BUSH'S DRUG PROBLEM-AND OURS

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP99-01448R000401580044-3
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 4
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: May 24, 2012
• Sequence Number: 44
• Publication Date: August 27, 1988
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

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DEALING WITH NORIEGA
BUSH'S DRUG
PROBLEM-
AND OURS
JEFFERSON MORLEY
George Bush has a drug problem. No, he isn't a
drug user. He presumably is willing to pee in a
cup to prove that. Bush's drug problem is Manuel
Antonio Noriega. Bush says that he wasn't con-
vinced Noriega was a drug trafficker until Feb.
ruary 1988, when Noriega was indicted in Tampa
and Miami on such charges. Noriega had been on
the C.I.A. payroll for years. How could the Vice.
President not have known anything about him?
Bush is among the most knowledgeable and
experienced public officials in the field of drug
enforcement. In 1976 he directed the Central In-
telligence Agency. In 1982, as Vice President, he
was named head of the South Florida Task
Force, which coordinated the antidrug opem
tions of several local, state and Federal law.
enforcement agencies. The task force was later
expanded into a nationwide antidrug network
called the National Narcotics Border Interdic-
tion Service (NNBIS, pronounced "Inbiss"), which
Bush also heads. Bush's impressive resume
only strengthens the suspicion that he has not
told the public the whole story.
"The smoking gunl" a journalist recently
demanded at a Washington party. "Does anyone
have the smoking gun on Bush and Noriega?"
The answer is yes.
Some would prefer that Bush's smoking gun
come in the form of a memorandum from Nori-
ega to Bush, preferably less than two pages long,
that bears the Vice President's initials. There is,
it is safe to say, no such memo.
In fact, the existence of a smoking-gun memo
is a bit of Washington mythology, cherished by
high-level miscreants and investigative journal-
ists alike. Journalists love the smoking-gun memo because it
relieves them of the burden of thinking historically. Wrong-
doers love the smoking gun because it relieves them of re-
sponsibility in all but the most heinous crimes. Comedian
Mark Russell notes the ethical credo of the Reagan Admin-
istration: "I wasn't indicted, therefore I succeeded." If Bob
Woodward, the Christic Institute or whoever else may be
looking fails to unearth the smoking-gun memo (as is usual-
ly the case), the malefactor can claim vindication.
Newsweek
Time
U.S. News & World Report
"Ch.? t`1 AT otJ _ 1
Date Auer I See4 -1 gb
The "smoking gun"-that is to say, the incontestable proof
of Bush's drug problem -is a body of historical evidence
that documents his central role in supervising the legal
twilight zone where national security and drug enforcement.
meet. More incriminating than any memo or leak provided
by some latter-day Deep Throat, this smoking gun is an un-
mistakable historical pattern. Senior U.S. policy-makers-
including Bush-have proclaimed themselves dedicated to
the war on drugs, while allowing immunity or leniency to be
extended to major suspected drug dealers in the name of
"national security." Noriega is only the latest and most
famous beneficiary of this routine practice.
Some of Noriega's Forerunners
George Bush first gained responsibility for antidrug ef-
forts in January 1976, when he became Director of Central
Intelligence. The C.I.A. had a major role in the war on
drugs. A year earlier President Gerald Ford had ordered the
agency to collect narcotics intelligence overseas and to
"covertly influence" foreign officials to assist in U.S. anti-
drug efforts. The C.I.A. also had some rather large poten-
tial problems concerning its part in the war on drugs.
The agency had a history of using electronic surveillance
overseas to collect drug intelligence. That surveillance was
one component of a program of domestic eavesdropping
that violated the C.I.A.'s charter, U.S. law and the Consti-
tution. When Bush became Director of Central Intelligence,
senior C.I.A. officials were facing the possibility of indict-
ment for their role in domestic electronic surveillance. That
summer, the Justice Department decided not to prosecute
the officials. A trial might well have revealed that the C.I.A.
had intervened in several ongoing drug investigations to gain
leniency for at least a dozen suspects.
That story is documented in a top-secret 114-page Justice
Department report titled "Report on Inquiry into C.I.A.-
Related Electronic Surveillance Activities," which has
since been partially declassified. (I obtained a copy from
Jeffrey Richelson, a consultant at the National Security Ar-
chive in-Washington, D.C.) The report was released in June
1976, about six months after Bush began as head of the
C.I.A., as background for any possible prosecution of the
agency's officials.
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The C.I.A., according to the inquiry, intervened in
numerous drug cases in order to maintain secrecy around its
agents and their operations. The agency was said to fear
"that the confidentiality of C.I.A.'s overseas collection
methods and sources would be in jeopardy should discovery
proceedings require disclosure of the C.I.A.'s electronic
surveillance activities." The result? "Several narcotics in-
vestigations and/or prosecutions had to be terminated." In
other words, the C.I.A. secretly fixed several drug cases.
