Che Guevara

 

Left: David Ferrie Right: Lee Harvey Oswald

Governor Jeb Bush and Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris publicly endorsed Hilliard’s operation.   

The Herald Tribune quoted Harris spokesman Ben McKay saying, “She appreciates the convenience that Florida Air offers.”  

Ms. Harris' reputation as a stickler for the letter of the law from the contested 2000 Presidential election was apparently put ‘on hold’  on Wally Hilliard’s behalf:  while she was "appreciating their convenience," the operation was flying passengers without holding an air carrier certificate. 

The juxtaposition of the discovery of a huge cache of heroin on a Lear jet belonging to Wallace J. Hilliard, 70, of Naples, Fl, Huffman Aviation’s owner, at the exact same time terrorist and Osama bin Laden associate Mohamed Atta arrived to attend his flight school from Afghanistan, a country producing well more than half of the world’s heroin, would normally have had U.S. Attorneys looking up the sentencing guidelines appropriate to major RICO narcotics trafficking cases, and getting ready to throw the book at him.   

In fact, they did nothing of the sort, which strongly indicates that the Army’s secret military intelligence unit Able Danger’s inability to prod federal authorities to move on Atta and other terrorists known to be in the U.S. encountered the same obstacles, and for the same reason.   

In fact, the only effort made at holding financier Wallace J. Hilliard, 70, of Naples, Florida accountable was the weak one of confiscating his plane. When Hilliard sued to get the DEA to return the Lear jet inn forfeiture hearings, attempting to show himself to have been an “innocent owner,” his motion was opposed by the Government and roundly rejected in court.  

The U.S. Attorney’s office opposed the plane’s return. Their motion said, “because the property was used or acquired as a result of a violation of the Controlled Substances Act.”  

Court documents revealed that Hilliard’s leasing company, Plane 1 Leasing, had been paid in cash for each charter by the two Latin passengers, which aviation experts in South Florida said strains credulity.   

“DEA would not return it, they auctioned it off, they told Wally they had ‘reasons,’” said an aviation source in Naples. “It was the first seizure in history for a so-called ‘innocent person’ where they took and kept the plane.”

The court concluded Hilliard’s company knew what was going on. Affidavits later filed by the machine-gun toting DEA agents who had surrounded the Lear jet indicated Hilliard’s company’s involvement went much deeper than anyone was willing to acknowledge publicly.

To understand what is going on at the core of the Central Intelligence Agency's cladestine compartments, it is important to understand its brief history.

During the Cold-war era, every area of the world was given to a commander in the Pentagon to overlook and begin to figure out how to control and push into a world-power system of government where the United States would be at the lead.

The secret network was planning a war with Cuba where one of its failures was the Bay of Pigs invasion.  Since all of this occured behind Kennedy's back, Kennedy fired Allen Dulles when he realized that there was a secret government compartment that did what it wanted with its own funding, military, weapons, everything.  The Bay of Pigs fiasco was known aas Operation Zapata, who believe it or not, was headed by George HW Bush.  George HW Bush owned Zapata Oil where he traveled back and fourth form Texas organizing this massive operation.  The majority of the individuals involved in the Kennedy Assasination were connected to this secret network that was planning to go to war with Cuba.  The CIA financed this by funneling money from the crug trade through Zapata Off-Shore Oil rigs and operations.

This secret network had a plan, Operation Northwoods, in which is would hijack aircraft and crash them into targets using remote control technology.  The declassified documents have been detailed in James Bamford's book, Body of Secrets, where it has caused much controversy over its relevance to the recent 9/11 attacks.  In Operation Northwoods, which was rejected by Kennedy's administration, the attacks would include shooting citizens in the streets and terrorism which they would blame on Cuba as a means of going to war.  They worked very closely with anti-Castro Cubans and the mafia during this time for the entire operation.  Again, all of these were the common suspects in the Kennedy Assassination.

This network operated in Vietnam, where they ran Heroin to and from the Golden Triangle region, much of it in soldier's coffins.  This was known as Operation Phoenix.  In the operation, Vietnam targets were detailed for assassination.  Until outlawed in mid 70s, the CIA directly involved in assassination attempts against Castro of Cuba, and Congolese leader Lumumba. The CIA also encouraged plots that resulted in assassination of Dominican Republic President Trujillo, South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem in 63 and Chilean Rene Schneider in 73. The most extensive assassination op was Operation Phoenix conducted during latter part of VN war. Twentieth Century Fund. (1992). The Need to Know: Covert Action and American Democracy.

From 65-68 U.S. and Saigon Intel services maintained an active list of VC cadre marked for assassination. Phoenix Program for 69 called for "neutralizing" 1800 a month. About one third of VC targeted for arrest had been summarily killed. Security committees established in provincial interrogation centers to determine fate of VC suspects, outside of judicial controls. Green Berets and navy SEALs most common recruits for Phoenix Program. Green Beret detachment B-57 provided admin cover for other Intel units. One was project cherry, tasked to assassinate Cambodian officials suspected of collaborating with NVNese, and kgb. Another was project oak targeted against svnese suspected collaborators. They controlled by special assistant for counterinsurgency and special activities, which worked with CIA outside of general abrams control.

To finance this the CIA actively ran the Heroin drug smuggling in the region.  Peter Dale Scott, a Canadian poet and a former English professor at the University of California, Berkeley and the son of noted Canadian poet and constitutional lawyer F. R. Scott.  He is known for his anti-war stance and his criticism of U.S. foreign policy dating back to the Vietnam War. He spent five years (1957-1961) with the Canadian diplomatic service.  He wrote a book the CIA banned during Vietnam called, The War Conspiracy, in which he detailed the accounts of this secret government and how this war was a chapter of the secret government's operations around the world.  The book exposed the CIA's involvement with Heroin smuggling and was deemed a national security threat by the CIA and banned.

During Iran-Contra, the United States public found out that this secret government officially existed.  During the hearings, John Kerry lead the probe.  What John Kerry failed to mention was that the Contras were getting their cocaine in the United States through the use of the CIA.  Some could argue that the former Skull and Bonesman covered up the Iran-Contra's darkest secret.

