Derided by the Mainstream Press and Taking on Reagan at the Height of His Popularity, the Freshman Senator Battled to Reveal One of America's Ugliest Foreign Policy Secrets. In December 1985, when Brian Barger and I wrote a groundbreaking story for the Associated Press about Nicaraguan Contra rebels smuggling cocaine into the United States, one U.S. senator put his political career on the line to follow up on our disturbing findings. His name was John Kerry. Yet, over the past year, even as Kerry's heroism as a young Navy officer in Vietnam has become a point of controversy, this act of political courage by a freshman senator has gone virtually unmentioned, even though -- or perhaps because -- it marked Kerry's first challenge to the Bush family. In early 1986, the 42-year-old Massachusetts Democrat stood almost alone in the U.S. Senate demanding answers about the emerging evidence that CIA-backed Contras were filling their coffers by collaborating with drug traffickers then flooding U.S. borders with cocaine from South America. Kerry assigned members of his personal Senate staff to pursue the allegations. He also persuaded the Republican majority on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to request information from the Reagan-Bush administration about the alleged Contra drug traffickers. In taking on the inquiry, Kerry challenged President Ronald Reagan at the height of his power, at a time he was calling the Contras the "moral equals of the Founding Fathers." Kerry's questions represented a particular embarrassment to Vice President George H.W. Bush, whose responsibilities included overseeing U.S. drug-interdiction policies. Kerry took on the investigation though he didn't have much support within his own party. [continues 5627 words]
Cocaine traffickers and money-launderers swarmed through the Nicaraguan contra movement in the 1980s to a far greater extent than was ever known, according to a report by the CIA's inspector general. One contra trafficker claimed Ronald Reagan's National Security Council cleared his work. The NSC's favorite covert airline also was under suspicion for drug connections, the report stated. In an historic document released on Oct. 8 -- and nearly ignored by the major news media -- CIA Inspector General Frederick Hitz confirmed long-standing allegations of cocaine trafficking by contra forces. Hitz identified more than 50 contras and contra-related entities implicated in the drug trade. [continues 3753 words]
The strange case of Cuban exile Frank Castro demonstrates how blowback from the CIA's violent campaigns against Fidel Castro in the 1960s flowed into South American drug trafficking in the 1970s and the Nicaraguan contra operation in the 1980s. According to the new report by CIA Inspector General Frederick Hitz, the CIA knew that Frank Castro, an anticommunist veteran of the CIA's Cuba operations, was implicated in terrorism and drug trafficking by the time he joined the contras in the mid-1980s. [continues 1465 words]
New evidence, contained in a Justice Department report, establishes that the Reagan administration knew from almost the outset that cocaine traffickers permeated the Nicaraguan contra army, yet did little to expose or to stop the contra-connected criminals. The report by the Justice Department's inspector general reveals example after example of leads not followed, corroborated witnesses disparaged, official law-enforcement investigations sabotaged, and even the CIA facilitating the work of drug traffickers. Ironically, Inspector General Michael Bromwich then joined a long parade of government investigators who shied away from obvious conclusions presented by the evidence. In his report's release on July 23, he stressed that "the Department of Justice's investigative efforts [in the 1980s] were not affected by anyone's suspected ties to the contras." [continues 4572 words]
John Hull, the American farmer in Costa Rica whose land became a base for contra raids into Nicaragua, averted prosecution for alleged drug trafficking by fleeing Costa Rica in 1989 with the help of U.S. government operatives. A report by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Bromwich disclosed new evidence about Hull's escape from Costa Rica in a plane flown by a pilot who worked for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. The report, however, could not reconcile conflicting accounts about the direct involvement of a DEA officer and concluded, improbably, with a finding of no wrongdoing. [continues 882 words]
New evidence, now in the public record, strongly suggests that the Reagan administration's tolerance of drug trafficking by the Nicaraguan contras and other clients in the 1980s was premeditated. With almost no notice in the national press, a 1982 letter was introduced into the Congressional Record revealing how CIA Director William J. Casey secretly engineered an exemption sparing the CIA from a legal requirement to report on drug smuggling by agency assets. The exemption was granted by Attorney General William French Smith on Feb. 11, 1982, only two months after President Reagan authorized covert CIA support for the Nicaraguan contra army and some eight months before the first known documentary evidence revealing that the contras had started collaborating with drug traffickers. [continues 1403 words]
