Meet the CIA: Guns, Drugs and Money, by Jeffery St. Clair + Alexander Cockburn.
Read this article in its entirety the next time you are tempted to believe anything told to us by any intelligence service anywhere in the world. Lying is Job Description 101 as far as secret organizations of this kind…including the FBI…are concerned.
A couple of random snippets:
On November 22, 1996, the US Justice Department indicted General Ramón Guillén Davila of Venezuela on charges of importing cocaine into the United States. The federal prosecutors alleged that while heading Venezuela’s anti-drug unit, General Guillén smuggled more than 22 tons of cocaine into the US and Europe for the Calí and Bogotá cartels. Guillén responded to the indictment from the sanctuary of Caracas, whence his government refused to extradict him to Miami, while honoring him with a pardon for any possible crimes committed in the line of duty. He maintained that the cocaine shipments to the US had been approved by the CIA, and went on to say that “some drugs were lost and neither the CIA nor the DEA want to accept any responsibility for it.”
The CIA had hired Guillén in 1988 to help it find out something about the Colombian drug cartels. The Agency and Guillén set up a drug-smuggling operation using agents of Guillén’s in the Venezuelan National Guard to buy cocaine from the Calí cartel and ship it to Venezuela, where it was stored in warehouses maintained by the Narcotics Intelligence Center, Caracas, which was run by Guillén and entirely funded by the CIA.
To avoid the Calí cartel asking inconvenient questions about the growing inventory of cocaine in the Narcotics Intelligence Center’s warehouses and, as one CIA agent put it, “to keep our credibility with the traffickers,” the CIA decided it was politic to let some of the cocaine proceed on to the cartel’s network of dealers in the US. As another CIA agent put it, they wanted “to let the dope walk” – in other words, to allow it to be sold on the streets of Miami, New York and Los Angeles.
When it comes to what are called “controlled shipments” of drugs into the US, federal law requires that such imports have DEA approval, which the CIA duly sought. This was, however, denied by the DEA attaché in Caracas. The CIA then went to DEA headquarters in Washington, only to be met with a similar refusal, whereupon the CIA went ahead with the shipment anyway. One of the CIA men working with Guillén was Mark McFarlin. In 1989 McFarlin, so he later testified in federal court in Miami, told his CIA station chief in Caracas that the Guillén operation, already under way, had just seen 3,000 pounds of cocaine shipped to the US. When the station chief asked McFarlin if the DEA was aware of this, McFarlin answered no. “Let’s keep it that way,” the station chief instructed him.
Over the next three years, more than 22 tons of cocaine made its way through this pipeline into the US, with the shipments coming into Miami either in hollowed-out shipping pallets or in boxes of blue jeans. In 1990 DEA agents in Caracas learned what was going on, but security was lax since one female DEA agent in Venezuela was sleeping with a CIA man there, and another, reportedly with General Guillén himself. The CIA and Guillén duly changed their modes of operation, and the cocaine shipments from Caracas to Miami continued for another two years. Eventually, the US Customs Service brought down the curtain on the operation, and in 1992 seized an 800-pound shipment of cocaine in Miami.
One of Guillén’s subordinates, Adolfo Romero, was arrested and ultimately convicted on drug conspiracy charges. None of the Colombian drug lords was ever inconvenienced by this project, despite the CIA’s claim that it was after the Calí cartel. Guillén was indicted but remained safe in Caracas. McFarlin and his boss were ultimately edged out of the Agency. No other heads rolled after an operation that yielded nothing but the arrival, under CIA supervision, of 22 tons of cocaine in the United States. The CIA conducted an internal review of this debacle and asserted that there was “no evidence of criminal wrongdoing.”
A DEA investigation reached a rather different conclusion, charging that the spy agency had engaged in “unauthorized controlled shipments” of narcotics into the US and that the CIA withheld “vital information” on the Calí cartel from the DEA and federal prosecutors.
Disingenuous denial has long been a specialty of the Central Intelligence Agency.
—snip—
In 1976, at one of the most fraught moments in the Agency’s relationship to Congress since its inception, Director William Colby (who had earlier blown the whistle on Helms’s lies about Chile) went before the Select Committee on Intelligence being run by Senator Frank Church of Idaho. This time the mood of Congress was sharper, prompted by Seymour Hersh’s exposés in the New York Times of domestic spying and also by charges that the CIA had been running an assassination program overseas.
Yes, Colby said, the possibility of using assassination had been entertained at the Agency, but at no time had it ever reached the level of successful practical application. As for domestic spying, there had been programs of mail surveillance and the like, but they were far from the “massive” operations alleged by Hersh, and they had long since been discontinued.
Colby was being typically modest. The CIA, through Operation CHAOS and similar programs, had compiled files on more than 10,000 Americans and kept a database with more than 300,000 names in it. It had wiretapped the phones of American reporters, infiltrated dissident groups and tried to disrupt anti-war protests. It spent $33,000 in support of a letter-writing campaign in support of the invasion of Cambodia.
As with the charges of complicity in drug running, the CIA’s role in assassination is one of those topics gingerly handled by the press or Congress from time to time and then hastily put aside, with the habitual claim that the CIA may have dreamed of it, thought about it and maybe even dabbled in it, but had never actually gone successfully all the way. But, in fact, the Agency has gone all the way many times, and we should look at this history in some detail since the pattern of denial in these cases strongly parallels the CIA’s relationship with the drug business.
There’s no dispute that the CIA has used assassination as a weapon lower down the political and social pecking order, as no one knew better than William Colby. He had, by his own admission, supervised the Phoenix Program and other so-called “counter-terror” operations in Vietnam. Phoenix was aimed at “neutralizing” NLF political leaders and organizers in rural South Vietnam. In congressional testimony Colby boasted that 20,587 NLF activists had been killed between 1967 and 1971 alone. The South Vietnamese published a much higher estimate, declaring that nearly 41,000 had been killed. Barton Osborn, an intelligence officer in the Phoenix Program, spelled out in chilling terms the bureaucratic attitude of many of the agents toward their murderous assignments. “Quite often it was a matter of expediency just to eliminate a person in the field rather than deal with the paperwork.”
—snip—
There’s more, of course.
Much more.
Read it and weep.
Or better yet…given the current disinfo campaigns being run on every available level of public discourse in the U.S.A…read it and WAKE THE FUCK UP!!!
Thank you and good night…
AG
