Drug War: Covert Money, Power & Policy: Propaganda Due

Nixon's 1970 Controlled Substances Act criminalized any herb or alkaloid with a "potential for abuse." That "potential" is defined by the general consensus of industrialized nations that drugs are worth far more illegal than legal, and that without the international Inquisition their own internal fascism would be harder to justify, and finance. "It was ironic," reported a secret 1977 House Government Operations subcommittee, "that the CIA should be given the responsibility of narcotics intelligence, particularly since they are supporting the prime movers." It is also ironic that although Congress can put its finger on it, it can't do a damn thing about it.

In 1974, at about the same time that Nixon was collapsing, the Office of Public Safety (OPS) within the Agency for International Development (AID), the CIA's major international police trainer, was spending hundreds of millions training and supplying police in at least 50 countries. But the OPS had been publicly associated with Vietnam's mass-murdering Operation Phoenix, which it ran, and with Costa Gavras' 1973 film State of Siege, about the OPS torture-murder operation against the Tupemaro guerrillas in Uruguay.

Congress, in its righteous indignation, reacted by outlawing the use of foreign assistance money for police training - except for drug enforcement programs. OPS agents simply became DEA agents and went right on with their work. The OPS became the DEA. Instead of being paid through AID, they were now paid through DEA from the State Department's Narcotics Assistance program.

Since the CIA is charged with international counterintelligence, and the FBI with domestic counterintelligence, the two agencies, by charter, have always functioned together through shared offices (the State Department's Counterterrorism Office) and liaison officers (the FBI's international Legal Attachés). That is, the FBI always was the CIA-FBI. The CIA-FBI merged with the DEA in 1982 and is now the largest overt foreign intelligence and police training operation of the U.S. government. Congress, in other words, in 1974, aside from teaching the CIA a good lesson in political subtlety, did nothing.

In July of 1983 Geoge Bush's 1976 CIA contractor, CORU chief Frank Castro, was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the smuggling of more than 1.5 million pounds of pot into the U.S. "Unindicted" because he helped to supply arms to the Contras, in exchange for license to deal. He and his partners, Hernandez-Cartaya (Trafficante) and Tony Fernandez, were allowed to buy federally insured banks with their drug money.

The CIA-trained Bay of Pigs veteran Guillermo Hernandez-Cartaya funnelled money to CORU through the World Finance Corporation, WFC, which functioned as Trafficante's money laundry. In the late 70's, WFC came under state and federal scrutiny for drug smuggling, money laundering, gun running, extortion and terrorism. At least 12 WFC board members or employees had CIA ties. One, founding director Walter Sterling Surrey, was an old OSS/State Department hand. Another WFC director, Juan Romanach, was identified by Interpol as a Trafficante operative.

The CIA pulled the plug on the WFC investigation. Hernandez-Cartaya, convicted of bank fraud in 1982, had a long-term relationship with Oliver North's ally Adnan Khashoggi and the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, BCCI, the CIA's tool in Pakistan. BCCI was convicted of money-laundering and banned from the U.S.

This recurring structural corruption, financed by the drug trade, has caused many in the world's police agencies to question basic Drug War policy. The FBI's Bud Mullen, who himself ended up questioning policy, took over the DEA in 1982, when it became a subdivision of the FBI. The FBI's home Office of Liaison and International Affairs, created in 1987, coordinates their various international Legal Attachés with the CIA, DEA, State, Interpol, and special and temporary operations. Interpol's U.S. office, the National Central Bureau, saw its staff go from 6 to 110 between 1979 and 1990, vastly increasing the intelligence interchange between U.S. police agencies and Interpol headquarters in Lyon, France. U.S. influence on Interpol policy also increased.

That policy was called into question by the world's top cop, Raymond Kendall, Secretary General of Interpol since 1985. On June 8, 1994, Kendall called for the international decriminalization of drug possession. The former Scotland Yard detective told BBC radio that "I am in favor of decriminalization but not in favor of legalization....If someone is caught with drugs they should be treated, not convicted." Kendall timed his remarks to coincide with the annual drug conference of Britain's Association of Chief Police Officers, which also called for coordinated international decriminalization.

