DEA Agents Agree: CIA means Cocaine Importation Agency

Celerino "Cele" Castillo, 3rd
Ex-DEA Agent

May 17, 2005


© Copyright 2005, From The Wilderness Publications, www.fromthewilderness.com. All Rights Reserved. May be reprinted, distributed or posted on an Internet web site for non-profit purposes only.

For over a century, our government has made sure that we are never to be told the truth about anything that we have done to other people in third world countries, especially in Latin America. With the creation of the School of the Americas, a breeding ground for assassins, and the death squads, we have become the greatest human rights violators in the world.

We have become the most hated country in the world, not because we practice democracy or value our freedom. We are hated because our government denies these basic principles to these people. The hate has come back to haunt us in the form of terrorism, and as they say, once again, "the chickens have come home to roost" with our own homegrown American made terrorist, Luis Posada Carriles.

When I was posted in Central America as a DEA agent I saw Luis Posada and Felix Rodriguez, another American terrorist, at Illopango airport base in El Salvador. Joining them was a CIA asset Venezuelan advisor Victor Rivera. They had become part of what was known as a CIA apparatus that did not have to answer to anyone. They were involved in everything from drug trafficking to kidnapping to the training of the death squads. It was at the height of the Iran-Contra investigation that I had documented these atrocities to my government. I could not understand how our government had assisted in having Posada escape from a Venezuelan prison, and then placed him at Illopango airport as a CIA asset under the new name of Ramon Medina. He was now working hand in hand with then U. S. Lt. Col. Oliver North.

When I asked about Posada's presence at Illopango, I was once again told that it was a covert operation being run by the White House. I started to learn real fast that just about every time I questioned illegal action, I would be told that it was "a covert operation being run by the White House." And as we found out later, my allegations were facts; that became especially clear when, in 1990, President Bush Sr. pardoned another American-made terrorist, Posada's partner in crime: Orlando Bosch. To the degree that the "war on terror" is a response to actual terrorism, that terrorism is retaliation: the U.S. has exported death and violence to the four corners of the Earth with individuals like Posada and Bosch.

Posada admitted to a New York Times reporter that he organized a wave of bombings in Cuba in 1997 that killed an Italian tourist and injured others. However, he is best known as the prime suspect in the bombing of a Cuban Airlines flight in Barbados in October 1976. All 73 crewmembers and passengers including teenaged members of Cuba's national fencing team were killed.

CONTINUED…

http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/hall/contra1.html

Additional resources:

http://www.albionmonitor.com/9612a/ciacontra.html

http://www.drugwar.com/castillonorthmay1104.shtm

www.powderburns.org

Michael Levine Interview

by Paul DeRienzo

from THE SH@DOW - box 20298 - NY, NY 10009

Michael Levine is a veteran of 26 years of undercover work for four federal agencies. He is the recipient of many Justice and Treasury Department awards for hi s work undercover, including the International Narcotics Enforcement Officer Association's Octavio Gonzales Award. He is also the subject of Donald Goddard's book Undercover: The Secret Lives of a Federal Agent (Dell, 1990).

Joining the DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration) after discovering his brother's heroin addiction which eventually killed his brother, Levine was the most successful agent in DEA history. By 1977, he had made 3,000 drug arrests going undercover to set up buy and bust operations against New York City heroin and cocaine dealers. This led to his assignment as DEA station chief in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

By 1989, after having several of his operations stopped by higher ups who allowed his targets to get away, Levine quit the DEA in disgust. Levine then wrote the book Deep Cover (1990, Delacorte Press), describing his experiences that led to his leaving the DEA, exposing the government's phony "War on Drugs".

Levine tells a chilling story of treachery by members of his own agency, and the CIA, men Levine calls the ":suits" who he says use the War on Drugs as a cynical cover for covert foreign policy adventures. Levine says that since he began speaking out against the War on Drugs he has been threatened by high level DEA agents and has been the target of campaigns meant to discredit him.