During Iran-Contra, it was uncovered that the CIA functioned as a liason between Pakistan and Afghan Opium farms.  The CIA sold drugs to finance its secret affairs all over the world.  The transactions took place during the Afghan-Soviet war in which the United States CIA created and financed the Afghanistan war effort.  The war with Soviet Russia and Afghanistan ended in 1979.  The CIA was had trained and financed rebel groups in central and South America.  These guerrilla fighters protected drug crops where the CIA then shipped them to the United States.  This also occurred in the middle east.

The BCCI (Bank of Credit and Commerce International) is the largest fraud and bankruptcy occurrence in the history of the world.  Every news paper and news agency has stories on it.  Abu Dhabi, the predecessor of BCCI, was the money laundering and investment finance bank in the 70's and 80's for Manuel Noriega and his cocaine and heroin network that was shared with the CIA.  Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Afghanistan, Columbia and many other countries held accounts that were used to launder the money, as documented by the investigation from the US Attorney's Office in the Southern District of Manhattan.

In 1992, the BCCI was broken up but finances didn't change hands.  Khalid Bin Mahfouz, the primary shareholder of the BCCI and Osama Bin Laden's half-brother, became a major Saudi financier and Investment banker.  During the BCCI scandal years, Bin Mahfouz financed Harken Energy, Geroge W Bush's failed energy company, saving his business career from bankruptcy.

The top 2 generals from the Mujahideen fighters that the CIA trained and sold Heroin for were Ramsi Yousef and Osama Bin Laden.  Ramsi Yousef was reportedly behind the WTC bombing in 1993, and Bin Laden behind 9/11.  Recent evidence has mounted against both those cases which suggests that these men were in fact, probably not behind the attacks at all.

Gary Webb helped to expose the Iran-Contra scandal.  He received the Pulitzer price for outstanding journalism for doing so.  The L.A. Times had never acknowledged that Webb was substantially correct in his reporting about the Nicaraguan contras' role in smuggling cocaine into the United States in the 1980s.

Though Los Angeles had been hit hard by the “crack epidemic” and the L.A. Times had devoted front-page space to trash Webb’s contra-cocaine reporting in 1996, the newspaper never ran a story detailing the CIA inspector general’s 1998 findings, which confirmed much of what Webb had alleged – and more.

The CIA inspector general found that not only had the contras helped the cocaine cartels get their goods into the United States, but that the CIA and the Reagan administration had helped cover up the evidence.

However, to have written that story in 1998, the L.A. Times editors would have had to admit they had wronged Webb two years earlier when they bought into the ongoing government cover stories about the innocence of the Reagan administration and the CIA.

It was much easier for the L.A. Times to ignore the findings of the CIA's own inspector general and to maintain the fiction that Webb was just a reckless reporter who had gotten the contra-cocaine story all wrong.

when trying to understand how the United States ended up with a national press corps that so eagerly passed on government propaganda about Iraq’s WMD and other lies, it is worth recalling the story of Gary Webb and the contra-cocaine scandal.

Steve Webb died of an apparent suicide in 2004.  He had its roots in his fateful decision eight years earlier to write a three-part series for the San Jose Mercury News that challenged a potent conventional wisdom shared by the elite U.S. news organizations – that one of the most shocking scandals of the 1980s just couldn’t be true.

Webb’s “Dark Alliance” series, published in August 1996, revived the decade-old allegations that the Reagan administration in the 1980s had tolerated and protected cocaine smuggling by its client army of Nicaraguan rebels known as the contras.

Though substantial evidence of the contra crimes had surfaced in the mid-1980s, the major news outlets had bent to pressure from the Reagan administration and refused to take the disclosures seriously.

Reflecting the dominant attitude toward Kerry and his work on the contra-cocaine scandal, Newsweek even dubbed the Massachusetts senator a “randy conspiracy buff.” [For details, see Consortiumnews.com’s “Kerry’s Contra-Cocaine Chapter” or Robert Parry’s Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & Project Truth.]

Thus, the ugly reality of the contra-cocaine scandal was left in that netherworld of uncertainty, largely proved with documents and testimony but never accepted by Official Washington, including its premier news organizations, such as the New York Times and the Washington Post.

Here is a list of deaths connected to the Iran-Contra scandal that had they not died, the public would have been more informed about the CIA's drug trafficking operations:

 

William Casey Hours before Casey was scheduled to testify before Congress about his knowledge of Iran-Contra, he was reported to have been rendered incapable of speech, and was later hospitalized. In his 1987 book, Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA 1981-1987, Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward, who had interviewed Casey on numerous occasions, said that he had gained entry to Casey's hospital room for a final, four-minute long encounter — a claim that was met with disbelief in many quarters, and adamant denial by Casey's wife, Sofia. According to Woodward, when he asked Casey if he knew about the diversion of funds to the Nicaraguan Contras, "His head jerked up hard. He stared, and finally nodded yes." Death Casey died of brain cancer in 1987.

Alan Standorf  An employee of the National Security Agency in electronic intelligence. Standorf was a source of information for Danny Casalaro who was investigating INSLAW, BCCI, etc. Standorf's body was found in the backseat of a car at Washington National Airport on Jan 31, 1991. 

Danny Casolaro He was working on a book that tied together the scandals surrounding the presidency of George H. W. Bush. He told his friends he was going to "bring back" the head of the Octopus. Instead, his body was found in a hotel in Martinsburg, West Virginia, on August 10, 1991, an apparent suicide.    .............  and see It was about the Regan-Bush administration and an alleged effort to delay the freeing of the hostages being held at the time by Iran in order to do damage to President Jimmy Carter's reelection bid. Casolaro was told that as a part of the effort, drugs and weapons were being flown into and out of the airport at Mena, Arkansas. Bill Clinton was governor at the time and there have been numerous questions about whether Clinton was in any way involved in any of the activities connected with Mena or protected those who were involved

Ian Spiro Spiro had supporting documentation for grand jury proceedings on the INSLAW case. His wife and 3 children were found murdered on November 1, 1992 in their home. They all died of gunshot wounds to the head. Ian's body was found several days later in a parked car in the Borego Desert. Cause of death? The ingestion of cyanide. FBI report indicated that Ian had murdered his family and then committed suicide.

