Manuel Noriega
On June 12, 1986, Seymour Hersh published a front-page story in the New York Times exposing General Manuel Noriega’s twenty-year association with the Colombian drug cartels. The exposé appeared just as Noriega was in Washington to receive a medal of honor from the Inter-American Defense Board. The article alleged that Noriega was involved in money laundering, arms dealing and political assassinations, including the torture and murder by decapitation of his liberal opponent, Dr. Hugo Spadafora. The article, based on sources in the Defense Intelligence Agency, also accused Noriega of selling US technology to the Cubans and Eastern Bloc nations.
Hersh quoted from a 1985 House Foreign Affairs Committee report that called Panama “a drug and chemical trans-shipment point and money laundering center of drug money.” That same investigation of Noriega prompted the NSC’s Admiral John Poindexter to travel to Panama and have a session with Noriega, during which Poindexter claims he told the squat general to “cut it out.” But it wasn’t long before Elliott Abrams, assistant secretary of state, had bailed out Noriega by intervening in a policy debate within the Reagan administration to insist that only after the Sandinistas had been dealt with should any serious sanctions against Noriega be considered. Noriega was a vital component in the CIA’s war against Nicaragua. At the request of the Reagan administration he had contributed more than $100,000 to Contras operating in Costa Rica, and in 1985 he had provided “an ordnance expert” for a North-planned operation that blew up a Sandinista military depot in Managua.
After the unflattering attention sparked by Hersh’s article, Noriega called Oliver North seeking counsel in cleaning up his image. North agreed to meet with a Noriega emissary on August 23, 1986, and minuted the encounter in a computer-message to John Poindexter, later unearthed by the National Security Archive:
You will recall that over the years Manuel Noriega and I have developed a fairly good relationship. It was Noriega who told me Panama would be willing to accept [Ferdinand] Marcos [the exiled former president of the Philippines].… Last night Noriega called and asked if I would meet w[ith] a man he trusts – a respected Cuban American – the president of a college in Florida. He flew in this morning and he outlined Noriega’s proposal: In exchange for a promise from us to ‘help clean up his [Noriega’s] image’ and a commitment to lift our ban on FMS [foreign military sales], he would undertake to ‘take care of the Sandinista leadership for us. I told the messenger that such actions were forbidden by US law and he countered that Noriega had numerous assets in place in Nicaragua that could accomplish many things that would be essential [to a] Contra Victory. Interesting. My sense is that this is a potentially very useful avenue, but one which would have to be very carefully handled. A meeting with Noriega could not be held on his turf – the potential for recording this information is too great … you will recall that he was head of Intelligence for the PDF [Panamanian Defense Forces] before becoming CG [commanding general]. My last meeting with Noriega was in a boat on the Potomac … Noriega travels frequently in Europe at this time of year and a meeting could be arranged to coincide with one of my other trips. My sense is that this offer is sincere, that Noriega does indeed have the capabilities preferred and that the cost could be born by Project Democracy (the figure of $1M was mentioned) … The proposal seems sound to me and I believe we could make the appropriate arrangements for reasonable OPSEC [operational security] and deniability. Beg advice.
Within minutes Poindexter had responded to North’s suggestion that this murderous thug and drug smuggler be retained at a cost of $1 million to help in the Contra War. “I wonder what he means about helping him clean up his act,” the admiral wrote. “If he is really serious about that we should be willing to do that for nearly nothing. If on the other hand he just wants us indebted to him, so that he can blackmail us to lay off, then I am not interested. If he really has access inside, it could be very helpful, but we cannot (repeat not) be involved in any conspiracy or assassination. More sabotage would be another story. I have nothing against him other than his illegal activities. It would be useful for you to talk to him directly to find out exactly what he has in mind with regard to cleaning up his act.”
North cleared the meeting with Secretary of State George Shultz and Shultz’s sidekick Abrams and then proceeded to London, where he hunkered down in a hotel with Noriega and reviewed plans to wreak mayhem on the Sandinistas, all in contravention of the express will of Congress. They reviewed plans for bombings of the Managua airport, attacks on phone lines and power plants and the destruction of an oil refinery. Noriega also pledged to create training camps for the Contras and the Afghan mujahedin, no doubt with advanced courses in accountancy, international banking practices and the covert movement of drugs and money.