CONTINUED…

http://www.totse.com/en/conspiracy/institutional_analysis/deajive.html

Additional resources:

http://www.serendipity.li/wod/levine.html

http://www.physicaldream.com/Eyeonsam/Is%20Anyone%20Apologizing%20to%20Gary%20Webb%20by%20Mike%20Levine.htm

Gary Webb

(1955-2005)

EXCERPT…

I had been thinking about looking into the claim that during the civil war in Nicaragua in the eighties, the CIA helped move dope to the United States to buy guns for the contras, who were mounting an insurrection against the leftist Sandinistas. So I called up Hector Berrellez, a guy who worked under Mike Holm in Los Angeles, a guy known within the DEA as its Eliot Ness, and he said, "Look, the CIA is the best in the world. You're not going to beat them; you're never going to get a smoking gun. The best you're going to get is a little story from me."

SNIP…

After a while, the San Jose Mercury News series disappeared except on a few byways of the Internet, Gary Webb was ruined, and things went back to normal. Things like Oliver North's diary entry linking dope and guns for the contras, like Carlos Lehder, a big Colombian drug dealer, testifying as a prosecution witness in federal court during the Noriega trial about the Medellín cartel's $10 million donation to the contras, like the entire history of unseemly connections between the international drug world and the CIA--all this went away, as it has time and time again in the past. A kind of orthodoxy settled over the American press that assumed Webb's work had been thoroughly refuted. He became the Discredited Gary Webb.

SNIP…

HECTOR BERRELLEZ STUMBLED ONTO GARY WEBB'S STORY YEARS before Gary Webb knew a thing about it. ….

In September 1986, Sergeant Tom Gordon of the Los Angeles sheriff's narcotics strike force pieced together intelligence about a big-time drug ring in town run by Danilo Blandón. A month later, on October 23, Gordon went before a judge with a twenty-page detailed statement documenting that "monies gained from the sales of cocaine are transported m Florida and laundered.,.. The monies are filtered to the contra rebels to buy arms in the war in Nicaragua." He got a search warrant for the organization's stash houses. On Friday, October 24, there was a briefing of more than a hundred law-enforcement guys from the sheriff's office, the DEA, the FBI. That was the same day that President Ronald Reagan, after months of hassle, signed a $100 million aid bill that reactivated a licit cash flow to the beleaguered contras. And on Monday, October 27, at daybreak, the strike force simultaneously hit fourteen L. A. area stash houses connected with Blandón.

That's where just another day in the life of Hector Berrellez got weird. Generally, at that early hour, good dopers are out cold; the work tends toward long nights and sleeping in. As Berrellez remembers, "We were expecting to end up with a lot of coke." Instead, they got coffee and sometimes doughnuts. The house he hit had the lights on, and everyone, two men and a woman, was up. The guy who answered the door said, "Good morning; we've been expecting you. Come on in." The house was tidy, the beds were already made, and the damn coffee was on. The three residents were polite, even congenial. "It was obvious," says Berrellez, "that they were told." The place was clean; all fourteen houses were clean. The only thing Berrellez and the other guys found in the house was a professional scale.

But there was a safe, and Berrellez got one of the residents to open it reluctantly. Inside, he found records of kilos matched with amounts of money, an obvious dope ledger, a photograph of a guy in flight dress in front of what looked to be a military jet, and photographs of some guys in combat. Hector asked the guy who the hell the people in the photographs were, and the guy said, "Oh, they are freedom fighters."

CONTINUED…

http://www.esquire.com/features/articles/2004/041217_mfe_webb_1.html

Additional resources:

http://www.ckln.fm/~asadismi/whiteout.html

http://www.csun.edu/CommunicationStudies/ben/news/cia/

The CIA, the Contras and Crack Cocaine

The CIA planes brought guns, washing machines, gourmet food, and fancy furniture intto Colombia and took drugs back to the U.S.

by Dennis Bernstein and Robert Knight

One day in the early 1980s, Wanda Palacio watched a Hercules cargo plane roll to a stop on the tarmac of Barranquilla International Airport, located in the Andean foothills just off the azure waters of Colombia's northern coast. According to Palacio, the aircraft bore the markings of Southern Air Transport, a private airline formerly run by the United States' Central Intelligence Agency.

Palacio was in Barranquilla that day with her host, Jorge Luis Ochoa, to arrange a cocaine deal. At the time, Ochoa was known as Colombia's most ambitious drug lord.

