Will the U.S. military ever leave Afghanistan? The answer appears to be no. When the U.S. military comes it stays. It’s been in Germany since the 1940s, and now has expanded, with its attack dog, NATO, from there throughout Eastern Europe to menace Russia. The Afghan adventure has so far lasted 20 years and cost two trillion dollars. Afghanistan provides a convenient, imperial base from which to threaten China. The U.S. military, realistically, will never want to give that up.

Trump left office with plans in place for the remaining 2500 U.S. troops to depart Afghanistan by May 1. Not a word about the 18,000 contractors, aka mercenaries, who have long outnumbered U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan. Like those soldiers, these mercenaries’ lives are at risk. They are also a geopolitical liability. If one gets killed, as happened not too long ago in Iraq, the U.S. retaliates. That could ignite war at any time.

Trump’s attempt to remove U.S. commandos from Afghanistan was a grudging concession to reality: the Taliban control most of the country and, if things continue on their current trajectory, will sooner rather than later rule all of it. They are a battle-hardened force, regard Americans as invaders and certainly don’t need the much ballyhooed and likely phony bounties from Russia as an incentive to attack U.S. troops. (Western media also accused the Chinese, those copy-cats, of putting bounties on U.S. soldiers, but somehow that frenzied fabulation never caused the hullaballoo that the Russian one did.) The Trump team therefore negotiated with the Taliban, who did not cease harassing U.S.-backed and financed Afghan government forces throughout this process. Biden quickly applied the brakes to the Trump disengagement vehicle.

Biden must know that by staying longer or adding troops, he ensures U.S. casualties. The military knows it. But that’s a price our generals appear willing to pay. After all, the Taliban and the U.S. military have been killing each other for 20 years. What’s another 20? U.S. generals have referred to this war as a “generational” conflict. Apparently, they don’t mean just one generation.

“The consequences of unilaterally ignoring the May withdrawal deadline will be the dissolution of the U.S.-Taliban agreement, placing U.S. soldiers back in the crosshairs of the Taliban,” wrote Adam Weinstein recently in Responsible Statecraft, “and an end to intra-Afghan negotiations.” Weinstein argues that those intra-Afghan talks may fail to produce a peace agreement, “but it is dead on arrival if Washington chooses to ignore the deadline altogether. An endless U.S. war effort will be the only remaining option.”

Altogether 35 governments currently have soldiers in Afghanistan. According to World Beyond War, these troop numbers range “from Slovenia’s six to the U.S.’s 2500. Most countries have fewer than 100.” Meanwhile, Ireland, Canada, Jordan, Croatia, New Zealand and France have removed their soldiers altogether. It’s a safe bet that were the U.S. to honor its deal with the Taliban and leave, those other 34 countries would follow suit.

That is the wise course. “Militarily the war against the Taliban has long been lost,” according to Moon of Alabama on February 23. “Even with the 100,000 western troops the Obama administration had sent, there was no way to win it.” But of course, if the U.S. finally departs, the current Afghan government may very well fall. Talks resumed on February 23, but the Taliban still resist a ceasefire; they still kill Afghan government troops, and plenty of other Afghans.

In late February, Secretary of State Antony Blinken “proposed a United Nations-led peace conference,” in a letter, MSN reported, to form “an inclusive Afghan government with the Taliban and establishing a three-month reduction in violence leading to a ceasefire.” Blinken suggests convoking the foreign ministers of Russia, the United States, China, India, Pakistan and Iran to put together a peace proposal. This longshot actually seems like a good idea; it worked with the Iran nuclear deal, until Trump came along. Let’s just hope the U.S. never has another such loony leader, determined to rip up every treaty that doesn’t have his very own signature on it.

Meanwhile a ceasefire. Such a truce is what’s needed, argues Dexter Filkins in the New Yorker – a promise from the Taliban to stop its attacks. But there’s no clear path to getting that before May 1, even with Blinken’s offer – and it may not exist any time after that, either. Still, Washington appears to want to delay the withdrawal deadline, which the Taliban will not agree to.

In an aside exposing the cruelty, dysfunction and absolute power of empire, Filkins describes how the U.S. transferred Taliban leaders from Guantanamo, where many had been tortured and all had been isolated for nearly 20 years, to luxury apartments with their families in Doha, so they can negotiate ending the war. Filkins mentions that some of these Taliban seem dazed and unfocussed after so many years in prison. From the lower depths to opulence, in the time it takes for one plane trip. “We tortured you for years, but now we need you,” is the peculiar message from U.S. negotiators, whom these Taliban must regard with a jaundiced eye, to say the least, that is, those of them who still have the unbroken mental capacity to consider their circumstances.

Western money sponsors the Afghan government, which clings to power and has stalled negotiations on occasion. “Without financial pressure,” Moon of Alabama writes, “there is no chance that the Afghan government and the Taliban will ever reach a power sharing deal. Even if there would be an agreement, there is little chance that it will be upheld by all sides. The conflict would likely reignite and the Taliban would win.” The most viable solution is a speedy U.S. departure. But anonymous officials have said that as far as the Biden team’s concerned, a full withdrawal by May is off the table. In his letter, however, Blinken says it’s still possible.

One wonders how the U.S. government will prime the press to cover this likely extension of an utterly pointless war. Will it squawk “democracy!” as it has so often in the past? After the initial U.S. assault to root out al Qaeda in 2001, democracy-building was the watchword. Then came feminism, promoted by the unlikely trio of Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld. Lately less of that. Instead, we get tired nostrums about “reducing the level of violence.” Not to be a party pooper, but there will always be violence in Afghanistan. If we wait until perfect peace breaks out, we’ll be there forever, which appears to be the plan.

Just how badly the democracy venture was a bust is instructive. “Afghan officials have conspired for more than 15 years to both multiply and ignore election fraud,” wrote James Bovard recently in CounterPunch. “U.S. tax dollars poured into the coffers of Afghanistan’s Electoral Complaints Commission (EOC) to safeguard voting. Alas – that agency was a prime source of the most brazen vote stealing.”

Tangled up with all these prevarications about why we’re in Afghanistan is the heroin trade. Since 2001 Afghanistan has led the world producing opium, responsible for over 90 percent of the world’s heroin. By 2017, according to Alfred McCoy in the Guardian a year later, Afghan opium production had reached 9000 tons. Money from the sale of that pays wages to Taliban fighters. McCoy explains how western intervention made Afghanistan “the world’s first true narco state.”

It’s not too much of a stretch to say the Afghan struggle is a war for control of the country’s opium profits. A teachable moment is provided by the case of one Afghan drug-kingpin, Haji Juma Khan who, targeted by federal prosecutors and the DEA, never went to trial. His lawyer noted evidentiary discussions of “several law enforcement agencies from the United States approaching people in Afghanistan, including Mr. Khan, and requesting assistance…payments made, services requested,” according to a 2018 article in the Intercept.

Allegations of the CIA’s enmeshment in Afghan drug trafficking percolated thorough articles, reports and books in recent years. The U.S. government investigated some of these claims. Suffice it to say, it would be shocking if the CIA were NOT involved in the Afghan heroin trade. It’s simply too lucrative to resist. But even with the CIA’s hand in this cookie jar, the Taliban appears to have that jar firmly in its grasp. Which means they have a steady source of income to finance their war indefinitely. The only question is when will Washington accept reality and either leave or admit that it intends to squander blood and treasure in Afghanistan ad infinitum? Or will the high council of ministers that Blinken hopes to convene somehow save the day? Chances are a much more prosaic course will prevail: the U.S. military will stay and gloss over its plans. Democracy, peace, women’s rights. Take your pick of these excuses. They all mean the same thing – endless war.

counterpunch.org

William S. SMITH

Fittingly, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) was founded by a grandnephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, Attorney General Charles J. Bonaparte, during the Progressive Era. Bonaparte was a Harvard-educated crusader. As the FBI’s official history states, “Many progressives, including (Teddy) Roosevelt, believed that the federal government’s guiding hand was necessary to foster justice in an industrial society.”

Progressives viewed the Constitution as a malleable document, a take-it-or-leave-it kind of thing. The FBI inherited that mindset of civil liberties being optional. In their early years, with the passage of the Espionage and Sedition Acts during World War I, the FBI came into its own by launching a massive domestic surveillance campaign and prosecuting war dissenters. Thousands of Americans were arrested, prosecuted, and jailed simply for voicing opposition.

One could write a long history of FBI abuses and failures, from Latin America to Martin Luther King to Japanese internment. But just consider a handful of their more recent cases. The FBI needlessly killed women and children at Waco and Ruby Ridge. Anyone who has lived anywhere near Boston knows of the Bureau’s staggering corruption during gangster Whitey Bulger’s reign of terror. The abuses in Boston were so terrific that radio host Howie Carr declared that the FBI initials really stood for “Famous But Incompetent.” And then there’s Richard Jewell, the hero security guard who was almost railroaded by zealous FBI agents looking for a scalp after they failed to solve the Atlanta terrorist bombing.

But it was 9/11 that really sealed the FBI’s ignominious track record. The lavishly funded agency charged with preventing terrorism somehow missed the attacks, despite their awareness of numerous Saudi nationals taking flying lessons around the country. Immediately after 9/11, the nation was gripped by the anthrax scare, and once again the FBI’s inability to solve the case caused them to try to railroad an innocent man, Stephen Hatfill.

With 9/11, the FBI also began targeting troubled Americans by handing them bomb materials, arresting them, and then holding a press conference to tell the country that they had prevented a major terrorist attack—a fake attack that they themselves had planned.

9/11 also opened the floodgates to domestic surveillance and all the FISA abuses that most recently led to the prosecution of Michael Flynn. I am no fan of Flynn and his hawkish anti-Islamic views, but the way he was framed and then prosecuted really does shock the conscience. After Jewell, Hatfill, Flynn, and so many others, it’s time to ask whether the culture of the FBI has become similar to that of Stalin’s secret police, i.e. “show me the man and I’ll show you the crime.”

I am no anti-law enforcement libertarian. In a previous career, I had the privilege to work with agents of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and they were some of the bravest people I have ever met. And while the DEA can be overly aggressive (just ask anyone who has been subjected to federal asset forfeiture), it is inconceivable that its agents would plot a coup d’état against the president of the United States. The DEA sees their job as catching drug criminals; they stay in their lane.

For the FBI, merely catching bad guys is too mundane. As one can tell from the sanctimonious James Comey, the culture at the Bureau holds grander aspirations. Comey’s book is titled A Higher Loyalty, as if the FBI reports only to the Almighty. They see themselves as progressive guardians of the American Way, intervening whenever and wherever they see democracy in danger. No healthy republic should have a national police force with this kind of culture. There are no doubt many brave and patriotic FBI agents, but there is also no doubt they have been very badly led.

This savior complex led them to aggressively pursue the Russiagate hoax. Their chasing of ghosts should make it clear that the FBI does not stay in their lane. While the nation’s elite colleges and tech companies are crawling with Chinese spies who are literally stealing our best ideas, the chief of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Section, Peter Strzok, spent his days trying to frame junior aides in the Trump campaign.

Some conservatives have called for FBI Director Christopher Wray to be fired. This would accomplish nothing, as the problem is not one man but an entire culture. One possible solution is to break up the FBI into four or five agencies, with one responsible for counterintelligence, one for counterterrorism, one for complex white-collar crime, one for cybercrimes, and so on. Smaller agencies with more distinctive missions would not see themselves as national saviors and could be held accountable for their effectiveness at very specific jobs. It would also allow federal agents to develop genuine expertise rather than, as the FBI regularly does, shifting agents constantly from terrorism cases to the war on drugs to cybercrime to whatever the political class’s latest crime du jour might be.

Such a reform would not end every abuse of federal law enforcement, and all these agencies would need to be kept on a short leash for the sake of civil liberties. It would, however, diminish the ostentatious pretension of the current FBI that they are the existential guardians of the republic. In a republic, the people and their elected leaders are the protectors of their liberties. No one else.

theamericanconservative.com

Those wishing to kill the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the agreement that restricts Iran’s nuclear program, have never given up.  The agreement’s ever-lengthening successful record, now more than two years old, of keeping closed all possible pathways to an Iranian nuclear weapon ought to have discouraged would-be deal-slayers.  But the slayers got a new lease on life with the election of Donald Trump, who, as part of his program of opposing whatever Barack Obama favored and destroying whatever he accomplished, has consistently berated the JCPOA.

