Cia Drug Operatives example essay topic

For the past decade and a half, the US government has sponsored the War on Drugs. This has been a massive law enforcement effort aimed at stamping out the flow and use of illegal narcotics. The main focus of this effort has been aimed at a relatively new, yet extremely potent drug - crack. However, this massive crackdown is much more than a simple effort aimed at protecting US citizens. Rather, it is instead a case of the federal governments trying to undo its own massive blunder. For much of the 1980's the federal government was involved in the sale and distribution of crack.

At the very least, they simply turned a blind eye towards the problem. At the worst - and what is the most likely possibility - the government condoned and facilitated the crack trade in the United States. All of it was done through the CIA and was meant as a quick source of funding to overthrow a hostile regime in Nicaragua. Yet, there was no care given for the long term consequences. In what is perhaps the worst example of racial discrimination taken by our government in decades, they aimed this effort primarily at the black communities of America. In financing this little war, our government created a monster which it now has no way to control.

The history of our government - specifically the CIA - in the drug trade is astounding. The CIAs predecessor, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), helped forge the original drug ties for our government. Created during World War II, the OSS often worked closely with Mafia heroin dealers in order to gain the US army access to the mainland of Italy so they could wage an attack (Parry; CIA, Drugs & the National Press). After its creation in 1947, the CIA kept this connection alive. This first started when the CIA formed an alliance with Corsican drug gangs in order to fight Communists at Marseilles.

As a result of this, the Corsican drug lords became the main suppliers of the US heroin trade for two decades (Time to Abolish the CIA). Despite our early alliance with the Corsican, Uncle Sam had bigger plans. US police waged a massive crackdown on the Corsican drug lords to free up the heroin market (CIA: Things Go Better With Pepsi! ). By the early 1960's, as communist influence continued to expand in Southeast Asia, the CIA went operational in producing heroin. When the French lost French-Indochina in the 1950's the CIA managed to inherit its drug trade.

In order to fight strong Chinese nationalism, the CIA turned Burma and Laos into one of the worlds largest opium producers (Time to Abolish the CIA). They used US government-owned aircraft to fly this heroin to market (Parry, CIA, Drugs & the National Press). This operation continued into the Vietnam War and, as a result, some 30,000 US servicemen became heroin addicts. By the early 1970's over seventy percent of the heroin entering the United States came from areas controlled by CIA mercenaries (Time to Abolish the CIA). After the loss of Vietnam, the CIAs drug trade cooled down. At the same time though, there was a major international affair heating up.

In Nicaragua, communism was taking hold. Backed by Fidel Castro, a regime of communists known as the Sandinista had overthrown the Somoza's, who had the backing of the United States (Overbeck, ParaScope). Soon, a flood of semi-capitalist immigrants began flowing to the United States to avoid persecution. Among these refugees were some of Central Americas largest cocaine dealers, particularly Norwin Menses and Danilo Blandon (Overbeck, ParaScope).

Seeing this large communist threat to the United States, the CIA began to forge some political ties with these refugees in order to plan an overthrow of the Sandinista government. However, due to conflicts with the Carter administration, the CIA was prohibited from beginning the revolution. However, when Ronald Reagan came to power, he had a very different outlook on the situation. Reagan viewed the Sandinista regime as a major threat the possibility of another Fidel Castro and he granted the CIA permission to deal with this problem (Overbeck, ParaScope). He authorized the CIA $19 million to cover the expenses, although this amount was officially acknowledged as insufficient (Michels, CIA Corruption). This funding was authorized under the Boland amendments, which were supposed to actually serve to restrict covert military operations through the will of the people.

Instead, it only encouraged the worst from the CIA. In order to gain funds, which Congress could not provide under these amendments, it allowed the CIA to bypass Congress completely to gain funds in most cases, by means of selling drugs (Castillo, Case File: CIA and Drugs). The CIA quickly set up a provisional revolutionary army in 1981 that came to be known as ARDEN. The CIA knew from the start that members of ARDEN were stooping to criminal activities to feed and clothe their cadre, but they did not care (Parry, CIAs Drug Confession). It quickly became apparent that ARDEN and the $19 million would not be nearly enough money to oust the Sandinista regime. The CIA combined ARDEN with several other small revolutionary groups to form a revolutionary army which became known as the Nicaraguan Democratic Force, or FDN (National Catholic Reporter).