Sen. John Tower : He was appointed by the Reagan/Bush Administration to chair the bipartisan committee to investigate the Iran/Contra scandals. He directed the Tower Report and had all the Iran Contra documents and knew the inside of the story. He was killed in an uninvestigated airplane crash later in Georgia in 1991. Also killed was his daughter, Marian.

Orlando Letelier He was torn to bits by a car bomb on the streets of Washington DC just before he was to testify against the Chilean dictator Pinochet. After the bombing, CIA Director George H. W. Bush told the FBI that there had been no Chilean involvement whatsoever. In 1991 the post-Pinochet Chilean Supreme Court asked George H. W. Bush if he would submit to questioning. BUSH REFUSED.

Ronni Moffit She was Letelier's assistant. She and her husband were riding in the car with Letelier when the bomb exploded. Mr. Moffit survived. Ronni didn't.

Russell Welch, an Arkansas State Police Investigator, was stricken with what his doctor called "military- grade" anthrax poisoning during his probe of Mena drug operations. Welsh did recover, thanks to a very astute doctor. Of course, Mena drug running has long been rumored to be connected with Clinton. 

Robert Bates Barry Seal's aircraft mechanic at Mena (name unknown as of this time) died March 21, 1995 of an "overdose of mouthwash". Regarded by local authorities as an obvious homicide.

Gandy Baugh - Attorney for Clinton friend Dan Lassater died by jumping out a window of a tall building January, 1994. His client was a convicted drug distributor.

Florence Martin Accountant subcontracting to CIA related to the Barry Seal case. Dead of three gunshot wounds to the head.   Dead in 1994 in Mabell, Texas, the victim of three gunshot wounds to the head. Ms. Martin had the documents and paperwork, including the PIN number for an account that had been set up in the name of Barry Seal for $1.5 million at the Fuji Bank in the Cayman Islands. Oddly enough, following her death, the money was transferred to the Guaranty Bank in the Cayman Islands and then to another bank in the Virgin Islands. Jim Wilhite, associate of Mack McClarty's former firm. Many remember the sleezy McClarty from Clinton's first administration.

Danny Casolaro - Investigative reporter. Investigating Mena Airport and Arkansas Development Finance Authority. He slit his wrists, apparent suicide in the middle of his investigation.

Paul Wilcher - Attorney investigating corruption at Mena Airport with Casolaro and the 1980 "October Surprise" was found dead on a toilet June 22, 1993 in his Washington DC apartment. Had delivered a report to Janet Reno 3 weeks before his death.

Barry Seal - Drug running pilot out of Mena Arkansas, Death was no accident.

Johnny Lawhorn Jr. - Mechanic, found a check made out to Clinton in the trunk of a car left in his repair shop. Died when his car hit a utility pole.

Stanley Huggins - Suicide. Investigated Madison Guarantee. His report was never released.

 

Kevin Ives & Don Henry - Known as "The boys on the track" case. Reports say the boys may have stumbled upon the Mena arkansas airport drug operation. Controversal case where initial report of death was due to falling asleep on railroad track. Later reports claim the 2 boys had been slain before being placed on the tracks. Many linked to the case died before their testimony could come before a Grand Jury. see: The Train Deaths - plus some comments from a mother of one of the boys about the connection to Bill Clinton..

Keith Koney Keith had information on the Ives/Henry deaths. Died in a motorcycle accident in July 1988 with unconfirmed reports of a high speed car chase.

Keith McKaskle McKaskle has information on the Ives/Henry deaths. He was stabbed to death in November 1988 at his home   and  In August 1989, Ronald Shane Smith was sentenced to ten years for the 10 November 1988 murder of Keith McKaskle. McKaskle had earlier expressed fears for his life, linking them to his knowing something about "the railroad track thing". Smith may have been paid to kill McKaskle, as a prison inmate said he had been approached and offered $4,000 to kill McKaskle himself.

Gregory Collins Greg had information on the Ives/Henry deaths. He died from a gunshot wound to the face in January 1989.

Jeff Rhodes He had information on the deaths of Ives, Henry & McKaskle. His burned body was found in a trash dump in April 1989. He died of a gunshot wound to the head and there was some body mutilation, leading to the probably speculation that he was tortured prior to being killed.    In July 1989 Frank Pilcher was arrested for the April 1989 murder of Jeffrey Rhodes. Rhodes had earlier told his father he feared for his life because he'd witnessed a narcotics transaction.

James Milan Milam had information on the Ives & Henry deaths. He was decapitated. The state Medical examiner, Fahmy Malak, initially ruled death due to natural causes. Milam?   Remember that Arkansas medical examiner, the one I said wasn't always the most conscientious investigator on God's green earth? Yep, we're about to see him again. Fahmy Malak listed James Milam's cause of death as a perforated ulcer, adding that Milam's small dog afterwards ate the dead man's head, accounting for Milam's headless condition.

Richard Winters Winters was a suspect in the deaths of Ives & Henry. He was killed in a "robbery" in July 1989 which was subsequently proven to be a setup.

Jordan Kettleson Kettleson had information on the Ives & Henry deaths. He was found shot to death in the front seat of his pickup in June 1990. 

Mike Samples Ives/Henry witness  ... The Wall Street Journal 4/18/96 Micah Morrison "…Mike Samples - Murdered June 1995 - Mike was another grand jury witness for Don and Kevin. He was reported as knowing a great deal about the deaths of Ives and Henry. Sources say he had been involved with picking up drugs that were dropped out of planes at the Mena drop sites. He was shot to death in the head and was not found for some time…."