The themes that the agreement’s opponents push are now familiar.  One of those themes is that the Obama administration was over-eager to get the agreement and consequently gave up the store to conclude the accord.  This argument never made sense, given the terms of the JCPOA.  The asymmetries in the agreement go against the Iranians, who came under a more intrusive nuclear inspection arrangement than any other country has ever willingly accepted, and who had to fulfill almost all of their obligations to break down and set back their nuclear program before gaining an ounce of additional sanctions relief.  But the argument has had the attraction for the opponents of not being directly disprovable as far as any mindset of former officials is concerned, and of jibing with the opponents’ further theme of a mythical “better deal” that supposedly was there for the taking.

An additional theme from the opponents has been that the JCPOA fails to address other Iranian policies and actions that have ritualistically come to be labeled as nefarious, malign, destabilizing behavior (NMDB).  This argument hasn’t made sense either, given that it was clear from the outset of negotiations that no agreement restricting Iran’s nuclear program would be possible if the parties negotiating the agreement dumped onto the table their other grievances against each other.  Any such futile expansion of the negotiating agenda would have meant that the Iranian nuclear program would have advanced ever closer to the capability of making a bomb and there still would have been the NMDB.  Nonetheless, the theme has been a favorite of opponents because it distracts attention from the success of the JCPOA in preventing an Iranian nuke, because there always will be some sort of objectionable Iranian action that can be pointed out, and because the NMDB mantra has now been chanted so much that it has come to be accepted as an unquestioned given.

Josh Meyer recently offered a variant on these themes with an extended article in Politico under the tantalizing title, “The secret backstory of how Obama let Hezbollah off the hook”.  The attention-getting theme that the author pushes is that a task force of the Drug Enforcement Administration investigating drug trafficking and other criminal activity of Lebanese Hezbollah was stymied by “the White House’s desire for a nuclear deal with Iran”.  Unsurprisingly, this theme has been replayed by the usual players dedicated to bashing the JCPOA or anything Obama-related, such as the Wall Street Journal editorial writers.  Some Republicans in Congress and even Eric Trump have echoed the theme.

The 13,000-word article aims to overwhelm with detail.  Through the sheer volume of leads, tips, suspicions, and genuine facts, the reader gets the impression of a thoroughly reported piece.  And Meyer clearly put a lot of work into it.  But as Erik Wemple of the Washington Post points out in an article about the article, Meyer never produces any direct evidence that the White House intentionally impeded the task force’s work, much less that any such interference had to do with the impending nuclear agreement.  After wading through all the detail, the careful reader can see that the attention-getting thesis about the Obama administration supposedly sacrificing drug and crime enforcement on the altar of the nuclear agreement rests on suspicion and innuendo.  It rests on statements such as that some decisions about the Hezbollah case “might have been influenced” by an inter-agency group’s awareness of the nuclear negotiations—meaning that, as Wemple notes, the decisions just as easily might not have been influenced by such awareness.

There is ample evidence that the Obama administration took numerous tough sanctions and law enforcement actions against Hezbollah, both before and after conclusion of the JCPOA.  Meyer includes in his article—and give Meyer credit for this inclusion—statements by former Obama administration officials alluding to those actions.  The very separation of the nuclear file from other grievances by or against Iran—which, as noted above, was essential to concluding any nuclear agreement at all—implied that there would not be any moratorium on enforcement actions against Iran’s Lebanese ally Hezbollah.

Meyer’s piece suffers from a sourcing problem in that it relies heavily on just two sources who currently are employed by, or affiliated with, organizations in the forefront of opposing the JCPOA.  One of those sources, David Asher, is on an advisory board of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, which has become mission control for undermining and trying to kill the nuclear agreement.

Whether or not such institutional connections affected what was told to Meyer, the account of a task force within DEA that felt frustrated that the rest of the government did not run fast and run automatically with whatever case it was building has the familiar ring of something that happens regularly, and quite properly and understandably, inside government.  Such happening need not have anything to do with White House interference or with any pending international agreement such as the JCPOA.  When a team of officials works hard on a project—as this team in DEA that was investigating some of Hezbollah’s activities undoubtedly did—its members naturally will feel frustrated by any inter-agency review that keeps the government from acting fully and immediately on whatever the team came up with (by, say, quickly filing a criminal indictment in federal court).  Such review is vital.  Typically there are not just one but several important national interests and equities that need to be considered, and that go beyond what the more narrowly focused team members would have had in mind.

In the case of Hezbollah and drug-running, those other considerations would have included such things as the possibility of violent responses, the cost of possibly losing sources of information on the group being investigated, and the legal soundness of any criminal case brought to court.  Some of these considerations get misleadingly presented in Meyer’s article as if they were part of some Obama administration effort to put brakes on legal actions against Hezbollah for the sake of preserving the nuclear agreement.  For example, former counterterrorism adviser Lisa Monaco is said to have “expressed concerns about using RICO [Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act] laws against top Hezbollah leaders and about the possibility of reprisals”.  As the Post’s Wemple observes, “ ‘Expressing concerns’ about certain law enforcement strategies may have been Monaco’s way of, like, using her governmental experience to sharpen U.S. policy, rather than working as the cog in an alleged plot to take it easy on Hezbollah.”

Beyond the multiple severe weaknesses in Meyer’s argument about what the Obama administration did or did not do are two important pieces of context that he never addresses.  One concerns just what difference a more aggressive campaign against Hezbollah during the period in question, even if it were possible, would have made.  Meyer makes it sound as if doing or not doing everything that this one task force in DEA wanted to do was the difference between crippling or not crippling a grave security threat.  In an interview on NPR, Meyer asserted that the Obama administration “did allow a group that was a regionally focused militia-slash-political organization with a terrorist wing to become a much more wealthy global criminal organization that has a lot of money that can now be used to bankroll terrorist and military actions around the world.”  No, it didn’t.  Even if one were to believe everything that Meyer’s piece insinuates about an alleged White House obstructionist operation motivated by nuclear negotiations, this would not have made Hezbollah “a much more wealthy” organization, much less have made it more likely to conduct terrorist and military actions “around the world”.

Hezbollah has been in existence for more than three decades.  During that time it has grown into a strong and multifaceted organization, including being recognized as a major political movement, with seats in the Lebanese parliament and portfolios in the Lebanese government.  Money-making criminal operations have long been a part of Hezbollah’s activity, and investigations and legal action—through several U.S. administrations—have long been a part of the U.S. response to that activity.  What one disgruntled team in DEA wanted to do during one administration was a minor episode in this story, not the make-or-break development that Meyer portrays it as.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the United Nations in 2012, drawing his own “red line” on how far he will let Iran go in refining nuclear fuel

Another piece of context applies to the whole theme, of which Meyer’s article is one manifestation, about the Obama administration supposedly drooling over a prospective nuclear agreement with Iran and giving it priority over everything else.  It wasn’t Obama who gave the specter of an Iranian nuclear weapon overriding priority.  It was other people who did that, and especially people who today lead the charge for aggressive confrontation with Iran and for killing the JCPOA.  Well before the negotiations that would lead to the JCPOA ever began, the rallying cry of these forces was that an Iranian nuclear weapon would be one of the gravest dangers the United States ever faced.  During the 2012 presidential campaign, Republican candidate Mitt Romney identified this possibility as the single most serious security threat against the United States.  Most prominent among the alarmists was Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who made sure the whole world would understand his dumbed-down message by displaying a cartoon bomb before the United Nations General Assembly.  It was only after the JCPOA closed all possible avenues to an Iranian nuclear weapon—and drained Netanyahu’s Looney Tunes bomb in the process—that we started hearing from the same forces more about how the JCPOA supposedly is bad because it doesn’t address other nefarious Iran-related activity.  Activity such as drug-running by Hezbollah.

Imagine that everything Meyer’s piece says or implies were true.  Imagine that the Obama administration really did see a choice between getting the JCPOA and cracking down on Hezbollah’s criminal activity. And imagine that the Obama administration said “yes” to everything that gung-ho team in DEA may have wanted to do.  Then presumably the administration also would have to say, “Well, yes, we did have a chance to negotiate an agreement that would prevent an Iranian nuclear weapon, but we thought a drug bust was more important.”  How would the alarmists, who had been ringing the alarm bell so long and hard about an Iranian nuclear weapon, react to that?  We can be confident the reaction would not be to express compliments to Mr. Obama.

The gross inconsistency of those opposing the JCPOA reflects how their real objectives have little to do with the terms of the agreement or how it was negotiated.  Their objectives have more to do with not wanting anyone to have any agreement with Iran on anything (Netanyahu’s objective, while he portrays Iran as the sole source of everything bad in the Middle East), or about staying in step with American supporters of Netanyahu’s government, or about not wanting any of Barack Obama’s accomplishments to survive.

consortiumnews.com

The president of Ecuador, Rafael Correa, devoted one of his weekly speeches to the mudslinging being directed against his government via social networks. Social networks are now the principal platform for media warfare.

A mass media law has been in effect in Ecuador since June 2013, which greatly limits any potentially hostile propaganda campaign, including «exposés». Typically, such campaigns are intended to compromise politicians and other figures friendly to the government. The Superintendent’s Office for Information and Communications, which monitors and assesses the work of the media, is responsible for enforcing the law in Ecuador.

Ecuador’s penal code includes a chapter titled «Crimes associated with mass media transgressions», which decrees that editors and publishers are responsible for the publication of defamatory or offensive materials. Ecuador is probably the only country in Latin America that has managed to set some sensible guidelines for the work of the media.

Currently the Western Hemisphere is being inundated with a flood of «exposés» featuring the names of politicians who are under attack by Washington. Apparently the CIA and NSA are pursuing a comprehensive plan aimed at getting many influential figures deposed and prosecuted.

Compromising materials on Nicolás Maduro, Inácio Lula da Silva, Dilma Rousseff, Cristina Kirchner, and Evo Morales were publicized by US intelligence agencies in one fell swoop without missing a beat, and those are now being used by a pro-American fifth column in order to destabilize Venezuela, Brazil, Argentina, and Bolivia. That blow is primarily aimed at leaders who are rejecting the neoliberal doctrine, pursuing social reform policies that will benefit many different strata of the population.

* * *

In Brazil, a scandal is unfolding over the convoluted issue of petrodollar-laundering and corruption, as well as the use of «undeclared revenue» to finance the election campaigns of the ruling Workers’ Party. Former president Lula da Silva (2003-2010) was detained for several hours and questioned by an investigator, accused of taking bribes from the company Petrobras. Specifically, Lula was asked to explain what money he had planned to use for the purchase of an apartment that he had allegedly looked in secret. Sixty Brazilian politicians, governors, and businessmen are named in the case. The investigation cast a shadow on Dilma Rousseff, the country’s current president. Brazil’s opposition media, under the control of the media holding company O Globo, claimed that Rousseff chaired Petrobras at a time when corrupt schemes were flourishing in the company. According to investigators, the contracts signed by senior managers hinged on the kickback percentage that was personally offered to them.

At the center of the crusade against Dilma is Aécio Neves, her recent rival in the presidential election and a senator and regular visitor to the US embassy. His agreement to «collaborate» with the Americans is still in effect, thus much of the NSA material from the dossiers on Lula and Dilma has been placed at the disposal of Neves’ people in Brazil’s courts and government agencies, and publications owned by the O Globo holding company have provided extensive coverage of these materials. As a result, Dilma’s approval ratings have dropped. Her nine-party coalition, With the Strength of the People, has disintegrated. This was in large part due to the fact that some of the Workers’ Party staff were vulnerable to accusations.

A campaign replete with serious problems for Brazil was unleashed. Brazil’s former finance minister, Luiz Carlos Bresser-Pereira, claims, «Unexpectedly there emerged a collective hatred on the part of the upper strata of society – the rich – against the party and the president. It wasn’t anxiety or fear, but hatred. Hatred, because for the first time we have a center-left government that has remained leftist. Despite all the compromises, it has not changed. Hatred, because the government has demonstrated a strong preference for the workers and the poor».