In exchange North agreed to sign Noriega up with a New York PR firm. In his book Panama: The Whole Story, Kevin Buckley quotes an American source who observed North and Noriega together. “To North, Noriega was a spymaster, an operator, a man who made things happen. To North, Noriega was like Brando, up the river in Apocalypse Now. No rules. Noriega thought North was a pipsqueak.”
If North revered Noriega, North’s patron William Casey, director of the CIA, had a coldly pragmatic appreciation of the usefulness of the Panamanian. Casey saw Panama as the key to US operations throughout Latin America, not only against Nicaragua but also Cuba. The relationship between Casey and Noriega was described by the latter’s right-hand man, José Blandón, to documentary filmmakers Leslie and Andrew Cockburn: “The US had information that Noriega was involved in the drug trade for at least eight years. Yes, they knew about that. But for the White House, the Reagan administration, the Contras were so important that the drugs took second place. There was a very special relationship between Casey and Noriega. At least $3 million in support came from Casey. Whenever there would be an investigation of Noriega, Casey would stop it.”
Actually the US had known about Noriega’s drug trafficking since at least the late 1960s, and there was a history across nearly three decades of US military and intelligence agencies shielding Noriega from criminal investigation. He had been recruited by the Defense Intelligence Agency in 1959 and began working for the CIA in 1967. When the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs attempted to indict Noriega in 1971 for drug trafficking, the CIA intervened to protect their man in Panama. The BNDD continued to brood on ways to get rid of Noriega, including a procedure chastely described as “total and complete immobilization.” But in the end the drug agency was overruled and ordered to work with the drug smuggler. Throughout the 1980s Noriega’s star continued to rise. In 1976, for example, the CIA paid Noriega $100,000 for his work on behalf of the Agency. The director of the CIA at the time was George Bush. By 1985, at the height of the Contra War, Noriega’s paycheck from the CIA had soared to $200,000 a year.
On October 5, 1986, a few weeks after the meeting in London, the bold plans explored by North and Noriega came crashing down in the wake of the similarly abrupt descent of a plane ferrying arms from Ilopango air base in El Salvador to Contra camps inside Nicaragua. As Eugene Hasenfus, a veteran of the CIA’s Air America operation in Laos, was kicking the supplies out of the back of a C-123K, a Sandinista gunner scored a direct hit and only Hasenfus managed to parachute down and into the world’s headlines, offering incontrovertible proof of the Reagan administration’s illegal shipments. Among the phone numbers in Hasenfus’s notebook was that of George Bush’s office.
In rapid order, Noriega’s fervent supporters inside the Reagan administration lost favor. Then William Casey died. Noriega’s star plummeted. He became a liability to George Bush, and it was not long before Noriega had been indicted as a drug smuggler, then became the target of an American invasion of Panama on December 20, 1989. Absurdly titled Operation Just Cause, the mission succeeded in killing plenty of Panamanian civilians but not Noriega, who found sanctuary in the house of the Papal Nuncio. Finally, on Christmas Eve, Noriega surrendered and in a Miami courtroom i
n 1990 learned what it was to fall from grace. The veteran of the CIA’s payroll and a thousand forgiven drug shipments went down on a 45-year prison sentence, which as of 1998 he is serving in the state of Florida. His amusing memoir, America’s Prisoner, detailing his career and relationship with the CIA, was not widely reviewed in the US press.
The greatest irony of all is that under the US-installed successor to Noriega, Guillermo Endara, Panama became the province of the Calí cartel, which rushed in after the Medellín cartel was evicted along with Noriega. By the early 1990s, Panama’s role in the Latin American drug trade and its transmission routes to the US had become more crucial than ever.
Celerino Castillo, the DEA Man Who Worked Too Well
In the 1980s, Celerino Castillo III was one of the DEA’s top agents, coordinating major busts in New York, Peru and Guatemala. But when he got to El Salvador at the height of the Contra War and reported that US agents under the control of Oliver North’s NSC operation were running drugs, his superiors informed him that if he persisted he would be run out of town. “I was told my career would end because I was stepping on a White House operation,” Castillo told us in the late summer of 1997. “I wrote dozens of reports but they disappeared into a black hole at DEA headquarters.” Eventually Castillo was pulled out of Central America and placed under an internal investigation; he finally left the DEA in disgust.