Boonie Bearden Ives/Henry Witness, disappeared  The Wall Street Journal 4/18/96 Micah Morrison "…Boonie Bearden - Murdered under mysterious circumstances March 1989 - He was a friend of both Greg Collins and Keith Coney. He "vanished" without a trace. It was rumored he knew exactly what had happened at the tracks. An anonymous caller said he knew where he had been murdered. The police found a piece of a shirt, nothing more. His body has never been recovered…."

notes:In a 25 May 1990 hearing before U.S. Magistrate Henry Jones Jr., Katherine Brightop said her ex-boyfriend Paul William Criswell told her he and three other men were involved in the teenagers' deaths. Brightop said Criswell told her the boys tried to steal cocaine from Callaway's home and they were caught and beaten to death before their bodies were placed on the tracks.

 

Michael Todd, who led Greater Manchester Police and was tipped to take over at Scotland Yard, killed himself following troubles in his private life, as it is being reported.

Sources speculated that Mr Todd's complicated personal affairs may have overwhelmed him while unconfirmed reports said a Sunday newspaper may have been planning to publish an exposÈ.

Ian Henderson, of the Llanberis and Ogwen Valley mountain rescue team, said: "Around 36 rescuers, including members of the RAF, were mobilised to bring Mr Todd's body down the mountain.

Manchester Chief Constable Michael Todd, 50, is the city police chief who led an investigation into charges that Britain cooperated with secret CIA flights to transport terrorism suspects without formal proceedings has been found dead, his deputy said Tuesday, March 11th, 2008.

 

Todd was elected vice president of the Association of Chief Police Officers of England and Wales in 2006, according to a biography on his Web site.

The association gave him the task of looking into accusations that Britain allowed the CIA to use the country's airports to fly terrorism suspects to other countries without any extradition hearings, a clandestine procedure known as "extraordinary rendition."

Todd's investigation concluded last June that there was no evidence to back the claim. Last month, however, Britain admitted one of its remote outposts in the Indian Ocean had twice been used by the United States as a refueling stop for the secret transfer of two terrorism suspects.

The interesting thing about this UK investigation, is that as recently as September 24th, 2007, one of these "rention" planes crashed in Mexico with 4 tons of cocaine on it. 

 

His radio show "THE EXPERT WITNESS” has been aired in York City on 99.5 FM since 1997 and features interviews and discussions with some of Americas top experts, lawyers, judges and law enforcement experts. The guy Mr. Levine had on this program is Bill Conroy a young Gary Webb inspired investigative journalist who writes for Narco News Publisher Al Giordano as well as Alex Cockburn's CounterPunch.

Bill Conroy

NARCONEWS deserves our respect because they are telling the truth from Latin America about the war on drugs. They are literally risking their lives to tell us the truth.

New Document Provides Further Evidence That Owner of Crashed Cocaine Jet Was a U.S. Government Operative Signatures Link Florida Pilot Greg Smith to DEA/FBI/CIA Operations in Colombia

By Bill Conroy

Special to The Narco News Bulletin

December 1, 2007

This particular Gulfstream II (tail number N987SA), was used between 2003 and 2005 by the CIA for at least three trips between the U.S. east coast and Guantanamo Bay — home to the infamous “terrorist” prison camp — according to a number of press reports. The suggestion that a “CIA plane” was flying a huge quantity of drugs toward the U.S. ensured that this incident would attract far more attention than the typical drug smuggling story.

The Gulfstream Jet was initially reported by the Mexican Press as carrying a huge cargo of more than 6 Tons of Cocaine as well as one ton of pure Heroin but a later press release courtesy of the Mexican Military had it dwindled down to only 4 tons of Cocaine with no Heroin whatsoever. By early October the Mexican press announced a 3rd reduction leaving only 3.7 Tons of cocainefollowed a few days with 3.6 then later by a 5th and final report from the Mexican Authorities that gave the amount as just 3.3 tons of Cocaine. Draw your own conlusions about the missing 3 ton's of cocaine and the ton of heroin that was first reported. Everybody is out to make money on the drug war even the so called good guys if there is such a thing.

The airplane which had originated out of Fort Lauderdale was returning to the United States from Colombia's Rio Negro José María Córdova International Airport.

The city of Rio Negro is a suburb of Medillen , Colombia and is also the home town of Colombian President Álvaro Uribe who is very close to Bush. Medillen was also the home of the worlds largest Cocaine Cartel for nearly 3 decades and probably still is with just different bosses running it.

The Gulfstream II also had a scheduled refueling stop recorded on it's flight log for Cancun , Mexico. Something went wrong because once the plane crossed into Mexico's Air Space from Belize the Mexican Military began tracking and following it. The Mexican Army and the Air Force also waited for the Aircraft in Cancún. The crew clearly had to change that refueling stop and flew west attempting to land at other smaller airports it eventually ran out of jet fuel and crash landed near the tiny Yucatan village of Tixkokob. Apparently their were four individuals aboard the aircraft but initially only one was captured although later 2 more were also picked up but the authorities haven't released all of their names supposedly there were 3 men and one lady but who really knows this whole thing is just crazy. To be honest with relation to the crew of the Gulfstream II N987SA the Mexican Government is being pretty damn silent.

While they fly tons of drugs in we have this idiot John P. (Pinocchio) Walters the so called Drug Czar claiming the United States is Winning the War on Drugs if so then why are ultra paranoid Conspiracy theorist cops getting all bent out of shape over a Blue Fuckin Hershey's breath mint wrapper that they swear was made to glorify the drug trade. I would assume Hershey's doesn't need to glorify much of anything with all the damn Chocolate they sell.

Alfred McCoy is Professor of Southeast and Asian History at the University of Wisconsin and author of The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade He serves as Director of the federally funded Center for Southeast Asian Studies and holds degrees from Columbia University, Berkeley, and Yale. The transcript of this special seminar on CIA secret actions and drug trafficking came to NCX from David Barsamian, noted journalist, interviewer, and Director of Alternative Radio.