Sensitive information about close relatives can be co-opted if no justification can be found to attack a politician that US operatives have decided to victimize. That is what the DEA, CIA, and US prosecutors are doing to the nephews of Cilia Flores, the wife of President Maduro. Those young men were arrested by police in Haiti and handed over to the US on charges of conspiracy to import cocaine into the United States. It will take time to prove that they were framed by DEA agents who staged scenes designed to entrap their «targets» in illegal deals, and the propaganda campaign against the family of President Maduro is already in full swing. According to Cilia Flores, the lawyers for the accused will prove that in this incident, the DEA operatives in Venezuela have committed crimes.

(to be continued)

The first signs of cancer were found in Chávez in May 2011. In June he underwent two surgeries at a specialized center in Havana. His Cuban surgeons found and removed a malignant tumor that had metastasized with sinister persistence, despite all preventive measures. New operations were needed. This athletic man, who was full of strength and physically robust, passed away on March 5, 2013 at the age of 58.

Expanding on this topic, Eva Golinger writes, «It is enough to know that one man who had for several years been one of his closest aides, who was often alone with him and brought him his food, coffee, and water, is now a protected witness in the United States. Soon Leamsy Salazar’s covert actions and close collaboration with intelligence agencies in Washington will be revealed».

The name of Hugo Chávez’s chief bodyguard was rarely mentioned in the media while the president was alive. Due to the nature of his work Leamsy Villafaña Salazar shunned publicity, did not like to be photographed, and tried to stay in the shadows. Chávez considered him to be a reliable, incorruptible, and professionally trained Bolivarian officer. This was precisely how the president described him on a TV broadcast about the attempted pro-American coup in April 2002. Conspirators managed to depose Chávez for three days, but with the support of the people and army, he triumphantly returned to the presidential Miraflores palace. From the roof of his palace he was welcomed by the military, among whom Salazar was readily visible, victoriously waving the Venezuelan flag. That image became the symbol of the victory over the counter-revolution.

Oddly enough, little is known about Salazar, and mostly from tight-lipped American sources. He was born in 1974 to a large family living in Petare, a slum district in the Venezuelan capital. After high school he entered the naval academy, graduating in 1998. He was a middling student, finishing 27th out of his class of 55. Nonetheless, in 1999 Salazar was tapped to be a presidential honor guard. Tito Rincón Bravo, Venezuela’s minister of defense and father of Leamsy’s first wife, played an important role in this appointment. Salazar became a personal assistant to Chávez. That job came with a very intense workload, due to the frantic pace of the president’s life.

After the events of 2002, Salazar was unexpectedly posted to a naval base in the provinces – in Punto Fijo (in Falcón State), but in 2006 Chávez ordered Salazar’s return to his former duties in the security detail.

Following Chávez’s death, Salazar provided security for the president of the National Assembly, Diosdado Cabello. But oddities in Salazar’s behavior made Cabello uneasy. At that time debate was still raging about the causes of Chávez’s death and the people who could have been involved, and so Cabello eventually asked the minister of defense to transfer Salazar to another post. At some point during this period Salazar married once again. His new wife was Anabel Linares Leal, a graduate of the military academy who had been presented with her officer’s sword from Chávez’s own hands. For a while Anabel worked with the financial accounts of the Venezuelan armed forces at Banco Bicentenario, which means that she had access to secret information about arms purchases abroad. The newlyweds applied for permission to travel to the Dominican Republic for their honeymoon. That permission was granted, and soon the couple was in Santo Domingo, but from there flew on to Spain. A special plane belonging to the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) flew Salazar and his family from Spain to the US.

This is how Emili J. Blasco, a Washington correspondent for the Spanish newspaper ABC who has often served as a mouthpiece for propaganda from US intelligence services, described Salazar’s escape. He claimed that in Spain the Americans had subjected the Salazars to lengthy interrogations in order to determine the «true objectives of their break with the regime».

The stories about Salazar in the international media, which were similar in tone and had obviously come from the same source, emphasize that while Chávez was alive, Salazar had been a «committed Bolivarian», but that after his death Salazar had decided to break with the regime. Therefore, Salazar had held secret negotiations with the DEA for 13 months, not only to arrange his escape, but also to obtain certain promises regarding his own safety, as well as that of his wife and children. But the CIA is not mentioned, only the DEA. The reason for that is clear – the CIA is a spy agency, and any indicator of possible long-standing secret ties with this «bureau of hit men» was something Salazar’s protectors tried to avoid, knowing that Venezuela’s SEBIN (Servicio Bolivariano de Inteligencia Nacional) counterintelligence agency would investigate the story of his involvement in Chávez’s murder.

Now the couple is in the US, living under federal protection, and they give testimony on a wide range of issues, but primarily on the «involvement» of various figures in the Bolivarian regime in drug trafficking, including military leaders. It should be kept in mind that long before Salazar made his escape, US intelligence agencies had begun to plant false information in the media about the existence of a so-called «Cartel of the Suns» (Cartel de los Soles), which was allegedly led by Diosdado Cabello and a group of Venezuelan generals with ties to him. Cabello was compromised as a preemptive measure, because US intelligence agencies saw him as the most likely successor to Chávez, but holding more radical anti-American views. Immediately after his escape, Salazar was recruited into this smear campaign against Cabello. Some of the information obtained from Salazar (or rather from his handlers in the CIA and DEA) was used by Emili J. Blasco in his book Bumerán Chávez, which was published simultaneously in Washington and Madrid in April 2015.

In particular, Salazar recounted how he had accompanied Diosdado Cabello on an excursion during which he had witnessed that leader of parliament’s (!) «direct involvement» in the late-night dispatch of drug-laden speedboats from the Paraguaná peninsula in Falcón State. For whom these drugs were intended and why this was done so close to the islands of Aruba and Curaçao, where there are surveillance outposts for the Pentagon, as well as CIA stations and DEA offices, Salazar did not explain. Based on Blasco’s commentary, one can conclude that the boats were headed for Cuba! What’s more, Salazar claimed that while accompanying Cabello he also had the opportunity to see his «secret armored vaults filled with US currency», with «mountains upon mountains of wrapped bills from floor to ceiling». That’s what a drug lord’s stash looks like in a Hollywood movie. According to Salazar’s account – or rather, the cover story that US intelligence services dreamed up for him – the troubles experienced by one of the guards who refused to take part in the drug deals were the last straw, prompting Salazar’s decision to flee: «They threatened to physically exterminate the man».

The pro-American media does its utmost to gloss over the questions that inevitably arise about Salazar’s participation in the preparations for Chávez’s murder. They claim that there can be no doubts about Salazar: he honorably served the regime and idolized Chávez until he realized that those immediately above him were mixed up in drug trafficking. However, the investigation conducted by SEBIN raises doubts about Salazar’s «spotless rectitude». Even his mother has admitted that Leamsy’s work in the presidential guard weighed heavily on him. But he was in no rush to distance himself from Chávez, because Salazar’s primary employer was someone else, and those people insisted that he strictly discharge his duties.

Recent media revelations about ties between Venezuela’s Cartel of the Suns and the Sinaloa Cartel have demonstrated the imagination and verve with which US intelligence agencies are fabricating «deals», with the intention of compromising their enemy. Allegedly «Chapo» Guzmán himself was in Venezuela in August and September of 2015 in order to discuss some joint projects. Passing mention has been made of his «business» trips to the country in 2009 and 2010 and of the warm nature of his relations with General Hugo Carvajal, a close associate of Diosdado Cabello. This is the same Carvajal whom the DEA tried to kidnap from the island of Aruba in the summer of 2014 – despite his diplomatic passport – and ship off to the US as a drug trafficker. Officials on the island prevented this from happening, and the general returned to Venezuela where he was greeted by President Maduro, Diosdado Cabello, and other Bolivarian leaders as a hero. It would be naive to think the DEA’s hunt for Carvajal was over. He is still on their «wanted list» because of evidence fabricated by US agents. That list also includes the names of others whom the DEA has identified as the ringleaders of the Cartel of the Suns.

Salazar’s statements are sharply at odds with the image of the honorable patriot he had previously cultivated. Quite revealing are Salazar’s allegations that Chávez died not in March 2013 but in December of 2012. Supposedly all of Chávez’s relatives took part in this ruse, as well as the members of the Bolivarian government, the leaders of Cuba, and Cuban counterintelligence. This was done in order to preserve the continuity of government authority serving the interests of «Maduro’s factions». Thus, every decree and resolution signed by the president after December can be declared fraudulent, and the Maduro government – illegal.

Meanwhile, the buzz of reporting on the Venezuelan leaders’ «drug deals» is getting louder. The plan devised by US intelligence is clearly evident: to distract the global public from the fact that Salazar is the most likely candidate to have killed Chávez. The Bolivarian media calls Salazar «Judas». Official (and unofficial) agencies in Venezuela are collecting evidence of his criminal activities, his clandestine meetings with representatives from the CIA and DEA, and the possibility that he gave the Americans information about the president’s travel itineraries and individuals with whom he had planned to meet, as well as biological material that belonged to Chávez.

The Americans are doing their best to impede this work. In Madrid, for example, the CIA station has manufactured a crisis surrounding the Venezuelan Defense Attaché Office staff, accusing them of spying on members of the opposition. But of course the real issue is quite different – the threat of lurid revelations about Chávez’s murder. Right now it is difficult to say who exactly will reveal the whole truth. That could end up being an idealist like Snowden – someone who considers lynching a politician like this to be unacceptable. There is some hope that a material incentive might prove effective: Venezuela’s leaders have decided to offer a financial reward for any specific information about the individuals who coordinated and carried out the murder of Hugo Chávez.

Then the scoop was picked up by other US outlets to accuse the men of being involved in drug trafficking. According to the first reports, Efraín Antonio Campo Flores, 30, and Francisco Flores de Freitas, 29, held Venezuelan passports. They were first arrested in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Later it was reported that Mr Campo Flores is the stepson of the President of Venezuela having been raised by Cilia Flores, Mr Maduro’s wife. The other man was reported to be a nephew of Ms Flores. They were arrested by the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents on November 10 in the airport of the Haiti capital and flown the same day to New York in a DEA jet. Local police force was not involved. The DEA does not trust Haitian policemen. Some limited information provided by DEA gives an idea on how the operation was conducted by US agents. 

The two men allegedly «caught the eye» of a DEA confidential informant in Honduras in October, 2014, when they were trying to traffic hundreds of kilograms of cocaine through the airport in the country’s Caribbean island of Roatán. They met the DEA agent several times. Once the two Venezuelans brought a kilogram of cocaine to the confidential informant to show the quality of the promised shipment. The meetings were filmed and taped: there is a video recording of the two men, Efraín Antonio Campo Flores and Francisco Flores de Freitas, discussing the ways to transfer cocaine to New York with the informant. 

National Assembly speaker Diosdado Cabello said the DEA routinely kidnapped people. The plane from Venezuela landed in Port-au-Prince with six people on board; two of them were arrested on spot. Others were allowed to return to Venezuela on board of the same aircraft. It shows that the mission of DEA agents was to arrest only the «relatives of Maduro». Cabello said he did not know who they were and what kind of relationship they had with the President’s family, but the two were grown up people free to do what they wanted. He said it stroke the eye that the DEA operation took place in the heat of pre-election campaign. The United States used the arrests to destabilize the situation ahead of the December 6 parliamentary elections.

The incoming reports confirm the view that the provocation to smear the Bolivarian leadership, which allegedly connives at drug trafficking, was planned by US special services operating under diplomatic cover in Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Matthew Purl, a seasoned CIA operative, coordinated the operation in Port-au-Prince. For the last 15 years he has been also seen in Russia, France, Tajikistan and Afghanistan. Purl was assisted by David Howell, the head of regional security office, Robert Hannan, Consul General in Haiti, Mary Ann Shepherd, Vice-Consul, and the numerous operatives of Drug Enforcement Agency operating in the country. 

The mission was supported by the staff in the Dominican Republic. The Dominican DEA office is headed by John Kanig, the CIA station is headed by Brian Quigley. The Central Intelligence Agency and the Drug Enforcement Agency in Santo-Domingo failed to carry out the mission:  they could not prove that the arrest of the Venezuelans had any relation to the confiscation of drugs on board of the luxury yacht The Kingdom that had set sail from Casa de Campo, La Romana.

