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15
The Uncover-up
Down the decades the CIA has approached perfection in one particular art, which we might term the “uncover-up.” This is a process whereby, with all due delay, the Agency First denies with passion, then concedes in profoundly muffled tones, charges leveled against it. Such charges have included the Agency’s recruitment of Nazi scientists and SS officers; experiments on unwitting American citizens; efforts to assassinate Fidel Castro; alliances with opium lords in Burma, Thailand and Laos; an assassination program in Vietnam; complicity in the toppling of Salvador Allende in Chile; the arming of opium traffickers and religious fanatics in Afghanistan; the training of murderous police in Guatemala and El Salvador; and involvement in drugs-and-arms shuttles between Latin America and the US.
The specific techniques of the uncover-up vary From instance to instance, but the paradigm is constant, as Far back as Frank Wisner and his “mighty Wurlitzer” of CIA friendlies in the press. Charges are raised against the CIA. The Agency leaks its denials to favored journalists, who hasten to inform the public that after intense self-examination, the Agency has discovered that it has clean hands. Then, when the hubbub has died down, the Agency issues a report in which, after patient excavation, the resolute reader discovers that, yes, the CIA did indeed do more or less exactly what it had been accused of. Publicly, the Agency continues to deny what its report has reluctantly admitted. The accusations are initially referred to in the CIA-Friendly press as “unfounded” or “overblown” or “unconfirmed,” or – the Final twist of the knife – “an old story.” After the CIA denials, they become “discredited accusations” and usually, when the Fuss has died down, they revert to their initial status of “unfounded” or even “paranoid” charges, put about by “conspiracy-mongers.”
Faithful to the “uncover-up” paradigm, the CIA passionately denied the allegations made by investigators including Gary Webb about the Agency’s alliance with drug-smuggling Contras, its sponsorship and protection of their activities in running cocaine into the United States. Then came the solemn pledges of an intense and far-reaching investigation by the CIA’s inspector General. In his 1996 series of denials, CIA director John Deutch had promised that the Agency’s Inspector General, Frederick Hitz, would conduct an internal review of all Agency files relevant to the issue and swiftly place the facts before the American people because of “the seriousness of the allegations and the need to resolve definitely any questions in this area.”
Inspector General Hitz went to work. At First, Deutch pledged that Hitz would present his findings within three months. Hitz was unable to meet this schedule. For almost a year and a half there was silence, except for intermittent news tidbits in the Washington Post from the CIA’s erstwhile apprentice Walter Pincus to the effect that the Inspector General’s probe was turning up nothing on Norwin Meneses.
Then, on December 18, 1997, stories in the Washington Post by Walter Pincus and in the New York Times by Tim Weiner appeared simultaneously, both saying the same thing: Inspector General Hitz had finished his investigation. He had Found “no direct or indirect” links between the CIA and the cocaine traffickers. As both Pincus and Weiner admitted in their stories, neither of the two journalists had actually seen the report whose conclusions they were purporting to relay to their readers. These two news stories were promptly picked up by the networks, all oF which made great play with the news that the CIA was clean. It was at this point that Gary Webb announced that after negotiation, he and his newspaper, the San Jose Mercury News, were parting company.
Then, fully six weeks later, George Tenet, the CIA’s new director, declared that he was releasing the Inspector General’s report. Anyone listening to Tenet’s announcement could have reasonably concl
uded that Weiner and Pincus had been accurate in their anticipatory news stories. Tenet boasted that “this has been the most extensive investigation ever undertaken by the inspector General’s office, requiring the review of 250,000 pages of documents and interviews with over 365 individuals. I am satisfied that the IG has left no stone unturned in his efforts to uncover the truth. I must admit that my colleagues and I are very concerned that the allegations made have left an indelible impression in many Americans’ minds that the CIA was somehow responsible for the scourge of drugs in our inner cities. Unfortunately, no investigations – no matter how exhaustive – will completely erase that false impression or undo the damage that has been done. That is one of the most unfortunate aspects of all of this.”
Tenet’s assertions were duly reported. The actual report itself, so loudly heralded, received almost no examination. But those who took the time to examine the 149-page document found inspector General Hitz making one damning admission after another.
The report described a cable From the CIA’s Directorate of Operations dated October 22, 1982, describing a prospective meeting between contra leaders in Costa Rica For “an exchange in [the US] of narcotics for arms.”