This is from Alfred McCoy's website:

Excerpted from testimony before the Special Seminar focusing on allegations linking CIA secret operations and drug trafficking-convened February 13, 1997, by Rep. John Conyers, Dean of the Congressional Black Caucus

Let's look at the heroin boom of the 1980s. In the 1980s, CIA op-erations again played a role in the revival of the U.S. drug problem. In 1979, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan and the Sandinistas seized power in Nicaragua, prompting two more CIA operations with some revealing similarities. Let us now pay particularly close attention to the CIA's Afghan operation. Not only is the Afghan operation simultaneous and similar to the controversial contra operation, but its direct and negative impact on U.S. drug supply is beyond question or controversy.

In 1980 and 1981, heroin production in Southwest Asia, Afghanistan and Pakistan suddenly expanded to fill gaps in the global drug market. Although Pakistan and Afghanistan had zero-zero-heroin production in the mid-1970s, by 1981 Pakistan had suddenly emerged as the world's number one heroin supplier. Reporting from Teheran in the mid 1970s, U.S. Ambassador Richard Helms, the former CIA Director, insisted that there was no heroin production in this region, only localized opium trade. This region, he said, then supplied zero percent of the U.S. heroin supply. In 1981, by contrast, the U.S. Attorney General announced that Pakistan was now supplying sixty percent of the U.S. demand for heroin. Inside Pakistan itself the results were even more disastrous. Rising from zero heroin addicts in 1979, Pakistan had five thousand addicts in 1980 and one million two hundred thousand addicts in 1985, the world's highest number in any terms. Why was Pakistan able to capture the world's heroin market with such surprising speed and ease?

After the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979, the White House assigned the CIA to mount a major operation to support the Afghan resistance. Working through Pakistan Inter-Service Intelligence, the CIA began supplying covert arms and finance to Afghan forces. As they gained control over liberated zones inside Afghanistan, the Afghan guerrillas required that its supporters grow opium to support the resistance. Under CIA and Pakistani protection, Pakistan military and Afghan resistance opened heroin labs on the Afghan and Pakistani border. According to The Washington Post of May 1990, among the leading heroin manufacturers were Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, an Afghan leader who received about half of the covert arms that the U.S. shipped to Pakistan. Although there were complaints about Hekmatyar's brutality and drug trafficking within the ranks of the Afghan resistance of the day, the CIA maintained an uncritical alliance and supported him without reservation or restraint.

Once the heroin left these labs in Pakistan's northwest frontier, the Sicilian Mafia imported the drugs into the U.S., where they soon captured sixty percent of the U.S. heroin market. That is to say, sixty percent of the U.S. heroin supply came indirectly from a CIA operation. During the decade of this operation, the 1980s, the substantial DEA contingent in Islamabad made no arrests and participated in no seizures, allowing the syndicates a de facto free hand to export heroin. By contrast, a lone Norwegian detective, following a heroin deal from Oslo to Karachi, mounted an investigation that put a powerful Pakistani banker known as President Zia's surrogate son behind bars. The DEA in Islamabad got nobody, did nothing, stayed away.

Former CIA operatives have admitted that this operation led to an expansion of the Pakistan-Afghanistan heroin trade. In 1995 the former CIA Director of this Afghan operation, Mr. Charles Cogan, admitted sacrificing the drug war to fight the Cold War. "Our main mission was to do as much damage to the Soviets. We didn't really have the resources or the time to devote to an investigation of the drug trade," he told Australian television. "I don't think that we need to apologize for this. Every situation has its fallout. There was fallout in terms of drugs, yes, but the main objective was accomplished. The Soviets left Afghanistan."

Again, distance insulated the CIA from political fallout. Once the heroin left Pakistan, the Sicilian Mafia exported it to the U.S., and local gangs sold it on the street. Eventually U.S. drug agents arrested a bunch of middle-aged Sicilians migrants at pizza parlors from Boston, MA to Milton, WI in the famous pizza connection case of the 1980s. Not surprisingly, most Americans did not make the equation between Afghan drug lords, the pizza parlors and the heroin in their cities. Hence, there was no controversy over this Afghan operation.

In Central America, however, simple proximity has made the fallout from the CIA operations explosive. Unlike the CIA's Asian warlords, Nicaragua's Contras did not produce drugs and had to make their money by participating in the smuggling of cocaine directly into the U.S. Proximity brought these operations to the attention of Congress in the late l980s, when Senator John Kerry's subcommittee investigated the Contra-cocaine links. His investigators established that four Contra-connected corporations hired by the U.S. State Department to fly humanitarian relief goods to Central America were also involved in cocaine smuggling. The DEA operative assigned to Honduras, Mr. Thomas Zepeda, testified that his office had been closed in June 1983 since it was gathering intelligence that the local military, the Honduran military, was involved in cocaine smuggling. His reports were threatening the CIA's relationship with the Honduran military in this key frontline state for Contra operation. In effect, Agency operations had once again created a de facto zone of protection closed to investigators from outside agencies. Read closely, the Kerry Committee established a pattern of CIA complicity in Central America strikingly similar to the one we saw in Laos and Afghanistan: tolerance for drug dealing by assets and concealment to protect larger covert operations.

The Mercury story tries to go the next step. It tries to establish a direct link between CIA operations and drug distribution in the U.S. According to Mercury reporter Gary Webb, this dark alliance began in the early 1980s when the contra revolt against Nicaragua's leftist Sandinista government was failing for want of funds. Here is his scenario.

In 1981 the CIA hired ex-Nicaraguan army colonel Enrique Bermudez to organize the main Contra force known as the FDN. Bermudez turned to two Nicaraguan exiles in the U.S. to supposedly supplement meager agency support with drug profits. In California, Danilo Blandon, the former director of Nicaragua's foreign marketing program, used his business skills to open a crack distribution network for the Contras in Los Angeles. During its decade of operation this crack network supposedly enjoyed a de facto immunity from prosecution. The people involved in this network were somehow miraculously exempted from investigation or arrest despite substantial involvement in the traffic.