The arrested crew members could not  provide any valuable information. The National Drugs Control agency (DNCD) of Dominican Republic resisted the pressure of US conspirators and refused to confirm the rumors that the yacht belonged to the family of Cilia Flores. So far, no evidence of the existence of 800 kg of cocaine – the shipment mentioned by DEA before – has been provided. Later the Agency mentioned the shipment of 50 kg of cocaine, but this information has not been confirmed. Now, US media writes about 5 kg shipment. It is a direct proof that the Drug Enforcement Agency was involved in behind the scenes schemes and foul play.

Late President of Venezuela Hugo Chavez banned the DEA activities in the country in 2005. He rightly accused the Drug Enforcement Agency of being involved in spying activities, provocations and subversive actions. Since then, the DEA has been constantly waging a war against the Venezuelan authorities. It’s worth to note, that after the break up with the Drug Enforcement Agency Bolivarian special services have become much more efficient. Drug dealers, who use Venezuela as a transit country, annually lose 55-60 tons of drugs. The Venezuelan Air Force has brought down over a hundred of aircraft with drugs on board. At that, the Obama administration continues to say that top military, police leaders and government officials of Venezuela are involved in drug trafficking.

False information about the existence of Cartel of the Suns (Cartel de los Soles) led by the military is spread around the country for propaganda purposes. According to the DEA and the CIA, the cartel uses naval vessels and military aircraft to ship drugs to the United States and the island nations of the Caribbean Basin. It’s worth to mention that US «strategic allies» in the Western Hemisphere – Peru, Colombia, Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras and Paraguay – are the leading cocaine, heroin and other drugs producers in the region. The shipments go along the routes well known by US special services to reach the United States market. Drug traffickers use the territory Venezuelan route, no matter it has become less safe, to transport drugs from Colombia through the Caribbean and Central America to the United States. 

The need to counter drug trafficking is used by the Pentagon and the special services as the primary reason for the existence of numerous military facilities in the region. The developed military and intelligence gathering infrastructure in the Caribbean and Central America does not make the fight against drug trafficking more efficient. The DEA offices legally function in Barbados, Curacao, Haiti, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, the Dominican Republic and Surinam. Illegal task groups operate throughout the entire region. The results are dubious. Many a time experts expressed the opinion that US special services give priority to collecting discrediting evidence related to drug trafficking against political, military, financial and business elites of the Western Hemisphere in order to exercise control over them. There will be discrediting evidence to collect and use as long as drug trafficking exists.  

The US government has targeted Bolivian President Evo Morales with a drug sting code-named «Operation Naked King». Carlos Toro, a Columbian and a former DEA agent who had been working under cover with the Medellín drug cartel, was also involved in the campaign against Evo Morales. The sealed indictments revealed last week in a lawsuit filed by Carlos Toro target the pilot of the presidential plane and a general in the Bolivian Air Force, Walter Álvarez; and Katty Orosco, a staffer in the president’s security service. The Bolivian power structures, as well as the power structures of Venezuela, have their own solid arguments. Morales expelled the Drug Enforcement Agency from the country to spur the efficiency of fight against drug trafficking. After that the smear campaign launched by DEA appeared to die down. Nonetheless, it is known that US operatives continue to conduct Operation Naked King from the territory of Paraguay.

Something similar takes place in Haiti. In Port–au-Prince the head of the anti-drug brigade made no comments on the DEA activities against the citizens of Venezuela. The DEA agents went as far as to threaten Michel Martelly, the President of Haiti. In April 2015, around 80 kg of cocaine were found aboard the Manzanares ship carrying sugar from Colombia under the Panamanian flag. The vessel was docked in the port of Cite Soleil.  

The DEA let the Haitians know the trace was leading to the inner circle of Michel Martelly. Of course, the President made relevant conclusions. His term expires in February 2016. No matter he enjoys friendly relations with Nicolas Maduro, Martelly decided to shy away from making any comments regarding the incident. A conflict with the DEA could be too risky.

Two Venezuelan citizens were arrested illegally. The case is far from being over. In the run up to the parliamentary election on December 6 the media outlets hostile to the Bolivarian government circulate accusations of its involvement in drug trafficking. The opposition uses social networks to address the voters calling on them to prevent drug traffickers from coming to power. No doubt, the supporters of Nicolas Maduro are closing ranks. They are involved in propaganda efforts as in the days of Hugo Chavez demonstrating the achievements of the ruling Socialist Party in all spheres. But there is a particularly bitter struggle ahead. 

All of Goldberg’s predecessors had also communicated with Bolivian presidents through such ultimatums. For many years Bolivia was completely dependent on the United States – politically, financially, economically, and militarily. The local CIA station maintained a permanent office in the presidential palace, the US military attaché controlled the army, and the IMF mission issued orders to the Ministry of the Economy. The American Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) operated without restraint, using its capabilities to compromise any inconvenient politician, trade unionist, or leader of an indigenous Indian organization.

It seemed there was no way for Bolivians to free themselves from this stranglehold. However, Morales together with a number of like-minded people by his side managed to restore their country’s independence and sovereignty. The unconditional American domination of Bolivia came to an end after the nationalization of its oil and gas fields, the approval of a new constitution, the incorporation of indigenous Indians into the political and economic life, and the country’s immersion into the movement to bring Latin America closer together.

The State Department replaced Goldberg with a chargé d’affaires in Bolivia, Larry Memmott, who has a solid background in diplomatic as well as intelligence work. But he was assigned the same task: to remove Evo Morales from the political stage. To accomplish this, an entire arsenal of destabilization techniques was put into operation – from NGOs and a fifth column to speeches by the opposition and the infiltration of terrorist groups into Bolivia. But Memmott was exposed after an incident involving Jacob Ostreicher, an established CIA agent. That agent was arrested, and a lawsuit was prepared, during which sensational revelations could have emerged about the scale of the CIA’s drug operations that had been aimed at discrediting the Bolivian government.

Memmott must have had a personal role in orchestrating Ostreicher’s escape from the country. As a result, the chargé d’affaires was recalled to the US, where he now explains at every opportunity that «everything was Morales’s fault». Perhaps the Bolivian president just has a persecution complex. Memmott swears that the US embassy was not involved in any kind of cover-up and never attempted to overthrow the Bolivian government. But he admitted that he was always disconcerted by Morales’s speeches in which the president spoke about the US «in a derogatory negative tone». In addition, it was Morales who banned local DEA operations and closed the USAID office.

Memmott not only offered justifications for his own actions, he continued to insist that Morales would have to be removed before Bolivia could make progress down the path mapped out by the US.

After Memmott’s failure, the US Embassy in Bolivia was reorganized and its entire staff replaced. The current chargé d’affaires in La Paz is Peter Brennan, who has worked in various Latin American countries, including Cuba. There are rumors that he is related to the current CIA director, John Brennan, and has dreams of an equally dazzling career. Peter has a hard-won reputation as a «hawk», and everything suggests that he is determined to prove it in Bolivia.

Currently, the United States is focusing on the allegedly growing threat of drug trafficking and the involvement of associates of Morales and the Vice President, Álvaro García Linera. The Bolivian president’s chief of staff, Juan Ramón Quintana, has claimed that a clandestine operation against President Morales is underway in the country, financed and directed by the US Drug Enforcement Administration. Quintana added that the DEA has a long history of attacking Morales, dating back to when he headed the Cocalero Union and was first elected to parliament and became a serious contender for the office of the presidency. According to Quintana, Washington is attempting to isolate the Bolivian leader on the international stage. The US has repeatedly tried to implicate Morales in drug trafficking and in having links to drug cartels, but their efforts at provocation have been unsuccessful. And here we have yet another attempt, coordinated by Brennan from La Paz with the firm support of the US propaganda machine.

The Obama administration has once again included Bolivia in the presidential list of major drug transit and/or major illicit drug producing countries. A report published in the US claimed that the data on Bolivia from the UN Office on Drugs and Crime did not reflect the true facts. It alleged that 35,000 hectares were actually being use to cultivate coca in Bolivia, not 20,400. Thus, it follows that this «undeclared production» could theoretically be used by criminal gangs to produce cocaine. Bolivian Foreign Minister David Choquehuanca summoned Brennan to his office for an explanation about the content of the US report.

Carlos Toro, a Columbian and a former DEA agent who had been embedded with the Medellín drug cartel, was also involved in the campaign against Evo Morales. Carlos Toro masqueraded as a drug lord for over 20 years before ending up in the US, and he is now said to fear being extradited to Colombia. Should that occur, Toro’s fate would not be hard to predict. For this reason he met with reporters in order to publicly declare his grievances against the DEA and to demand the pay he had earned after his years of collaboration. Toro spoke about the many projects in which he had been involved, including Operation Naked King, which was primarily targeted against Evo Morales.

Allegedly the DEA possesses evidence that individuals close to the Bolivian president are engaged in drug trafficking. Among those named by Toro are: the father of Vice President Álvaro García Linera – Raul García, who died in 2011; a friend of Linera’s – the Argentine Faustino Giménez, who worked in the Bolivian mining industry; the pilot of the presidential plane and a general in the Bolivian Air Force, Walter Álvarez; and Katty Orosco, a staffer in the president’s security service. After the DEA took the materials on Operation Naked King out of Bolivia, they were given to DEA employees in Paraguay so that the project could continue.

If US officials truly did possess materials implicating Morales and his inner circle, they would have used them long ago. Bolivian Interior Minister Carlos Romero condemned the Americans’ use of propaganda «evidence» from the former DEA agent, stating that the individuals named had never drawn the attention of law-enforcement officials.

This much-hyped information, the release of which was staged by US intelligence agencies, is a good example of a common gambit by which «subjects» who have undergone unwarranted (and often fabricated) attacks exonerate themselves and prove their innocence. In this instance, the intensification of black propaganda against the Bolivian president and his associates signals the future plans of US intelligence agencies to destabilize that regime.

Evo Morales believes that Americans are trying to «justify their failures» with these moves. The President stated that his country was successfully reducing its acreage under coca cultivation and has invited John Kerry to come to Bolivia in order to compare the existing US data with the UN statistics. That would help to determine which methods are most useful for fighting drug trafficking: «The United States always wants to act like a policeman so that its facts will be accepted over all others, but fortunately it isn’t any such thing».

The US embassy immediately responded: «We welcome the announcement by President Morales about improving cooperation in this area of global interest. We are ready to discuss and analyze our measures and methodology with the government and other institutions». Such discussions, with input from the US embassy, have occurred repeatedly in the past and have been used by staffers of the CIA, US military intelligence, and DEA to expand their operational contacts within the Bolivian security services, to recruit agents, and to stage provocations.

The accusations coming from Washington are increasingly harsh, in particular about «the strengthening of the positions of the drug cartels» in Bolivia and the use of its territory to transport drugs. But in fact, after the DEA was expelled from the country, the Bolivian authorities have become more and more effective each year at combating drug trafficking. Increasingly large quantities of drugs are regularly intercepted en route from Paraguay and Peru, where the DEA has as much free rein as at their own headquarters. Morales quite justifiably claims: «Instead of demonizing us and belittling our results, the United States should acknowledge and utilize our methods».

The outlawing of narcotic drugs at the start of the Twentieth Century, the turning of the matter from public health to social control, coincided with American’s imperial Open Door policy and the belief that the government had an obligation to American industrialists to create markets in every nation in the world, whether those nations liked it or not.

Civic institutions, like public education, were required to sanctify this policy, while “security” bureaucracies were established to ensure the citizenry conformed to the state ideology. Secret services, both public and private, were likewise established to promote the expansion of private American economic interests overseas.

It takes a book to explain the economic foundations of the war on drugs, and the reasons behind the regulation of the medical, pharmaceutical and drug manufacturers industries. Suffice it to say that by 1943, the nations of the “free world” were relying on America for their opium derivatives, under the guardianship of Harry Anslinger, the Commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN).

Narcotic drugs are a strategic resource, and when Anslinger learned that Peru had built a cocaine factory, he and the Board of Economic Warfare confiscated its product before it could be sold to Germany or Japan. In another instance, Anslinger and his counterpart at the State Department prevented a drug manufacturer in Argentina from selling drugs to Germany.

At the same time, according to Douglas Clark Kinder and William O. Walker III in their article, “Stable Force In a Storm: Harry J. Anslinger and United States Narcotic Policy, 1930-1962,” Anslinger permitted “an American company to ship drugs to Southeast Asia despite receiving intelligence reports that French authorities were permitting opiate smuggling into China and collaborating with Japanese drug traffickers.”