When George Bush became the C.I.A.'s director, did he
learn about leniency shown to drug smugglers in 1972-75?
? Rafael Alarcon is perhaps the most interesting recipient
of C.I.A. leniency. Alarcon was the former head of drug en-
forcement in Chile in the late 1960s, and he apparently
moonlighted in drug trafficking. In April 1974, Alarcon and
four other top narcotics officials from Chile's federal police
were indicted for conspiracy to smuggle drugs. Alarcon was
alleged to have received a half-million-dollar bribe plus
$1,000 for every kilo of cocaine successfully smuggled into
New York. The inquiry report notes that Alarcon was extra-
dited to the United States in September 1974 and allowed to
plead guilty to reduced charges, apparently because of
C.I.A. concerns.
? Frank Matthews, indicted in New York City in 1973,
was described in The New York Times as "a very important
man in narcotics." A declassified section of the Justice
Department's inquiry notes that "Matthews and others
were indicted in the Eastern District of New York on
domestic narcotics distribution charges only." (Emphasis
added.] The clear implication of the inquiry is that the
C.I.A. objected to charging Matthews with importing nar-
cotics. The report adds that "nine others [suspects] were
severed from the indictment," also because of C.I.A. con-
cerns. Matthews skipped bail in the summer of 1973 and is
thought to be dead.
? Gustav Guerra-Montenegro was a suspected drug
dealer indicted with six other people in Los Angeles in
1972. The indictment, according to the inquiry, was dis-
missed as a result of C.I.A. concerns. Guerra-Montenegro's
whereabouts today are not known. At least one (and prob-
ably four) other such cases are described in the Justice
Department inquiry, but the names and other details remain
classified.
? Another narcotics smuggler protected in the 1970s was a
C.I.A. agent from Thailand named Puttaporn Khramkhru-
an. His case does not appear in the declassified version of
the inquiry report, but it was documented by investigative
reporters from the Chicago Daily News in 1975. Puttaporn
was a low-level agent indicted for smuggling 104 pounds of-
raw opium into the United States for use in the manufacture
of heroin. Once again, the C.I.A. prevailed upon the Justice
Department to drop all charges against the drug smuggler.
The agency feared that Puttaporn's trial might expose a
C.I.A. program that provided air support for opium pro-
duction in Southeast Asia.
a.
Did Bush know about these cases? Did he take any action
to change the policy of intervening on behalf of drug
suspects in order to protect C.I.A. sources and methods? Is
this still C.I.A. policy? Would it be policy under the Bush
Administration? Bush's press office declined to answer these
questions.
When the Justice Department decided in mid-1976 not to
prosecute C.I.A. officials for illegal wiretapping, Bush was
spared, at least for a decade, the revelation that the C.I.A.
actions had secretly compromised major narcotics cases.
The story of Noriega's forerunners was never made public.
Dirty Problem, Dirty People
In January 1982, President Reagan vetoed legislation that
would have created a "drug czar." To soothe members of
Congress who wanted more Federal action against drugs,
Reagan created the South Florida Task Force in February
1982, naming Bush to head it. Within a year, the task force
was expanded into NNBIS.
What did Bush accomplish at the helm of the drug
war? Glenn English, a stubborn Representative from Okla-
homa, attempted to answer that question in a series of hear-
ings held between 1981 and 1988. English concluded that
"the Administration's interdiction efforts over the past
eight years have been little more than lip-service and press
relations."
Though English is a Democrat and more than a little
abrasive, the former administrator of the Drug Enforce-
ment Administration, Francis (Bud) Mullen, a Republican
who supports Bush for President, was equally blistering in a
memo about Bush's drug war sent to the Justice Department
in January 1984. "The accomplishments of our interdiction
programs are overemphasized [by Bush's subordinates],
building unrealistic expectations among the American
people that this strategy is the primary means of reducing
the availability of illegal drugs," Mullen wrote. He suggested
prophetically that NNBIS might become "this administra-
tion's Achilles Heel for drug law enforcement."
NNBIS had three formal goals. First, the Vice President's
office was supposed to help law-enforcement agencies ex-
tract materiel and assistance from the armed forces. Second,
the clout of the Vice President's office was supposed to en-
courage the D.E.A., the Customs Service and the Coast
Guard to cooperate with each other, as well as with the
Florida cops. Third, Bush was supposed to use his C.I.A.
experience to improve the intelligence available to drug in-
terdiction agents.
Bush's drug bureaucrats were perhaps most successful in
obtaining military assistance. The dollar total of Defense
Department spending on the drug war rose from $1 million
in 1981 to $196 million in 1986.