While the Agency's relations with Asian opium lords were lost in the mists of far-off mountains, Representative Maxine Waters, the Black Caucus leader from Los Angeles, has police documents to charge the CIA with protecting Contra leaders.

Let us now return to the four questions we asked at the outset. Question one: Did the Agency ever ally with drug traffickers? Yes. Beyond any doubt. Once controversial, not even the CIA any longer bothers to deny that it has often allied with major and minor drug dealers. Question two: Did the CIA protect these allies from prosecution? Yes. There is a recurring pattern of protection. During a major CIA operation, the operational zone becomes a special de facto protected area where everything is subordinated to the protection of this covert operation. To protect the integrity of the operation, the CIA blocks all investigation, by the DEA, Customs, Congress and local police. Whenever anyone connected with this effort is arrested outside of the protected area, the CIA often blocks prosecution that will compromise its operation. And lest we forget, there is only one element that any criminal needs to become a powerful entrepreneur of vice and violence: protection against prosecution.

Question three: Did such alliances and protections contribute significantly to an expansion of the global drug trade and U.S. drug supply over the past fifty years? This is a question that is open to interpretation. If we were to place perfect information on the tables of two academics, they would probably produce two books with two very different answers to two very different interpretations. I would argue, with my imperfect information, that in Burma, Laos and Afghanistan, CIA operations provided critical elements, logistics, arms and political protection that facilitated the rapid growth of heroin and opium production in both areas. Clearly the CIA alliance was central to the rise of some major drug dealers and catalytic in the expansion, production and processing in certain drug zones. It would not be unreasonable to conclude, therefore, that such CIA operations led to an increase in the production and processing of illicit drugs in these covert war zones. But it is difficult to state unequivocally that these individual dealers and these zones did or did not shape the long-term trajectory of supply and demand within the vastness and complexity of the global drug traffic.

Question four: Did the CIA encourage drug smugglers to target African American communities? This pattern of CIA complicity in drugs proceeds from the internal logic of its covert operations, an inadvertent consequence of a style of indirect intervention abroad. There is a striking similarity in the patterns of CIA complicity with drug dealers in Laos, Afghanistan and Central America. Just as I can find no evidence, nor any logic, to the proposition that the CIA in Laos during the Vietnam War wanted one-third of the American soldiers in South Vietnam to become heroin addicts, so I can see no evidence nor any logic of any CIA targeting of blacks in South Central Los Angeles. During the 1980s, however, there is every indication that the CIA was aware that its Afghan operations contributed to the export of heroin to the U.S. and did nothing-nothing-to slow this drug flow. At the same time, the same agency, the same division of the same agency, mounting an operation of a very similar character in Central America, may or may not have known. This is something that needs to be pressed. But in Afghanistan it's very clear that they knew.

Since a substantial portion of the African American community already suspects the worse, that the CIA willfully flooded their communities with drugs, the time has come for an unflinching search for answers to these questions. As Congress investigates, I have a good idea of what it will find. I doubt that there is evidence the CIA actually trafficked in drugs or targeted any Americans, whether GIs in South Vietnam or blacks in South Central. But investigators will discover CIA alliances with warlords, colonels and criminals who used this protection to deal drugs. Suffering from what I call "mission myopia," CIA agents, in Mr. Charles Cogan's words, regarded narcotics as "mere fallout." For CIA agents in Laos, the heroin epidemic among GIs in Vietnam was only fallout. For agents in Pakistan, drug shipments to America were just fallout. In the case of the CIA's Afghan operation, it is clear that the Agency created a zone of protection for heroin production, and agents tolerated trafficking by local assets that supplied much of the entire U.S. heroin markets. For Vietnam veterans and for African Americans who live with the pain of this fallout, these findings will be profoundly disturbing. That the CIA apparently regarded increased drug shipments to the U.S. as acceptable fallout may spark considerable controversy. But these findings will be better for this nation's political health than the CIA's blanket denials, which can only fan the flames of allegations that have willfully targeted black communities for drug distribution.

From Michael Ruppert, former LAPD Narcotics Chief who blew the whistle on CIA drug trafficking, this article is on FromTheWilderness.com:

During "Iran-Contra" Congressman Dick Cheney of the House Intelligence Committee was a rabid supporter of Marine Lt. Col. Oliver North. This was in spite of the fact that North had lied to Cheney in a private 1986 White House briefing. Oliver North's own diaries and subsequent investigations by the CIA Inspector General have irrevocably tied him directly to cocaine smuggling during the 1980s and the opening of bank accounts for one firm moving four tons of cocaine a month. This, however, did not stop Cheney from actively supporting North's 1994 unsuccessful run for the U.S. Senate from Virginia just a year before he took over the reins at Brown and Root's parent company, Dallas based Halliburton Inc. in 1995.