Federal drug law enforcement’s relationship with the espionage establishment matured with the creation of CIA’s predecessor organization, the Office of Strategic Services. Prior to the Second World War, the FBN was the government agency most adept at conducting covert operations at home and abroad. As a result, OSS chief William Donovan asked Anslinger to provide seasoned FBN agents to help organize the OSS and train its agents to work undercover, avoid security forces in hostile nations, manage agent networks, and engage in sabotage and subversion.

The relationship expanded during the war, when FBN executives and agents worked with OSS scientists in domestic “truth drug” experiments involving marijuana. The “extra-legal” nature of the relationship continued after the war: when the CIA decided to test LSD on unsuspecting American citizens, FBN agents were chosen to operate the safehouses where the experiments were conducted.

The relationship was formalized overseas in 1951, when Agent Charlie Siragusa opened an office in Rome and began to develop the FBN’s foreign operations. In the 1950s, FBN agents posted overseas spent half their time doing “favors” for the CIA, such as investigating diversions of strategic materials behind the Iron Curtain. A handful of FBN agents were actually recruited into the CIA while maintaining their FBN credentials as cover.

Officially, FBN agents set limits. Siragusa, for example, claimed to object when the CIA asked him to mount a “controlled delivery” into the U.S. as a way of identifying the American members of a smuggling ring with Communist affiliations.

As Siragusa said, “The FBN could never knowingly allow two pounds of heroin to be delivered into the United States and be pushed to Mafia customers in the New York City area, even if in the long run we could seize a bigger haul.” [For citations to this and other quotations/interviews, as well as documents, please refer to the author’s books, The Strength of the Wolf: The Secret History of America’s War on Drugs (Verso 2004) and The Strength of the Pack: The Personalities, Politics, and Espionage Intrigues that Shaped the DEA (TrineDay 2009). See also www.douglasvalentine.com]

And in 1960, when the CIA asked him to recruit assassins from his stable of underworld contacts, Siragusa again claimed to have refused. But drug traffickers, including, most prominently, Santo Trafficante Jr, were soon participating in CIA attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro.

As the dominant partner in the relationship, the CIA exploited its affinity with the FBN. “Like the CIA,” FBN Agent Robert DeFauw explained, “narcotic agents mount covert operations. We pose as members of the narcotics trade. The big difference is that we were in foreign countries legally, and through our police and intelligence sources, we could check out just about anyone or anything. Not only that, we were operational. So the CIA jumped in our stirrups.”

Jumping in the FBN’s stirrups afforded the CIA deniability, which is turn affords it impunity. To ensure that the CIA’s criminal activities are not revealed, narcotic agents are organized militarily within an inviolable chain of command. Highly indoctrinated, they blindly obey based on a “need to know.” This institutionalized ignorance sustains the illusion of righteousness, in the name of national security, upon which their motivation depends.

As FBN Agent Martin Pera explained, “Most FBN agents were corrupted by the lure of the underworld. They thought they could check their morality at the door – go out and lie, cheat, and steal – then come back and retrieve it. But you can’t. In fact, if you’re successful because you can lie, cheat, and steal, those things become tools you use in the bureaucracy.”

Institutionalized corruption began at headquarters, where FBN executives provided cover for CIA assets engaged in drug trafficking. In 1966, Agent John Evans was assigned as an assistant to enforcement chief John Enright.

“And that’s when I got to see what the CIA was doing,” Evans said. “I saw a report on the Kuomintang saying they were the biggest drug dealers in the world, and that the CIA was underwriting them. Air America was transporting tons of Kuomintang opium.” Evans bristled. “I took the report to Enright. He said, ‘Leave it here. Forget about it.’

“Other things came to my attention,” Evans added, “that proved that the CIA contributed to drug use in America. We were in constant conflict with the CIA because it was hiding its budget in ours, and because CIA people were smuggling drugs into the US. We weren’t allowed to tell, and that fostered corruption in the Bureau.”

Heroin smuggled by “CIA people” into the U.S. was channeled by Mafia distributors primarily to African-American communities. Local narcotic agents then targeted disenfranchised blacks as an easy way of preserving the white ruling class’s privileges.

“We didn’t need a search warrant,” explains New Orleans narcotics officer Clarence Giarusso. “It allowed us to meet our quota. And it was on-going. If I find dope on a black man, I can put him in jail for a few days. He’s got no money for a lawyer and the courts are ready to convict. There’s no expectation on the jury’s part that we have to make a case.

“So rather than go cold turkey, the addict becomes an informant, which means I can make more cases in the neighborhood, which is all we’re interested in. We don’t care about Carlos Marcello or the Mafia. City cops have no interest in who brings dope in. That’s the job of the federal agents.”

The Establishment’s race and class privileges have always been equated with national security, and FBN executives dutifully preserved the social order. Not until 1968, when Civil Rights reforms were imposed upon government bureaucracies, were black FBN agents allowed to become supervisors and manage white agents.

The war on drugs is largely a projection of two things: the racism that has defined America since its inception, and the government policy of allowing political allies to traffic in narcotics. These unstated but official policies reinforce the belief among CIA and drug law enforcement officials that the Bill of Rights is an obstacle to national security.

Blanket immunity from prosecution for turning these policies into practice engenders a belief among bureaucrats that they are above the law, which fosters corruption in other forms. FBN agents, for example, routinely “created a crime” by breaking and entering, planting evidence, using illegal wiretaps, and falsifying reports. They tampered with heroin, transferred it to informants for sale, and even murdered other agents who threatened to expose them.

All of this was secretly known at the highest level of government, and in 1965 the Treasury Department launched a corruption investigation of the FBN. Headed by Andrew Tartaglino, the investigation ended in 1968 with the resignation of 32 agents and the indictment of five. That same year the FBN was reconstructed in the Department of Justice as the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (BNDD).

But, as Tartaglino said dejectedly, “The job was only half done.”

First Infestation

Richard Nixon was elected president based on a vow to restore “law and order” to America. To prove that it intended to keep that promise, the White House in 1969 launched Operation Intercept along the Mexican border. This massive “stop and search” operation so badly damaged relations with Mexico, however, that National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger formed the Ad Hoc Committee on Narcotics (the Heroin Committee), to coordinate drug policy and prevent further diplomatic disasters.

The Heroin Committee was composed of cabinet members represented by their deputies. James Ludlum represented CIA Director Richard Helms. A member of the CIA’s Counter-Intelligence staff, Ludlum had been the CIA’s liaison officer to the FBN since 1962.

“When Kissinger set up the Heroin Committee,” Ludlum recalled, “the CIA certainly didn’t take it seriously, because drug control wasn’t part of their mission.”

Indeed, as John Evans noted above, and as the government was aware, the CIA for years had sanctioned the heroin traffic from the Golden Triangle region of Burma, Thailand and Laos into South Vietnam as a way of rewarding top foreign officials for advancing U.S. policies. This reality presented the Nixon White House with a dilemma, given that addiction among U.S. troops in Vietnam was soaring, and that massive amounts of Southeast Asian heroin were being smuggled into the U.S., for use by middle-class white kids on the verge of revolution.

Nixon’s response was to make drug law enforcement part of the CIA’s mission. Although reluctant to betray the CIA’s clients in South Vietnam, Helms told Ludlum: “We’re going to break their rice bowls.”

This betrayal occurred incrementally. Fred Dick, the BNDD agent assigned to Saigon, passed the names of the complicit military officers and politicians to the White House. But, as Dick recalled, “Ambassador [Ellsworth] Bunker called a meeting in Saigon at which CIA Station Chief Ted Shackley appeared and explained that there was ‘a delicate balance.’ What he said, in effect, was that no one was willing to do anything.”

Meanwhile, to protect its global network of drug trafficking assets, the CIA began infiltrating the BNDD and commandeering its internal security, intelligence, and foreign operations branches. This massive reorganization required the placement of CIA officers in influential positions in every federal agency concerned with drug law enforcement.

CIA Officer Paul Van Marx, for example, was assigned as the U.S. Ambassador to France’s assistant on narcotics. From this vantage point, Van Marx ensured that BNDD conspiracy cases against European traffickers did not compromise CIA operations and assets. Van Marx also vetted potential BNDD assets to make sure they were not enemy spies.

The FBN never had more than 16 agents stationed overseas, but Nixon dramatically increased funding for the BNDD and hundreds of agents were posted abroad. The success of these overseas agents soon came to depend on CIA intelligence, as BNDD Director John Ingersoll understood.

BNDD agents immediately felt the impact of the CIA’s involvement in drug law enforcement operations within the United States. Operation Eagle was the flashpoint. Launched in 1970, Eagle targeted anti-Castro Cubans smuggling cocaine from Latin America to the Trafficante organization in Florida. Of the dozens of traffickers arrested in June, many were found to be members of Operation 40, a CIA terror organization active in the U.S., the Caribbean, Central and South America, and Mexico.

The revelation that CIA drug smuggling assets were operating within the U.S. led to the assignment of CIA officers as counterparts to mid-level BNDD enforcement officials, including Latin American division chief Jerry Strickler. Like Van Marks in France, these CIA officers served to protect CIA assets from exposure, while facilitating their recruitment as informants for the BNDD.

Many Cuban exiles arrested in Operation Eagle were indeed hired by the BNDD and sent throughout Latin America. They got “fantastic intelligence,” Strickler noted. But many were secretly serving the CIA and playing a double game.

Nixon with CIA director Richard Helms.

Second Infestation

By 1970, BNDD Director Ingersoll’s inspections staff had gathered enough evidence to warrant the investigation of dozens of corrupt FBN agents who had risen to management positions in the BNDD. But Ingersoll could not investigate his top managers while simultaneously investigating drug traffickers. So he asked CIA Director Helms for help building a “counter-intelligence” capacity within the BNDD.

The result was Operation Twofold, in which 19 CIA officers were infiltrated into the BNDD, ostensibly to spy on corrupt BNDD officials. According to the BNDD’s Chief Inspector Patrick Fuller, “A corporation engaged in law enforcement hired three CIA officers posing as private businessmen to do the contact and interview work.”

CIA recruiter Jerry Soul, a former Operation 40 case officer, primarily selected officers whose careers had stalled due to the gradual reduction of forces in Southeast Asia. Those hired were put through the BNDD’s training course and assigned to spy on a particular regional director. No records were kept and some participants have never been identified.

Charles Gutensohn was a typical Twofold “torpedo.” Prior to his recruitment into the BNDD, Gutensohn had spent two years at the CIA’s base in Pakse, a major heroin transit point between Laos and South Vietnam. “Fuller said that when we communicated, I was to be known as Leo Adams for Los Angeles,” Gutensohn said. “He was to be Walter DeCarlo, for Washington, DC.”

Gutensohn’s cover, however, was blown before he got to Los Angeles. “Someone at headquarters was talking and everyone knew,” he recalled. “About a month after I arrived, one of the agents said to me, ‘I hear that Pat Fuller signed your credentials’.”

Twofold, which existed at least until 1974, was deemed by the Rockefeller Commission to have “violated the 1947 Act which prohibits the CIA’s participation in law enforcement activities.” It also, as shall be discussed later, served as a cover for clandestine CIA operations.

Third Infestation

The Nixon White House blamed the BNDD’s failure to stop international drug trafficking on its underdeveloped intelligence capabilities, a situation that opened the door to further CIA infiltration. In late 1970, CIA Director Helms arranged for his recently retired chief of continuing intelligence, E. Drexel Godfrey, to review BNDD intelligence procedures. Among other things, Godfrey recommended that the BNDD create regional intelligence units (RIUs) and an office of strategic intelligence (SI0).

The RIUs were up and running by 1971 with CIA officers often assigned as analysts, prompting BNDD agents to view the RIUs with suspicion, as repositories for Twofold torpedoes.

The SIO was harder to implement, given its arcane function as a tool to help top managers formulate plans and strategies “in the political sphere.” As SIO Director John Warner explained, “We needed to understand the political climate in Thailand in order to address the problem. We needed to know what kind of protection the Thai police were affording traffickers. We were looking for an intelligence office that could deal with those sorts of issues, on the ground, overseas.”

Organizing the SIO fell to CIA officers Adrian Swain and Tom Tripodi, both of whom were recruited into the BNDD. In April 1971 they accompanied Ingersoll to Saigon, where Station Chief Shackley briefed them. Through his CIA contacts, Swain obtained maps of drug-smuggling routes in Southeast Asia.