Celerino Castillo was born in south Texas. His father had won the Bronze Star and the Purple Heart for heroism during World War II after being shot six times in the Philippines. “Cele,” as he calls himself, won a Bronze Star during his tour of duty in Vietnam, a tour that persuaded him to pursue a career in anti-narcotics work. Prompting him to this decision was the sight of many of his comrades whacked out on heroin. “Every week we would send another overdose victim home in a green bag,” Castillo recalled. “If the soldier was well liked someone would pump a bullet in the soldier’s body. The family would be told he died a hero’s death. If the consensus was that the dead soldier had been an asshole he would be sent home with nothing more than needle pricks in his arms.”
After a stint in Texas working on the drug squad in the Edinburg police department, Castillo was hired by the DEA in 1979. He became the first Mexican American to work in the Agency’s New York City office, at that time the largest DEA station in the US. Racism, Castillo remembers, was pervasive throughout the agency, which employed few Hispanics or other Spanish speakers even though it was busting Latin Americans on a daily basis. “Every Hispanic agent I knew fell into the same trap, and was assigned to wiretap monitoring, translations and surveillance. We worked long hours building cases against Dominicans and Puerto Ricans and would have to stand back while white paper-pushers took the credit.”
Castillo broke through many of these barriers when he and his Latin American partner orchestrated one of the largest heroin seizures in New York history, a $20 million shipment of high-grade heroin that originated in the poppy fields of Afghanistan. This bust earned Castillo a new assignment to lead a series of commando-style raids on cocaine labs in the forests of Peru. One such operation netted 4 tons of coca paste, three airplanes and a large cocaine refinery. But after a year in Peru, Castillo’s cover was blown. “There was a picture of me taken during an operation that was in every newspaper in South America,” Castillo says. “I left Peru and was assigned to work in Guatemala.” In 1985 the Guatemala DEA station was run by Robert Stia who also oversaw DEA operations in Belize, El Salvador and Honduras. Castillo was given charge of El Salvador, and his assignment represented the first time the DEA had set up an operation in that country. Stia had some initial advice for Castillo: “One, stay out of trouble with the locals. Two, don’t make the US government look bad.”
Stia then brought up a touchy subject – the Contra supply project run by Oliver North’s men out of Ilopango air base near San Salvador. “Be careful what you do down there. Don’t interfere in their operations,” Stia ordered Castillo, and told of persistent reports of drug running by Contras and the pilots supplying them with weapons. But, Stia insisted, those associated with the operation were off limits to the DEA.
Castillo responded that he wasn’t going to be reluctant to investigate the Contras and their associates. “If I receive intelligence the Contra operation is trafficking,” he told Stia, “I’ll investigate and report it.” Stia laughed and told Castillo he’d be quickly yanked out of Latin America if he interferred in the Contra resupply effort.
It didn’t take long for Castillo to find evidence that those associated with Contra missions also had their hands in cocaine running. His first hard information came from a Cuban exile called Socrates Amaury Sofi-Perez, a Bay of Pigs veteran who worked as a freelance agent for the Guatemalan secret police and for the CIA. Sofi-Perez also ran a shrimp company in Guatemala City, which Castillo found out was being used to launder drug money for the Contras. According to Castillo, Cocaine from Colombia was delivered to Sofi-Perez’s factory, where it was packed in with frozen shrimp and then shipped to Miami. Sofi-Perez had secured easy entry into the United States by paying off the US Customs. A share of the profits was duly turned over to the Contras. “We have to support the Contras fully,” Sofi-Perez told Castillo in early 1986. “Nicaragua must be liberated from the Sandinistas at any cost, and if trafficking provides the means for that, so be it.” Sofi-Perez went on to say that his operation paled next to what was going on at Ilopango under the nose of another Bay of Pigs veteran, Félix Rodríguez, aka Max Gomez.