The CIA’s Directorate of Operations instructed its field office not to look into this imminent arms-for-drugs transaction “in the light of the apparent involvement of US persons throughout.” In other words, the CIA knew that the Contras were scheduling a drugs-for-arms exchange, and the Agency was prepared to let the deal proceed. How did the Inspector General handle this cable, which on its face confirmed the central accusation made by investigators going back to Robert Parry, Brian Barger and Leslie Cockburn’s first reports?
The episode is buried deep in the report, itself written in sedative prose, and the Inspector General triumphantly concludes that the CIA was conducting itself in a proper manner, since any action against US citizens involved in the Costa Rica meeting would have breached the prohibition on activities by the CIA within the United States.
Among those set to attend this Costa Rican rendezvous were leaders of two of the main Contra groups, the FDN and the UDN, US arms dealers and one Renato Peña, who was a lieutenant in Norwin Meneses’s drug ring importing cocaine from Latin America to the United States and marketing it on the West Coast. Peña was also chief spokesman for the Contras in San Francisco. Peña was interviewed by the CIA’s inspector General, to whom Peña admitted he had made as many as eight trips in California between 1982 and 1984, ferrying money and drugs from Meneses’s cocaine ring. On each trip, Peña told the Inspector General, he would take $600,000 to $1 million in cash to Los Angeles and return to San Francisco with 6 to 8 kilos of cocaine. Peña said he had met Meneses at a 1982 San Francisco meeting of the FDN. Eventually, Peña became the “military representative of the FDN in San Francisco,” a position he owed, so Peña told the CIA Inspector General, to Norwin Meneses’s close relationship with Enrique Bermúdez, the CIA-paid military commander of the FDN. Peña further told Hitz that he had been told by Colombian wholesalers that a percentage of the profits from Meneses’s cocaine sales were being funneled to the Contras.
Thus did Peña confirm to the Inspector General that a major drug smuggler was also a contra high-up; and that the CIA knew that there was a contra arms-for-drugs shuttle and did nothing to stop it.
Reading further into the Inspector General’s report, we Find that six months after the CIA cable traffic concerning the Costa Rica meeting, there was another CIA cable from the Latin American division station, alluding to a Nicaraguan expatriate who, in October 1982, said he was “hoping to contact a friend named Norbin [sic] [Meneses] in Miami who would direct him to the counter-revolutionary training camps in south Florida and eventually to join Miskito combat units in Honduras.” The CIA report thus discloses more evidence that the CIA knew of links between Norwin Meneses, identified as a drug smuggler as early as 1978, and the Contras.
When Hitz’s staff finally interviewed Meneses himself in the Nicaraguan prison where he is serving a forty-year sentence for drug smuggling, the report notes that Meneses made haste to declare that he had been a contra “recruiter,” but had never been involved in the cocaine business. Hitz uses this blatantly untruthful statement as proof that drug smuggling and Contra activity never overlapped.
As For Danilo Blandón, Rick Ross’s cocaine supplier in Los Angeles and the cocaine ring associate of Meneses: the Inspector General’s interview with Blandón, now a timber merchant in Nicaragua, records that Blandón declared he entered the cocaine business in 1981 and that during the time he was a cocaine wholesaler he met with FDN military commander Enrique Bermúdez at least four times. On each occasion Bermúdez said that he was desperate for money and urged the Nicaraguan to do what he could to help the Contra cause. “The ends justify the means,” Blandón recalled the Contra commander telling him. Blandón admits that Bermúdez was aware that Meneses was involved in criminal enterprises.
Somewhat undercutting the credibility of Meneses, Blandón described a meeting with Bermúdez in Honduras that occurred as Blandón and Meneses were in the midst of a drug run to Bolivia. Blandón said he’d met with Bermúdez again in Fort Lauderdale in late 1983. The significance of these meetings is that Blandón, a confessed drug smuggler, had an ongoing relationship with the CIA’s top Contra military commander.
Blandón told the Inspector General that he gave about $40,000 to the Contra cause in 1981 and 1982 and that Meneses gave a similar amount. In other words, the Contras were getting drug money. Blandón had an even closer relationship to the Contra commander Eden Pastora, so the Inspector General’s report notes. Blandón told the CIA probers that he had allowed Pastora to live “rent free in one of his houses in Costa Rica from 1984 to 1987.” This is a period when Blandón admits that his income was coming almost solely from his cocaine business. Blandón recalled to CIA investigators that Pastora asked everyone he came in contact with to raise money For the Contra cause. Blandón said he gave Pastora $9,000 in cash in 1985 and also two trucks in 1986.