As Palacio watched men in green uniforms remove two green military trunks out of the plane and onto a truck -- she would describe this scene later in an 11-page sworn statement to Congress -- her host explained his operation: The plane was a CIA plane, Ochoa told her, and he was "exchanging guns for drugs." The crew, he said, were CIA agents, and "these shipments came each Thursday from the CIA, landing at dusk. Sometimes they brought guns, sometimes they brought U.S. products such as washing machines, gourmet food, fancy furniture or other items for the traffickers which they could not get in Colombia." And each time, Ochoa told Palacio, "they took back drugs."

"Some of the people involved in drug smuggling are present or past agents of the Central Intelligence Agency."

CONTINUED...

http://www.albionmonitor.com/9612a/ciacontra.html

FBI Memo on Marcus Garvey

FBI Memo

J. Edgar Hoover to Special Agent Ridgely
Washington, D.C., October 11, 1919

MEMORANDUM FOR MR. RIDGELY.

I am transmitting herewith a communication which has come to my attention from the Panama Canal, Washington office, relative to the activities of Marcus Garvey. Garvey is a West-Indian negro and in addition to his activities in endeavoring to establish the Black Star Line Steamship Corporation he has also been particularly active among the radical elements in New York City in agitating the negro movement. Unfortunately, however, he has not as yet violated any federal law whereby he could be proceeded against on the grounds of being an undesirable alien, from the point of view of deportation. It occurs to me, however, from the attached clipping that there might be some proceeding against him for fraud in connection with his Black Star Line propaganda and for this reason I am transmitting the communication to you for your appropriate attention.

The following is a brief statement of Marcus Gravey and his activities:

* Subject a native of the West Indies and one of the most prominent negro agitators in New York;
* He is a founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League;
* He is the promulgator of the Black Star Line and is the managing editor of the Negro World;
* He is an exceptionally fine orator, creating much excitement among the negroes through his steamship proposition;
* In his paper the "Negro World" the Soviet Russian Rule is upheld and there is open advocation of Bolshevism.


Respectfully,
J. E. Hoover

JEH-GPO
DNA, RG 60, file 198940. TMS, recipient's copy.


SOURCE:

http://afroamhistory.about.com/library/blmarcus_garvey_fbimemo.htm

Total Coverage: The CIA, Contras, and Drugs

News: The CIA-coke connection was detailed long before Dark Alliance -- and the evidence keeps coming

By Eric Umansky
August 25, 1998
Mother Jones

You may have seen the headline last month on the front page of the NEW YORK TIMES. (Then again, you may not have, since it ran in a small box on the bottom-left corner.) It announced, "CIA Says It Used Nicaraguan Rebels Accused of Drug Tie." The beginning of that story read:

"The CIA continued to work with about two dozen Nicaraguan rebels and their supporters during the 1980s despite allegations they were trafficking in drugs.... he agency's decision to keep those paid agents, or to continue dealing with them in some less formal relationship, was made by top officials at headquarters in Langley, Va."

In other words, top officials at the CIA knew the agency was working with Contra drug traffickers and didn't do anything about it. But the story, even with that shocking headline, quickly disappeared. None of the other major papers, news magazines, or TV networks reported the NEW YORK TIMES' findings.

SNIP...

But the story of the CIA-funded Contras trafficking coke isn't new. And neither is the surprising lack of media interest in getting to the bottom of it:

* Contra supporters dealing cocaine to fund their army was actually first reported in 1985, in an article by Robert Parry and Brian Barger of the ASSOCIATED PRESS. After interviewing DEA, Customs, and FBI officials, the article said there was evidence the Contras were importing drugs into the U.S. to support their war effort. No other newspapers followed up on the story. As would be the case in the future, though the press ignored the allegations, the Reagan administration didn't. The Justice Department contacted the editors at the AP and politely asked them to remove references in that story that connected Contra drug-smuggling to John Hull, a CIA "asset" in Costa Rica.

SNIP...
But if the media weren't biting, the Reagan administration was keenly interested in the committee findings. Jack Blum, the lead investigator for the committee, complained that the administration obstructed the investigation. The report itself complains of pressure from the executive branch: "...officials in the Justice Department sought to undermine attempts by Senator Kerry to have hearings held on the allegations."