Upon their return to the U.S., Swain and Tripodi expressed frustration that the CIA had access to people capable of providing the BNDD with intelligence, but these people “were involved in narcotics trafficking and the CIA did not want to identify them.”

Seeking a way to circumvent the CIA, they recommended the creation of a “special operations or strategic operations staff” that would function as the BNDD’s own CIA “using a backdoor approach to gather intelligence in support of operations.” Those operations would rely on “longer range, deep penetration, clandestine assets, who remain undercover, do not appear during the course of any trial and are recruited and directed by the Special Operations agents on a covert basis.”

The White House approved the plan and in May 1971, Kissinger presented a $120 million drug control proposal, of which $50 million was earmarked for special operations. Three weeks later Nixon declared “war on drugs,” at which point Congress responded with funding for the SIO and authorization for the extra-legal operations Swain and Tripodi envisioned.

SIO Director Warner was given a seat on the U.S. Intelligence Board so the SIO could obtain raw intelligence from the CIA. But, in return, the SIO was compelled to adopt CIA security procedures. A CIA officer established the SIO’s file room and computer system; safes and steel doors were installed; and witting agents had to obtain CIA clearances.

Active-duty CIA officers were assigned to the SIO as desk officers for Europe and the Middle East, the Far East, and Latin America. Tripodi was assigned as chief of operations. Tripodi had spent the previous six years in the CIA’s Security Research Services, where his duties included the penetration of peace groups, as well as setting up firms to conduct black bag jobs. Notably, White House “Plumber” E. Howard Hunt inherited Tripodi’s Special Operations unit, which included several of the Watergate burglars.

Tripodi liaised with the CIA on matters of mutual interest and the covert collection of narcotics intelligence outside of routine BNDD channels. As part of his operational plan, code-named Medusa, Tripodi proposed that SIO agents hire foreign nationals to blow up contrabandista planes while they were refueling at clandestine air strips. Another proposal called for ambushing traffickers in America, and taking their drugs and money.

Enter Lucien Conein

The creation of the SIO coincided with the assignment of CIA officer Lucien Conein to the BNDD. As a member of the OSS, Conein had parachuted into France to form resistance cells that included Corsican gangsters. As a CIA officer, Conein in 1954 was assigned to Vietnam to organize anti-communist forces, and in 1963 achieved infamy as the intermediary between the Kennedy White House and the cabal of generals that murdered President Diem.

Historian Alfred McCoy has alleged that, in 1965, Conein arranged a truce between the CIA and drug trafficking Corsicans in Saigon. The truce, according to McCoy, allowed the Corsicans to traffic, as long as they served as contact men for the CIA. The truce also endowed the Corsicans with “free passage” at a time when Marseilles’ heroin labs were turning from Turkish to Southeast Asian morphine base.

Conein denied McCoy’s allegation and insisted that his meeting with the Corsicans was solely to resolve a problem caused by Daniel Ellsberg’s “peccadilloes with the mistress of a Corsican.”

It is impossible to know who is telling the truth. What is known is that in July 1971, on Howard Hunt’s recommendation, the White House hired Conein as an expert on Corsican drug traffickers in Southeast Asia. Conein was assigned as a consultant to the SIO’s Far East Asia desk. His activities will soon be discussed in greater detail.

The Parallel Mechanism

In September 1971, the Heroin Committee was reorganized as the Cabinet Committee for International Narcotics Control (CCINC) under Secretary of State William Rogers. CCINC’s mandate was to “set policies which relate international considerations to domestic considerations.” By 1975, its budget amounted to $875 million, and the war on drugs had become a most profitable industry.

Concurrently, the CIA formed a unilateral drug unit in its operations division under Seymour Bolten. Known as the Special Assistant to the Director for the Coordination of Narcotics, Bolten directed CIA division and station chiefs in unilateral drug control operations. In doing this, Bolten worked closely with Ted Shackley, who in 1972 was appointed head of the CIA’s Western Hemisphere Division. Bolten and Shackley had worked together in post-war Germany, as well as in anti-Castro Cubans operations in the early 1960s. Their collaboration would grease federal drug law enforcement’s skid into oblivion.

“Bolten screwed us,” BNDD’s Latin American division chief Jerry Strickler said emphatically. “And so did Shackley.”

Bolten “screwed” the BNDD, and the American judicial system, by setting up a “parallel mechanism” based on a computerized register of international drug traffickers and a CIA-staffed communications crew that intercepted calls from drug traffickers inside the U.S. to their accomplices around the world. The International Narcotics Information Network (INIS) was modeled on a computerized management information system Shackley had used to terrorize the underground resistance in South Vietnam.

Bolten’s staff also “re-tooled” dozens of CIA officers and slipped them into the BNDD. Several went to Lou Conein at the SIO for clandestine, highly illegal operations.

Factions within the CIA and military were opposed to Bolten’s parallel mechanism, but CIA Executive Director William Colby supported Bolten’s plan to preempt the BNDD and use its agents and informants for unilateral CIA purposes. The White House also supported the plan for political purposes related to Watergate. Top BNDD officials who resisted were expunged; those who cooperated were rewarded.

Bureau of Narcotics Covert Intelligence Network

In September 1972, DCI Helms (then immersed in Watergate intrigues), told BNDD Director Ingersoll that the CIA had prepared files on specific drug traffickers in Miami, the Florida Keys, and the Caribbean. Helms said the CIA would provide Ingersoll with assets to pursue the traffickers and develop information on targets of opportunity. The CIA would also provide operational, technical, and financial support.

The result was the Bureau of Narcotics Covert Intelligence Network (BUNCIN) whose methodology reflected Tripodi’s Medusa Plan and included “provocations, inducement to desertion, creating confusion and apprehension.”

Some BUNCIN intelligence activities were directed against “senior foreign government officials” and were “blamed on other government agencies or even on the intelligence services of other nations.” Other BUNCIN activities were directed against American civic and political groups.

BNDD officials managed BUNCIN’s legal activities, while Conein at the SIO managed its political and CIA aspects. According to Conein’s administrative deputy, Rich Kobakoff, “BUNCIN was an experiment in how to finesse the law. The end product was intelligence, not seizures or arrests.”

CIA officers Robert Medell and William Logay were selected to manage BUNCIN.

A Bay of Pigs veteran born in Cuba, Medell was initially assigned to the Twofold program. Medell was BUNCIN’s “covert” agent and recruited its principal agents. All of his assets had previously worked for the CIA, and all believed they were working for it again.

Medell started running agents in March 1973 with the stated goal of penetrating the Trafficante organization. To this end the BNDD’s Enforcement Chief, Andy Tartaglino, introduced Medell to Sal Caneba, a retired Mafioso who had been in business with Trafficante in the 1950s. Caneba in one day identified the head of the Cuban side of the Trafficante family, as well as its organizational structure.

But the CIA refused to allow the BNDD to pursue the investigation, because it had employed Trafficante in its assassination attempts against Fidel Castro, and because Trafficante’s Operation 40 associates were performing similar functions for the CIA around the world.

Medell’s Principal Agent was Bay of Pigs veteran Guillermo Tabraue, whom the CIA paid $1,400 a week. While receiving this princely sum, Tabraue participated in the “Alvarez-Cruz” drug smuggling ring.

Medell also recruited agents from Manuel Artime’s anti-Castro Cuban organization. Former CIA officer and White House “Plumber” Howard Hunt, notably, had been Artime’s case officer for years, and many members of Artime’s organization had worked for Ted Shackley while Shackley was the CIA’s station chief in Miami.

Bill Logay was the “overt” agent assigned to the BUNCIN office in Miami. Logay had been Shackley’s bodyguard in Saigon in 1969. From 1970-1971, Logay had served as a special police liaison and drug coordinator in Saigon’s Precinct 5. Logay was also asked to join Twofold, but claims to have refused.

Medell and Logay’s reports were hand delivered to BNDD headquarters via the Defense Department’s classified courier service. The Defense Department was in charge of emergency planning and provided BUNCIN agents with special communications equipment. The CIA supplied BUNCIN’s assets with forged IDs that enabled them to work for foreign governments, including Panama, Venezuela and Costa Rica.

Like Twofold, BUNCIN had two agendas. One, according to Chief Inspector Fuller, “was told” and had a narcotics mission. The other provided cover for the Plumbers. Orders for the domestic political facet emanated from the White House and passed through Conein to “Plumber” Gordon Liddy and his “Operation Gemstone” squad of exile Cuban terrorists from the Artime organization.

Enforcement chief Tartaglino was unhappy with the arrangement and gave Agent Ralph Frias the job of screening anti-Castro Cubans sent by the White House to the BNDD. Frias was assigned to International Affairs chief George Belk. When Nixon’s White House chief of staff H.R. “Bob” Haldeman sent over three Cubans, Frias interviewed them and realized they were “plants.” Those three were not hired, but, Frias lamented, many others were successfully infiltrated inside the BNDD and other federal agencies.

Under BUNCIN cover, CIA anti-Castro assets reportedly kidnapped and assassinated people in Colombia and Mexico. BUNCIN’s White House sponsors also sent CIA anti-Castro Cuban assets to gather dirt on Democratic politicians in Key West. With BUNCIN, federal drug law enforcement sank to new lows of political repression and corruption.

Novo Yardley

The Nixon White House introduced the “operations by committee” management method to ensure control over its illegal drug operations. But as agencies involved in drug law enforcement pooled resources, the BNDD’s mission was diluted and diminished.

And, as the preeminent agency in the federal government, the CIA not only separated itself from the BNDD as part of Bolten’s parallel mechanism, it rode off into the sunset on the BNDD’s horse. For example, at their introductory meeting in Mexico City in 1972, Ted Shackley told Latin American division chief Strickler to hand over all BNDD files, informant lists, and cable traffic.

According to Strickler, “Bad things happened.” The worst abuse was that the CIA allowed drug shipments into the U.S. without telling the BNDD.

“Individual stations allowed this,” SIO Director John Warner confirmed.

In so far as evidence acquired by CIA electronic surveillance is inadmissible in court, the CIA was able to protect its controlled deliveries into the U.S. merely by monitoring them. Numerous investigations had to be terminated as a result. Likewise, dozens of prosecutions were dismissed on national security grounds due to the participation of CIA assets operating around the world.

Strickler knew which CIA people were guilty of sabotaging cases in Latin America, and wanted to indict them. And so, at Bolten’s insistence, Strickler was reassigned. Meanwhile, CIA assets from Bolten’s unilateral drug unit were kidnapping and assassinating traffickers as part of Operation Twofold.

BNDD Director Ingersoll confirmed the existence of this covert facet of Twofold. Its purpose, he said, was to put people in deep cover in the U.S. to develop intelligence on drug trafficking, particularly from South America. The regional directors weren’t aware of it. Ingersoll said he got approval from Attorney General John Mitchell and passed the operation on to John Bartels, the first administrator of the DEA. He said the unit did not operate inside the U.S., which is why he thought it was legal.

Ingersoll added that he was surprised that no one from the Rockefeller Commission asked him about it.

Joseph DiGennaro’s entry into the covert facet of Operation Twofold began when a family friend, who knew CIA officer Jim Ludlum, suggested that he apply for a job with the BNDD. Then working as a stockbroker in New York, DiGennaro met Fuller in August 1971 in Washington. Fuller gave DiGennaro the code name Novo Yardley, based on his posting in New York, and as a play on the name of the famous codebreaker.

After DiGennaro obtained the required clearances, he was told that he and several other recruits were being “spun-off” from Twofold into the CIA’s “operational” unit. The background check took 14 months, during which time he received intensive combat and trade-craft training.

In October 1972 he was sent to New York City and assigned to an enforcement group as a cover. His paychecks came from BNDD funds, but the program was reimbursed by the CIA through the Bureau of Mines. The program was authorized by the “appropriate” Congressional committee.

DiGennaro’s unit was managed by the CIA’s Special Operations Division in conjunction with the military, which provided assets within foreign military services to keep ex-filtration routes (air corridors and roads) open. The military cleared air space when captured suspects were brought into the U.S. DiGennaro spent most of his time in South America, but the unit operated worldwide. The CIA unit numbered about 40 men, including experts in printing, forgery, maritime operations, and telecommunications.

