Drugs, War and The CIA

Allegations of CIA drug trafficking

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The CIA made its own internal inquiries of its staff and clients in Laos concerning the drug trade, but never denied the essential allegation.

"One sane voice fighting tons of nonsense."

Rather, the CIA took the position that trading in opium was legal in Laos until The CIA explained that opium served the isolated Lao hill tribes as their sole cash crop and that opium was one of the few medicines available in the primitive living circumstances. The CIA had its own internal security agents investigating possible commercial opium exports mid onward. One Hmong guerrilla commanding officer was pressured into giving up dealing in opium.

The CIA concluded that small amounts of opium might have been smuggled via Air America, given wartime conditions. The Agency's case officers even staged a couple of impromptu raids on drug refineries , but were reined in by the CIA Office of General Counsel. A number of allegations have been written about and several local, state, and federal investigations have taken place related to the alleged use of the Mena Intermountain Municipal Airport as a CIA drop point in large scale cocaine trafficking beginning in the early s.

Bush and Bill Clinton. The CIA's self-investigation, overseen by the CIA's inspector general, concluded that the CIA had no involvement in or knowledge of any illegal activities that may have occurred in Mena. The report said that the agency had conducted a training exercise at the airport in partnership with another Federal agency and that companies located at the airport had performed "routine aviation-related services on equipment owned by the CIA". A film about these events called American Made focusing on the notorious pilot and Medellin cartel drug smuggler Barry Seal , portrayed by Tom Cruise , was released on September 29, In October , two former federal agents and an ex-CIA contractor told an American television network that CIA operatives were involved in the kidnapping and murder of DEA covert agent Enrique Camarena , because he was a threat to the agency's drug operations in Mexico.

According to the three men, the CIA was collaborating with drug traffickers moving cocaine and marijuana to the United States, and using its share of the profits to finance Nicaraguan Contra rebels attempting to overthrow Nicaragua's Sandinista government. A CIA spokesman responded, calling it "ridiculous" to suggest that the Agency had anything to do with the murder of a US federal agent or the escape of his alleged killer. The investigation was conducted by the Sub-Committee on Terrorism, Narcotics, and International Operations, chaired by Senator John Kerry, so its final report was known as the Kerry Committee report.

The Report concluded that "it is clear that individuals who provided support for the Contras were involved in drug trafficking, the supply network of the Contras was used by drug trafficking organizations, and elements of the Contras themselves knowingly received financial and material assistance from drug traffickers. His articles asserted that the CIA was aware of the cocaine transactions and the large shipments of drugs into the U.

General Manuel Noriega , head of government of Panama, had been giving military assistance to Contra groups in Nicaragua at the request of the U. Bush , provided Noriega with hundreds of thousands of dollars per year as payment for his work in Latin America. His trial took place in Miami , where he was sentenced to 45 years in prison. Noriega's prison sentence was reduced from 30 years to 17 years for good behavior. On January 23, he was released from prison and placed under house arrest to prepare for surgery. On March 7, he suffered a brain hemorrhage during surgery which left him in critical condition, to which he succumbed to death on May 29, at the age of A failed CIA anti-drug operation in Venezuela resulted in at least a ton of cocaine being smuggled into the United States and sold on the streets.

The incident, which was first made public in , was part of a plan to assist an undercover agent to gain the confidence of a Colombian drug cartel. The plan involved the unsupervised shipment of hundreds of pounds of cocaine from Venezuela. The drug in the shipments was provided by the Venezuelan anti-drug unit which was working with the CIA, using cocaine seized in Venezuela. The shipments took place despite the objections of the U. When the failed plan came to light, the CIA officer in charge of the operation resigned, and his supervisor was transferred.

In addition, the former Venezuelan anti-narcotics chief General Ramon Guillen Davila and his chief civilian aide were both indicted in connection with the shipments. We take a very critical look at the entire history of the war on drugs. In particular, looking at American foreign policy and how the Central Intelligence Agency is not just been involved in a couple of bad apples here and there. In couple rogue operations as a lot of these drug trafficking allegations have been called before. But actually very directly involved in drug trafficking not only drug trafficking but in the largest drug trafficking stories of our time.

Whether that's in the secret tests that introduced LSD to the United States or heroin during the late 60's and early 70's from southeast Asia, to cocaine during the late 70's and early 80's onto opium and heroin coming out of Afghanistan. There's a huge story to be told there about the actual extent of the US government's involvement in drug trafficking. This is a story that a lot of your listeners may have heard about, people have heard about MK Ultra and I had as well, but I never really understood the full origins of the story.

They go all the way back to the 's. During the 's of course, US and the Soviet Union are locked in a battle for hearts and minds around the world and psychoactive drugs were a big part of the Cold War psychological warfare programs on both sides. The CIA had heard rumors that the Soviet Union was starting to use LSD at this point as a truth serum to see if they could break spies and get them to expose details, admit they were spies et cetera.

