1980s to early 1990s, Afghanistan

CIA-supported Moujahedeen rebels engaged heavily in opium culti-vation while fighting against the Soviet-supported government. The Agencys political protection and logistical assistance enabled the growers to markedly increase their output. CIA-supplied trucks and mules, which had carried arms into Afghanistan, were used to transport opium to heroin laboratories along the Afghan-Pakistan border. The output is estimated to have provided up to one half of the heroin used annually in the United States and three-quarters of that used in Western Europe. US officials admitted in 1990 that they had failed to investigate or take action against the drug operation because of a desire not to offend their Pakistani and Afghan allies.20 As in earlier drug-related actions, CIA officers may also have gotten their hands on a portion of the drug money, using it to help finance their operations, or even themselves. In 1993, an official of the DEA called Afghanistan the new Colombia of the drug world.21

1986 to 1994, Haiti

While working to keep right-wing Haitian military and political leaders in power, the CIA looked away from their drug trafficking.

Joseph Michel Francois, no. 3 man in the military government of 1991-1994, was regularly briefed by the DEA, which shared intelligence with him on suspected drug smuggling operations in Haiti, this while Francois was himself a leading drug lord, working with the Colombian Medellin cartel. Francois was part of a new organization, the National Intelligence Service (SIN), created by the CIA in 1986, purportedly to fight the cocaine trade, though SIN officers, Francois and others, themselves engaged in the trafficking.22

1980s, the United States and the Cocaine Import Agency

In addition to the cases cited above of drugladen planes landing in the US unmolested by authorities, there is the striking case of Oscar Danilo Blandon and Juan Norwin Meneses, two Nicaraguans living in California. To support the Contras (particularly during a period in which Congress banned funding for them), as well as enriching themselves, the two men turned to smuggling cocaine into the US under CIA protection. This led to the distribution of large quantities of cocaine into Los Angeles inner city at a time when drug users and dealers were trying to make the costly white powder more affordable by changing it into powerful little nuggets of crack. The Nicaraguans funneled a portion of their drug profits to the Contra cause while helping to fuel a disastrous crack explosion in Los Angeles and other cities, and enabling the gangs to buy automatic weapons, sometimes from Blandon himself.

The ties between the two Nicaraguans and the CIA were visible not far beneath the surface, as the following indicate:

When Blandon was finally arrested in October 1986 (after Congress had resumed funding for the Contras and his services were much less needed), and he admitted to crimes that have sent others away for life, the Justice Department turned him loose on unsupervised probation after only 28 months behind bars and subsequently paid him more than $166,000 as an informer.

According to a legal motion filed in a 1990 police corruption trial in Los Angeles: in a 1986 raid on Blandons money-launderer, the police carted away numerous documents purportedly linking the US government to cocaine trafficking and money laundering on behalf of the Contras. CIA personnel appeared at the sheriffs department within 48 hours of the raid and removed the seized files from the evidence room. At the request of the Justice Department, a federal judge issued a gag order barring any discussion of the matter.

When Blandon testified in 1996 as a prosecution witness in a drug trial, the federal prosecutors obtained a court order preventing defense lawyers from delving into his ties to the CIA.

Though Meneses was listed in the DEAs computers as a major international drug smuggler and was implicated in 45 separate federal investigations since 1974, he lived openly and conspicuously in California until 1989 and never spent a day in a US prison. The DEA, US Customs, the Los Angeles County Sheriffs Department and the California Bureau of Narcotic Enforcement all complained that a number of the probes of Meneses were stymied by the CIA or unnamed national security interests.

Lastly, the CIA-Contra-drugs nexus brings us the case of the US Attorney in San Francisco who gave back $36,800 to an arrested Nicaraguan drug dealer, which had been found in his possession. The money was returned after two Contra leaders sent letters to the court swearing that the drug dealer had been given the cash to buy supplies for the reinstatement of democracy in Nicaragua. The letters were hurriedly sealed after prosecutors invoked the Classified Information Procedures Act, a law designed to keep national security secrets from leaking out during trials. When a US Senate subcommittee later inquired of the Justice Department the reason for this unusual turn of events, they ran into a wall of secrecy. The Justice Department flipped out to prevent us from getting access to people, records-find-ing anything out about it, recalled Jack Blum, former chief counsel to the Kerry Senate subcommittee referred to above, which investigated allegations of Contra cocaine trafficking. It was one of the most frustrating exercises that I can ever recall. 23

The more I think about it, its the difference between manslaughter and murder. Its the intent. The intent was not to poison black America but to raise money for the Contros, and they [the CIA] didnt really care what it came from. If it involved selling drugs in black communities, well, this was the price of admission.

Gary Webb24

CHAPTER 25 : Being the Worlds Only Superpower Means Never Having to Say Youre Sorry

I will never apologize for the United States of America. I dont care what the facts are. George Bush 1

Cuba

Cuba, said US District Judge James Lawrence King on December 17, 1997, in outrageous contempt for international law and basic human rights, murdered four human beings in international airspace. He then proceeded to award $187.6 million to the families of the Florida-based Cuban pilots who had been shot down in February 1996 by Cuban jets while on an air mission, destination Cuba.2 (In actuality, the Cuban government had done no more than any government in the world would have done under the same circumstances. Havana regarded the planes as within Cuban airspace, of serious hostile intent, and gave the pilots explicit warning: You are taking a risk. Planes from the same organization had gone even further into Cuban territory on earlier occasions and had been warned by Cuba not to return.)

In November 1996, the federal government gave each of the families a down payment of $300,000 on the award, the money coming out of frozen Cuban assets.3

Such was justice, anti-communist style.

Totally ignored by the American government, however, was Cubas lawsuit of May 31, 1999, filed in a Havana court demanding $181.1 billion in US compensation for death and injury suffered by Cuban citizens in four decades of war by Washington against Cuba. The document outlined American aggression , ranging from backing for armed rebel groups within Cuba and the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, to subversion attempts from the US naval base of Guantanamo and the planting of epidemics on the island.

Cuba said it was demanding $30 million in direct compensation for each of the 3,478 people it said were killed by US actions and $15 million each for the 2,099 injured. It was also asking $10 million each for the people killed, and $5 million each for the injured, to repay Cuban society for the costs it has had to assume on their behalf. That was substantially less than the amount per person fixed by US Judge King in the pilots case, the document pointed out.