DiGennaro would check with Fuller and take sick time or annual leave to go on missions. There were lots of missions. As his BNDD group supervisor in New York said, “Joey was never in the office.”

The job was tracking down, kidnapping, and, if they resisted, killing drug traffickers. Kidnapped targets were incapacitated by drugs and dumped in the U.S. As DEA Agent Gerry Carey recalled, “We’d get a call that there was ‘a present’ waiting for us on the corner of 116th Street and Sixth Avenue. We’d go there and find some guy, who’d been indicted in the Eastern District of New York, handcuffed to a telephone pole. We’d take him to a safe house for questioning and, if possible, turn him into an informer. Sometimes we’d have him in custody for months. But what did he know?”

If you’re a Corsican drug dealer in Argentina, and men with police credentials arrest you, how do you know it’s a CIA operation? DiGennaro’s last operation in 1977 involved the recovery of a satellite that had fallen into a drug dealer’s hands. Such was the extent of the CIA’s “parallel mechanism.”

The Dirty Dozen

With the formation of the Drug Enforcement Administration in July 1973, BUNCIN was renamed the DEA Clandestine Operations Network (DEACON 1). A number of additional DEACONs were developed through Special Field Intelligence Programs (SFIP). As an extension of BUNCIN, DEACON 1 developed intelligence on traffickers in Costa Rica, Ohio and New Jersey; politicians in Florida; terrorists and gun runners; the sale of boats and helicopters to Cuba; and the Trafficante organization.

Under DEA chief John Bartels, administrative control fell under Enforcement Chief George Belk and his Special Projects assistant Philip Smith. Through Belk and Smith, the Office of Special Projects had become a major facet of Bolten’s parallel mechanism. It housed the DEA’s air wing (staffed largely by CIA officers), conducted “research programs” with the CIA, provided technical aids and documentation to agents, and handled fugitive searches.

As part of DEACON 1, Smith sent covert agent Bob Medell “to Caracas or Bogota to develop a network of agents.” As Smith noted in a memorandum, reimbursement for Medell “is being made in backchannel fashion to CIA under payments to other agencies and is not counted as a position against us.”

Thoroughly suborned by Bolten and the CIA, DEA Administrator Bartels established a priority on foreign clandestine narcotics collection. And when Belk proposed a special operations group in intelligence, Bartels immediately approved it. In March 1974, Belk assigned the group to Lou Conein.

As chief of the Intelligence Group/Operations (IGO), Conein administered the DEA Special Operations Group (DEASOG), SFIP and National Intelligence Officers (NIO) programs. The chain of command, however, was “unclear” and while Medell reported administratively to Smith, Conein managed operations through a separate chain of command reaching to William Colby, who had risen to the rank of CIA Director concurrent with the formation of the DEA.

Conein had worked for Colby for many years in Vietnam, for through Colby he hired a “dirty dozen” CIA officers to staff DEASOG. As NIOs (not regular gun-toting DEA agents), the DEASOG officers did not buy narcotics or appear in court, but instead used standard CIA operating procedures to recruit assets and set up agent networks for the long-range collection of intelligence on trafficking groups. They had no connection to the DEA and were housed in a safe house outside headquarters in downtown Washington, DC.

The first DEASOG recruits were CIA officers Elias P. Chavez and Nicholas Zapata. Both had paramilitary and drug control experience in Laos. Colby’s personnel assistant Jack Mathews had been Chavez’s case officer at the Long Thien base, where General Vang Pao ran his secret drug-smuggling army under Ted Shackley’s auspices from 1966-1968.

A group of eight CIA officers followed: Wesley Dyckman, a Chinese linguist with service in Vietnam, was assigned to San Francisco. Louis J. Davis, a veteran of Vietnam and Laos, was assigned to the Chicago Regional Intelligence Unit. Christopher Thompson from the CIA’s Phoenix Program in Vietnam went to San Antonio. Hugh E. Murray, veteran of Pakse and Bolivia (where he participated in the capture of Che Guevara), was sent to Tucson. Thomas D. McPhaul had worked with Conein in Vietnam, and was sent to Dallas. Thomas L. Briggs, a veteran of Laos and a friend of Shackley’s, went to Mexico. Vernon J. Goertz, a Shackley friend who had participated in the Allende coup, went to Venezuela. David A. Scherman, a Conein friend and former manager of the CIA’s interrogation center in Da Nang, was sent to sunny San Diego.

Gary Mattocks, who ran CIA counter-terror teams in Vietnam’s Delta, and interrogator Robert Simon were the eleventh and twelfth members. Terry Baldwin, Barry Carew and Joseph Lagattuta joined later.

According to Davis, Conein created DEASOG specifically to do Phoenix program-style jobs overseas: the type where a paramilitary officer breaks into a trafficker’s house, takes his drugs, and slits his throat. The NIOs were to operate overseas where they would target traffickers the police couldn’t reach, like a prime minister’s son or the police chief in Acapulco if he was the local drug boss. If they couldn’t assassinate the target, they would bomb his labs or use psychological warfare to make him look like he was a DEA informant, so his own people would kill him.

The DEASOG people “would be breaking the law,” Davis observed, “but they didn’t have arrest powers overseas anyway.”

Conein envisioned 50 NIOs operating worldwide by 1977. But a slew of Watergate-related scandals forced the DEA to curtail its NIO program and reorganize its covert operations staff and functions in ways that have corrupted federal drug law enforcement beyond repair.

Assassination Scandals

The first scandal focused on DEACON 3, which targeted the Aviles-Perez organization in Mexico. Eli Chavez, Nick Zapata and Barry Carew were the NIOs assigned.

A veteran CIA officer who spoke Spanish, Carew had served as a special police adviser in Saigon before joining the BNDD. Carew was assigned as Conein’s Latin American desk officer and managed Chavez and Zapata (aka “the Mexican Assassin”) in Mexico. According to Chavez, a White House Task Force under Howard Hunt had started the DEACON 3 case. The Task force provided photographs of the Aviles Perez compound in Mexico, from whence truckloads of marijuana were shipped to the U.S.

Funds were allotted in February 1974, at which point Chavez and Zapata traveled to Mexico City as representatives of the North American Alarm and Fire Systems Company. In Mazatlán, they met with Carew, who stayed at a fancy hotel and played tennis every day, while Chavez and Zapata, whom Conein referred to as “pepper-bellies,” fumed in a flea-bag motel.

An informant arranged for Chavez, posing as a buyer, to meet Perez. A deal was struck, but DEA chief John Bartels made the mistake of instructing Chavez to brief the DEA’s regional director in Mexico City before making “the buy.”

At this meeting, the DEACON 3 agents presented their operational plan. But when the subject of “neutralizing” Perez came up, analyst Joan Banister took this to mean assassination. Bannister reported her suspicions to DEA headquarters, where the anti-CIA faction leaked her report to Washington Post columnist Jack Anderson.

Anderson’s allegation that the DEA was providing cover for a CIA assassination unit included revelations that the Senate had investigated IGO chief Conein for shopping around for assassination devices, like exploding ashtrays and telephones. Conein managed to keep his job, but the trail led to his comrade from the OSS, Mitch Werbell.

A deniable asset Conein used for parallel operations, Werbell had tried to sell several thousand silenced machine pistols to DEACON 1 target Robert Vesco, then living in Costa Rica surrounded by drug trafficking Cuban exiles in the Trafficante organization. Trafficante was also, at the time, living in Costa Rica as a guest of President Figueres whose son had purchased weapons from Werbell and used them to arm a death squad he formed with DEACON 1 asset Carlos Rumbault, a notorious anti-Castro Cuban terrorist and fugitive drug smuggler.

Meanwhile, in February 1974, DEA Agent Anthony Triponi, a former Green Beret and member of Operation Twofold, was admitted to St. Luke’s Hospital in New York “suffering from hypertension.” DEA inspectors found Triponi in the psychiatric ward, distraught because he had broken his “cover” and now his “special code” would have to be changed.

Thinking he was insane, the DEA inspectors called former chief inspector Patrick Fuller in California, just to be sure. As it turned out, everything Triponi had said about Twofold was true! The incredulous DEA inspectors called the CIA and were stunned when they were told: “If you release the story, we will destroy you.”

By 1975, Congress and the Justice Department were investigating the DEA’s relations with the CIA. In the process they stumbled on, among other things, plots to assassinate Torrijos and Noriega in Panama, as well as Tripodi’s Medusa Program.

In a draft report, one DEA inspector described Medusa as follows: “Topics considered as options included psychological terror tactics, substitution of placebos to discredit traffickers, use of incendiaries to destroy conversion laboratories, and disinformation to cause internal warfare between drug trafficking organizations; other methods under consideration involved blackmail, use of psychopharmacological techniques, bribery and even terminal sanctions.”

The Cover-Up

Despite the flurry of investigations, Nixon’s successor, Gerald Ford, reconfirmed the CIA’s narcotic intelligence collection arrangement with DEA, and the CIA continued to have its way. Much of its success is attributed to Seymour Bolten, whose staff handled “all requests for files from the Church Committee,” which concluded that allegations of drug smuggling by CIA assets and proprietaries “lacked substance.”

The Rockefeller Commission likewise gave the CIA a clean bill of health, falsely stating that the Twofold inspections project was terminated in 1973. The Commission completely covered-up the existence of the operation unit hidden within the inspections program.

Ford did task the Justice Department to investigate “allegations of fraud, irregularity, and misconduct” in the DEA. The so-called DeFeo investigation lasted through July 1975, and included allegations that DEA officials had discussed killing Omar Torrijos and Manuel Noriega. In March 1976, Deputy Attorney General Richard Thornburgh announced there were no findings to warrant criminal prosecutions.

In 1976, Congresswoman Bella Abzug submitted questions to new Director of Central Intelligence George H.W. Bush, about the CIA’s central role in international drug trafficking. Bush’s response was to cite a 1954 agreement with the Justice Department gave the CIA the right to block prosecution or keep its crimes secret in the name of national security.

In its report, the Abzug Committee said: “It was ironic that the CIA should be given responsibility of narcotic intelligence, particularly since they are supporting the prime movers.”

The Mansfield Amendment of 1976 sought to curtail the DEA’s extra-legal activities abroad by prohibiting agents from kidnapping or conducting unilateral actions without the consent of the host government. The CIA, of course, was exempt and continued to sabotage DEA cases against its movers, while further tightening its stranglehold on the DEA’s enforcement and intelligence capabilities.

In 1977, the DEA’s Assistant Administrator for Enforcement sent a memo, co-signed by the six enforcement division chiefs, to DEA chief Peter Bensinger. As the memo stated, “All were unanimous in their belief that present CIA programs were likely to cause serious future problems for DEA, both foreign and domestic.”

They specifically cited controlled deliveries enabled by CIA electronic surveillance and the fact that the CIA “will not respond positively to any discovery motion.” They complained that “Many of the subjects who appear in these CIA- promoted or controlled surveillances regularly travel to the United States in furtherance of their trafficking activities.” The “de facto immunity” from prosecution enabled the CIA assets to “operate much more openly and effectively.”

But then DEA chief Peter Bensinger suffered the CIA at the expense of America’s citizens and the DEA’s integrity. Under Bensinger the DEA created its CENTAC program to target drug trafficking organization worldwide through the early 1980s. But the CIA subverted the CENTAC: as its director Dennis Dayle famously said, “The major targets of my investigations almost invariably turned out to be working for the CIA.”

El Chapo’s first escape in 2001 from the supposedly escape-proof Puenta Grande prison and his second escape from another escape-proof prison at Altiplano, west of Mexico City, have implicated a number of Mexican officials in the acceptance of bribes from the cash-rich Guzman. In addition, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and its plants inside the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) have come under renewed scrutiny for their roles as facilitators of successive Mexican government officials, including past president Vicente Fox and current president Enrique Peña Nieto, both accused of aiding and abetting in the respective escapes of El Chapo, but also the entire Mexican and Latin American drug smuggling infrastructure.

The focus of 2016 presidential candidates on the issue of illegal immigration from Mexico has resulted in a media attention bonanza for Republican hopeful Donald Trump while the softer immigration proposals of such candidates as Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio have come in for heavy criticism. Trump riled the American political establishment when he accused most illegal immigrants from Mexico of being criminals. The July shooting death in San Francisco of 31-year old Kate Steinle, in front of her father, by an illegal Mexican immigrant named Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez has boosted Trump opinion poll ratings, especially after it was revealed that Lopez-Sanchez had been deported from the United States on five previous occasions.