Hitz’s investigators checked out Blandón’s story with Eden Pastora, who acknowledged the generosity of Blandón and then added some disclosures of his own. Pastora confessed that he had received at least $40,000 and two planes, including a C-47 cargo plane, from cocaine trafficker George. Morales. Pastora also admitted to receiving two helicopters and $60,000 in cash from two Cuban exiles also linked to the drug trade. He acknowledged receiving another $25,000 From Manuel Noriega.
Even more damning, the Inspector General’s report ekes out the admission that the Agency requested the Justice Department to return $36,800 to a member of the Meneses drug ring. This was money that had been seized by the DEA in the famous “Frogman raid” on the San Francisco waterfront in which the drug agents captured Meneses’s men unloading 200 kilos of cocaine. The raiding party then proceeded to the home of Julio Zavala, one of Meneses’s lieutenants who had been arrested. In a bedside table the police discovered $36,800 and confiscated the money as evidence.
The CIA immediately went to bat on Zavala’s behalf. A memo in the CIA file quoted in Hitz’s report says that “At OGC’s [the CIA’s Office of General Counsel] request the US Attorney has agreed to return the money to Zavala.” The CIA’s Inspector General said the Agency wanted the money returned “to protect an operational equity, i.e. a Contra support group in which it [the CIA] had an operational interest.”
An August 22, 1984 CIA memo, also quoted in the Inspector General’s report, talks of the need for secrecy in the whole frogman affair. Under the name of Lee S. Strickland, assistant general counsel of the CIA, the memo says in part, “I believe the station must be made aware of the potential for disaster. While the allegations [that is, drugs for Contra guns] might be entirely false, there are sufficient factual details which would cause certain damage to our image and program in Central America.”
One familiar feature in the “uncover-up” paradigm is the frequently made statement by CIA-friendly jo
urnalists that “no smoking gun” has been detected in whatever probe is under review. The CIA’s successful request that $36,800 be returned to a gang of drug smugglers because the CIA had an “operational equity” in it is an obviously smoking gun, although to say this is to scant the larger truth that the whole of Inspector General Hitz’s report is a smoking gun.
If one were to look For another spectacularly smoking gun, in the narrower sense of the phrase, the account of Carlos Cabezas, a drug pilot who was making drug/arms runs between San Francisco and Costa Rica, is a suitable candidate. As we described it in chapter 12, the Inspector General’s report has to confront the fact that Cabezas told CIA investigators how he had gone to Costa Rica in the spring of 1982 with money for the Contras. There he met with Horatio Pereira and Troilo Sánchez, who were Contra leaders and also partners with the Contra/drug smuggler Norwin Meneses. In the company of these two, Cabezas recalled, was a curly-haired man who said his name was Ivan Gomez. Pereira identified Gomez to Cabezas as the CIA’s “man in Costa Rica.” Cabezas told the Inspector General that Gomez said he was there to “ensure that the profits from the cocaine went to the Contras and not into someone’s pocket.”
Struggling with this damning statement, the Inspector General concedes that indeed the CIA did have a “contractor” in Costa Rica using the name “Ivan Gomez.” But, the Inspector General bravely adds, though Cabezas’s description of a man he had seen twice fifteen years earlier was accurate to the extent that the CIA’s contractor did indeed have dark curly hair, his overall appearance was “significantly different,” that is, the “real” Ivan Gomez was shorter and slighter in build than Cabezas’s memory of him.
Six weeks after his report (heavily censored in its declassified version) was released, Inspector General Hitz went to Capitol Hill to testify before a House committee. There he made even more damaging admissions. For the first time the Inspector General of the CIA disclosed that his Agency knew that “dozens of people and a number of companies connected in some fashion to the Contra program” were involved in the drug trade. He said the CIA knew that drugs had been going back along the Contra supply lines into the United States and added, “Let me be frank. There are instances where the CIA did not in an expeditious or consistent fashion cut off relationships with individuals supporting the Contra program who were alleged to have engaged in drug trafficking activity or take action to resolve the allegations.”
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