* Oliver North's diary contained at least two extraordinary entries:

From a July 12, 1985, meeting with Richard Secord, North's boss in the Reagan administration:

"$14M to finance came from drugs."
This entry, which was given in part to the Kerry Committee, was first reported in NEWSWEEK. North claimed he did nothing wrong and said the Kerry Committee was "just playing politics and dragging out wild charges."

And this entry on Aug. 9, 1985, which was submitted as part of the Iran-Contra special prosecutor report:

"Honduran DC-6 which is being used for runs out of New Orleans is probably being used for drug runs into U.S."

North claimed he told the DEA about this plane. In 1994, the WASHINGTON POST decided to verify North's claim. The POST interviewed top law officials, from the DEA, Customs, State Department, CIA, and White House, including some who had meetings with North at the time of the diary entry. Each one said that North did not pass the information on to them.

CONTINUED...

http://www.motherjones.com/news/special_reports/total_coverage/coke.html

CIA Drugs: The Record Ignored

- by Joe Horman , October 22, 1996

In their rush to mask the crimes of government and CIA officials, the LA Times and Washington Post predictably omitted salient and persuasive evidence that clearly supports the findings of the San Jose Mercury News that the CIA's contra army smuggled tons of cocaine into the United States. What follows are some of the published reports, congressional findings and testimony all of which, when taken in their entirety, amount to a preponderance of both direct and circumstantial evidence that persuasively support the central contentions.

UNITED STATES SENATE SUBCOMMITTEE FINDINGS.

That investigation, directed by Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., established that the administration gave contra-supply contracts to four companies that were either under indictment for drug trafficking or listed as suspected smugglers in law enforcement computers. Kerry's probe also confirmed that pilots used for contra arms flights carried cocaine into the United States as well as guns to Central America. And Kerry found that drug kingpins had contributed heavily to the contra cause, in hopes of gaining favor with Washington.

IRAN CONTRA SWORN TESTIMONY

The Iran-contra testimony of CIA officer Alan Fiers, "with respect to the Resistance Forces it is not a couple of people. It is a lot of people." Friers was the CIA's Central-American Station Chief and contra coordinator.

OFFICIAL FINDINGS OF COSTA RICA CONGRESSIONAL INVESTIGATION

In July 1989, North and other major contragate figures were barred from Costa Rica. The order was issued by none other than Costa Rican President Oscar Arias acting on recommendations from a Costa Rican congressional commission investigating drug trafficking. The commission concluded that the contra resupply network in Costa Rica that North coordinated from the White House doubled as a drug smuggling operation.

The narcotics commission started probing the contra network centered around the northern Costa Rican ranch of U.S.-born rancher John Hull because of the "quantity and frequency of the shipment of drugs that passed through the zone." North's personal notebook mentioned "the necessity of giving Mr. Hull protection."

CONTINUED...

http://nick.assumption.edu/WebVAX/Mena/Horman22Oct96.html

Clouds Over George Bush

By Robert Parry

The night of Sept. 21, 1976, was a grim one in Washington.

That morning, one of the worst terrorist incidents in the capital's history had shaken the stately buildings along Embassy Row. A bomb had ripped apart the car carrying Chile's former foreign minister Orlando Letelier and two American co-workers.
Letelier and a woman, Ronni Moffitt, died from the blast. Moffitt's husband was wounded.

That evening at a dinner at the Jordanian Embassy, Rep. James Abourezk was distraught. Letelier had been a personal friend, and his violent death in the heart of Washington was weighing heavily on Abourezk's mind.

In the room, the congressman spotted the gangly, preppy figure of George Bush, director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Abourezk thought he might enlist Bush's help in solving the murder.

Given Letelier's status as an ascerbic critic of Chile's military dictatorship, there already were suspicions that agents of Gen. Augusto Pinochet had planted the bomb.

Abourezk button-holed the CIA director and asked Bush to commit the CIA to the search "to find the bastards who killed" Letelier. Abourezk recalled that Bush looked concerned and responded, "I'll see what I can do. We are not without assets in Chile."