To address the lack of funds, the CIA raised money in the way to which it had become accustomed - selling drugs. So, the CIA instructed its top FDN agent, Enrique Bermudez, to deal with this problem. Bermudez met with Blandon and Menses, the Nicaraguan refugees, in Honduras. Bermudez told them that the FDN needed money, and that he wanted them to raise it. He said to use whatever means necessary because the ends justified the means (Overbeck, ParaScope). Since he was dealing with two powerful drug lords, it was implied that the funds would be raised through drug sales.

Even the CIA knew of the connection. It sent internal cables throughout much of the revolution referring to him as a drug kingpin (Honey, Dont Ask, Dont Tell). In 1982, the year the FDN really started gaining power and the drug running was taking off, the CIA and the Department of Justice worked out an agreement known as a Memorandum of Understanding - which gave the CIA the blessing to ignore drug trafficking by anyone who was an agent, asset or non-staff employee of the CIA (Honey, Dont Ask, Dont Tell). This essentially gave the CIA free rein to run its drug operation. Blandon had been given the California drug market at his meeting with Bermudez, so in late 1982, he began funneling cocaine into the United States. However, Blandon had no real street connections to sell the cocaine to.

To alleviate this problem, he began doing business with a high school dropout by the name of Ricky Ross. Ross had done some small-time drug pushing before, but Blandon gave him a virtually unlimited opportunity to expand that business. There was a small problem though. Blandon provided only cocaine, which at $5,200 per ounce was mainly the drug for the Hollywood elite (Michels, CIA Corruption). Ross associated mainly with lower class African-Americans. So, Blandon came up with an ingenious plan.

He showed Ross how to cook up a new form of cocaine on the stove which added impurities to the cocaine but made it more addictive (McCoy, Drug Fallout). Ross called this new invention Ready Rock and it sold for about twenty dollars a hit (Michels, CIA Corruption). Ross began to wholesale this Ready Rock - which soon became known as crack to a couple of local gangs known as the Bloods and the Crips (Overbeck, ParaScope). A crack epidemic was soon born, and it spread like wildfire. With Blandons constant supply of cheap cocaine, Ross was able to sell his crack to gangs at bargain basement prices. By 1984, Ross was selling 500,000 crack nuggets daily (Muhammad, A Pawn in the CIA Drug Game).

Soon, he expanded his market to areas all over the United States. All the while, he was unknowingly funneling profits back to Blandon who used them to help finance the FDN (National Catholic Reporter). Eventually though, Blandon began to get nervous. Funneling millions of dollars worth of cash, drugs, and arms into and out of the United States was a very risky business.

So, he and Menses, who was now his Colombian supplier, quit supplying cocaine in 1985. This left the FDN without any major source of funding. So, the operation was indirectly handed over to Oliver North, who was the National Security Councils point man (Bernstein and Knight, Pacific News Service). Although North did not directly sell the cocaine, at the very least, he turned a blind eye towards its continuance.

He allowed for the use of CIA-owned planes to transport the cocaine (Parry, The Kerry-Weld Cocaine War). His own journal even documents these events. One entry, dated August 5, 1985, reports, Without the Honduran army, there would have been no Contras. $14 million [to finance arms] came from drugs (Ruppert, Iran-Contra Era). Shortly after, on August 9, 1985, he wrote, Honduran DC-6 which is being used out of New Orleans is probably being used for drug runs into the US (The Contras, Cocaine, and Covert Operations). The CIA knew that its operatives were selling drugs to fund the FDN and condoned this action by looking the other way.

Despite going well at first, these covert drug operations didnt go unnoticed for long. People began to notice that the crack epidemic was primarily striking black communities. Since traditional drug epidemics strike all races and all economic classes, the only explainable reason for this phenomenon was because the supply was only going into black communities (Overbeck, ParaScope). This was soon picked up by the media which further investigated it.

The story was finally broken by two reporters, Robert Parry and Brian Barger, in late 1985. This first link did not imply that the CIA was directly involved, only that several contra groups were engaging in cocaine trafficking, in part to help finance their war in Nicaragua (Kornbluh, Columbia Journalism Review). Nevertheless, this kind of negative exposure had the CIA and the Reagan administration on the defensive. Rather than simply stopping these atrocities though, the Reagan administration took an approach which it found more appealing. Through use of such groups as Accuracy in the Media, the Reagan administration arranged to strongly criticize and threaten the reputation of any journalist who spoke out against the Nicaraguan guerillas. (Parry, CIA, Drugs & the National Press).

