THE SCOOP for October 9, 1996
The CIA and Drugs
Just Say No
(C)1996 Bob Harris
TheScoop@earthlink.net
Could the CIA have been involved in the crack epidemic of the 1980s?
Recent San Jose Mercury News reports implicate a couple of Contras as major players in L.A.'s Reagan-era cocaine boom. The op-ed puppies are all ablither, claiming that either the reports are all wrong, or the CIA just employed a few bad apples.
Hey, anybody could overlook a few tons of crack.
The CIA promises an internal investigation. You bet -- just as soon as they're done releasing their JFK files.
Whenever the CIA gets busted, their three responses are, in order:
a) It didn't happen,
b) We didn't do it, and
c) We'll never do it again.
The real story is d) none of the above.
Even before the CIA was born in 1947, the spooks used narcotics as a tool of foreign policy.
At the close of World War II, Naval Intelligence sprang Lucky Luciano from a New York pen and shipped him home to Italy. Why? Mafia goons were handy in breaking up socialist activities in European labor unions, and the Sicilian heroin trade helped stabilize the region's postwar economy. The CIA/mob alliance was born.
A few years later and one island over, the Guarini brothers of Corsica ran smack to the U.S. through Cuba. The CIA winked, set up the Castle Bank in the Bahamas to launder the profits, and skimmed some of the loot to maintain the cash crop exports of death-squad dictators in Honduras, Nicaragua, and much of the rest of Latin America.
In 1960, when the CIA's Havana puppet, Batista, was overthrown by Castro, the Agency put an actual mafia contract on Fidel's head. Before long, a whole army of Cuban exiles was set up in Florida with black market money.
After Kennedy yanked the air cover on the Bay of Pigs invasion, promised Khruschev never to invade Cuba, and broke up the training camps in the Keys, do you think these guys just gave up and got jobs at K-Mart?
Laundering cash and evading radar are marketable skills.
Ten years later, in one of the largest drug busts in history, some genuine narcs brought down a ring responsible for half the shit in the Sunshine State. Guess what? Two-thirds of the suspects were Bay of Pigs vets with get-out-of-jail-free cards.
A lot of these same Cuban exiles and some CIA-trained Argentinian thugs overthrew Bolivia in the "cocaine coup" of 1980, installing Luis Garcia Meza to brighten our nasal cavities.
These are the folks that trained and financed the Contras.
Dozens of major Contra figures -- Jose Bueso Rosa, Rafael Quintero, Manuel Noriega, etc. -- were coke bottlers. Ollie North's "humanitarian aid" providers -- DIACSA, SETCO, Frigorificos de Puntarenas, etc. -- were repeatedly investigated for smuggling dope. They still received State Department approval, at the very moment casual marijuana smokers Ron and Nancy Reagan were preaching zero tolerance.
The deals weren't all in Latin America. In the '50s, the CIA supported the heroin-rich Kuomintang in China. In the '60s, the CIA turned 35,000 Hmong opium growers into a secret army to fight the commies in Laos. In the '80s, it was the Afghan Mujaheddin importing our guns and exporting drugs.
Same as it ever was.
Anybody out there honestly think $200 billion of dope reaches our inner cities in Freeway Ricky's Astrovan? You think that all cash gets laundered through Bimini by Crack Alley kids who can't read a paper?
Who has the planes, people? Who has the training? Who has airstrips hidden in the hills of Texas, Arkansas, and Arizona (several of which I've seen with my own eyes)?
It's not paranoia. It's not a conspiracy theory. It did happen, CIA people did it, and they will do it again. _______________________
Bob Harris is a political humorist who has lectured at over 250 colleges nationwide.
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