The problem with Bush's promise, however, was that some of the CIA's top "assets" in Chile were implicated in the murder.

CONTINUED...

http://www.consortiumnews.com/1990s/c122898a.html

Real-Life 'National Treasure' -- in Reverse

By Robert Parry
May 6, 2005

The “October Surprise mystery” – did Republicans strike a secret deal with Iran in 1980 to sabotage Jimmy Carter and win the White House for Ronald Reagan? – has similarities to the storyline of the action movie “National Treasure,” only in reverse.

Walt Disney’s “National Treasure” is the imaginative tale of a search for a treasure hidden by America’s Founding Fathers to keep it away from the British monarchy. To find the treasure more than two centuries later, the hero – played by Nicolas Cage – travels from city to city in pursuit of complicated clues, including some concealed in invisible ink on the back of the Declaration of Independence.

The search for the truth behind the October Surprise mystery has seemed almost as unlikely at times, except the narrative is nearly the opposite: today’s American rulers destroy clues that otherwise might lead to knowing whether the democratic process – arguably the greatest national treasure – was stolen in plain sight.

At the center of this October Surprise “treasure hunt in reverse” has been the creation of bogus or dubious alibis for key participants in alleged meetings between Republicans and Iranians in 1980 when Iran’s Islamic fundamentalist government was holding 52 American hostages and President Carter was desperately seeking their release.

SNIP...

Rep. Lee Hamilton, D-Ind., the chairman of the House October Surprise task force, wrote an Op-Ed article for the New York Times, entitled “Case Closed.” It cited the supposedly solid Casey alibis as key reasons why the task force findings “should put the controversy to rest once and for all.”

CONTINUED...

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2005/050605.html

BCCI, Afghanistan, and Past Drug-Terrorist Networks

You can read online a US Senate Subcommittee Report entitled "The BCCI Affair" about BCCI, the Bank of Credit and Commerce International. The Report concluded:
a) that BCCI constituted international financial crime on a massive and global scale, including money-laundering and arms trafficking,
b) that BCCI systematically bribed leaders and politicians in 73 countries around the world, including the US,
c) that it evaded regulatory barriers and penetrated the US banking system. It also reached 12 other conclusions.

The Senate Report's conclusions downplayed what the Subcommittee had heard from Acting CIA Director Richard Kerr about CIA knowledge of "the illegal activities that BCCI was involved in -- narcotics money-laundering, terrorism, support to terrorism, and other activities such as that" (Hearings, III, 584), at a time when the CIA itself banked at both BCCI and First American, a US bank which BCCI illegally controlled.

Buried in the Report is the finding that "terrorist organizations... received payment at BCCI-London and other branches directly from Gulf-state patrons, and then transferred those funds wherever they wished without apparent scrutiny."

Books such as The Outlaw Bank, by Jonathan Beaty and S.C. Gwynne, go further. Beaty and Gwynne accuse BCCI of involvement with Saudi and Pakistani intelligence and defense and foreign policy (e.g. 167, 291), with the movement of narcotics to finance the Afghan resistance of the 1980s (p. 296), and with the CIA and its director William Casey (e.g. pp. 80-82, 250-51). They cite (on p. 118) a Financial Times story <7/25/91> in which the then Finance Minister of Pakistan "appeared to accept ... that BCCI in Pakistan had been used by the CIA to transfer money to Afghan resistance leaders and their backers in the Pakistani military."

BCCI collapsed in 1991. It would appear that the networks and connections persist. It is pertinent to recall the words of a former senior DEA Agent with whom I once shared a TV panel, whose special area was the Middle East: "In my 30-year history in the Drug Enforcement Administration and related agencies, the major targets of my investigations almost invariably turned out to be working for the CIA" (quoted in Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall Cocaine Politics <1998 edition>, xviii).

CONTINUED...

http://ist-socrates.berkeley.edu/~pdscott/q4.html

Opinion

Sibel Edmonds–an appeal to the Internet community

By W. David Jenkins III
Online Journal Contributing Writer

EXCERPT...