Rodríguez had been in some of the major hot spots associated with the CIA, from the Bay of Pigs to Bolivia (where he had been present at the capture and execution of Che Guevara in the 1960s, to Southeast Asia in the early 1970s. Rodríguez was also among the CIA men most deeply involved in planning operations against the Sandinistas. In March 1982 he drafted a proposal to create a mobile tactical squad, essentially an assassination team. This idea found great favor both at the CIA and in the National Security Council. Later in 1982 Rodríguez was assigned to oversee the Contra supply effort in El Salvador, which he did from 1982 to 1986.
Rodríguez had numerous ties to cocaine traffickers, perhaps most notoriously to Gerard Latchinian, an international arms dealer. In 1983 Rodríguez and Latchinian went into business together in a company known as Giro Aviation Corporation, headquartered in Florida. A year later, on November 1, 1984, Latchinian was arrested by the FBI at an airstrip in south Florida for his role in a $10 million cocaine deal. The money from the cocaine sale was scheduled to finance the assassination of the newly elected president of Honduras, Roberto Suazo Cordoba. Latchinian’s partner in this project was General José Bueso Rosa, a man who had helped the CIA set up its Contra training base in Honduras.
In 1986 Bueso Rosa was arrested in the United States and, like Latchinian two years earlier, was convicted. But the US government, in the form of the NSC and CIA, intervened to have Bueso Rosa’s sentence reduced. The brief on Bueso Rosa’s behalf filed by General Robert Schweitzer of the NSC read, “General Bueso Rosa has always been a valuable ally to the United States. As chief of staff of the Honduran armed forces he immeasurably furthers the United States’ national interest in Central America. He is primarily responsible for the initial success for the American military presence in Honduras. For this service he was awarded the Legion of Merit by the President of the United States, the highest award that can be presented to a foreign military officer.”
In other words, North and the CIA were trying to save the ass of a drug smuggler and would-be assassin, a partner of a long-term CIA man who was on fairly close terms with former CIA director, and subsequently White House resident, George Bush. To quote North’s memo when assistance to Bueso Rosa was being reviewed: “Look at options: pardon, clemency, deportation, reduced sentence. Objective is to keep Bueso from … spilling the beans.” Poindexter e-mailed back to North: “you may advise all concerned that the President will want to be as helpful as possible to settle this matter.” Bueso
Rosa ended up doing a short stint in the minimum security prison at Elgin Air Force Base in Florida, known as Club Fed.
To continue with the unsavory circle of Félix Rodríguez, the CIA man with whom Castillo was now dealing. One of Félix Rodríguez’s prime recruits in El Salvador was another man with a malodorous past: Luis Posada Carriles. Like Rodríguez, Posada was a Cuban exile who had been trained in anti-Castro terrorism by the CIA. He missed out on the Bay of Pigs since his anti-Castro brigade never left Nicaragua for the mission, but in the early 1960s he ran arms to anti-Castro cells in Cuba, supervised the sabotage of Cuban ships and planned terrorist assaults on Cuban embassies throughout Latin America. Through the 1960s he was working with another Cuban right-winger, Orlando Bosch.
By the late 1960s the CIA had placed Posada in the Venezuelan DISIP, the country’s secret police. In that capacity he assisted the Chilean and Argentinian military regimes in some of the bloodiest repressions of the epoch. In 1976 Posada was called to a meeting of anti-Castro Cubans convened by Bosch in the Dominican Republic. A new wave of terrorism against Cuba began soon after, culminating in the October 6 mid-air destruction by bomb of a Cuban civilian airliner carrying seventy-three passengers, including a team of Cuban athletes. The police quickly arrested two men who had got off the plane at its last touchdown before it blew up. One confessed to planting the bomb and admitted that he worked for Posada. When Venezuelan police raided Posada’s house in Caracas they found evidence linking him to the bombing, including flight schedules for the airline.
Posada was arrested but managed to avoid extradition and ultimately bribed his way out of prison in 1985. He made his way to Aruba, where he called his old comrade Félix Rodríguez. The CIA man promptly had him flown to El Salvador, gave him a new name, Ramon Medina, fixed him up with false papers and put him on a salary of $3,000 a month. The new job for this fugitive mass murderer was to work as chief of logistics at Ilopango air base in the Contra supply operation.
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