doctrine.

Washington persuaded Islamabad to run the war in return for $3 billion in military aid to Pakistan, besides $2 billion for Afghan guerrillas. The CIA dispatched military trainers to guerrilla encampments along the border.

CIA and State Department officials later told the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Tim Weiner (now with the New York Times) that Hekmatyar was “scary … vicious … a fascist … definitely dictatorship material.” And a Boston-based businessman who has worked with the Free Afghanistan Alliance recently told this writer, half in jest, that mujaheddin press offices featured outer rooms with anti-Soviet posters and inner chambers depicting Uncle Sam as the Great Satan.

As if unaware of whom they were dealing with, the Reagan administration earmarked for Hekmatyar half the mujaheddins’ $2 billion. Another billion would flow into his coffers from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Libya, and Iraq. The White House hailed him as a “freedom fighter.” And the war against Soviet invaders heated up.

Nearly one million villagers would perish. And the Soviets would stumble through mountainous terrain no more friendly than the jungles of Vietnam.

In February 1989, nine years and 15,000 Soviet casualties later, Moscow withdrew ignominiously, having gained little other than the wrath of its own people. Their last puppet regime collapsed in 1992, leaving a vacuum filled by rival guerrilla factions. With the Soviets out of the picture, the Bush administration ended support for Hekmatyar.

The bloody inter-guerrilla combat continues, notwithstanding Hekmatyar’s deal with a rival to become prime minister on June 26. Helping to keep Hekmatyar’s image polished until well after the Russians withdrew was a blind eye to the massive heroin trafficking. But in May 1990 time became ripe to notice the emperor’s lack of apparel.

The Washington Post disclosed that month that Hekmatyar’s underlings were processing opium into heroin. Indeed, as University of Wisconsin history professor Al McCoy told this writer, what inspired him to expand his 1972 blockbuster “The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia” into “The Politics of Heroin” was discovering that “drug trafficking was financing the CIA’s secret warriors in Afghanistan just as it had in Indochina.”

And narcotics have reportedly remained the Afghan guerrillas’ lifeblood since the White House shut off its billion-dollar spigot.

The payback for Washington’s investment has been a double-edged sword: Russia suffered a devastating stalemate; American heroin users got a shot in the arm. The US addict population, after falling sharply in the mid-‘70s due to poor harvests in Southeast Asia, doubled in the early ‘80s, with half the heroin arriving from Afghanistan and Pakistan.

At the same time, the “Holy War” against Soviet infidels attracted Islamic extremists from far and wide to Afghanistan, there to be trained by the CIA and its proxies. Now the chickens are coming home to roost.

Not by chance did Sheik Omar Abdul Rahman flee in 1990 from Egypt – where he allegedly ordered the assassination of President Amwar Sadat – to Peshawar, Pakistan. There, he reportedly met with long-time disciple Gulbuddin Hekmatyar to commission the training of militant fundamentalists.

According to a former senior policy maker quoted recently in the Los Angeles Times, “The non-Afghans were there before we got to Afghanistan, and they were there when we left … They didn’t get much attention until shortly before the World Trade Center bombing.” And, according to present and former US officials, “American forces never knowingly trained non-Afghans.”

That’s hard to swallow in light of investigations following the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, which have revealed that a small army of future terrorists was trained in Pakistan for the war in Afghanistan. Two were convicted for that bombing. Their spiritual leader, Rahman, was convicted of instigating a wave of terrorist acts that included the bombing.

Three of the Islamic extremists beheaded on May 31 for the November bombing in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, were trained in Pakistan for the Afghan Holy War.

And while Defense Secretary Perry has speculated that Iran might be responsible for the June 25 bombing in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia that killed 19 US soldiers, Saudi investigators are said to be pursuing an Afghan connection.