Kendall expanded on his reasoning at the annual congress of his 176-nation International Criminal Police Organization meeting in Beijing in October of 1995. ''If you look at the real threat to our societies today, what you have is a combination of organized crime and drug trafficking.'' Decriminalization, since it would collapse the commodities' value, would bankrupt the traffickers. This tactic is necessary because "we're pretty overwhelmed." Traffickers ''have the ability to corrupt our institutions at the highest level. If they can do that, then it means our democracies are in real danger.''

"It seemed that whenever the CIA had an 'interest' in a doper, the doper never appeared in the DEA computer." Frontline DEA agent Michael Levine, a 25-year veteran of the force, knows wherof he speaks. In 1980, as the DEA's Country Attaché to Argentina and Uruguay, he was working dangerous undercover operations to set up the biggest coke dealers in neighboring Bolivia. The famous dealers he was hunting not only failed to appear in the DEA computer, but, with CIA and Argentine help, overthrew the centrist, anti-dealing Bolivian government Levine had been cooperating with:

"The only ruling government of Bolivia - a nation that produces the raw material for as much as 90 percent of the cocaine entering the United States - that ever wanted to help DEA defeat their drug barons was paid for its faith in our sincerity with torture and death at the hands of CIA-sponsored paramilitary terrorists under the command of fugitive Nazi war criminal (also protected by the CIA) Klaus Barbie." (Levine's parenthesis)

Klaus Barbie’s Bolivian Secret Police ID Card. He took the name of a rabbi he had murdered; The Children of Izieu

The Nazi killers Levine was hunting literally tortured to death the Bolivian ministers he was working with, with the help of his own agency. That's how the enraged Michael Levine, a fierce agent who believed in his work, fell out of love with the DEA. There was, of course, nothing at all he could do about it except pick up a pen. His 25 years as a frontline DEA agent led Levine to the inescapable conclusion that the CIA is running the drug trade. He calls his book The Big White Lie: The CIA and the Cocaine/Crack Epidemic. When Levine sank his teeth too deeply into the real dealing structure, he found himself in trouble with his own command structure. That, of course, was precisely Raymond Kendall's point.

The Bolivian excuse, once again, was "communism," meaning, in this case as in so many others, a coalition of moderate liberal nationalists who believed in a mixed economy. Today, the boogeyman, in the absence of "the scourge of communism," is "the scourge of drugs," supporting precisely the same fascist dynamics. I can't say it better than former Green Beret General Barry McCaffrey, an original defender of the Hmong opium connection. McCaffrey took over in March of 96 as Clinton's Drug Czar: "The new problems are obvious - they're counterterrorism, they're counterdrugs, they're illegal movements of peoples, they're arms smuggling, they're transnational Marxist movements that have now become international criminal conspiracies, narco-guerrilla forces." That is, in this masterpiece of fascist double-speak, the new problems are the old problems.

Reader’s Digest, 2/1955

And to combat these horrible leftists, McCaffrey is going to ship all the arms he can to the Bolivian, Brazilian, Argentine, Mexican, Honduran, Guatemalan, Peruvian, Salvadoran, Colombian, Pakistani, Philippine, Taiwanese and Burmese military. With McCaffrey in charge, the fascists have nothing to worry about. "Every government in the Western Hemisphere is a democracy but Cuba," Clinton told Dole in the Presidential debate of 10/6/96. Dole agreed. This is a given. "And Cuba,"added Dole, "is infested with drug dealers."

If, by McCaffrey-Clinton-Dole-IMF standards, "democratic" Brazil has the world's 8th largest economy, why does it rank 80th by measures of social welfare? Most of Latin America has a higher hunger, infant mortality, illiteracy, poverty and disease rate than most of the rest of the third world. The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization declared in 1990 that hundreds of thousands of Brazilian children die of hunger every year. It said that 40% of Brazilians, more than 50 million people, go to bed hungry every night. Most of them, of course, are completely disenfranchised. Populist political leaders are regularly assassinated by the "democratic" "anti-drug" death squads armed and trained by McCaffrey and Company.

It is no coincidence that the Italian fascist conspiracy that helped the CIA finance the Bolivian Cocaine Coup, as well as financing Argentina's dirty war, as well as attempting to take over Italy itself, was called Propaganda Due, P-2. You know - like Reichstag Zwei, R-2 - Play it again, Adolph.