With that supply they began a program called MK Ultra which had all sorts of other drugs involved. In particular they started doing secret tests around the country.

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Some of them using in veteran's hospitals and through the military. Others were in mental hospitals, a lot of basic, pretty much a lot of them were unwitting people, mental patients. But one of the incredible stories we found, I never knew this before, is that Ken Kesey, famously the author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and really the guy who started the famous acid tests in the San Francisco Bay area, it was really the godfather of acid movement.

As a Stanford grad student, or sorry an undergrad, was part of a test at the Menlo Park Veteran's hospital. Loved it so much that he got a job in the lab, stole all the acid, went up to San Francisco and started his acid test. This was also happening in other places around the country. It was just that Ken Kesey was the progenitor of the entire movement. It literally was the CIA. That is a real challenge to all good thinking Libertarians like myself. Small L Libertarians who say that the government can never do anything right.

The manage to strangely change the course, not of, I guess maybe of Cold War history, but certainly of American cultural history through their actions. The first episode of the series, and again check these out on history. Plus there's other material there that's well worth delving into. You look at the prehistory of Richard Nixon's declaration of a war on drugs in the early 70's, what were some of the motivating factors you found behind Nixon declaring war on drugs?

Very early in the 70's he talked about, famously used the phrase, declaring a war on drugs, that illegals drugs were the number one enemy facing America. What was going on, things like pot and acid and heroin rose to that level of attention from the federal government? You really had two strains happening. You had the psychedelic movement which was heavily influenced by acid which the CIA itself had introduced, which is just my blowing right.

Then you had pot as well which basically increasing numbers of young people were smoking. Nixon declares famously this war on drugs in June At the same time there was a massive heroin epidemic that really was ravaging mostly the eastern seaboard. What a lot people don't realize is that too in part, you could argue another case of blow back from our own operations. During the mid 60's to late 60's there was a famous, everyone knows, a war against communist forces in Vietnam but also next door there was a gigantic secret war happening in Laos that officially we were not supposed to be fighting.

Both politically it was radioactive for Johnson to declare another front but there were also treaties that said that we couldn't have troops on the ground both with Laos and we had an agreement, a sort of tacit agreement with the Soviet Union they wouldn't put troops on the ground. There was a massive clandestine CIA operation in Laos running this secret war. Basically we go into business helping a local warlord named Vang Pao. When we started the war in the mid 60's, around 65, Vang Pao was a sort of somewhat populous, anti-communist leader of the Hmong hill people in Laos and was peripherally involved in growing opium because that's really what the cash crop was in that area.

By , into Vang Pao was the biggest heroin trafficker on the planet. Some of his partners were the Sicilian mobsters that we had gone into business to put in Havana Cuba and south Florida to try to kill Fidel Castro. Basically we had created this huge network or aided this huge network of international drug trafficking that created a massive heroin epidemic which has only been surpassed by the current opioid crisis and we go into that later.

What happens is, there's all this heroin in the theater of war in southeast Asia, a lot of troops are getting hooked, famously they all start bringing this heroin back and heroin really starts devastating the inner city and there was a legitimate belief by a lot of people that really it was out of control and crime rates were really skyrocketing especially in cities like New York.

So Nixon was under a lot of pressure.

He had run in under the banner of law and order and the country was literally falling apart by in his eyes. As you were saying, the crime really ratcheted up. It started in the 50's but it really ratcheted up in the 60's, there was the perception that people were leaving cities in droves to avoid crime. You talk, I think, in the first episode, it's something that in the government figures had something like 50, heroin addicts around the country or heroin users and it had crept up to something like , or , by about Part of it Nixon was a law and order guy and there's, you go into this a bit at your site as well as in the show that John Ehrlichman one of Richard Nixon's chief lieutenants in a , 94 interview with Dan Baum who ultimately published a story in Harper's about this, that he said that the war on pot and the war on drugs was really a way to control black people.

There was also this sense that the urban American was going to hell in a hand basket as well.

CIA involvement in Contra cocaine trafficking

Follow up question for that is, the war on drugs gets birthed out of mixed feeling and Nixon and there's some footage in one of the episodes of Ronald Reagan denouncing the use of acid in the 60's and obviously became drug warrior himself as president. There was a strong bipartisan element to the war on drugs because even people, Jimmy Carter seemed to be okay with the idea of pot legalization or decriminalization until events overtook him and he became a staunch drug warrior.

People like Bill Clinton, people like Barack Obama also added to the drug war. What is the, I guess that's a long wind up for a pretty simple question, what is it about the war on drugs that pulls such support from Democrats and Republicans across the board? I think this is pretty deep question because I think it goes to what I found in working on this project which is really one of the most epic projects I've ever worked on in my life in terms of the amount of research we did.

I think drugs have always played a scapegoat role in our society where we see other social forces, in particular economic forces and other things that have been pressures on communities and it's very easy to point the finger at drugs. In some ways it's a natural reaction to try to crack down on them in the harshest way. Of course by cracking down on drugs are an inanimate object, there is no such thing as a crack down on drugs. You're cracking down on people. And when you crack down on people, that has a reverberating effect.