As important as the Downing Street Minutes and continued pressure on the mainstream media are to revealing the truth to the nation, there is another critically important story that requires our attention and our action—and the clock is ticking away on this one. We have only until the end of July to make a difference and perhaps turn the course of history. Of course, I'm referring to Sibel Edmonds and, after my conversations with her, I felt I should make an effort before time runs out and her witness to significant governmental chicanery is suppressed by the government forever.

On May 14, Edmonds published "Gagged, But Not Dead" which can still be read on herwebsite where she updates the reader on the status of her case and the subsequent gag order placed not only on her but also on members of Congress forbidding even discussing matters relating to her case!

Many of you may still be nauseous after being lectured to by the likes of criminals such as G. Gordon Liddy and Chuck Coleson in the wake of Mark Felt outing himself as "Deep Throat." These ex-convicts, along with former Nixonians like Pat Buchanan, ranted repeatedly that Felt should have followed the "proper channels of authority" if he had had a problem with the Watergate scandal rather than sneaking off to the Washington Post.

Sibel Edmonds is the perfect example of why Felt did the right thing when he leaked to the Post: those "proper channels of authority" in the Nixon administration were corrupt. Those "proper channels" were active co-conspirators themselves.

However, the Nixon administration's activities were simple child's play compared to the practiced corruption that rules the Bush II administration—and whistleblowers like Edmonds, Colleen Rowley and others now know that. Hopefully for them and all of us, there's still time to correct the dismaying non-results their adherence to following "proper channels" have produced.

CONTINUED...

http://www.onlinejournal.com/Commentary/062505Jenkins/062505jenkins.html

From Kobe Bryant to Uncle Sam

Why They Hated Gary Webb

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
December 18 / 19, 2004

I read a piece about Kobe Bryant a couple of days ago. The way it described his fall made me think of Bryant as a parable of America in the Bush years, that maybe even W himself could understand. No longer the big guy leading the winning team to victory over Commie scum, but a street-corner lout, picking on victims quarter his size, trying always to buy his way out of trouble. Don't leave your sister alone with Uncle Sam! No one want to buy Uncle Sam's jerseys anymore, same way they don't buy Kobe Bryant's.

This business of Uncle Sam's true face brings me to Gary Webb and why they hated him. Few spectacles in journalism in the mid-1990s were more disgusting than the slagging of Gary Webb in the New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times. Squadrons of hacks, some of them with career-long ties to the CIA, sprayed thousands of words of vitriol over Webb and his paper, the San Jose Mercury News for besmirching the Agency's fine name by charging it with complicity in the importing of cocaine into the US.

There are certain things you aren't meant to say in public in America. The systematic state-sponsorship of torture by the US used to be a major no-no, but that went by the board this year (even though Seymour Hersh treated the CIA with undue kindness in Chain of Command: the Road to Abu Ghraib) . A prime no-no is to say that the US government has used assassination down the years as an instrument of national policy; also that the CIA's complicity with drug dealing criminal gangs stretches from the Afghanistan of today back to the year the Agency was founded in 1947. That last one is the line Webb stepped over.He paid for his presumption by undergoing one of the unfairest batterings in the history of the US press, as the chapter from Whiteout we ran on our site yesterday narrates.

SNIP...

There were similar fountains of outrage in 1996 that the CIA hadn't been given enough space in Webb's series to solemnly swear that never a gram of cocaine had passed under its nose but that it had been seized and turned over to the DEA or US Customs.

In 1998 Jeffrey St Clair and I published our book, Whiteout, about the relationships between the CIA, drugs and the press since the Agency's founding. We also examined the Webb affair in detail. On a lesser scale, at lower volume it elicited the same sort of abuse Webb drew. It was a long book stuffed with well-documented facts, over which the critics lightly vaulted to charge us, as they did Webb, with "conspiracy-mongering" though, sometimes in the same sentence, of recycling "old news". Jeffrey and I came to the conclusion that what really affronted the critics, some of them nominally left-wing, was that our book portrayed Uncle Sam's true face. Not a "rogue" Agency but one always following the dictates of government, murdering, torturing, poisoning, drugging its own subjects, approving acts of monstrous cruelty, following methods devised and tested by Hitler's men, themselves transported to America after the Second World War.

CONTINUED...

http://www.counterpunch.com/cockburn12182004.html