San Francisco has, for several decades, been a major transfer point for illegal drugs from Mexico and other countries in Latin America. When Lopez-Sanchez was arrested for the murder of Steinle, it was revealed he was already wanted by U.S. authorities on a narcotics-related warrant.

While Trump and Texas Republican Senator Ted Cruz have denounced the idea of U.S. citizenship for millions of illegal Latin American immigrants in the United States, Bush and Rubio, with their own familial ties to Latin America, have supported the concept. Bush and Rubio are also avid free traders with a Mexican oligarchy-run economy. Mexico’s two largest parties, the conservative pro-business National Action Party (PAN) and the globalist-inclined Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), are also mired in drug money and cartel bribery.

The only party that seemed intent on cleaning up the cartels’ control over the Mexican political scene, the left-progressive Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), saw itself wracked by internal dissension and a party split after its razor-thin loss of the presidency in 2006 amid evidence of massive election fraud. The CIA’s playbook calls for sowing the seeds of rebellion in parties that are on the verge of taking power and challenging the power of the autocrats and globalists. Mexico was no exception.

Jeb Bush, whose wife is Mexican, will have a difficult time avoiding his past activities as both a Florida-based businessman and Florida governor that intersected with individuals linked to narcotics smuggling syndicates, including those like the Sinaloa and Gulf cartels based in Mexico.

While Bush was Florida’s governor, U.S. bank regulators discovered that El Chapo’s Sinaloa cartel controlled 23 accounts at the Wachovia Bank branch in Miami. After leaving office as Florida governor in 2007, Bush established the office for Jeb Bush and Associates, in convenient rent-free office space, in the HSBC building on Brickell Avenue in the heart of Miami’s business district. Early in 2015, HSBC was caught by U.S. federal authorities laundering $881 million in narcotics money, much of it for the Sinaloa cartel. Earlier, HSBC was discovered to have laundered $376 billion for Wachovia. No one at HSBC went to prison and the bank paid a $1.9 billion fine to the Justice Department in a «deferred prosecution», a contrivance cooked up by attorneys and prosecutors to keep bankers from serving time in prison. Jeb Bush, whose links to Wachovia and HSBC should have caused a closer look by prosecutors, decided to try to become the third member of the Bush family to serve as president of the United States.

When Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega’s American lawyers threatened to expose videotapes showing Noriega and George H W Bush conspiring to smuggle drugs into the United States, the trial judge, William M. Hoeveler, merely ruled that the CIA could not be brought up by the defense during Noriega’s trial in Miami. Hoeveler, a Jimmy Carter nominee, served on the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida until his retirement last year. Although he obviously took his orders from Langley, Hoeveler is praised by his colleagues as a «shining star» of American jurisprudence. America’s judicial benches are rife with judges who have acted on behalf of money launderers and politicians who have benefited from their financial largesse. The Bush family is the worst example of a political dynasty that has enriched itself from narcotics smuggling and money laundering and has ensured that a network of «dirty judges» have been selected to serve on federal benches and state judgeships in Florida and Texas.

On September 28, 2007 a CIA contractor Gulfstream jet carrying 3.3 metric tons of cocaine from Colombia to El Chapo’s Sinaloa Cartel in Cancun crashed in Quintana Roo state, near the town of Tixkoko, on the Yucatan peninsula. The aircraft was associated with two firms previously identified as charter firms for CIA rendition flights: S/A Holdings LLC of Garden City, New York and Richmor Aviation of Hudson, New York. On September 16, 2007, the plane was sold to two Florida businessmen, one from Miami and the other from Lakeland, Florida. The two businessmen were not identified but the plane was sold to the businessmen for $2 million by Donna Blue Aircraft of Coconut Creek, Florida. Any examination of the Bush family’s and CIA’s drug smuggling operations in Florida, Louisiana, and Texas always turns up a complicated network of «folding tent» companies, aircraft that constantly switch owners, shady Latin American billionaires and millionaires living in Florida, and the convenient «dead bodies» when law enforcement is tipped off about the smuggling operations.

Two individuals who were tied to Jeb Bush’s drug smuggling and money laundering operations in Florida turned up dead under very suspicious circumstances. Manny Perez, Bush’s money laundering accomplice at Eagle National Bank, was found floating in a canal in West Hialeah, near Miami, after it was believed he was going to blow the whistle on the Bush family’s drug operations in Florida. Police ruled Perez’s death a «swimming accident.» Another Bush bagman, Manny Diaz, died in a suspicious car accident. Both Mannys were prepared to testify before Senator John Kerry’s Senate banking subcommittee investigating Iran-contra and drug money laundering in 1988. George Morales, a CIA contractor, died from slipping on a bar of soap in the prison shower the day before his release from prison in Florida for cocaine trafficking. Morales was scheduled to fly to Washington, DC to testify before the House of Representatives on the CIA’s drug and weapons smuggling operations, activities which involved Jeb Bush and his father, the 41stpresident of the United States.

Yet another CIA operative with enough information to sink the Bush family’s political fortunes in the 1980s, Johnny Molina, committed suicide in a Pensacola, Florida restaurant parking lot. Police concluded that Molina shot himself by unloading 20 rounds from a MAC 10 clip into his body. Molina’s body was cremated before an autopsy could be conducted. Former CIA pilot-turned-DEA informant Barry Seal was gunned down gangland execution style in a Baton Rouge, Louisiana while performing community service after his drug conviction. When he was arrested in Louisiana for flying a plane full of marijuana into the state, Seal reportedly had George H W Bush’s private phone number in his briefcase.

Kerry discovered what many investigative journalists discovered about the CIA’s and the Bush family’s ties to drug smuggling: the interwoven web of companies, banks, CIA contractors, aircraft companies and planes, and ships involved in the illicit enterprise. All of these operations, from «Frigorificos de Puntarena», a Costa Rican seafood company, and Ocean Hunter, Inc., another seafood company based in Miami, to SETCO Air, which flew drugs from Central America to Florida, and Vortex/Universal Air Leasing of Miami, were linked to the CIA and Bush family, including Jeb Bush.

The ramifications of El Chapo’s prison escape and Trump’s inconvenient referrals to the Mexican criminal immigrant problem are bubbling to the surface in a presidential campaign where the connections of the Bush family to the CIA drug trade are an issue, whether the Bushes and their well-heeled supporters like it or not.

The Central Intelligence Agency is behind the movie. For instance, it tells a story about arming the Venezuelan military, including the use of satellites to control the country’s territory. According to CIA, Venezuela needs space surveillance to conduct drug trafficking with impunity. Diosdado Cabello has condemned the smear campaign against him and the national military and security services top leaders. The propaganda campaign is intensive. Almost every day TV channels (CBS, NBC, ABC, FOX and CNN), as well as newspapers (The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times) offer information about corruption in the ranks of Venezuela’s political and military leadership. 

The ballyhoo is accompanied by reports that lawsuits are launched in the United States against Cabello and the members of his inner circle. Army, security services and guard service deserters are used for gathering discrediting information. They also use retired Venezuelan state employees which have cooperated with international drug cartels and decided to cooperate with law enforcing agencies in hope to be pardoned. The attempts undertaken by Central Intelligence Agency and Drug Enforcement Agency to topple Diosdado are easily explainable. He is a reliable partner of President Maduro; the both were close friends of late President Chavez. 

The United States use fraud to prove that drug trafficking from Venezuela threatens the security of the United States and the entire Western Hemisphere. Experts know that drug cartels use sparsely populated areas of Venezuela for transporting hallucogenics. A small plane crashed off the coast of northern Colombia on May 22 and 1.2 metric tons of cocaine was recovered from the wreckage along with the body of the pilot with a Mexican passport. Colombian coast guards found the contraband in one-kilogram packages from the wreckage of the Hawker 800 aircraft. "The airplane, a Hawker 800, which left Venezuela and was destined for Central America, was detected in the early hours of today when it illegally entered Colombian air space," a statement from the Colombian Air Force said. Venezuelan Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino said the plane came from Central America and not from his country. According to him, the plane landed in a remote part of Venezuela for a few hours, and his country's air force shot at the plane when it took off again. The Minister noted that Reuter agency was partial highlighting the event. 

Since 2013, Venezuelan authorities say they have shot down or neutralized 90 aircraft carrying more than 180 tons of cocaine and other drugs. They have also destroyed 50 illegal air strips used by planes transporting narcotics. The US Drug Enforcement Agency and leaders of international drug cartels are well aware of this information. No matter that, they go on testing the effectiveness of Venezuela’s “integral defense”. 

This time the intruders tried to deceive the Venezuelan Air Force. The plane landed at a clandestine airstrip in western Apure state shortly after midnight. When the plane took off again a few hours later, Venezuelan jets ordered the pilot to descend, but he refused and shots were fired that hit the aircraft. A turbine was hit and the plane made a hedge-hopping flight to Columbia. 

Columbian and Venezuelan drug dealers cause big problems. It all looks like kind of Nanay wrestling. The interests of drug dealers and special services are intertwined. Cocaine produced in Columbia in great quantities is transported to Venezuela in small planes which are hard to track. According to Venezuelan special services, there is an illegal light aircraft market in Latin America and the Caribbean. The stolen planes are flown to the United States to get repainted and reregistered. Some of these planes are used by the Central Intelligence Agency and the Drug Enforcement Agency. This April Mexican La Jornada published an article called DEA Scandal: Drugs, Prostitutes and 'Grotesque' U.S. Double Standards. The article says, that U.S. government agencies like the ATF (The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) and Drug Enforcement Agency have shown no compunction about breaking national laws, smuggling weapons to criminal groups involved in the drugs trade, laundering their money and even participating in parties paid for by drug traffickers, all of which has been made clear by various investigations conducted in our neighbor country. 

Under such circumstances, it is grotesque that U.S. politicians and media appear restless over the alleged unreliability of security organs in countries like Mexico and Colombia and use such concerns as a pretext for operations of their own troops on foreign territory. The director of the Drug Enforcement Administration Michele Leonhart resigned following a scandal involving DEA agents partying with prostitutes in Colombia – and after lawmakers in our neighboring country's House of Representatives issued a statement of no confidence in respect to her performance on the issue.

More information on DEA activities becomes public domain. The up-to-date arms sales by US agencies to drug traffickers in Latin and Central America are a proven fact. In 2014 more than 20 thousand arms made in USA were taken away from drug traffickers. There are many instances of money laundering by Drug Enforcement Agency operatives that have come into the open. Secret funds provide money for activities in “hostile countries” like Venezuela, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Argentina and, of course, Brazil. The leaders of these states were wise enough to distance themselves for foreign ventures of Bush Jr. and Obama. As a result, the United States resorted to dirty technologies used in smear campaigns, like, for instance, putting forward accusations of involvement in corruption, illegal enrichment and persecution of journalists and opposition leaders. The publication of the book written by Emili J. Blasco, a correspondent of ABC newspaper in Washington, called Bumerán Chávez: Los Fraudes que Llevaron al Colapso de Venezuela (Boomerang Chavez: Frauds that Led to the Collapse of Venezuela) is part of the CIA-initiated project “Venezuelan leadership and drug trafficking”. The special services resort to the services offered by Blasco to make public the information to smear those who have fallen out of favor with the United States. 

The book describes a conversation between Blasco and Leamsy Salazar, a Venezuelan military, who had close ties with the security service guarding Hugo Chavez, Nicolas Maduro and Diosdado Cabello. He left Venezuela. Salazar went to Spain first. The he was transported to the United States as a special witness. He is supposed to become the chief witness at the trial versus Venezuelan drug traffickers. Everything Salazar told Blasco is an outright lie disseminated by the Central Intelligence Agency and Drug Enforcement Agency. In particular, the former security operative said that in 2006 and 2007 Comandante Chavez personally discussed an arms and ammunition in exchange for drugs deal with FARC leaders to boost the guerillas’ combat capability as they fought the government forces. Now it’s clear Salazar cannot be trusted, whatever he says. 

According to the data obtained by Venezuelan special services, Leamsy Salazar established contacts with the Central Intelligence Agency when he serves as a presidential guard. Journalist Juan Martorano does not exclude that Salazar was involved in the plot to assassinate Chavez.