0NY5;N ID D
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Bush proclaimed that he had forged unusual cooperation
between the various law-enforcement agencies, enabling
them to make far more drug busts. Representative English
and the G.A.O. found these assertions inflated. NNBIS, for
example, took credit for 136 drug interdiction cases between
June 1983 and June 1984. G.A.O. auditors examined
seventy-seven of these cases, forty-eight of them in detail,
and found that Bush's bureaucrats actually made a dif-
ference in only fourteen of the forty-eight. In other words,
according to the G.A.O., Bush's drug warriors played an in-
strumental role in only 29 percent of the cases for which
they took credit.
In January 1984 Bush's office claimed that the combined
efforts of the South Florida Task Force and NNBIS "have
captured 5 million pounds of marijuana- practically halting
the flow of that drug into this part of the country." The
claim, as Mullen points out, was "absolutely false," the
figure of 5 million pounds not supported even by Bush's
own statistics.
Improved intelligence, the third goal of NNBIS, was
perhaps its most important mission. In announcing the crea-
tion of his drug bureaucracy in June 1983, Bush proclaimed
that "with the help and support of C.I.A. Director Bill
Casey, and the entire intelligence community, we expect to
be better informed and more knowledgeable regarding the
actions and activities of smugglers." Through Casey, the
Vice President had access to the proceedings of the National
Foreign Intelligence Board, which oversees all U.S. intelli-
gence agencies. The board has a Narcotics Working Group
that prepares reports on U.S. dru& intelligence capabilities.
If Bush's subordinates did obtain timely drug information
from U.S. intelligence agencies, they seemed reluctant to
share it. George Corcoran, former assistant commissioner
for enforcement of U.S. Customs, told Representative
English in July 1985 that his office had only begun to receive
intelligence reports from NNBIS two weeks earlier-just as
Representative English's hearings were announced. When
Bush's bureaucrats did share intelligence, it was virtually
useless, according to former D.E.A. director Mullen.
Worse yet, Bush's drug warriors did not know - or did
not care - that a minimum of six drug traffickers were
assisting the Reagan Administration's contra war in
Nicaragua. It is worth noting that the information about
these drug traffickers comes from public sources, the
contras and the Reagan Administration itself.
Oliver North, for example, wrote in his private notebook
about the possible drug connections of Gustavo Villoldo, a
prominent contra. In 1984 George Morales, a major cocaine
distributor in Miami, gave at least $400,000 and an airplane
to contra leaders. In a memo written in April 1985, Rob
Owen, an aide to North, told his boss that two contra
leaders in Costa Rica, Jost Robelo and Sebastian Gonzalez,
were possibly involved in drug running. In 1985 Michael
Palmer, a former Delta Air Lines pilot and an admitted
multimillionaire drug trafficker, was introduced to the contra
effort by the C.I.A. He was then named vice president of
Vortex, an air freight firm that began working closely with
the agency. In February 1986 Vortex received a $96,961 State
Department contract to fly supplies to the contras.
The case of a top-ranking Honduran military officer named
Jose Bueso Rosa is especially revealing. Bueso Rosa, the
Chief of Staff of the Honduran armed forces, was indicted
in October 1984 for his role in a plot to assassinate the Presi-
dent of Honduras, which would have been financed by prof-
its from a drug deal. His co-conspirators imported 760
pounds of cocaine into South Florida.
Seven hundred and sixty pounds of coke is a lot of nose
candy-but not enough, it seems, to displease Oliver North.
Bueso Rosa had worked with North and other Reagan Ad-
ministration officials in setting up the contra war effort in
Honduras, and also on other still-classified national security
matters. After Bueso Rosa pleaded guilty to conspiracy in
the assassination plot in June 1986 and was sentenced to the
minimum term of five years in jail, North wrote to State
and Justice Department officials to urge leniency for the
Honduran.
Did Vice President Bush know about North's efforts on
behalf of Bueso Rosa? Were these efforts consistent
with Bush's call for stern punishment of drug traffickers?
Again, Bush's office declined to comment.
The responsibility for this failure belongs not only to Bush
but also to the nature of the drug enforcement system. Con-
trary to drug war mythology, law-enforcement officers and
drug smugglers are not total enemies. As Peter Reuter, an
economist with the RAND Corporation, points out, drug en-
forcers and drug entrepreneurs share two basic economic
goals: to restrict supply of drugs and to maintain high prices.
The law official pursues these goals in the hope of
discouraging drug use, as called for by the President, the
Congress and the public. The high-level drug trafficker pur-
sues these same goals to maximize profits. The cop and the
smuggler are stuck in a long-term embrace.
The simple fact is that drug dealers and national security
policy-makers also have common interests. National securi-
ty bureaucrats know that successful covert actions depend
on people like Michael Palmer: operatives who can fly
planes, who know their way around Latin America, who
know how to launder money, manipulate the legal system
and avoid detection. Smugglers know that getting involved,
even tangentially, in U.S. "national security" operations can
improve their chances for judicial leniency. The Reagan Jus-
tice Department dropped all drug charges against Palmer in
October 1987.
