Noriega for his relationship with drug traffickers because the Panamanian was providing valuable support for our policies in Central America, especially Nicaragua .6

When a confluence of circumstances led to Noriega falling into political disfavor with Washington, the Bush administration was reluctantly obliged to turn against him. In 1989, the US invaded Panama, kidnapped and imprisoned the general, and falsely ascribed the invasion to the war on drugs whereas several foreign-policy imperatives actually lay behind the operation. Drug trafficking through Panama continued unabated under the new US-installed government.7 Had Noriega become addicted to communism rather than drug money, the Marines would have landed in Panama City long before.

As further indication of how US officials are in actuality relatively undisturbed about drug trafficking as such-in stark contrast to their public pose-consider the case of the former Panamanian ambassador-at-large in Washington, Ricardo Bilonick. He helped smuggle nearly 40,000 pounds of Colombian cocaine into the US in the early 1980s, but because he could serve a higher political purpose by turning states witness against Noriega, he got off with a three-year sentence, compared to Noriegas 40 years. At his trial, Bilonick received letters of reference from former president Jimmy Carter, former Under-Secretary-of-State William D. Rogers, and a former US ambassador to Panama.8 There are thousands of men and women languishing in American prisons, charged with cocaine offenses, who-in TOTAL-did not traffic in as much cocaine as Bilonick did.

1980s, Central America

Washingtons philosophy was consistent: let em traffic in drugs, let em murder, rape and torture, let em burn down schools and medical clinics...as long as they carry out our wars, theyre our boys, our good ol boys.

Obsessed with overthrowing the leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua, Reagan administration officials tolerated and abetted drug trafficking as long as the traffickers gave support to the Contras. In 1989, the Senate Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics and International Operations (the Kerry Committee) concluded a three-year investigation by stating:

There was substantial evidence of drug smuggling through the war zones on the part of individual Contras, Contra suppliers, Contra pilots, mercenaries who worked with die Contras, and Contra supporters throughout the region.. .U.S. officials involved in Central America failed to address the drug issue for fear of jeopardizing the war efforts against Nicaragua...In each case, one or another agency of the U.S. government had information regarding the involvement either while it was occurring, or immediately thereafter...Senior U.S. policy makers were not immune to the idea that drug money was a perfect solution to the Contras funding problems. 9

In Costa Rica, which served as the Southern Front for the Contras (Honduras being the Northern Front), there were several different CIA-Contra networks involved in drug

trafficking, including that of CIA asset John Hull, an American whose farms along Costa Ricas border with Nicaragua were the main staging area for the Contras. Hull and other CIA-connected Contra supporters and pilots teamed up with George Morales, a major Miami-based Colombian drug trafficker who later admitted to giving more than $4 million in cash to the Contras. Morales planes were loaded with weapons in Florida, flown to Central America and then brought back with cocaine on board. 10

In 1989, after the Costa Rica government indicted Hull for drug trafficking, a DBA-hired plane clandestinely and illegally flew him to Miami. The US repeatedly thwarted Costa Rican efforts to extradite Hull back to Costa Rica to stand trial. Another Costa Rican-based drug ring involved anti-Castro Cubans whom the CIA had hired as military trainers for the Contras. Many of the Cubans had long been involved with the CIA and drug trafficking. They used Contra planes and a Costa Rican-based shrimp company, which laundered money for the CIA, to move cocaine to the United States.11

In Honduras, in exchange for allowing the US to convert the country into a grand military base, the CIA and DEA turned a virtually blind eye to the extensive drug trafficking of Honduran military officers, government officials and others. The CIA itself enlisted Alan Hyde, a leading Honduran trafficker-the godfather of all criminal activities, according to US government reports-to use his boats to transport Contra supplies. In exchange, the Agency discouraged counter-narcotics efforts against Hyde. A CIA cable stated that Hydes connection to [CIA] is well documented and could prove difficult in the prosecution stage. 12

There were other way stations along the cocaine highway, such as the Guatemalan military intelligence service, closely associated with the CIA, and which harbored many drug traffickers, and Ilopango Air Force Base in El Salvador, a key component of the US military intervention against the countrys guerrillas. Former DEA officer Celerino Castillo, stationed in El Salvador, has written of how Contra planes flew north loaded with cocaine, landed with impunity in various spots in the United States, including an Air Force base in Texas, then returned laden with cash to finance the war. All under the protective umbrella of the United States Government.

The operation at Ilopango was run by Felix Rodriguez (aka Max Gomez), who reported to Vice President George Bush (President Reagans drug czar ) and to Oliver North of Reagans National Security Council staff, where North oversaw Contra operations. (Reagan, after all, had hailed the Contras as the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers. ) An entry from Norths diary, August 9, 1985, reads: Honduran DC-6 which is being used for runs out of New Orleans is probably being used for drug runs into U.S.

The CIA owned one of Ilopangos airport hangers, and the National Security Council ran another. When Castillo informed DEA headquarters of the details on cocaine flights from El Salvador to the US, his employer effectively ignored the reports; eventually, Castillo was forced out of the agency. 13

When some authority in the US wasnt clued in about one of the arriving drug flights, and made an arrest, powerful strings were pulled on behalf of dropping the case, acquittal, reduced sentence or deportation. Reportedly, a US Customs agent was reassigned from his Texas post back to Washington because he was investigating Contra drug deals too vigorously. There is also the case of Honduran general Jose Bueso Rosa, who was convicted of conspiring to murder the president of Honduras, the plot being financed by a huge cocaine deal. Senior Reagan administration officials intervened with a Federal judge to obtain leniency for Bueso to honor his services to the Contras. He received five years, while other defendants were sentenced to as much as 40 years.14

The connections were everywhere: Four companies that distrib-uted humanitarian aid to the Contras but were owned and operated by narcotics traffickers , and under investigation in the United States for drug trafficking, received State Department contracts of more than $800,000.15 Southern Air Transport, formerly CIA-owned, and later under Pentagon contract, was deeply involved in the drug running as well.16

A former US Attorney in Miami told the Kerry Committee that Justice Department officials told him that representatives of their department, the DEA and the FBI met in 1986 to discuss how Senator Kerrys efforts to push for the hearings could be undermined .17

To make it easier for the CIA to ignore, while benefiting from, the drug trafficking all about them, in 1982 Agency Director William Casey negotiated an extraordinary secret memo of understanding with Attorney General William French Smith to spare the CIA from any legal responsibility to report drug trafficking operations of anyone working for it. 18 This agreement was not fully rescinded until 1995.

1990s, South America

Venezuelan General Ramon Guillen Davila was indicted by a federal grand jury in Miami in 1996 for smuggling as much as 22 tons of cocaine into the United States between 1987 and 1991. At the time he was engaged in this activity, Guillen was the head of the Venezuelan National Guard anti-drug bureau and was what the Miami Herald called the CIAs most trusted man in Venezuela . The CIA, over the objections of the DEA, had approved the controlled shipments of cocaine to the United States as some kind of vague operation to gather information about the Colombian drug cartels. It has not been reported what kind of success this operation had, but at least on one occasion, in 1990, a ton of Guillens cocaine made it to the streets of America. The CIA actually acknowledged this one, categorizing it as poor judgment and management on the part of several CIA officers .19

See the Interventions chapter for discussion of how Washington ignored much of the drug trafficking of government and military personnel in Peru, Colombia and Mexico in the 1990s because of the anti-leftist campaigns being waged by these regimes with US support.