As the Bush Secretary of Defense during Desert Shield/Desert Storm (1990-91), Cheney also directed special operations involving Kurdish rebels in northern Iran. The Kurds' primary source of income for more than fifty years has been heroin smuggling from Afghanistan and Pakistan through Iran, Iraq and Turkey. Having had some personal experience with Brown and Root I noted carefully  when the Los Angeles Times observed that on March 22, 1991 that a group of gunmen burst into the Ankara, Turkey offices of the joint venture, Vinnell, Brown and Root and assassinated retired Air Force Chief Master Sergeant John Gandy. In March of 1991, tens of thousands of Kurdish refugees, long-time assets of the CIA, were being massacred by Saddam Hussein in the wake of the Gulf War. Saddam, seeking to destroy any hopes of a successful Kurdish revolt, found it easy to kill thousands of the unwanted Kurds who had fled to the Turkish border seeking sanctuary. There, Turkish security forces, trained in part by the Vinnell, Brown and Root partnership,  turned thousands of Kurds back into certain death. Today, the Vinnell Corporation (a TRW Company) is, along with the firms MPRI and DynCorp (FTW June, 00) one of the three pre-eminent private mercenary corporations in the world. It is also the dominant entity for the training of security forces throughout the Middle East. Not surprisingly the Turkish border regions in question were the primary transhipment points for heroin, grown in Afghanistan and Pakistan and destined for the markets of Europe. A confidential source with intelligence experience in the region subsequently told me that the Kurds "got some payback against the folks that used to help them move their drugs." He openly acknowledged that Brown and Root and Vinnell both routinely provided NOC or non-official cover for CIA officers. But I already knew that. From 1994 to 1999, during US military intervention in the Balkans where, according to "The Christian Science Monitor" and "Jane's Intelligence Review," the Kosovo Liberation Army controls 70 per cent of the heroin entering Western Europe, Cheney's  Brown and Root made billions of dollars supplying U.S. troops from vast facilities in the region. Brown and Root support operations continue in Bosnia, Kosovo and Macedonia to this day. Dick Cheney's footprints have come closer to drugs than one might suspect. The August Center for Public Integrity report brought them even closer. It would be factually correct to say that there is a direct linkage of Brown and Root facilities - often in remote and hazardous regions - between every drug producing region and every drug consuming region in the world. These coincidences, in and of themselves, do not prove complicity in the trade. Other facts, however, lead inescapably in that direction. A DIRECT DRUG LINK The CPI report entitled "Cheney Led Halliburton To Feast at Federal Trough" written by veteran journalists Knut Royce and Nathaniel Heller describes how, under five years of Cheney's leadership, Halliburton, largely through subsidiary Brown and Root, enjoyed $3.8 billion in federal contracts and taxpayer insured loans. The loans had been granted by the Export-Import Bank (EXIM) and the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC). According to Ralph McGehee's "CIA Base ©" both institutions are heavily infiltrated by the CIA and routinely provide NOC to its officers.

One of those loans to Russian financial/banking conglomerate The Alfa Group of Companies contained $292 million to pay for Brown and Root's contract to refurbish a Siberian oil field owned by the Russian Tyumen Oil Company. The Alfa Group completed its 51% acquisition of Tyumen Oil in what was allegedly a rigged bidding process in 1998. An official Russian government report claimed that the Alfa Group's top executives, oligarchs Mikhail Fridman and Pyotr Aven "allegedly participated in the transit of drugs from Southeast Asia through Russia and into Europe."

These same executives, Fridman and Aven, who reportedly smuggled the heroin in connection with Russia's Solntsevo mob family were the same ones who applied for the EXIM loans that Halliburton's lobbying later safely secured. As a result Brown and Root's work in Alfa Tyumen oil fields could continue - and expand.

After describing how organized criminal interests in the Alfa Group had allegedly stolen the oil field by fraud, the CPI story, using official reports from the FSB  (the Russian equivalent of the FBI), oil companies such as BP-Amoco, former CIA and KGB officers and press accounts then established a solid link to Alfa Tyumen and the transportation of heroin.

In 1995 sacks of heroin disguised as sugar were stolen from a rail container leased by Alfa Echo and sold in the Siberian town of Khabarovsk. A problem arose when many residents of the town became "intoxicated" or "poisoned." The CPI story also stated, "The FSB report said that within days of the incident, Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) agents conducted raids of Alfa Eko buildings and found 'drugs and other compromising documentation.'

"Both reports claim that Alfa Bank has laundered drug funds from Russian and Colombian drug cartels.

"The FSB document claims that at the end of 1993, a top Alfa official met with Gilberto Rodriguez Orejuela, the now imprisoned financial mastermind of Colombia's notorious Cali cartel, 'to conclude an agreement about the transfer of money into the Alfa Bank from offshore zones such as the Bahamas, Gibraltar and others. The plan was to insert it back into the Russian economy through the purchase of stock in Russian companies.

"É He [the former KGB agent] reported that there was evidence 'regarding [Alfa Bank's] involvement with the money laundering ofÉ Latin American drug cartels."

It then becomes harder for Cheney and Halliburton to assert mere coincidence in all of this as CPI reported that Tyumen's lead  Washington attorney James C, Langdon, Jr. at the firm of Aikin Gump "helped coordinate a $2.2 million fund raiser for Bush this June. He then agreed to help recruit 100 lawyers and lobbyists in the capital to raise $25,000 each for W's campaign."

The heroin mentioned in the CPI story, originated in Laos where longtime Bush allies and covert warriors Richard Armitage and retired CIA ADDO (Associate Deputy Director of Operations) Ted Shackley have been repeatedly linked to the drug trade. It then made its way across Southeast Asia to Vietnam, probably the port of Haiphong. Then the heroin sailed to Russia's Pacific port of Valdivostok from whence it subsequently bounced across Siberia by rail and thence by truck or rail to Europe, passing through the hands of Russian Mafia leaders in Chechnya and Azerbaijan.  Chechnya and Azerbaijan are hotbeds of both armed conflict and oil exploration and Brown and Root has operations all along this route.

This long, expensive and tortured path was hastily established, as described by FTW in previous issues, after President George Bush's personal envoy Richard Armitage, holding the rank of Ambassador, had traveled to the former Soviet Union to assist it with its "economic development" in 1989. The obstacle then to a more direct, profitable and efficient route from Afghanistan and Pakistan through Turkey into Europe was  a cohesive Yugoslavian/Serbian government controlling the Balkans and continuing instability in the Golden Crescent of Pakistan/Afghanistan. Also, there was no other way, using heroin from the Golden Triangle (Burma, Laos and Thailand), to deal with China and India but to go around them.

It is perhaps not by coincidence again that Cheney and Armitage share membership in the prestigious Aspen Institute, an exclusive bi-partisan research think tank, and also in the U.S. Azerbaijan Chamber of Commerce. Just last November, in what may be a portent of things to come, Armitage, played the role of Secretary of Defense in an practical exercise at the Council on Foreign Relations where he and Cheney are also both members. Speculation that the scandal plagued Armitage, who resigned under a cloud as Assistant Secretary of Defense in the Reagan Administration, is W's first choice for Secretary of Defense next year is widespread.