To further this effort, Reagan introduced a measure which came to be known as public diplomacy that had a primary effort of perception management for issues which might have been sensitive to the CIA. These actions amounted to the Reagan administrations manipulating the media in order to prevent any negative exposure. The small amount of negative media that was generated was enough to arouse Congressional suspicions. The main flash point was an incident which came to be known as the Frogman Case. In 1983, several swimmers in wetsuits were caught smuggling 430 pounds of cocaine ashore in San Francisco.

The swimmers were arrested, and any confession made by them could have created a very embarrassing situation for the CIA. Claiming that the money they were found to possess belonged to the Nicaraguan Contras, the CIA arranged for their release and the return of $36,000 (Parry, Contra-Cocaine: Bad to Worse). This arrangement was done in secret to avoid any negative publicity. However, the story was uncovered by the San Francisco Examiner in March of 1986 (Parry, Contra-Cocaine: Bad to Worse). Senator John Kerry picked up on this and had Congress establish the Subcommittee on Narcotics, Terrorism and International Operations (National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 2). The main focus of this committee was to figure out why the US Attorney in San Francisco, Joseph Russo niello, had returned the money (Webb, San Jose Mercury News).

This investigation led them on the trail of the Contra drug operation. With the threat of exposure, the CIA, Department of Justice, and Reagan administration collaborated to form a massive stonewall. This effort was fronted by the Justice Departments Criminal Division chief, William Weld. (Parry, Kerry-Weld Cocaine War). When Kerry and other Senators began asking for information, their requests were either ignored or denied by the Justice Department on national security grounds.

Jack Blum, who was the committees chief counsel, recalls this investigation as being one of the most frustrating exercises that he could ever recall because the Justice Department flipped out to prevent them from getting access to... anything (Webb, San Jose Mercury News). The investigation continued for almost two years. The final conclusions of Kerry committee report were that our covert agents have converted themselves to channels for drugs (Bernstein and Knight, Pacific News Service). But, the Reagan administration took no action against the CIA to further investigate these allegations. Rather, the CIA conducted its own investigation - which lasted only 12 days - which found that the CIA and the Contras had no connection with any drug-related operations. In many instances, this report is still being cited by the CIA today to absolve itself of any major drug smuggling charges (Parry, Kerry-Weld Cocaine War).

This cover up continued throughout the rest of the 1980's. The conspiracy continued to spread until it started to affect other government agencies. The US Drug Enforcement Agency as well as the FBI both were forced to cover up for the CIA during this time. In order to make arrests of crack pushers, the DEA originally worked with several CIA operatives who were smuggling cocaine into the United States.

However, in short order, the DEA was forced to ignore the massive amount of cocaine that the Contras were shipping into the US. Ricky Ross was known to have obtained cocaine from some of these DEA operations (Muhammad, A Pawn in the CIA Drug Game). Dennis Dale, who was the chief of an elite DEA unit in Central America, noted in his journal, In my 30 year history in DEA, the major target of my investigation almost invariably turned out to be working for the CIA (Ruppert, Iran-Contra Era). Some of the most startling revelations came from a Central American DEA agent named Celerino Castillo.

He witnessed drugs and arms being loaded onto planes and sent to the United States, yet he was obligated not to report it because of the Memorandum of Understanding between the CIA and the Justice Department (Bernstein and Knight, Pacific News Service). The FBI also used coercion methods to keep reporters and government officials from digging too deeply into the Contra-cocaine connection. When CIA drug operatives were arrested in the US, the FBI pulled strings with local prosecutors to allow for their release (Bernstein and Knight, Pacific News Service). Ultimately, the CIA and the FDN waged a losing battle against the Sandinista regime. In 1989, the Contras lost U.S. support, and the government decided that it was time to finally do something about the crack problem that it had created. The War on Drugs had been going on for several years, and the black community felt the brunt of it (Muhammad, Lawmakers Demand CIA Drug Probe).

The government had arrested Ricky Ross in 1988 for pushing crack, but he struck a deal with prosecutors, became a DEA informant, and got off with a minimal sentence. The police had been after Blandon since 1986, when they raided several of his suspected crack storage areas, but they always came away empty. They finally managed to get him convicted in 1992, which resulted in a two year prison sentence (Webb, San Jose Mercury News). During Blandons trial, the government tried to force him to testify about his drug connections in Central America, but the CIA got a court order preventing it.