It also can be used as a tool. Nixon is probably one of the most cynical politicians in our history but maybe not the worst in my opinion. He saw it purely, in my opinion, as a political move. As a way to take out this, he believed he had all these enemies that were growing around him, all these social movements, you had black nationalism, you had increasingly radicalized hippie movement that had turned from a peacenik movement into a more dangerous, whether underground type of operations. There was a feeling that society was unraveling to some degree.

That was in large part because it was because we lived in a oppressive racist society and there was a war that in , everyone knew was at a stalemate or that we had lost but continued going on. People don't realize half the people died, of our soldiers after when Nixon ran under this completely cynical lie that he had a secret plan to end the war [Editor's note: Journalism historian Joseph W.

Campbell has documented that Candidate Nixon never publicly made such a pledge , which continues to be cited frequently. At the website, at history. The early attempts to link cocaine with black people and if you want to crack down on cocaine because white women may be taking it or something, you crack down on black people. When pot became illegal, under federal law, became effectively illegal in the 's, it was identified with Mexicans.

Chinese and opium was a problem. It is fascinating in the 60's you have with something like LSD the youth movement and hippies and then again when ecstasy which was made illegal in the 80's thanks in large part to Joe Biden. After the series' publication, the Northern California branch of the national Society of Professional Journalists had voted Webb "Journalist of the Year" for After Ceppos' column, The Mercury News spent the next several months conducting an internal review of the story.

The review was conducted primarily by editor Jonathan Krim and reporter Pete Carey, who had written the paper's first published analysis of the series. Carey ultimately decided that there were problems with several parts of the story and wrote a draft article incorporating his findings. The paper also gave Webb permission to visit Central America again to get more evidence supporting the story. The editors met with Webb several times in February to discuss the results of the paper's internal review and eventually decided to print neither Carey's draft article nor the articles Webb had filed.

At the end of March, however, Ceppos told Webb that he was going to present the internal review findings in a column. In the column Ceppos continued to defend parts of the article, writing that the series had "solidly documented" that the drug ring described in the series did have connections with the Contras and did sell large quantities of cocaine in inner-city Los Angeles. But, Ceppos wrote, the series "did not meet our standards" in four areas.

Ceppos noted that Webb did not agree with these conclusions. I believe that we fell short at every step of our process: Several people here share that burden But ultimately, the responsibility was, and is, mine. When Attorney General Janet Reno determined that a delay was no longer necessary, the report was released unchanged. It found that "the allegations contained in the original Mercury News articles were exaggerations of the actual facts.

These factors, rather than anything as spectacular as a systematic effort by the CIA or any other intelligence agency to protect the drug trafficking activities of Contra supporters, determined what occurred in the cases we examined. The report called several of its findings "troubling. It concluded, however, that these problems were "a far cry from the type of broad manipulation and corruption of the federal criminal justice system suggested by the original allegations. The first one, "The California Story", was issued in a classified version on December 17, , and in an unclassified version on January 29, According to the report, the Inspector-General's office OIG examined all information the agency had "relating to CIA knowledge of drug trafficking allegations in regard to any person directly or indirectly involved in Contra activities.

In the rd paragraph, the report described a cable from the CIA's Directorate of Operations dated October 22, , describing a prospective meeting between Contra leaders in Costa Rica for "an exchange in [the United States] of narcotics for arms, which then are shipped to Nicaragua. The lieutenant trafficker was also a Contra, and the CIA knew that there was an arms-for-drugs shuttle and did nothing to stop it. Six weeks after the declassified and heavily censored first volume of the CIA report was made public, Inspector General Frederick Hitz testified before a House congressional committee.

Each is closely examined in terms of their relationship with CIA, the drug trafficking activity that was alleged, the actions CIA took in response to the allegations, and the extent of information concerning the allegations that was Shared with U. As I said earlier, we have found no evidence in the course of this lengthy investigation of any conspiracy by CIA or its employees to bring drugs into the United States.

These included CIA assets, pilots who ferried supplies to the Contras, as well as Contra officials and others. Let me be frank about what we are finding. There are instances where CIA did not, in an expeditious or consistent fashion, cut off relationships with individuals supporting the Contra program who were alleged to have engaged in drug trafficking activity or take action to resolve the allegations.

Hitz also said that under an agreement in between Ronald Reagan 's Attorney General William French Smith and the CIA, agency officers were not required to report allegations of drug trafficking involving non-employees, defined as paid and non-paid "assets"—pilots who ferried supplies to the contras, as well as contra officials and others. This agreement, which had not previously been revealed, came at a time when there were allegations that the CIA was using drug dealers in its controversial covert operation to bring down the leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua.

The House Intelligence Committee issued its report in February This support "was not directed by anyone within the Contra movement who had an association with the CIA," and the Committee found "no evidence that the CIA or the Intelligence Community was aware of these individuals' support.

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