Robert Earl, one of those baby-faced aides to Oliver
North, made the point succinctly in a deposition before the
Congressional committees investigating the Iran/contra af-
fair. Acknowledging North's relationship with suspected ter-
rorists, Earl shrugged and said, "Dirty problems require dirty
people to be dealt with."
CONTINUED
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'Excruciating Detail,
As early as 1971, U.S. officials had identified Panama as
a transshipment point for narcotics traffic. A C.I.A. report
cited by Jack Anderson in 1973 described Panama as "one
of the great contraband centers of the world."
In January 1975, President Ford ordered the C.I.A. to
"covertly influence foreign personalities to assist in pro-
grams aimed at international narcotics traffic." That meant
people like Noriega, who was then Panama's intelligence
chief. Campaigning earlier this year, Senator Robert Dole
asked Bush if Noriega was on the C.I.A. payroll in 1976.
Bush refused to answer. (Michael Dukakis might resurrect
the query in the fall campaign.) It is known that the C.I.A.
was aware of Noriega's drug trafficking in 1977, at the
latest. "We had drugs-and Noriega-all over the place,"
Seymour Hersh of The New York Times quoted one official
as saying.
Norman Bailey, a former National Security Council aide,
said that in 1983 and 1985 he saw U.S. intelligence reports
that described Noriega's involvement in money laundering in
"excruciating detail." An aide to Bush told The Washington
Post that the Vice President did not see the classified in-
telligence reports cited by Bailey, only some other classified
intelligence reports. Unfortunately for Bush's alibi artists,
there was also plenty of information about Noriega and
drugs in the unclassified Miami Herald, which Bush's
underlings in the Miami office of NNBIS presumably read.
"Scandals Hint at Panama Role in Drug Trade," was the
page-one Herald headline on August 3, 1984. Reporter Guy
Gugliotta noted that a load of 1,200 kilograms of cocaine
shipped from Panama had been seized in Miami that June.
A week afterward, Julian Melo, the fourth-ranking officer
in Noriega's Panama Defense Forces, had been arrested in
Panama, purged from the armed forces and then set free.
Gugliotta also noted that Colombia's biggest drug traf-
fickers had conferred in Panama in May 1984.
Regarding Bush and Noriega, there are only three possibili-
ties: (a) Bush is lying when he says he didn't have any "hard
evidence" about Noriega's drug trafficking; (b) Bush had
suspicions about Noriega but didn't share them with anybody
else and didn't pursue them himself; (c) The Vice President
knew less about drug smuggling in Panama than the readers
of The Miami Herald. Bush prudently chooses (b), a frank
admission of failure, if not incompetence, in the drug war.
Just because Bush and Noriega didn't collaborate doesn't
mean they didn't work for the same ends, which would not
necessarily require bribes or kickbacks or dirty dealing.
Jon Gettman, national director of the National Organi-
zation for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, notes that "the
government serves the big-time drug dealer's purposes in
ways that don't require financial corruption. The govern-
ment, after all, can put the dealer's competition out of
business. Drug enforcement officials don't have a lot of
money to spend, so they have to decide between this opera-
tion and that operation. Those decisions are often made
Z~ -
based on information provided by informants-who are
doing all sorts of things on the side. Noriega is a prime ex-
ample of that." In other words, drug traffickers like Noriega
and drug enforcers like Bush do not actually have to collab-
orate in order to help each other. If they are economically
rational actors, they will, in effect, collude.
Noriega told Gugliotta how drug traffickers encourage
this collusion: "I can tell you that criminal organizations are
always looking for ways to penetrate legitimate organiza-
tions, and they knock on all the doors."
The "criminal organizations" are international networks
of profit-minded drug entrepreneurs. The "legitimate organ-
izations" are the national security agencies as directed by
the White House. The "doors" enable smugglers and covert
operators to pass from the one enterprise to the other. These
doors are guarded by national security policy-makers who
also have responsibility for drug enforcement - e.g., George
Bush.
Did George Bush know that Rafael Alarcon, Frank Mat-
thews, Gustav Guerra-Montenegro, Puttaporn Khram-
khruan and their associates had passed through one such
door in the mid-1970s? Did he look the other way when Jose
Bueso Rosa went from supporting the contras to participating
in the drug-funded assassination plot in 1984? Did the Vice
President of the United States hear the soft rapping of a big-
time dope dealer like Michael Palmer in 1985? Did Bush
leave the door unlocked for Noriega? Or did he merely issue
inflated press releases while having no clue what was really
going on? These are interesting but secondary questions.
George Bush's drug problem-and ours-is that the door
between covert U.S. national security operations and the
drug trafficking business was - and is - wide open. ^
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