Most of his testimony from that trial is still under lock and key. The only public testimony hinting at CIA involvement is Blandons testimony saying we received orders from the from other people (National Catholic Reporter). Blandon also became a DEA informant, and in later court testimony which was recently made public said he sold cocaine to raise money for the CIAs army (Michels, CIA Corruption). Blandon was also used in a reverse sting to arrest Ricky Ross again. Ross still remains in prison (Webb, San Jose Mercury News). Norwin Menses, the Colombian drug lord who supplied Blandon with cocaine, still remains free, despite the fact the US government had numerous opportunities to arrest him (Webb, San Jose Mercury News).

With all of the strings tied up, the CIA hoped that the Contra-crack connection would be forgotten. Unfortunately for them, it was not. The story was again exposed in August of 1996 by San Jose Mercury News reporter Gary Webb (National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 2). The three part series which Webb produced caused a massive public outcry, especially among the black communities of Los Angeles. There was a massive backlash by the mainstream media, who were quick to point out that Webbs story was full of holes (Kornbluh, Columbia Journalism Review). By January of 1997, the Mercury News denounced the story and fired Gary Webb (Parry, Contra-Cocaine: Bad to Worse).

However, the fire had been ignited. Representative Maxine Waters continued to pressure the CIA to reveal the Contra-cocaine connection, but to no avail. Then, on October 8, 1998, the CIA released the results of the longest internal investigation which it had ever conducted about the contras and cocaine smuggling. Although the executive summary of the document said the CIA had no connection to any drugs, the report itself shows otherwise. Among the reports findings: [In some cases, CIA] acted to an end a relationship after receiving drug trafficking allegations or information. In another six cases, CIA knowledge of allegations or information indicating that organizations or individuals had been involved in drug trafficking did not deter their use / employment by CIA.

In at least two of those cases, CIA did not act to verify drug trafficking allegations or information even when it had the opportunity to do so. (Errata) This report only sparked further outcries by the victims of the crack epidemic. Most recently, a lawsuit was filed against the CIA on behalf of those Los Angeles residents who were affected by the crack epidemic (MSNBC). The lawsuits aim is to force the release of classified information about the CIAs involvement in the cocaine trade. With its long connection to the drug trade, the CIA has continually worked against the American people. They knowingly condoned the flow of cocaine into the United States, and turned a blind eye when they were asked to stop it.

They caused an outbreak of one of the most addictive drugs the world has ever known. They knowingly targeted American citizens in order to advance their objectives. In the name of protecting national security, they have only hurt the overall well being of the United States. All evidence points to the fact that, unless they are stopped now, they will only continue this practice of channeling drugs onto American soil. Bernstein, Dennis and Knight, Robert. DEA Agents Decade Long Battle to Expose CIA-Conta-Crack Story.

4 October 1996. web Castillo, Celerino. Case File: CIA and Drugs. 27 April 1998. web CIA Sued Over Cocaine Epidemic. MSNBC.

1 March 1999. web CIA: Things Go Better With... Pepsi! web Contras, Cocaine, and Covert Operations. National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 2.1997. web Errata. CIA Website. 8 October 1998. web Honey, Martha. Dont Ask, Dont Tell.

In These Times. May 1998. web Kornbluh, Peter. Columbia Journalism Review. January / February 1997. web McCoy, Alfred W. Drug Fallout. Progressive.

August 1997. pp 24-27 [SIRS]. Michels, Paul. CIA Corruption The Collegiate Times. 8 October 1996. web Muhammad, Rosalind. A Pawn in the CIA Drug Game. Final Call.

1996. web Muhammad, Rosalind. Lawmakers Demand CIA Drug Probe. Final Call. 1996. web Overbeck, Charles. Transcript: Gary Webb Speaks on CIA Connections to Contra Drug Trafficking (and Related Topics). ParaScope. web Parry, Robert.

CIA, Drugs, and the National Press. The Consortium. 23 December 1996. web Parry, Robert. CIAs Drug Confession. The Consortium. 15 October 1998 web Parry, Robert.

Contra Cocaine: Bad to Worse. The Consortium 16 February 1998. web Parry, Robert. The Kerry-Weld Cocaine War. The Consortium 11 November 1996. web Report Says CIA Dealings Led to US Crack Outbreak.

National Catholic Reporter. 6 September 1996. web Rupert, Michael C. Iran-Contra Era. CIA & Drugs Fact Sheet. 1998. web Time to Abolish the CIA.

In These Times. 30 September 1996. [SIRS]. Webb, Gary. Crack Plagues Roots are in Nicaraguan War. San Jose Mercury News.

18 August 1996. pp. 1-3 [SIRS]. This paper is true and the sources are real. If you have any questions, you may e-mail me at.