The Clinton Administration took care of all that wasted travel for heroin with the 1998 destruction of Serbia and Kosovo and the installation of the KLA as a regional power. That opened a direct line from Afghanistan to Western Europe and Brown and Root was right in the middle of that too. The Clinton skill at streamlining drug operations  was described in detail in the May issue of FTW in a story entitled "The Democratic Party's Presidential Drug Money Pipeline." That article has since been reprinted in three countries. The essence of the drug economic lesson was that by growing opium in Colombia and by smuggling both cocaine and heroin from Colombia to New York City through the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico (a virtual straight line), traditional smuggling routes could be shortened or even eliminated. This reduced both risk and cost, increased profits and eliminated competition.

FTW suspects the hand of Medellin co-founder Carlos Lehder in this process and it is interesting to note that Lehder, released from prison under Clinton in 1995, is now active in both the Bahamas and South America. Lehder was known during the eighties as "The genius of transportation." I can well imagine a Dick Cheney, having witnessed the complete restructuring of the global drug trade in the last eight years, going to George W and saying, "Look, I know how we can make it even better." One thing is for certain. As quoted in the CPI article, one Halliburton Vice President noted that if the Bush-Cheney ticket was elected, "the company's government contracts would obviously go through the roof." THE DARK PAST

In July of 1977 this writer, then a Los Angeles Police officer struggled to make sense of a world gone haywire. In a last ditch effort to salvage a relationship with my fiancŽe, Nordica Theodora D'Orsay (Teddy),  a  CIA contract agent, I had traveled to find her in New Orleans. On a hastily arranged vacation, secured with the blessing of my Commanding Officer, Captain Jesse Brewer of LAPD, I had gone on my own, unofficially, to avoid the scrutiny of LAPD's Organized Crime Intelligence Division (OCID).

Starting in the late spring of 1976 Teddy had wanted me to join her operations from within the ranks of LAPD. I had refused to get involved with drugs in any way and everything she mentioned seemed to involve either heroin or cocaine along with guns that she was always moving out of the country. The Director of the CIA then was George Herbert Walker Bush.

Although officially on staff at the LAPD Academy at the time, I had been unofficially loaned to OCID since January when Teddy, announcing the start of a new operation planned in the fall of 1976 had suddenly disappeared.  She left many people, including me, baffled and twisting in the breeze. The OCID detectives had been pressuring me hard for information about her and what I knew of her activities. It was information I could not give them. Hoping against hope that I would find some way to understand her involvement with CIA, LAPD, the royal family of Iran, the Mafia and drugs I set out alone into eight days of  Dantean revelations that have determined the course of my life from that day to this.

Arriving in New Orleans in early July, 1977 I found her living in an apartment across the river in Gretna. Equipped with scrambler phones, night vision devices and working from sealed communiquŽs delivered by naval and air force personnel from nearby Belle Chasse Naval Air Station, Teddy was involved in something truly ugly. She was arranging for large quantities of weapons to be loaded onto ships leaving for Iran. At the same time she was working with Mafia associates of New Orleans Mafia boss Carlos Marcello to coordinate the movement of service boats that were bringing large quantities of heroin into the city. The boats arrived at Marcello controlled docks, unmolested by even the New Orleans police she introduced me to, along with divers, military men, former Green Berets and CIA personnel.

The service boats were retrieving the heroin from oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico, oil rigs  in international waters, oil rigs built and serviced by Brown and Root. The guns that Teddy monitored, apparently Vietnam era surplus AK 47s and M16s, were being loaded onto ships also owned or leased by Brown and Root. And more than once during the eight days I spent in New Orleans I met and ate at restaurants with Brown and Root employees who were boarding those ships and leaving for Iran within days. Once, while leaving a bar and apparently having asked the wrong question, I was shot at in an attempt to scare me off.

Disgusted and heart broken at witnessing my fiancŽe and my government smuggling drugs, I ended the relationship. Returning home to LA I made a clean breast and reported all the activity I had seen, including the connections to Brown and Root, to LAPD intelligence officers. They promptly told me that I was crazy. Forced out of LAPD under threat of death at the end of 1978, I made complaints to LAPD's Internal Affairs Division and to the LA office of the FBI under the command of FBI SAC Ted Gunderson. I and my attorney wrote to the politicians, the Department of Justice, the CIA and contacted the L.A. Times. The FBI and the LAPD said that I was crazy.

According to a 1981 two-part news story in the "Los Angeles Herald Examiner" it was revealed that The FBI had taken Teddy into custody and then released her before classifying their investigation without further action. Former New Orleans Crime Commissioner Aaron Cohen told reporter Randall Sullivan that he found my description of events perfectly plausible after his thirty years of studying Louisiana's organized crime operations.

To this day a CIA report prepared as a result of my complaint remains classified and exempt from release pursuant to Executive Order of the President in the interests of national security and because it would reveal the identities of CIA agents.

On October 26, 1981, in the basement of the West Wing of the White House, I reported on what I had seen in New Orleans to my friend and UCLA classmate Craig Fuller. Craig Fuller went on to become Chief of Staff to Vice President Bush from 1981 to 1985.

In 1982, then UCLA political science professor Paul Jabber, filled in many of the pieces in my quest to understand what I had seen in New Orleans. He was qualified to do so because he had served as a CIA and State Department consultant to the Carter administration. Paul explained that, after a  1975 treaty between the Shah of Iran and Saddam Hussein the Shah had cut off all overt military support for Kurdish rebels fighting Saddam from the north of Iraq. In exchange the Shah had gained access to the Shat al-Arab waterway so that he could multiply his oil exports and income. Not wanting to lose a long-term valuable asset in the Kurds, the CIA had then used Brown and Root, which operated in both countries and maintained port facilities in the Persian Gulf and near Shat al-Arab to rearm the Kurds. The whole operation had been financed with heroin. Paul was matter-of-fact about it.

In 1983 Paul Jabber left UCLA to become a Vice President of Banker's Trust and Chairman of the Middle East Department of the Council on Foreign Relations.